Student loan debt weighs on graduate

By Amanda Benedict

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I graduated from my undergraduate institution with $30,000 in student loan debt. My graduate school loans bumped up my total debt to its current amount: $89,000. Every single day, morning, noon and night, this number floats into my thoughts.

I think about my debt on the drive to my minimum wage job. It creeps into my thoughts when I am out with friends, and it burrows into my subconscious when I lay down to sleep each night. I also fixate on the fact that my minimum wage job will never allow for me to save for retirement. Actually, it leaves little room for a place to live and daily necessities.

After graduating in 2008, I moved to Japan to teach English. I lived alone, made enough to pay my student loans, and even had enough to go shopping or save for trips. It has been hard in the last year to reconcile where I was not so long ago, with where I am now at age 27: living at my parents' house, working a minimum-wage job, and not able to pay my debts.

I have tried to describe to my family and friends how it feels to be in this situation. I have tried to express what I feel every time I am rejected from a clerical/secretarial job or from any random job that I know I am competent enough to do but am not even given the opportunity to interview.

“Frustrated” is often repeated by myself and those who try to comfort me. “Discouraged” is another recurring theme in discussions about my job prospects; others that come to mind are “bitter, dispirited, furious.”

However, there has been one word that I was afraid to use to describe my situation. I was ashamed to say it to myself and when I finally did, I broke down into tears. Failure: I feel like a failure, for my family and myself.

I would never have guessed that at age 27 I would be living with my parents, with $89,000 in debt and working a minimum wage job in retail. If asked in high school, I would have responded that this scenario was my worst nightmare.

While it the feeling of failure still makes me tear up, I think it has been good to talk about it because my support group can help to reassure me that I am not a failure. I also realize that many other Millennials are in similar circumstances. Staying positive and making connections are the best antidote to fear and sadness. Stay strong, Gen X'ers and Millennials, and remember you are not alone.

Amanda Benedict of Cedar Rapids earned a bachelor's degree in political science at the College of St. Benedict, graduating in 2008. Shortly after the flood hit Cedar Rapids, she left for Japan, to teach English. During her second year abroad, she was a high school English teacher in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands on the island of Saipan. She then attended graduate school at the University of San Diego, earning a master's degree in International Relations and graduating in May 2012. Comments: amandabenedict4@gmail.com