Friends - who do you tell?

I’ve just come home from dinner with old friends from my University days. It was excruciating to try and talk about my life without telling them that I’m bankrupt. This is becoming a recurring theme. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve returned home after such a long absence and so I’m reconnecting with people from the past or I’m reaching a significant time in my life (eg. 20 yr High School reunion) but I keep finding myself in situations where I need to explain what I’ve been doing for the past little while. Or maybe I’m just more conscious of it.

My point is that I feel such a fraud. My friend was asking lots of difficult questions about my situation. What was I going to do? Was I looking for a job? The worst part is that they all assume that I sold my business for a princely sum and I’m now considering my options from a sound financial position. I faltered, I admit it, I couldn’t bring myself to disabuse this idea. It seemed so appealing to think that I really was that clever, that successful. But now I feel like I lied by omission. I simply didn’t deny it. What have I done? God help me if anyone ever discovered this blog. But it begs the question: are you being deceitful if you don’t tell your friends that you’re bankrupt?

When you become bankrupt, your bankruptcy, and information about your estate, are entered into the public domain. Anyone can access that information, for a fee. It’s unlikely anyone would go looking for it unless they were planning to do business with you, or were perhaps of malicious intent. I’ve moved a considerable distance to get away from anyone that might have malicious intent. Thankfully I made all my mistakes very far from home so I have the luxury of returning to a place where no-one knows. But there are so many questions about where I’ve been and what I’ve done and it’s really hard to not tell them about the most significant thing that‘s happened to me in the last 10 years.

So who do you tell? Well, I’ve told:

My parents, my siblings and their spouses, my closest friends, my former boss and another professional mentor. A total of fourteen people. I imagine that some of those people have told other people that I don’t know, just for news value, but I trust most of them to be discreet and certainly never to tell anyone detrimental. Trust is really the key here. I don’t mind people knowing, in fact it’s something of a relief to not have to hide it but I do worry about it being used against me somehow.

The thing is that all of the creditors know, and some of them are people who knew me personally. There are also creditors who have connections in my professional network. All of these people are mightily pissed off and would love to do my reputation as much harm as possible. I confess that I would feel exactly the same way if I was them. I’m pretty paranoid about how far they might go to discredit me.

I guess I’m just waiting for the day that I’m publicly humiliated in front of all of my peers. So, perhaps I can allow myself the small indulgence of maintaining the ignorance of my wider circle as long as possible.