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We Understood the Assignment
I remember being a little girl watching The Cosby Show. When I tell you… I wanted their lives.
It wasn’t just that Claire was always wearing a bad suit, or that she spent $11K on a painting (about $32K in today’s dollars), or even that Theo eventually got the Gordon Gartrell shirt for $95 (roughly $270 today).
What I loved about their lives was that money was never the main focus. It seemed like money never determined what they could or couldn’t do. Whatever they wanted felt possible, that’s what I wanted…that kind of freedom.
I wasn’t alone. A lot of us grew up watching money from the outside.
We learned the formula out the gate, finish high school, go to college, climb the ladder, start the business, make six figures, then make more. Buy the house in the right neighborhood, give your kids everything they need and the option of everything they want, take vacation, borrow from no one, and barbecue on the weekends. Whew, I think that’s everything… Oh, and make sure your parents are good.
Okay, so you did all the things and yet…
SOMETHING JUST ISN’T RIGHT… because now you feel exhausted because you are constantly monitoring, watching deposits and withdrawals., moving money from here to there just to keep everything standing. It’s crazy and chaotic and it feels like on any day, if one thing goes wrong, the whole thing could tip over.
This is usually when we start secretly wishing for a Do Over.
“If I could just pay off the debt, get my loans forgiven, build my emergency fund.”
We start hoping for a Do Over because something in us knows this isn’t how it’s supposed to feel.
There is something about being in this position that makes you feel like a fraud. I’m talking about that sick feeling you get when you have the thought “if people actually knew how financially close to the edge l am, they’d be shocked”.
Financial fragility despite high income often comes with shame andembarrassment in front of yourself when the third overdraft fee hits this month.
I’ve been there, and I’ve walked with people who’ve been there.
For most people, it’s not that they’re bad with money or careless. This is what it looks like when success outpaces infrastructure.
This is what it looks like when success outpaces infrastructure (that was not a typo, I wanted to say that again).
Many of us grew up seeing what money could build, but we never saw the process, the how to build it. We saw the lifestyle, the high income, the freedom. We didn’t see the systems, the decisions, the trade offs, the timing, the delayed gratification, or the infrastructure underneath it, and how they were built. We didn’t know that we were looking at the finished product, not the process.
So, we learned how to acquire the life, not how to build and support it.
When you are young, no one tells you that being a higher earner is not the same thing as having financial stability.
You Won — The Turning Point
For many of us, because we had such a clear vision of what success looked like when we were younger, we were determined and we went right to it; this is why it’s not about failure.
The Do Over isn’t about undoing your life or erasing what you built. It’s about allowing yourself to believe, I MEAN REALLY BELEIVE, that this is just the beginning – that’s half of the Do Over right there.
Courage
The late, great Maya Angelou said, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” (Come on Auntie!)
The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it’s safety.
Courage is what allows you to stand when it would be easier to run back. Courage is what allows you to hold two conflicting truths at the same time. You did what you set out to do, and it’s not working the way you hoped it would.
You are not broken, it’s just that you are being asked to grow in a way you weren’t asked to before. That pain and fragility that you are living with, the constant tension is a sign that you’re ready for freedom.
In the next article, we’ll talk about what courage looks like in action, and how YOUR Do Over can begin to take shape.
-Kahlilah Dowe