My Life Is a Balance Sheet (And Right Now, I’m Auditing the Chaos)

 

I used to think balance sheets were boring.

Turns out, they’re just brutally honest.

Because when you’re a single mum trying to hold your life together with one hand while googling “is this normal or am I burnt out” with the other, everything suddenly starts to look like assets versus liabilities.

Let’s start with the basics

Assets are things that support you.

Liabilities are things that drain you.

This applies to:

• Businesses
• Bodies
• Brains
• Bank accounts
• Emotional baggage you swore you’d dealt with in your twenties

Same rules. Different spreadsheets.

My current assets (subject to revaluation)

• One child who is 90% joy, 10% why-is-this-sticky
• A brain that still works, even if it now requires snacks and silence
• The ability to laugh at things that would previously have sent me spiralling
• Google Calendar (underrated asset, zero appreciation in value, essential to operations)
• Writing things down instead of pretending I’ll “remember later”

Intangible assets include:

• Resilience (acquired the hard way, not tax deductible)
• Perspective (comes free after everything goes wrong at least once)
• The realisation that calm is more valuable than competence

My liabilities (we’re being honest here)

• Sleep deprivation (long-term liability, high interest rate)
• Unhealed stuff I thought I’d “processed” but apparently just shoved in a cupboard
• Financial stress that likes to pretend it’s logical but is actually emotional
• Trying to keep everything “in my head” like that’s a flex and not a warning sign
• Alcohol, formerly listed as “stress management”, now correctly reclassified as a cost

Some liabilities don’t show up immediately.

They sit there quietly accruing until one day you snap at someone over something that absolutely did not deserve that level of rage.

Ask me how I know.

Profit and loss: the emotional edition

Some days I run at a profit:

• I eat
• I move
• I don’t catastrophise
• I feel vaguely human

Other days are a straight loss:

• Everything feels heavy
• My skin is dry, my patience is thinner, and my tolerance for nonsense is non-existent
• I wonder how I used to do more than this and still look vaguely put together

The mistake I used to make was judging the loss days.

Now I treat them like any decent accountant would:

“Okay. Not ideal. What actually caused this?”

Spoiler: it’s usually underinvestment in rest and overexposure to stress.

Health is just another balance sheet (sorry)

Energy in vs energy out.

Care in vs neglect out.

Truth acknowledged vs truth buried.

Unhealed things don’t disappear — they just sit on the balance sheet quietly, distorting everything else until you finally admit they’re there.

This is not a personal failing.

This is basic accounting.

The myth of “having it together”

Some people look very solvent until you open the books.

Some people look chaotic but are actually doing the most sensible thing possible:

restructuring.

Right now, I’m not maximising profit.

I’m restoring stability.

Which, incidentally, is exactly what you do when something matters.

Final audit note

I used to think I needed to be:

• More organised
• More disciplined
• Better at holding everything in my head

What I actually needed was:

• Fewer liabilities
• More grace
• And a willingness to admit when a system no longer works

Turns out, whether it’s money, health, or life —

you don’t win by pretending the numbers are different.

You win by finally reading them properly.

And then adjusting.