“Everything you can see, you can have. Money, everything.”
“Everything you can see, you can have. Money, everything.”
I kid you not. One day a few years ago I was walking home near where the F and N trains come out of the tunnel. A man was nearby. He was sort of mumbling to himself. He didn’t seem well. As I got near him he suddenly spoke clearly and said those words. I looked around to see if anyone else was nearby. I was alone. He went back into his world and I walked away confused.
I looked around at the houses. “Anything? Money?”
When I started my business I went through a crisis of faith of sorts. I’m going to have to go back a bit to give you some context.
How Money Mindsets can Start
I grew up poor. My mom will disagree with this but getting food from your church or praying to God that you can pay rent this month counts as poor in my book. It didn’t stay that way forever, but it was that way long enough for it to get wedged in my psyche that nice things weren’t for me. My mom cleaned houses. A lot of the time I’d go with her especially when I was little, or during the summers when I was young. I felt both envy and shame.
As I got older, I went to “nicer schools” in “better neighborhoods” because my mom wanted me to get a “good education.” But we were still living in apartments most of the time. I was angry and scrappy. Other kids didn’t “get me.” They didn’t know where I came from. “Oh, your dad’s a doctor? Well, my dad’s in prison.” I associated wealth with being out of touch. With spoiled rich kids who drove Hummers in the high school parking lot. Who shot a BB gun at my beater car because it was funny. So yeah, I was fucking angry and I thought people with money were assholes.
So I had this weird relationship with money. I thought it was evil. I felt completely incompetent when it came to knowing how to use it. My money model was my mom who always owned her own business but she didn’t really know what she was doing with money either. I saw her working so hard, exhausted, and stressed. Yeah, we could afford nicer shampoo and eventually a nicer car, but that was superficial.
After a while, I realized it wasn’t fair to make snap judgments. I started to meet people with money who I respected. I also realized the inherent conflict I had created for myself. I wanted money but I hated it and was largely ignorant of what to do with it once I got it. So how was this going to work out? I needed to shift something. I needed new role models. I needed to learn how to use money in a way that aligned with me. I needed to heal my relationship with money. I worked on this for years. I went to conferences and workshops. I started looking at my bank account every day. I read books.
It still felt weird. Don’t get me wrong. It was getting better, but this was a big change. In so many ways, I was getting further away from my roots. First-generation college student, masters degree, and getting to sit down while earning money. I wondered what happened to the kids I grew up with when we lived by the mall. As I changed schools, I saw fewer and fewer kids like us. If they were there, they hid and blended in with our more upper-middle-class counterparts. In grad school, there were even fewer. I was grateful to my mom. She worked so hard to give me a little more and make sure I knew I could get a good education. But I was conflicted. If I changed, made money, maybe didn’t have to be so scrappy, would I be bad? Out of touch? An asshole?
I thought of Donald Trump, the quintessential out of touch rich person. Was I in danger of becoming like him? If I just stayed broke, I’d never have to worry about that.
But I was tired of being broke. And I started to wonder if being broke was really doing anything to help other people. It’s not like I was giving the money I didn’t have away to help other broke people not be broke. Instead, I was stressed out and overworked. I wore it like a badge of honor for so long until it felt more like a weight.
When I prepared to open my business, it came to a head. What kind of business owner was I going to be? How would I work in a way that aligned with my values? Was there a way to obtain wealth and do it ethically? How could I trust myself to be generous with money if I had it? Would I just be stingy? What about capitalism?!
These are still questions I grapple with. I am still learning how to be wise with my money. I try to keep it flowing in and out. I try to see it for what it is- energy. I realize that my being broke never helped other broke people. I wince a little as I write that because I still wonder about it. Me being broke meant that I was in the same boat as other broke people which meant that it was easier for me to look out from my broke place and blame people with money for my problems. Being broke made me feel disempowered and helpless.
Wealth disparity is a huge problem. I’m not saying, “We just all need to have lots of money and that will solve everything! And it’s actually your fault you’re broke. You just have to change your mind!” As long as capitalism is a thing, we’re going to have a lot of social problems related to money and wealth. At the same time, my continuing to be broke and stressed out was not helping other broke people. It wasn’t changing the system. It was just burning me out which is incidentally what a capitalist system is created to do. To use people, burn them out, and cast them aside. And though I would love capitalism to just disappear right now, the reality is that I currently live in a capitalist system. So I have to grapple with that and figure out how to live the life I want and have it align with my values and find out what I can do to change this current reality so that it can become something different. I don’t have the answers. Every day I am trying to live according to my values and to be wise with money, with energy, and with resources knowing that there is so much that I don’t know. And that I will make mistakes. And will learn. And years from now, I will be doing it differently because I will have learned more. But I have to start that process because the alternative is poverty and burnout and anger and resentment.
We all Have Money Histories
We all have money histories that have to do with class, race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. We all have real challenges that we face when it comes to creating abundance in our lives. Some of those things are not directly in our control. I can’t just not be a woman. I am a woman and that creates some challenges that are outside of my control. But there are a lot of things that are in my control. The way systems of oppression work are by creating real systematic barriers to people’s success, well being, growth, and right to life. They also work by getting in our heads. By making us believe that these things are true, that we are unworthy. So that even when we’re not directly confronted with these challenges, they live inside us, influencing our thoughts and behaviors.
“Stay small. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t let anyone see you. It’s not safe. That good stuff is for other people. Not you. You wouldn’t even know what to do with it if you got it. You’d probably be bad with it.” You might even hear this from people within your own community because this was true for them in a way. Perhaps it really wasn’t safe for them to be bigger and bolder and begin to have. Because maybe it got taken away. Maybe they became a target. This is the legacy of so many people and it’s in our bodies. So allowing yourself to “have” is an act of resistance and rebellion and is so brave. You get to have. And you get to do it in a way that is different from what you have seen before. You get to create a new kind of having that is generative and expansive and one hundred percent you. You get to learn. You get to make mistakes. You get to grow. You don’t have to be perfect. You get to just try and have that be enough. You are enough.
