No one talked about debt when I started college in 2005. My high school didn't have a guidance counselor, and no one in my family had gone to college. All my mother could afford to give me was $20, a fresh-from-the-bank bill she pressed into my hand inside a Popeye's bathroom.

But I wanted to go — HAD to go — so I signed every paper possible to cover the tuition. I made straight A's in high school, but I'm embarrassed to admit I had no idea what "loan" really meant. I didn't know I'd signed up for tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

I didn't have enough money to cover my textbooks my first year, so I stole them. The Calculus book alone was $340. I returned them at the end of the year, sneaked them in the way I'd sneaked them out, then, the next year, I signed up for a bigger loan, one that came with a refund

I worked four jobs in college, but the loan was fake money to me. My senior year, I lived in the most expensive dorm room on campus because I'd lived in trailers and tiny apartments with cockroaches, and I thought being in college meant I deserved to live somewhere nice.

That dorm had a private bathroom and a separate living room, and I paid for it with my ever-increasing loan. My parents moved every nine months, so after I graduated, the bill for my loan went to an apartment they'd lived in six apartments ago. I never saw it.

I defaulted, and then, somehow !, the loan people found me, living in the attic of a nice lesbian couple who rented to me for $100 a month while I earned $6/hour working at a newspaper. My interest rate the next year was 19 percent, so I spent almost my entire paycheck on loans.

Much later I found out I could have gone to LSU for free. My GPA/ACT score meant I qualified for TOPS, a state scholarship that covers tuition. But LSU didn't recruit in parishes with high Black populations back then, and they never even sent me a brochure.

(LSU has changed that policy, in part because they recognized, as the 2nd Blackest state, that it was financially beneficial to them. I wrote about that for @hechingerreport : https://hechingerreport.org/racial-diversity-as-a-financial-necessity-at-state-universities/)

. @CherylStrayed described her own debt as "my punishment for having grown up in poverty." That resonates w/ me. I'm not poor now. I don't have a salaried/staff job, which means I never sleep because I'm constantly freaking out about $, but I'm not poor the way I was. And yet ...

The poverty I was born into continues to shape my day-to-day life. I look at the debt I still have ($25,000), and I don't sleep because I don't know how I'll pay it and my rent (and and and) this year.

Meanwhile, college enrollment is down, tuition is up, and schools everywhere still lack guidance counselors and financial management classes. If you're not already, follow @hechingerreport , a great org that covers these issues all the time.

ALL OF THIS AND I SOMEHOW WROTE THE WRONG YEAR OF WHEN I WENT TO COLLEGE? I guess education was wasted on me, haha. I started in 2001.

AND I am technically lucky. I had a $20,000-a-year scholarship, and, for much of my adult life, I've had a job that allowed me to make monthly payments. My loan has been sold so many times I can't remember how much I borrowed, but the interest makes it a hamster wheel.

The month before the Cares Act paused interest, for example, I paid $300, $46.88 of which went to the principal, while $252.12 went to interest.