Yeah, I just filed my taxes for the first time and I can barely believe it myself. I’m still recovering. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Let me provide a little background. This was my first time filing taxes, but not my first time working. I’ve volunteered and worked here and there pretty much since starting high school, but 2016 was the first year I had a job that pays the kind of money that the government wants a cut of. Unfortunately, I didn’t really know that and due to a couple other weird circumstances, I ended up being saddled with some crazy tax charge I had no idea about. It was kinda stressful at the time but my mom took over and my parents paid up the difference. Crisis over, I thought.
So fast-forward to now, when I’m trying to file my taxes in order to avoid the same issues. Of course I went straight to the free online service, being the cheap little ethnic kiddo I am. And at first everything was looking really, really good. The interface was easy, the steps seemed pretty self-explanatory, and I was feeling pretty darn grown-up. And then it got rejected. And rejected again. And rejected yet again. I started to freak out.
But I kept it calm. Before I even called my parents, because, surprise, I am also the perfectionist little ethnic kiddo, I called H & R Block. I was using their service, and the call was free, so I figured I had probably just bungled something minor and could have it ironed out after a few deep breaths and an hour or two of being on hold. No dice. Everything was clear on their end and, as I would have to repeatedly remind my parents, the reps were certain that I had filled out everything perfectly. The only new info they could give me was that somehow the IRS had a different adjusted gross income, or AGI, than what I put down for 2016. The only problem there is that I never filed taxes for 2016, so I should have had no AGI on file. Yeah, the stress was really starting to kick in now.
So I put on my big girl pants and called…the IRS. The nervous sweat was real, my friends. After sitting through the ads and tinny music for approximately half a lifetime, I finally got put through, just to be told that I would have to mail in my tax return and then was promptly dismissed. Okay. I figured I could handle that.
Perhaps I had overestimated my ability not to freak out and overthink EVERY LITTLE THING. First I put off even really thinking about finishing the process until what I thought was the deadline. Then I freaked out, only to realize that the deadline was actually two days later. So I relaxed. Too much. I put it off again until midnight the day before I needed to do it, then I frantically googled and questioned my equally clueless roommates. Please, despite how further incriminating this is for me, keep in mind that literally all I had to do at this point was print out the tax return I had already filled out and mail it off with my W2s. Yeah…not my finest moment.
But, eventually, I got over my little moment and decided to just physically go to an H & R Block office and talk to a professional in person, regardless of the cost. My cheap little ethic kid heart clenched at the thought but my perfectionism would not take no for answer, so I went. And was sent out in literally three minutes when they told me to do exactly what I already knew I needed to. Isn’t life so much fun when you never trust yourself? Anyway, so I made my final trek to a post office and paid thirteen bucks to send it all off. By the time I finally got back into the car, I had a stress stomachache so bad that all I could do was sit still and take deep breaths for a bit.
But I did it.
I just cleared that obstacle. Sure, the bottom of my shoes grazed the top of it, but I cleared that bad boy. And even if it comes back to bite me later, if I somehow messed up the form as my anxiety has been trying to tell me all day, I’ll clear that hurdle too. Because if there’s one thing this whole mess taught me, it’s that I can handle things. They may scare me silly, they may take the strongest deodorant I can afford, and they make take every last bit of courage I can scrape up, but I can, and will, handle it.