Taxing Effort

By Cheryl Hansen

I am a writer and by definition, I fear everything that involves math. I wasn’t bad at it, really, I just never liked it. And once I chose the path of writing, I knew I’d have to abandon numbers completely. It’s just one of those rules. I’m OK with it, too; math aficionados don’t usually know their way around a semi colon, so it’s fair.

And yet…

I did our taxes last week. I. Did. Our. Taxes. Me. In retrospect, the tax software pretty much makes it fool proof, but that’s not the point. The point is that doing taxes is so not my thing. I get itchy just thinking about it. But this year, I figured I’d give it a shot. And it didn’t suck. In fact, it was eye-opening. I asked money-saving questions none of our tax pros had asked before. I learned a lot about where our money is going and best practices to save on our tax bill moving forward. But more importantly, I learned that activities previously thought to be impossible or untouchable simply aren’t impossible or untouchable. And that opens up a whole bunch of doors for me.

It seems I’ve introduced a voice to all of those naysayers in my head who often remind me of what I can’t do. That voice is sorta street, too, and given that simple but ginormous tax-filing victory, she’s pretty loud about the fact that I can do stuff: I can make a healthy meal in the time it takes to boil macaroni… I can work up to running 3-4 miles… I can do camel pose without passing out.

The bigger lesson, of course, is that with every victory, those positive tough-girl voices will sooner or later outnumber the naysayers. And I’m no math whiz, but that has to be a good thing.