Every day I feel a little more like a broken individual who just can't get fixed.
Call me "Ms. Glass".
I tend to think of myself as a once beautiful porcelain bowl that was dropped, broken into a thousand pieces, then mending itself with Crazy Glue. The cracks still show, and it is slowly coming apart and leaking.
Last night I learned ... like, deeply learned, that I have a tenuous and unhealthy relationship with money. But only as it pertains to myself. Not others.
This might not make any sense to anyone but me, but there it is. It's my truth. So it doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense to anyone else.
Through a very enlightening conversation with my soul sister I got to the core of why I had so many issues and anxiety with managing my own monies. When it came to me—very uncomfortably, I might add—I nearly had a full-blown anxiety attack before I could even get the words out. It was then that I realized that this truth was dug so far inside that even I couldn't see it until I allowed myself to do so. I had hidden it from myself.
My truth, my dubious relationship with money started ages ago when money became the focal point of everything. My dad was a gambler. A very good one I might add. He would bring home hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars in just a weekend of gambling. The monies were just tossed atop the bed like candy falling from a piñata. It was then that my mother's shopping addiction started. My mother has always had an addictive personality. When she wasn't addicted to one thing it was another.
This made the finances incredibly unstable. We might be dancing in dough today, and fending for scraps tomorrow. There was the rollercoaster of having and not having; of hand-me-downs that were ill suited for anyone, to extravagance that was far too much for the hood. And we indubitably grew up in the hood.
Then ... my dad stopped gambling. He cleaned up his act. That is when poverty came and stuck!
The rest, as the say, is history. The proverbial rollercoaster, turned into a full-on haunted house.
Then came my adulthood. This too led to a perpetual instability and struggle with money. Always ... struggling. Always, fighting. Always.
Having tied myself to an incredibly horrid man who intentionally belittled me at every turn, he made it clear that my worth was only in as much as I could provide financially. It didn't matter how perfect of a wife I was (and I was a fucking perfect wife) if I could not produce the monies he thought I should be producing, then I was worthless. Period.
One day he said something to me that stuck. It stuck like nothing had ever stuck before. I think these words changed my life entirely when it came to my relationship with money.
We were having an argument about his constant need to indulge in expensive things and have fancy stuff, and the extents to which he would go to in order to get those things. I said, "Life isn't all about the money."
He said, "Yes it is."
I asked him, "So you would rather have money than your wife and kids? No, wait, what would you choose ... money and fancy stuff, or your family?"
He said, with the most serious look I had ever seen before, "I would ALWAYS CHOOSE THE MONEY."
Those words broke my soul.
When we finally broke up, the struggle of poverty continued. Always fighting, always trying to make a way. Always trying to make ends meet. Always.
The money was never enough. And whenever I thought I was finally breathing from the struggle, something else came along.
Eventually, money became poison.
It was fire and ice. I didn't want it even though I needed it. It was my best friend and my worst enemy. Whenever I had it, I wanted it to go as fast as possible. Whenever I didn't have it, I needed it right away.
I've learned that I am damaged. Sometimes I feel that it is beyond repair. I wonder, is it even worth trying to continue working to my enlightenment, and through this chaos, or jus do like most and say "this is me"?
I want to say the former is the most beneficial route, but the latter seems more convenient. Mostly because, despite writing this blog post without shedding a tear, I am hurting inside. Why? Because the route to enlightenment hurts like a son of a bitch.
Of course I will keep working, but just for today I am feeling quite tired.
No comments:
Post a Comment