SUBSCRIBER WOW: TAX DAY, THE SEQUEL

Lessons learned on the roller coaster.

A year ago at this time I wrote about my first real experience of tax day. It was a lot about the ongoing and very normal anxiety of having to make a living, which as a freelancer kind of peaks around tax day, because suddenly you have to pay out thousands of dollars to cover all the taxes that all your employers don’t take.

Last year I spent most of the six months leading up to April 15th anxious about what my tax guy would find, then stunned when he called me the Friday before the filing deadline to tell me I owed even more than I expected.

One of the conclusions I drew from the experience was that I needed to learn a lot so that I wouldn’t go through that again.

CUT TO: Me, this February, having learned nothing and once again fearing what was to come. And what did come—well, it’s been an adventure. And unexpectedly, in a very short and somewhat tumultuous period of time, I’ve learned an awful lot.

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THE FINELY-NUANCED HELPLESSNESS OF THE PRIESTHOOD

This is a anecdote I might have told before, but you kind of need it for the rest: When I was working at America Magazine, a friend on staff who was a former Jesuit told me about an odd challenge he sometimes faced from Jesuit writers. When he would ask them to submit an invoice for payment, some would get strangely frustrated, ask him if that was really necessary or could he just do one for them. Despite being more educated, accomplished, and independent than most people, these men were absolutely thrown by this very small thing.

As he talked about it, I realized I had done the very same thing the first couple times I had been asked to submit invoices for payment for articles with other publications. And it was true, I wasn’t quite sure what an invoice looked like. But the bigger issue seemed to be, Why are they making me learn a new thing when I just spent all this time writing the article? Why do I have to do that work, too?

I can’t remember whether my friend and I came up with this together or whether he just laid it out for me—I think it was probably the latter—but we ended up talking about ths idea of the seeming helplessness that some Jesuits will offer when asked to do something they don’t know how to do, and don’t want to have to do.