My business has been sinking for four years. Every month another employee would go away, not to be replaced. We cut and cut. Finally, I'm the last one standing and a few months ago I stopped getting paid, scraping together a living doing side jobs while I struggle to re-invigorate my company's out-dated business model. This involved writing hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and developing new platforms to bring my services into the new mobile/social web. In that battle, I feel that I am succeeding but each month the bills are being paid later and later, our home and cars are deteriorating, and the kids are eating cheaper and cheaper food. My "light at the end of the tunnel" was made a little bit closer and brighter by the prospect of an upheaval in American politics -- and perhaps a hope of a better economy -- however as Obama won re-election and I continued to hammer away at renewing and remaking my company, I suddenly starting feeling less proud of the sacrafices I was making, and forcing my family to make, and more like I was just being a sucker.

I felt proud that I was bagging my lunch and eating at my desk -- eventually resorting to end-piece bread slices saved from my kid's lunch menu, slices of generic cheese and dollar-store mustard. I discovered that if I wore black sox you couldn't see the holes in my shoes and that maybe I could get away with wearing them for another month. Oh, etc etc etc cry cry cry.

Well, I still think I'm gonna pull it out, my new product is going to hit 2013 with a splash and all will be well, but at what cost? My wife struggle personally with the sacrafices and then, just about a month ago, she secretly applied for foodstamps without telling me, fearing that I would be too proud to go along with it.

Then, last Friday she got a debit card in the mail with $800 dollars on it for food. She handed me a folder with some paperwork telling me I needed to finalize some things to make the benefit permanent. We went to the store and bought the kinds of groceries that we had not been able to afford in a long time.

She was right, I was ashamed. But, when I went shopping with the card, nobody seemed to look at me funny, it was just like I was a normal person buying regular things with real money.

I don't know what to make of this, but I do know that today I brought a bagged lunch to work with me with real food in it.

I gathered together my accounts requested by some slack jawed unmotivated and apathetic government worker who rifled off a list of vague documentation he would need to make our benefits official. When I looked at my stack of unpaid, overdue, or debts considered "in collection" it hit me how screwed we really were / are. My monthly budgets, scrawled on a legal pad, looked more like some kind of Jackson Pollack painting than something you would see from a normal thriving household.

Have I been herded into a socialist pen?