Of all the feelings typically associated with filing a tax return – fear, anguish, dread, hysteria, indifference – nostalgia was not something I expected to experience while I was going through my bank statements with a ruler and a highlighter pen.
But there I was, sobbing quietly while striking across purchases and transfers. All that was missing was rain hitting the window (preferably in slow motion) so that I could pause, rest the pen on my chin, and stare out into the garden in a moment of desperate sincerity.
How did it come to this? It’s been the same routine every year up ‘til now, give or take a few weeks depending on how organised I’ve been: lug the shoeboxes out from under the bed, organise them vaguely into categories (“utilities”, “travel”, “periodicals”, “???”) and chronologies, and then set aside a weekend or so to tabulate everything into a spreadsheet.
Typically, I try to get this all done as fast as is possible without stuff-ups: “joyful decluttering” guru Marie Kondo is not a fan of collections of bits of paper (“few are truly necessary and they generally hold so little joy”), and neither am I. Once the tax return is done, the receipts are filed away, never to be thought of again, or at least until next tax time rolls around and I have to relearn how to do a spreadsheet anew (the ins and outs of Excel are, along with certain birthdays and phone numbers, intel forever destined to vacate my memory immediately after use).
This time around, however, something was different. I approached my tax return in a Zen-like state, and rather than feeling crippled by the creeping dread of audits and payables, I took the time to assess where my life had been the past 12 months. As I cruised through the financial year, month by month, it felt less like collating data and more like reading an old diary.
Piecing together the year in expenses felt like assembling a jigsaw puzzle of a former life: a restaurant lunch here (the day my ex-partner and I discussed moving to Los Angeles together), a birthday present there (a book for a treasured friend), numerous “payday loans” from my brother (complete with internet humour-related reference notes inevitably referring to my immense personal suckage).
Tipped off by the hieroglyphics of Eftpos receipts and bank statements, I remembered trips interstate to see family and friends (plane tickets, airport dinners, exorbitant taxi fares in towns I get lost in), weeks spent languishing in emotional doldrums (high incidences of microwave food purchases and iTunes rentals of soppy movies, therapist’s fees) and career-related epiphanies (purchases of textbooks, computer programs and Tafe fees).
It wasn’t so much a sweat-inducing inventory of consumerism (you can only buy so much when 100% of your income comes from freelance journalism) as it was a life laid bare in the minutiae of my incomings and outgoings. As I looked at frivolous purchases made to impress a man who didn’t deserve the attention, I reflected on the leaps and bounds I’ve made, emotionally, since I tried to dazzle him with concert tickets. I watched, through the ink of my highlighter pen, good savings habits develop and debts slowly dwindle. Late-night McDonalds purchases were reduced to almost nil.
For many years I used to joke to friends that I didn’t celebrate New Year’s Eve, and instead chose to take stock of my life when the end of the financial year rolled around. It was little more than shtick; a handy way to avoid the inevitable tears of NYE and make myself seem both super deep and well-organised.
This June, I finally learned what I’d meant all those years, and the spiritual return I received from those few hours of meditative reminiscence was far greater than any emotional payable made throughout the year.
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