So I’d finally made it.
I’d moved out to Toronto a few years previously, survived Opera School, and was heading to a real job! Well… as real as a job wearing a costume and shouting Italian across a room will ever be.
Not only was I going to be performing in a world class hall, and working with world class performers and teachers, I was going to get PAID!
For being an artist.
Living. The. Dream.
I moved to a nicer apartment; nothing fancy, but this one (as opposed to the last one) had heat!! I bought meat much more often, and significantly less rice. I paid for friends’ dinner. I was the person I always knew I could be. Everything was going perfectly; there was money in my chequing account, and even a little bit adding up on the saving side of things. Plenty to go around.
It started with a phone call. From the Canada Revenue agency (CRA). Apparently I had made a mistake in my last year’s filing and could please send them form T-blah blah blah everything would be fine.
Well. That didn’t seem all that serious. So I continued on with my life.
…it may have been more serious than I anticipated.
TIP: Do not avoid calls from the CRA. The problem will not “just go away”. They tend to know where you live.
When they didn’t hear from me they sent me a nice note complete with a request for all the money. “How much did you say?” I asked, sure that I had heard them wrong, but there it was in plain black and white.
All. The. Money.
Apparently, when you’re a self-employed artist filing taxes is not the simplest thing, and the online tax program I had used had failed to fully encapsulate those subtleties. Ooops. There went my savings. Out the door went my fall wardrobe plans. In came stress.
So much stress.
I didn’t know what to do. Even after I had thrown all my money at the problem I still had a substantial debt, and no real idea of what had gone wrong. Somehow they didn’t cover this in Opera School.
Clearly I needed help.
