The Story I Told Myself About Money
The stories that play in our heads usually get planted there by whatever’s happening in the world around us as we grow up. We absorb them from parents, friends, and the wider culture, and depending on how loud and constant they are, we tend to adopt them as fact.
Growing up, the story in our house was: be careful with money, save for the rainy day that’s definitely coming. Good luck doesn’t last, and you’d better be ready when it runs out. That story wasn’t unique to my family. Most of our parents had grown up under parents shaped by war and depression, and they’d had the same story drilled into them. They passed it down.
Everyone interprets an inherited story differently. Some people hear “good luck can’t last” and decide to spend freely, so there’s nothing left to lose when the bad day comes. I went the other way. Every purchase became an internal debate: do I need this, or should I save it for the day I can’t earn anything and end up destitute? The rainy day always won. So I mostly just stopped spending.
The only exception was spending money with someone else who was operating from a different story than mine. As a lifelong people-pleaser, I weighted other people’s arguments more heavily than my own; if someone told me it was fine to buy the thing, I’d buy it, then spend the rest of the day quietly justifying it to myself, wrapped in guilt.
Sometime in my thirties, I noticed how extreme this had gotten and dialled it back a bit. But the core belief that ruin was coming eventually never left. Then I got married, had kids, and my ability to save took a real hit. I worried about money constantly. It was exhausting.
Then I got divorced.
And there it was: proof. My story had finally been confirmed.
Starting over after divorce is hard enough. Starting over while genuinely believing the world has ended and you’ll never see financial stability again is a different level of hard. The day I’d spent my whole life bracing for had finally arrived. I was going to be financially unstable forever. That’s a difficult belief to build a life on. I tried to limit the damage by taking no risks at all, hoarding whatever savings I had left and making them last until I died.
Then I started noticing other people telling themselves different stories. One that fascinated me: if you run out of money, you go find a way to make more. Really? That was allowed?
Another was the gratitude story: friends who felt genuinely lucky to live where they lived and have the work they had, who seemed to move through life with more actual joy because of it.
Slowly, I noticed something else too. Doomsday hadn’t come. I hadn’t become destitute. I had only believed I would. That belief was never true; it had just been busy manufacturing my reality anyway.
So what did the story actually do for me? It helped me save, and I’m genuinely grateful I came out of my divorce with some financial stability because of it. But did I need the guilt and buyer’s remorse that came bundled in with the saving? Honestly, no. I could have saved just as well without any of that extra weight. Pay yourself first; that’s really all it takes. I did that automatically every month. The guilt over everything I spent afterward wasn’t doing anything useful. It was just the cost of believing a story I’d never actually tested.
Do you have a story about money running in the background of your own head? What is it actually doing to how you live?
