Day 652: money & fear

okee dokee artichokee.

i still haven’t decided how stringent i want to be in writing daily vs. whenever i feel like it but i know i want to start feeling comfortable writing here again so the way i’m going to do that is to channel my stream of consciousness through my fingers and onto the screen

this is going back to the ol’ familiar way of writing whatever comes up and slinging it onto the wall rather than approaching writing as a craft and actually trying to make something polished, but given that the status quo is me not writing anything at all, this will do

when i interned at facebook in 2011 (omg that’s literally a decade ago), there were posters with pithy, motivational bits like “what would you do if you weren’t afraid?” and the infamous “move fast and break things”, and my favorite of the bunch was “done is better than perfect”. very helpful when i hold silly expectations of myself to some arbitrary standard which stops me from actually making progress

i don’t think i’ll appreciate the full scope of the impact of the ayahuasca retreat until much later. several months? a year? several years? don’t know. the retreat ended almost two months ago, and there’s a part of me that wants to be able to clearly articulate the effect it had on me. but when i check in, it feels pretty clear that there’s still a lot being integrated and i’m just starting to notice some of the new perspectives that were made available and their ramifications. it feels like seeds were planted from those ceremonies, and i’m starting to see that some flowers are blossoming, but i have no idea what the fruit will be. some of the changes have been fairly stark though, so i’ll note the current state of things even though i have no idea where it’ll ultimately end up.

in one of the ceremonies, i had a clear recognition where i saw that my relationship with money was governed by fear. i can go on about my childhood, my family’s socioeconomic background, etc. to speculate about why my conditioning is the way that it is, but i’m going to skip all that for now and just say that i’ve always had an extremely strong orientation to frugality and saving as much money as possible. and during the ceremony, i saw that much of that originates from a fear of not having enough.

it became clear that while this fear originated to serve and protect me, it was no longer necessary. i saw that it was the source of suffering, and that it was based in a perspective of separation — that “i” was apart from this world and had to fend off a cold, uncaring, hostile universe.

and i saw that it didn’t have to be that way. that instead of living from fear, i could live from trust. that my mindset of scarcity, of not having enough, could instead be a mindset of abundance, of trust in myself, in life, and in the universe. i felt a profound shift, a release, as if i had been holding my breath for eons and learned that i could just let it all out in a big sigh.

this shift from scarcity to abundance, from fear to trust has shown up in all sorts of ways, some of them quite unexpected (e.g. suddenly feeling comfortable riding motorcycles as my primary mode of transportation despite the dangers involved putting me off every time in the past). one of the most notable areas has been with money. there’s a strong sense of “i’ll always have enough” / “i’ll always be able to figure something out” that seems to have overwritten the part of my operating system that kept asking “will i have enough?”

to be honest, i’m not quite sure what to make of this. i recognize that things can take a drastically unfortunate turn of events on any day. sure, with my current knowledge, experience, and credentials i’m confident in my ability to get a high-paying tech job at any point, but it’s also possible that i get into a tragic accident (say, from riding a motorcycle?) that renders me paralyzed or brain damaged. my ability to make money in the future is not guaranteed.

and yet. while i know this rationally, at an emotional level, there’s that sense of trust. trust that it will work out, whatever that means. trust that even if things do take a turn for the worse, that it, too, will be okay.

i don’t want to give the wrong impression. this still very much feels like a transition-in-progress, meaning that i’m not always operating from a place of perfect trust, openness, and surrender. but it feels like things have moved in that direction, and that i find myself operating from that place more easily.

it also feels like i’m probably overcorrecting, although it’s difficult to tell in real-time. i went from being hyper-frugal to spending quite liberally. today was the first time i bought a device on the day apple announced it, and it didn’t take that long for me to justify spending nearly as much on a macbook pro as i did on the used honda civic i drove several years ago. in austin, i found myself buying items from bakery displays without asking about their prices first, whereas in the past i probably wouldn’t have walked in to start with. i spent as much in the past two months than i did all of last year, and that’s not even taking into account the obscene rent i’ll be paying for my apartment starting in november. basically, i’m spending more money now than i ever have in my entire life, and while letting go of the fear around money feels like a good direction, it feels almost reckless at this point.

and that’s okay. as i’m navigating how to live from a place of more ease, i’m certain to make mistakes along the way, but i trust that it’ll all work itself out. it’s all part of the process of life doing its thing