'I was $2 million in debt, with a baby to care for, as everything we built crumbled away.'
On March 9, 2009, the electricity company came to cut the power off in my apartment in Louisiana. When the lights went out, I ran outside, with my one-year-old daughter on my hip, to see what had happened. I went down the pathway to where the meters were, and I saw the power man. He was cutting off a lot of people's power—that was the nature of the neighborhood my partner and I lived in.
I'm from south central Los Angeles, not from the best neighborhood, and I felt like I had won the lottery—that I had reached the pinnacle of success. I was living good, I was eating good. My then-partner, who co-owned the business, and I drove matching Range Rovers. I thought I was living the life. Our business used to create six-figures a month but, going into my second month in the hospital, it dropped to around $20,000. We had an expensive office in Manhattan Beach, California, we had employees and my then-fiancé and I owned 13 pieces of property. My partner was exhausting our personal savings to keep everything afloat.
I felt like my life was ending. I could not possibly see, with no money coming in, how I was ever supposed to get out of this. I was so used to paying a bill whenever I got it, so I felt a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. I had never seen a bill like that in my life, and it was devastating. Who do you ask for help? Where do you turn?
We got eviction notices every month because we never paid on the 1st. If we paid by the 10th it was a miracle. I was doing odd jobs in a real estate office, but the pay was low and erratic. My partner ended up driving down a street and stopping at every fast food place and applying for jobs. At Taco Bell he told a woman who worked there,"I will literally mop the floors. I just need health insurance for my family." And my partner worked at Taco Bell for 18 months, originally mopping the floor until he was promoted to work at the drive-thru.
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