It’s not about the money, money, money (but actually it is, a little bit)

On money, meaning, and mentally rewiring our scars, shame and social scripts

I’ve become obsessed with the idea of earning money. 

It began with the niggling feeling a couple years ago that I was not earning my worth. 

I was doing niche, high-quality work as a lawyer. Yet, I was doing it mostly for free. I was paid generously in other ways. There were many stories of virtue that floated around in my field. “Courageous”, “cause-driven”, “committed”, and so on. There were only a handful of others also doing this work, and they were generous, easy-going and helpful. There was plenty of meaning in what I did. 

But all of it was hot air. The only thing it did was keep afloat my balloon of an identity up high in the sky.

Meaning wasn’t about to feed me or keep the lights on. I felt neither “courageous” nor “cause-driven” nor “committed.” I needed to be on the level with myself about work and my values. I needed to return to earth and ground myself.

I got here because a younger me set out on a quest to be free. To dream and do things that felt meaningful and true to me.

When I finished college, I had a corporate job in a foreign country. I would have lived in an expensive city on the heels of a global recession, but I was promised financial stability, free healthcare, and other accompanying first-world niceties in exchange. Yet, I may as well have been the third-wheel in the marriage of my work-visa and my contract of employment — my time, money and mobility didn’t feel like they’d be mine for much longer. So I turned down the job and stayed back in India.

What I did instead sadly didn’t bring freedom either. Only I didn’t know it then. 

I wanted to learn the ropes of a practice-area that I loved. So I moved to the national capital and joined a small firm servicing public-sector clients. The only problem was that I barely made enough to cover rent. I was as good as an apprentice, because the system worked on the principle of tutelage. 

I was all too aware that my life was the dream of thousands of women in my country (apart from being my own). I told myself to suck it up and do the best I could with what I had.

I assembled a wardrobe of inexpensive export-rejects. I rented a room that would fail to make the cut as a Nordic prison. I got around only by subway or the bus. I ate home-cooked meals that were pocket-friendly even if palate-unfriendly. And my lifestyle choices did not involve make-up, manicures, or martini nights. Life was alright, and I managed to be happy even.

A couple of years in, I transitioned into research while practising law on the side pro-bono. Amid long solitary stints of research, I got involved in cases on short-notice. The work was uncharted, urgent, niche, and exciting, but it was an uphill climb. I was once again underpaid, and this time even older. I told myself that research was noble even if underfunded, and that the opportunity to also practise on the side was rare. I had enough privilege, few needs and some audacity to keep chugging along.

Over time, I worked up an uncommon expertise straddling research and practice. Yet, when I did work for people who could afford to pay me at market-rates, they assumed that my field came with a commitment to pro-bono service. And when I did work for people who could not afford to pay me at any rate, I assumed that if I didn’t do this work, no one would. 

My dreams felt Sisyphean. My convictions sustaining them broke down. 

Truthfully speaking, I enjoyed my work. I enjoyed it so much that I would do it even if I weren't paid to do it, which I know because I had been doing it for free for so long. 

But I was steeped in a culture of shame around money.

It was shameful to make grotesque amounts of money, but it was also shameful to not make a decent amount of money. It was shameful to say how much you earn, but it was shameful to be earning less than what others think you earn. It was shameful to live only for yourself, but it was also shameful to look like you were just about surviving and scrappy. It was shameful to live above one’s station, and it was shameful to live below one’s station. There was so much shame that the only thing I knew was that I was meant to be ashamed. Did I want to make money, or did I want to do meaningful work? 

My parents and partner always had the same response to my quandary: “meaning is more important, money will find its course.” 

In a world where money is taken to mean a Moncler jacket or a million-dollar mansion, nobody wanted me to trade in my work of ten years for empty gains in status. But in my world, money was an occasional coffee, a ceramics class, or a cohort-based course for creators. Even I wasn’t dying to trade in my work of ten years for these freedoms or a full life. 

I was stuck in a loop of loving my work but hating how unfree it made me.

Ten years, 87 therapy sessions, and 4983 sad feelings later, I had a breakthrough. It ended my hot-air ballooning and brought me back to earth… mercifully right onto the road to self-discovery. 

I uncovered a deep, unconscious wound in me from a time that I only barely remember. A time of shouting, raging, crying, and hurting, when my mum often left home.

One time I ended up going with her. My memory is hazy but the day went something like this. We would walk and walk, and she would cry and cry, and I would hold her hand and I would watch her cry from a whole foot below her face, and she would cry some more, and I would just watch her cry, and squeeze her hand from down under and walk and walk while she cried and cried. 

I was 11, maybe 12. My brain was about as developed as a puppy’s. And maybe my puppy brain grew into a whole-ass therapy-dog brain because I made it my life’s mission to be there with for her after that. And maybe I became her closest friend and confidante in the years after. And maybe I came to believe that the only way to be seen was to be desperately needed by someone, and to give myself as generously as I could, or to at least hold their hands when they cry and walk and walk by their side. Because I can’t remember a time in my life when I haven’t happily rolled over on my back, or let myself be cuddled when someone needed, or played fetch tail-wagging, as if the only way to ever be seen is to be really, desperately, needed by someone with little else… Even if it meant doing ten years of barely remunerated work, never giving myself a nice thing (or accepting with grace a nice thing I’m given), but always being the happy-helper, the peace-maker, and the emotional-sponge for everyone around me.

In my bones and in my flesh, I had let myself believe that being there for someone in desperate need is worth so much more (isn’t that the literal definition of priceless) than being there for someone who’s not (where I’d only be worth my price).

But I’ve come a long way from there, and I no longer feel seen only when I’m needed. I’m now determined to recalibrate my sense of worth, and I know that some things need to change. 

I’m teaching myself to embody the belief that I’m worthy as I am. If I am worthy as I am, I can be worthy even when I am not needed. 

When I’m being real, I know I’m not needed any more than the next gal. The world will go on and so will I, but only if I’m willing to not let ‘everyone’s emergency also be mine’ (as a famous human (of NY) once said). 

Of late, I’ve also come to see how cannibalising the parts of me that serve others are, of the parts of me that serve myself. Not being needed by others doesn’t mean I’m not needed at all. I need myself more than anyone needs me — something I unwittingly let myself forget for too many years.

So I’m teaching myself to remember that sometimes I can do things for myself. And sometimes, only I can do things for myself. Earning my worth in money happens to be one of the things that lies at the intersection of both truths.

Only I can earn for myself, if only I give myself permission to earn for myself.

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Feedback is the greatest love language. Thank you

Michelle Varghoose

and

Kirsten Corbett

for your love, feedback and the courage you gave me to publish this one.