Tax season, every year, is a stressful time for me. That’s been the case since I came to the States; I remember that first time of trying to do American taxes and basically thinking to myself, this is arcane and ridiculous, and somehow I have to do this every year? (Yes. Yes, I do. Every single year.)
It’s not just that I’m hardly fiscally-minded. I try to make myself feel better about that each year by going, oh, I’m creative, that means I get a pass on being business-minded or serious in a way that actually benefits me — a theory that certainly makes me feel a little better about myself before the crushing reality sets in and I worry if I don’t have all the paperwork I need and perhaps I’m going to be destroyed by a system that really couldn’t care less how creative I may or may not be. It’s also that the tax system is this very strange, seemingly very intentional anxiety machine that makes things as difficult to understand as possible: do you have the right forms? Have they all been filled in by other people appropriately? Because if they screwed up, that means you screwed up. Are you going to get everything filed in the appropriate manner to two different entities in time? And, because I’m in Portland, Oregon, will you also remember to pay the entirely separate Arts Tax, which isn’t included in the State filing for some reason?
It doesn’t help that I have experience of having done it wrong in the past; I remember being told, the first time I went to a tax specialist, that I’d been doing it so wrong for the past three years that I owed an entire subsection of taxes I wasn’t even aware of. Oh, and because I’d owed it for so long, I’d be charged a 100% penalty for non-payment, so I basically had six years of back taxes waiting for me like the worst Christmas gift ever. I remember being called while on a business trip to the UK by a separate tax preparer that something was wrong with my paperwork and they probably wouldn’t be able to file on time unless I scanned and submitted entirely different documents that I didn’t have to hand because, again, I was in a different country on a work trip.
Because of all of this, I try to do my taxes pretty early each year — preferably somewhere in February, so I have two months or so to fix things if and when they go wrong. Except that, this year, I spent February and the first half of March sick, so I had this internal pressure of gotta do taxes gotta do taxes GOTTA DO TAXES in my head the entire time. They were done before the end of March, filed and accepted, but still. I’m half-convinced that, somehow, something is going to go wrong at any moment and I won’t have time to fix it.
Happy tax filing deadline tomorrow, everyone.