A Money💲tory: Part Four

This is the final chapter of a four-part newsletter series I'm sharing on money...
 

But the story I'm living is still being written.

I said in Part One that sobriety didn't fix my money problems, but it made them hard to ignore. (If you missed the first three installments, I've reposted them to my blog.) Abundance mantras and magical manifesting also don't fix money problems. Make no mistake, I love meditation and tarot cards and positive affirmations and they might put me in the right mindset, but real change only comes from intention and inspired action. No, sobriety didn't fix my money problems but because I had quit using alcohol, something I didn't think I could ever do until I did it, I knew I could approach financial recovery the same way.

Here is how I modeled my financial recovery after my recovery from alcohol addiction:

• I began the work of looking at my patterns through personal investigation. Through writing my origin stories and spending stories, I researched my own past. When I got sober, I did the same work of looking at my history of alcohol use to help me understand the patterns and unfortunate choices that I'd perpetuated for decades.

• From the pattern work, I started to understand my motivations. The Enneagram has been an essential tool in this step. As a Type 7, one of my basic motivations is to have my needs fulfilled. With this knowledge, I've cultivated compassion for myself as I could see how I'd fumbled over and over towards that desire, using the inadequate tools I had at the time. And just like in addiction recovery, healthier tools lead to healthier financial sobriety.

• The practice of extending compassion to myself has grown into loving myself, and my recovery from alcohol has been the same. I forgive myself for the mistakes I made using the tools I had at that time and because I value myself, I desire to do better, to clean up the destruction and be the healthiest version of myself I can be.

• I practice gratitude for how far I've come: I no longer use the pawn shop, I have a bank account and money in savings, I charge what I'm worth, I'm paying off my debts, I've paid off my student loan, I can be relied on for groceries and gas and I no longer take money from my kids. I no longer use alcohol to cut myself off from my reality and I no longer use spending to cut myself off from my financial reality.

• And finally, I practice generosity, either through service or philanthropy. I know that generosity is really reciprocity, because that's how energy works. Abundance is really satiation. It doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement, but it's the feeling of being satisfied by enough.

In both recoveries, it is daily and often uncomfortable work. I have to stay diligent and intentional and while I've not had a sip of alcohol in 6.5 years, I can still occasionally numb out with spending, feel disembodied or powerless over my finances. And when I do, I just re-enter. Like with alcohol use, it was decades of destruction, so it's going to take some time to rebuild my foundation. I'm going to love myself through it.

In 2018, I had a natal chart reading from Natha Campanella, a friend, astrologer and life coach. She mentioned several times that she could see patterns in my chart that could be about helping women build wealth. Every time she said it, I'd almost laugh out loud. But the truth is, while I'm not an expert in financial recovery, I know how to disrupt patterns. I feel like I was subversive straight out of the womb, but if I was a rule-follower, I would have only continued the generations of patterns that had been established for me. As it is, I'm the first in my family to take care of my physical health through exercise and nutrition--heart disease and type 2 diabetes run rampant in my family. I'm the first to address addiction and mental health through real work and support. I'm the first to have a more fluid and less dogmatic spirituality and I'm the first to have a bachelor's degree. What if YOU are the one THEY have been waiting for?

I know how to change stories. If you have a story that should have ended long ago and yet you are stuck on how to end it and begin a new one, I know something about that. If you're tired of doing the same thing and expecting to get different results, I can help you with that. Invest in yourself now, and we can start when you're ready. Offer is good only until the end of the month. Just enter STORY2020 for 25% off at checkout.  And thank you for sticking with me through this series. Thank you for holding my vulnerability tenderly and if you caught a glimpse of your own reflection in my story, I hope that it bolsters some possibility to change your own money story. 

A Money💲tory: Part Three

This is a four-part newsletter series I'm releasing about money...

If you missed Part One and Two, you can read them here.

I ended the last part about the darkness before the dawn and I just want to interject that while this feels very vulnerable for me, it's not just an exercise in bleeding on the page. If you have struggled with your own financial recovery, I hope my transparency helps you and provides you with some hope for your own financial recovery.

I got married in my late twenties and I was the bill-payer in that relationship. We lived paycheck to paycheck but I did a decent job at managing our finances. We even paid for a cesarean birth of my son out of pocket and put a down payment on a house. But when our marriage fell apart seven years later, I had no savings, a two-year old and a drinking problem, so barely-getting-by was not a  structure that was going to support me. 

Those first few years after our separation were hard and because it felt unmanageable, I disassociated more and more from the severity of my debt. When I finally sold the house, I took my half of the equity and just repeated the pattern I'd mentioned in Part Two: depravity was always followed by spending as a reward. I bought myself a digital camera and enrolled myself back in school to learn digital editing and while that may seem like a smart investment, I never paid down my school loan and other bills I'd abandoned after the divorce. Oh, and I was drinking more than ever. 

I won't make you suffer through every detail of this slow and excruciating death of my finances, but I will tell you what it looked like when I finally quit drinking in 2014: I lost that camera to a pawn shop as well as many family heirlooms, I lost my bank account after losing thousands of dollars in overdraft fees, I borrowed money from people that I couldn't pay back, I stopped paying my student loan and credit card bills, I took money from my children to buy alcohol. I'm sure I left some things out but I think you get the picture.

If anyone can turn this turd sandwich into something positive, it's me. And it may only seem like I'm bypassing that horror show by moving onto the gifts, but know that I came back from that, one painful, hard day at a time. It took every second of five years. I'll never forget the day I walked out of the credit union with my new bank account. It took me most of the day to convince myself that the bank didn't make a mistake. And the positive byproduct of this experience is that it really transformed my spending habits. I had no money to spend and because I was sober and working on my overall health, I really got to examine my patterns, as I spoke about earlier.

In Part Four, the last chapter of this Money Story, I'm going to tell you how I did that and how I modeled my financial recovery after my recovery from alcohol. I'm going to end by telling you about my big dreams for the future, because it wouldn't be a letter from me if I didn't talk about the future.  

And I can't talk about the future without mentioning the 25% discount I'm offering to newsletter subscribers to work with me one-on-one through Change Your Story. If you're tired of doing the same thing and expecting to get different results, I can help you with that. Invest in yourself now, and we can start when you're ready. Offer is good only until the end of the month. Just enter STORY2020 for 25% off at checkout. See you there.

Eight Weeks

Hi.

I am eight weeks from three years of sobriety, and yes, I know this is breaking the one-day-at-a-time rule, but let's just go with it (*cough*rulebreaker*). Because I am fast approaching the date, I've been thinking a lot about what it was like. In the first six months of my sobriety, I journaled almost every day, pen to paper, not because I was told to but because I felt compelled to. I didn't know what else to do and my brain felt like it may explode on the daily, so I got it down. I'm so glad I did. About a year ago, I went through that journal and made color-coded note cards, like a good nerd, and separated my journal into categories. I thought for the next eight weeks I would expound on a card I pulled from the deck. I was one lucky and determined chick from Day One and was immediately blessed with the Feel Goods, so the thoughts from this deck are more about epiphanies than a daily, internal struggle. I hope they will help someone reading this, while helping me remember.

Many of these thoughts or epiphanies had to do with old stories, things I had always thought and because I had always thought them, they must be true. So here is one. I always thought that if you didn't have some damage, like some sort of dysfunction, subversion or demon, if you were not flawed or fragmented, that you were just boring. Some of this story still stays with me and reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by the Lutheran minister and theologian Nadia Bolz Weber, "If you don't have any demons, I don't really want to have coffee with you." That resonates. The thing is, I only associated this subversion with drinking, like you had to be drunk to be any of those things. 

The association made sense. It was the only time I had those cut-to-the-chase deep conversations, where you told your deepest secrets, rehashed that shameful event, exposed your soft underbelly. It was the only time spontaneity happened, the middle-of-the-night-three-hour roadtrips, the Jackassery antics, the naked full moon raft trips. Subversion and raw, guttural vulnerability only happened in the middle of the night, surrounded by empties. I had no idea there was any other way to connect, like really connect.

Where did this story originate? I always surrounded myself with people that were smarter than me, funnier than me, more talented than me, or at least that is what I projected. Perhaps it was my own feelings of unworthiness as I trodded through young adulthood. Perhaps it was aspirational of me, hoping some of them would rub off? I know that alcohol was the only thing that seemed to make me funnier and less self-conscious. With the magic of hindsight, reality would argue that alcohol made everyone funnier and me only the more self-critical. And we know how this story ends, the introspection later would turn to guilt, shame and self-deprecation that eventually ended with the most miserable girl on the planet. Now that sounds like a party.

"Below the anger is fear."--Robin Williams

I think you could substitute the word anger for sadness, shame or self-sabotage, and it all comes back to fear. It took a very long time for me to see that the scale was tipping, to see that my coping strategies were backfiring and I could no longer deny the noise. And when you become more afraid of life, of exposing your insecurities, vulnerabilities, struggles, demons, than you are afraid of death, that is the ultimate in self-destruction. 

So I've come full circle. People that are striving to glue the pieces back together are way more interesting to me now, charging a way more subversive act. Exposing demons, unguarded is way more punk to me now. Do you have to get sober to do this? No, maybe not, but I think you have to be willing to change something drastically in your life that isn't working anymore and in doing so, you have to be willing to take a good, hard look at your ancient stories.