Random Date Archeology is a weird little machine I built for myself because I have spent most of my life leaving evidence everywhere and almost none of it in anything resembling an orderly fashion. Emails, calendars, tweets, invoices, photos, old hard drives, Google Drive folders, weird attachments, half-remembered stories. So I pick a random day and see what was happening. Sometimes I get nothing. Sometimes I get a photograph or a meeting or a little boring artifact that opens a door into something bigger. And sometimes I land on a Wednesday in 2017 and discover that I was, more or less, standing in the middle of a seven-year financial nightmare while simultaneously trying to sell three cameras on eBay.

The date this time was April 5, 2017. There is not much on my calendar. There usually isn’t. My calendar was apparently not interested in recording existential dread. Gmail, however, was. At 3:48 that afternoon an attorney from Northwest Justice Project emailed Heidi and me a five-page document titled Answer and Affirmative Defenses. We had been sued. The plaintiff was Old Republic National Title Insurance Company, and the lawsuit revolved around an $81,096.18 lien attached to the house we had sold in Lynnwood the year before. The proposed answer basically said: we sold the house in May 2016, we gave the title company the information about the liens, we relied on them to pay everything that needed to be paid, and now somehow we were the ones staring at an $81,000 problem. There is a lot of legal language in the document and I am not going to pretend I understand every bit of it now any more than I did then. What I remember is simpler. One dark night there had been a knock on our door and someone handed us lawsuit papers for a mistake involving eighty-some-thousand dollars. I tweeted that night, because of course I did: “Fuck. So, now we got served papers for that $80000 mistake the title company made.”

To understand why this was happening you have to go all the way back to early 2011, which was one of the years when my life was being held together with optimism, freelance work, and whatever loose change might be hiding underneath the couch. I had been laid off in January. By the end of that year I had made about $15,000 gross, we had burned through what little savings we had, gone deeper into debt, and I had spent six months trying to get Bank of America to finish an emergency loan modification on our house. I found an email I sent on December 27, 2011 with the subject line “Please Help Us Not Lose Our House.” I sent it to a ridiculous collection of Bank of America people, including executives, because by that point I had apparently decided that if the normal channels were useless I might as well start flinging distress signals at everybody in the building. In the email I explained that we had started the modification in June after being told it would take six to eight weeks. Six months later we had been passed through four different primary contacts, repeatedly told to resend documents, repeatedly promised calls that never came, and we were four months behind on the mortgage with a notice of intent to foreclose sitting in front of us. The sentence that matters most is right there in the subject line. Please help us not lose our house.

Eventually the modification did happen. As part of it, on April 20, 2012, an FHA partial claim was created. It was a subordinate deed of trust in favor of HUD for exactly $81,096.18, due decades later. This was not Bank of America handing me an eighty-one-thousand-dollar check. It was a separate obligation created as part of keeping us in the house, and it was recorded with Snohomish County that September. At the time I don’t remember thinking of it as some dramatic third mortgage waiting in the shadows. I was mostly thinking that we had managed not to lose the house. The paperwork went into the giant pile of paperwork that adulthood generates and life kept moving.

Except it never entirely disappeared. In 2015 we ran into it again while trying to refinance. A loan officer at BECU emailed me an old deed and asked, “Do you remember this?” I forwarded it to housing counselors at Solid Ground with the subject “HUD 3rd Lien.” What followed was almost comical. I called Bank of America and they apparently had no clue. Solid Ground tried HUD and reported back that HUD seemed equally confused. At one point I was told HUD was not willing to subordinate the lien, which was going to make refinancing difficult. So by 2016 this was not some secret document I had never seen. We knew there was a weird third lien. We did not fully understand it, and apparently neither did some of the institutions involved, but we knew it existed.

That is important because of what happened next. We sold the Lynnwood house in May 2016 and moved to Tacoma. Before closing, Old Republic asked us for payoff information for all three loans. On May 3 I emailed them and specifically said that I had included the documentation for our third lien, which was part of the loan modification. I attached the deed. This does not magically settle the legal question of who was responsible for what, and I am not going to rewrite a lawsuit from memory and declare somebody legally negligent ten years later. But the documentary part is very clear: they asked for all three payoffs, and I sent them the third-lien paperwork before closing.

Then we closed, and we got money back. Not $81,096.18. Not even particularly close. We took home something in the neighborhood of $60,000. And that matters, because nothing about sixty-something thousand dollars coming out of a real-estate closing looked to me like somebody had accidentally handed us the money that was supposed to pay off that third lien. Had the check been for exactly $81,096.18, I honestly think alarm bells would have gone off immediately. I knew that number. I had been dealing with that weird BofA/HUD lien for years. But sixty grand just looked like proceeds from selling a house, and once the title company had closed the transaction and handed us the money, we assumed the things that were supposed to be paid had been paid. So we used the money to help us move to Tacoma. And then we used it to live. It was a rough year for Bootstrapper. But we still had bills. We had kids. We moved into a new house. That money became ordinary life pretty quickly, because ordinary life has a remarkable ability to eat sixty thousand dollars without making much of a ceremony out of it.

And here is where the story gets uncomfortable in a way I think is important to preserve. By August 2016, when Old Republic finally told us there really was still an $81,096.18 payoff owing, I wrote to an attorney that we had known there was a chance something like this might pop up and had saved “a good chunk” of the proceeds. We obviously did not have anything close to eighty-one thousand dollars left. So the clean version of this story is not “we had absolutely no idea and spent every penny.” We knew there was uncertainty. We hoped the closing had resolved it. We spent money we later wished we had not spent. I knew we had fucked up. Heidi knew we had fucked up. But there was not a giant blame war between us over it. I do not remember us turning on each other. We mostly did what we always seemed to do when something enormous landed in our lap: accept that it had happened and start trying to figure out how the hell to fix it.

For months it kind of consumed us. We called people. We emailed people. Heidi did the same. HUD started trying to collect. Attorneys tried to figure out what had happened. In March 2017 we were served. By April Northwest Justice Project was helping us answer the lawsuit and talking to us about bankruptcy. We drove from Tacoma to Everett to meet with a bankruptcy lawyer after asking if the meeting could just be done by phone. On April 20, 2017, I tweeted: “Had to take the day off work and drive to Everett to meet with the bankruptcy lawyer.” Then: “When we got there, we discovered something that made the whole drive pointless. If only he’d done the meeting over the phone, like we asked.” Then: “But at least we found out I can make money again. So that’s good.” That last sentence makes me laugh now because it is such a perfect little Adam sentence. Entire financial life on fire, but okay, good, there is one variable we have successfully resolved.

I used to remember this period as one where I was stressed but not really panicked, and that is still true in the sense that I was functioning. I was not melting down. I was working the problem. But doing this excavation changed how I understand that part of myself. I have always been unusually functional under pressure, especially when there is a concrete thing in front of me to solve. Years later, while trying to get a difficult edit finished at the Rainiers after something like an eleven-hour day, I remember having a genuinely great time doing the work. Then I got home and discovered that my jaw had basically seized because I had been clenching it all day without realizing it. I had not been calm in the sense of having no stress. I had been so absorbed in the task that I was not consciously noticing what the stress was doing to my body.

The Twitter archive gave me the same correction for 2017. Present-day me said I do not really remember many physical side effects from the bankruptcy mess, but also admitted that this was years before what I now think of as The Break, years before I had much language for my own mental health or body. Then I found a tweet from March 24, 2017: “I’ll tell y’all, bankruptcy causes physical pain.” Well. There you go. Apparently my body knew exactly what was happening even if I did not preserve the details in memory. That same night I wrote that bankruptcy looked like our only option, that Bank of America had fucked up multiple times over many years, and that the upside was that we hopefully would not lose everything. “Our house should be protected,” I wrote. “But it still feels horrible.”

The house was the big one. We had just bought this house in Tacoma. The idea that we might solve the Lynnwood-house disaster by losing the new house was terrifying. We did our own research and thought we were probably safe, but “probably” is a pretty shitty word when you are talking about whether your family gets to keep its home. What finally changed the emotional temperature was sitting down with lawyers and learning what bankruptcy actually meant in our case. We could keep the house. We could keep the car. We would not lose everything. And a whole pile of debt could go away. Once the unknown monster had edges, I could deal with it. That is a pattern I understand much better about myself now. I do not particularly need control. I need the world to be legible. Undefined catastrophe scares the hell out of me. Defined catastrophe becomes a problem I can work.

By early April we were filling out paperwork and taking the required credit counseling course. On April 7 I wrote, “We’re ready as we’ll ever be to file. So I’d like to get that taken care of as soon as possible.” On April 10 I was printing a pile of bankruptcy documents and sending copies with Heidi for an afternoon meeting. On April 11 I sent a list of debts that included a $12,500 BECU line of credit, a $10,500 BECU credit card, medical bills, utilities, and whatever else was lurking beyond that particular document. This was not just about the $81,096 lien anymore. Bankruptcy was going to reset a whole lot of financial weight we had been dragging behind us for years.

And because I apparently cannot live through one financial crisis at a time, April 5 also finds me trying to sell three Blackmagic Design 4K Studio Cameras on eBay. These were Bootstrapper cameras, and unlike the house mess, this one I can blame squarely on myself. They were good cameras. They were just the wrong cameras for us. They made sense for studio work and not for the sports work we were actually doing, and buying them had been a bad purchasing decision. The eBay saga is almost comic relief in the middle of the bankruptcy story. One buyer won and did not pay. I opened an unpaid-item case. I relisted them. Somebody in Italy wanted international shipping. I got lowball offers for $3,500, $4,000, $4,250. Another buyer “bought” them and then got flagged by eBay as suspicious. I relisted them again. And again. On April 5, while attorneys were drafting our response to an $81,000 lawsuit, I was also sitting there at 11:25 at night relisting these goddamn cameras.

They finally sold for real on June 6, for $5,000. Two days later I printed the shipping label. That is such a small thing compared to everything else in this story, but I like it as a little pull-away because it was one more problem that had been hanging around for months and then, finally, it was gone. Wrong equipment, corrected. Box shipped. Some of the money recovered. Let’s say half. Move on.

The bankruptcy itself was officially filed on June 1, 2017. By then we had moved from the Everett lawyer to the final bankruptcy attorney in Tacoma, Kimberly MacDonald, who I remember not liking us very much. That is entirely my impression and not some objective ruling on her character, but it is one of those little emotional fragments that survives. On the exact filing date I was emailing her office thirty- and sixty-day transaction histories and then, minutes later, another message because I had forgotten the savings account statement. Which feels right. Even on the day your bankruptcy is filed there is apparently still one more PDF you forgot to attach.

Also, I apparently lied to myself when I first said we barely told anybody about the bankruptcy because we were ashamed. We were ashamed. That part is true. Bankruptcy carried all the cultural baggage you would expect, the feeling that this was a failure and not something you wanted to advertise. But I absolutely talked about it. Publicly. Repeatedly. Twitter Adam was apparently incapable of suffering quietly. On April 9, the night before another major step in the process, I wrote a huge thread explaining what had happened. I wrote that we had talked to more lawyers and that bankruptcy was our only option. I wrote about the fear that if the case dragged on long enough, the equity in our Tacoma house might rise enough that we could lose it. I wrote: “Anyway, that’s tomorrow. We sign the paperwork and declare bankruptcy. I don’t know why it’s bothering me so much. We’ve got what we need.” Then, while Heidi slept, I sat in the living room listening to records and drinking beer because apparently that was the best emotional technology I had available at the time. “It’s not ideal,” I wrote, “but it’s what I’ve got.”

And after the Everett bankruptcy-lawyer trip on April 20, I apparently ended up drinking with Marguerite and tweeted, “Bankruptcy sucks. But @Marguerit is pretty fucking awesome.” She replied that it had been a long drive and she was glad I was there. I answered that it was a long story but, as a real estate agent, she would appreciate it: “It’s the Fucking title company that messed up.” There were nearby tweets about red wine in a can and pineapple cider. So much for keeping the whole thing private. I was embarrassed, yes. I was also processing it out loud, which is probably one of the ways I have always survived things. Turn it into a story. Joke about it. Explain it to somebody. Find the absurdity. Keep moving.

The final big scene I can actually anchor happened July 10, 2017. The night before, I tweeted, “Is there a song about going to court at 8:30 tomorrow morning and having an existential crisis the night before?” Then I wrote one, because of course I did: “Mom and dad went a courtin’ today / Do da do da / Mom and dad read chapter 7 / Do da do da / The title company screwed them over / Oh the do da day.” This is why I love having my old Twitter archive. Memory wants to turn everything into solemn little documentaries. Twitter remembers that sometimes I dealt with terror by writing a terrible Stephen Foster parody at midnight.

Later that day, after court, I wrote: “The morning’s court appearance went much better than expected. It closed a chapter on our lives. Glad we have a house and a healthy family.” I do not remember the details of the courtroom very clearly now. I remember going. I remember the process. I remember that by the time we were actually finishing it, Heidi and I had already done most of the emotional heavy lifting over the months before. The fear had largely burned itself out once we knew we were not going to lose everything. What was left was paperwork, court, certificates, credit damage, and then this weird thing I did not expect at the beginning: relief.

Our debt dropped dramatically. We no longer had those lines of credit and credit-card payments hanging over us. We had a house. We had a decent car. Rebuilding our credit for a few years did not feel like much of a punishment compared to what we had been carrying. I even remember there being a little excitement in it once we understood what was going to happen. Not excitement about being bankrupt, exactly. Excitement about the possibility of starting over without dragging years of financial mistakes, layoffs, underemployment, emergency survival decisions, and the ghost of that fucking Lynnwood mortgage behind us.

Looking back at this now, the thing I keep noticing is how many versions of the story are true at the same time. Bank of America put us through a modification process that I experienced as incompetent and terrifying. HUD held an $81,096.18 partial-claim lien. Old Republic asked us for all three payoff numbers and I sent them the third-lien documentation before we closed. We still spent money we knew might not be entirely safe to spend. We were sued. We were ashamed of bankruptcy and I also tweeted about it constantly. I remember myself as stressed but functional, and contemporary me left behind the sentence “bankruptcy causes physical pain.” I was scared we could lose the new house, and then the moment lawyers made the rules understandable, fear turned into acceptance, then hope, then even some excitement. None of that cancels any of the rest of it out.

I think that may be why this random Wednesday is worth preserving. April 5 was not the beginning or the end. It was almost exactly the middle of the tunnel. The old house had already been sold. The money was mostly gone. The $81,096 problem had already resurfaced. We had already been served. Northwest Justice Project was drafting our answer. Bankruptcy was only days away from becoming the plan. The cameras were still sitting around waiting for somebody on eBay to actually pay for them. We had no idea yet that a few months later I would walk out of court and write that a chapter of our lives had closed.

At the time it felt like a nightmare. Years later, I remember the result differently. Bankruptcy wiped away an enormous amount of debt and gave us the kind of clean slate we probably never would have created for ourselves voluntarily. It was humiliating and frightening and exhausting and, in the end, enormously freeing. I have called it a blessing in a really evil disguise before, and I still think that is probably the best description I have.