For years she hid the credit card bills from her husband: The $2,500 embroidered coat from Neiman Marcus. The $900 beaded scarf from Blake in Chicago. A $600 pair of Dries van Noten boots. All beautiful items, and all perfectly affordable if she had been a hedge fund manager or a Google executive.
Friends at first dropped hints to go easy or rechannel her creative instincts. Her mother grew concerned enough to ask pointed questions. But sales clerks kept calling with early tips on the coming season’s fashions, and the seasons kept changing.
“It got so bad I would sit up suddenly at night and wonder if I was going to slip up and this whole thing would explode,” said the secretive shopper, Katharine Farrington, 46, a freelance film writer living in Washington, who is now free of debt. “I don’t know how I could have been in denial about it for so long. I guess I was optimistic I could pay, and that I wasn’t hurting anyone.
“Well, of course that wasn’t true.”
Well, they could at least have shown a picture of the $2,500.00 embroidered coat….or maybe the boots.
it would be a better article if they focussed on how she went from being a debtor to how she got debt free, rather than attempt to justify the denial and deceipt as a “healthy” human attribute.
True love is not “denial” of fault, but knowing every fault and choosing to love regardless of those faults.
God is not in denial of our flaws, he knows everyone of them, it is only our deception which allows us to imagine that they are hidden, yet he loves every one of us without condition.