My Two Cents: “I'm 39, Divorced, and I Lost All My Income”

How a massage therapist who can’t work is getting by.

- Charlotte Cowles

THE LAST DAY I WORKED was on March 14, the Saturday before Governor Cuomo closed New York down. I rent a workspace in Brooklyn, and no one in my building was on the same page about hygiene protocols. I was also nervous about taking the train to get there. I knew there was no way I could say for sure that none of my clients would get infected at an appointment. So I was just like, “I can’t do this,” and I canceled all the next day’s appointments.

Shutting down my business was terrifying financially. And the irony is I was just getting to a good place money-wise. About a year ago, I got a divorce, and that process was finally ending. I’d also doubled my business revenue, which allowed me to start paying down my consumer debt more aggressively. I had one shared credit card from my marriage that had about $11,000 on it and another personal credit card with about $9,000. My plan was to pay off both by June or July and then start tackling my $90,000 of student debt from when I went to graduate school for acupuncture. Before all this, I mapped it out so that I could pay it off in the next five years.

I was also planning to go to aesthetician school this summer so that I could add facials and skincare to my services, and it would have bumped up my annual revenue by about $50,000. Everything was lining up perfectly—and then it all just came crashing down.