I am one of those people who needs TONS of alone time but has a crazy social schedule. If I don’t get alone time I go nuts. I find it really helps to dedicate mornings to quiet. Even if we have people over I still stay in my room, have coffee alone and work quietly for a couple of hours. I’m super protective of my routine, it really helps keep me sane.

Can your business support a full-time staff member? What will this individual be doing this summer? Do you have a business plan and was this included as part of your business plan and have you achieved the target you established to support the full-time hire?

With that said, can you really afford the full-time hire? Are you providing benefits? Are you paying all the necessary employment taxes?

Just asking the questions to make sure you don’t crash and burn.

In the meantime – “smart giril” is starting a blog soon – I hope when I do you’ll allow me to announce it on your blog with a link. You really inspired me.

In regards to social situations, it is so easy to stigmatize yourself. For me, it is also easy to get this all out of perspective. I used to define myself by something one of my parents did when I was younger. EVERYONE I knew, in the neighborhood and everyone I went to school with through high school knew about it. It defined me. When I went off to college and into the work world, noone knew about this part of my life. Yet for me, it still defined who I was.

It took me a LONG time to realize that to other people, who did not know about the situation, the situation did NOT define me in their eyes. They defined me by their interactions with me, how I am as a friend, employee, acquaintance, neighbor, etc. It took me forever to realize that even if they later learn about the situation that happened when I was younger, they do not define me by that situation and my reaction to it. It just becomes a piece of background information about me, but their most powerful definition of me is what they have learned about me through their own interactions with me.

For me, the issue is still a HUGE part of who I am that I think about daily. But I have over the years learned that I cannot let it define who I am to myself, because it certainly does not define who I am to others.

I’m sharing this because I’d like to encourage you to try thinking about your definition of yourself a bit differently. The debt is a part of your history of yourself that you should never deny in your mind. It is even the topic of this blog. But enough of your personality comes through in this blog for me to be sure that it is NOT what defines you.

Your friends from high school and college who don’t know about the debt define you through what they know about their interactions with you, and that definition is totally legitimate. It should not make you uncomfortable around them, which I would guess is what is making it feel difficult and tiring.

Now as a practical matter, your plan for resolving the debt dictates that you don’t have alot of extra cash, so when these people make plans that cost money, you might feel like you don’t belong. That is a different issue. You don’t need to share with everyone why you are being frugal. You are young, growing a business, and have put yourself on a tight and disciplined personal budget in order to do the right thing with your business. If others don’t like that part of the definition of you, then they are probably not the right people to be hanging around with anyway.

We see ourselves so differently than others do. It is a lifelong exercise to attempt to see ourselves as others do, both to correct our faults we may not see that others do, and to put into perspective things about ourselves that others don’t worry about.