Do you want to be right or free?

That question changed my life.

When I was in my early twenties, I had a pretty fixed and limited idea of how my life should play out or what success would look like: engaged right after school (so everyone knew I was desirable and worth locking down) to someone from my church community (so they know I wasn't going to hell) and buying a house (so they'd know we were financially secure and making smart investments for our future).

We did "smart" things like go to the bank and have meetings and make spreadsheets and crunch numbers, and I found myself right on track to success with 3 princess cut rock kind of ring on my left hand, and a solid chunk of debt shouldered between myself and my ex.

There were a lot of warning signs for that relationship, and (luckily) we realized our incompatibility before officially tying the knot. But that didn't mean we were without a mess of logistics to untangle — mostly financial ones.

I won't lie — my coping strategy in the past was heavily reliant on avoidance. It still is, but I'm aware of my tendencies and actively working to overcome them. I didn't have that kind of awareness back then, so I basically turned my back to the mess and walked away.

I occupied myself with the details that come with cancelling a wedding with less than three months to spare, and I let myself off the hook for dealing with the finances. My ex said he'd gone to the bank and handled it, and I let that be good enough.

I moved to the West coast, started my new life, and left all of that weight in the past.

Until I got a letter in the mail, letting me know that the line of credit I was a cosigner on was missing its payments.

Let me back up a bit here. If you don't have the cash on hand to make large purchases (like a house) banks can be really strategic about helping you get the funds you need, thanks to credit. I won't bore you with the details, but basically as part of getting a mortgage and doing the renovations we wanted, I had co-signed onto a line of credit for my ex. I thought he "took my name off" when we split, but he hadn't, and I found out thanks to a registered letter from the bank a year and a half later.

My understanding of our split had been that he sold the house (the mortgage was in his name because I have always been self-employed as an adult) and used the money to pay off the shared line of credit and closed it.

Suffice to say, he didn't.

I tried to look into my options, at this point still not fully understanding the ramifications of signing a legal contract.

That sounds dumb, doesn't it.

I was ready to marry him (sign a lifelong legal contract because, love) and I linked up our finances without having any grasp on the long term ramifications.

Then, at 25, the ramifications hit me like a truck.

Basically, legally, I was 100% on the hook for his activity in the years since we had split.

(There were a lot of tears.)

I had a friend who was a lawyer so I gathered up all of the documents I could (being on the account meant I could go into a local branch and print off all of the statements) to see what I could do about it, and after reading over everything she looked me in the eye and said something I'll never forget:

"Here's the thing. There's a lot of emotion built into what's happening here, and based on the story and the numbers that back it up, you got a bit screwed.

But if you're hoping to walk into that meeting and be told that you were right and he is responsible for the amount, that won't happen. And legally, you are equally responsible. That's what you signed up for.

That doesn't mean that you can't walk away from this. The real question isn't 'are you right,' but 'do you want to be right, or do you want to be free?'"

She waited to let me think about it, and I said, "I want to be free."

Her follow up question was, "How much are you willing to pay to make that happen."

From there, I looked at the pages of bank statements and pile of receipts in front of me. I had crunched the numbers and I knew where every dollar had been invested together.

I took a deep breath, named my price, and she nodded.

"Then accept that that's what you're going to pay."

And I did.

That conversation was such a game changer for me because prior to that, I had a real attachment to being right. And not just knowing what was true for myself, but having other people corroborate my story and agree that I was right.

But in that moment, I knew that it didn't matter.

I could argue my experience of the numbers until I was blue in the face but that wouldn't change that my ex felt equally screwed over by the fact that I walked away from a mortgage and unfinished house: that I left him to pick up the pieces of what I started building with him.

That was my responsibility too, and it wasn't right for me to completely diminish his story and his hurt in the midst of our split — or to leave him 100% responsible for the financial fallout.

The truth was (as my mom always said) somewhere in the middle — we both had new partners and new lives that we wanted to get on with. We were both weighed down and tied together by this financial agreement. And neither of us could afford to dissolve it on our own; despite avoiding this closure for so many years, we needed each other to close the door.

Being faced with that choice made me own that my highest value is freedom, and the ability to choose how I set my life up. In this case, it meant paying a financial price. Once I accepted that, I was able to show up to the meeting with my ex to have a discussion about how to proceed.

I was terrified going into that meeting. There is so much emotion and story tied into the money, and the potential for it to go wrong was immense.

I took charge of the conversation because I knew that I wanted it to be on my terms.

As we sat down to talk, I wanted to be able to agree up front that we were basing the conclusion on what was fair for both of us, and that would ultimately come down to where the funds had been spent. I wanted to get unified in the outcome we were after before we got into the emotion of the conversation because we had to be able to acknowledge the feelings of hurt, and then set them aside so we could follow the paper trail as objectively and fairly as possible.

It meant that I had to examine his facts, feelings, and story, and compare them to my facts, feelings, and story.

My initial feeling had been that I was 0% responsible for the debt for a lot of reasons. The reality was that there was a portion that could be accounted for as mine, depending on how the profits from the sale of the house had been spent.

I had a lot of information, but not all of it.

When we first sat down for our conversation/mediation, I asked my ex what he thought was fair, and he said that I should pay for half of the debt. Period, the end.

I said okay, but here's what my calculations are — and I was able to show the spending that had happened in some of my accounts that he didn't know about; credit cards I had already paid off; records of our joint bank account and tangible proof that showed our responsibility.

We negotiated, he named a price that he felt was fair after we'd reviewed the bank statements, and the amount he named was within the limit I had decided ahead of time I was willing to pay. So we left Tim Hortons (yup) and went to the bank to make everything official.

Within two hours, I was finally free, and it didn't matter at all whether not anyone else thought that I was right.

(That was the most freeing thing of all.)

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