I’ve been wrestling with the idea of privilege, more specifically, financial privilege. Unbeknownst to me, I’ve associated privilege with self-aggrandizement, complacency, entitlement, and hubris subconsciously. Which conflicted with my achievement focused, security seeking conscious mind. 

That association runs deep. I have an almost visceral aversion to financial privilege because I’m afraid it will change me, that I’ll turn into the kids I went to high school with, whose comfort and confidence seemed completely foreign to my upbringing. My aunt, who raised me, didn’t understand; she thought I hadn’t yet suffered enough to know life’s hardships the way she did.

Over time, I internalized a belief that having financial privilege meant being a selfish and disconnected person deprived of empathy for others’ suffering. The auto-translation on a subconscious level was to have money was to lose empathy. That belief shaped how I viewed not just wealth, but myself. It’s much more nuanced than ‘rich people are evil’, I boiled down the self-defeating beliefs down in detail so I know what thoughts/beliefs to tackle in order to unlearn what I had ‘caught’ growing up in my environment. It’s easy to think ‘oh, she just doesn’t want to be perceived as a bad person’, but the truth is I don’t care about the optics. I am more concerned that I AM a bad person for wanting more and not accepting my lot in life with a smile. Written down, it sounds ridiculous but it’s the catch-22 of being rebellious.

Looking back, I can see how that mindset fed into self-abandonment. I constantly minimized my struggles, convincing myself that everyone else had it worse, that my pain didn’t count. My suffering became something to hide, not acknowledge.

Now, when I think of my aunt at my age, I recognize the echoes of her beliefs in me. It’s unsettling—almost terrifying—to realize how deeply this pattern runs. My relationship with money remains conflicted: I eagerly seize opportunities to succeed, yet recoil when they involve financial gain. Somewhere inside, that old fear still whispers that prosperity and compassion can’t coexist.

“the reason that you’ve gone through sickness and difficulty and suffering in your life is because that’s what God has ordained to make you strong enough to stay there when you get there”

So when all the land of Egypt was famished, the people cried to Pharaoh for bread. Then Pharaoh said to all the Egyptians, “Go to Joseph; whatever he says to you, do.” Genesis 41:55 (NKJV)

“Dean Simonton says, ‘Gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions. In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions.’” – Malcolm Gladwell

“If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises an indomitable force.” – Malcolm Gladwell

"The schoolyard monitor said
she saw Maddy hit Teddy pretty hard,
like she knew what she was doing."

"Maybe this is my fault.
I taught her to defend herself.

"Think it's good teaching
your little girl to fight?"

"No.
Defend herself though, yeah."

“wisdom is knowledge in action” – Tony Robbins

Psalm 109 — Plea for Judgment of False Accusers
To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David.

1 Do not keep silent, O God of my praise!
2 For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful
  Have opened against me;
  They have spoken against me with a lying tongue.
3 They have also surrounded me with words of hatred,
  And fought against me without a cause.
4 In return for my love they are my accusers,
  But I give myself to prayer.
5 Thus they have rewarded me evil for good,
  And hatred for my love.
6 Set a wicked man over him,
  And let an accuser stand at his right hand.
7 When he is judged, let him be found guilty,
  And let his prayer become sin.
8 Let his days be few,
  And let another take his office.
9 Let his children be fatherless,
  And his wife a widow.
10 Let his children continually be vagabonds, and beg;
  Let them seek their bread also from their desolate places.
11 Let the creditor seize all that he has,
  And let strangers plunder his labor.
12 Let there be none to extend mercy to him,
  Nor let there be any to favor his fatherless children.
13 Let his posterity be cut off,
  And in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
14 Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the Lord,
  And let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.
15 Let them be continually before the Lord,
  That He may cut off the memory of them from the earth;
16 Because he did not remember to show mercy,
  But persecuted the poor and needy man,
  That he might even slay the broken in heart.
17 As he loved cursing, so let it come to him;
  As he did not delight in blessing, so let it be far from him.
18 As he clothed himself with cursing as with his garment,
  So let it enter his body like water,
  And like oil into his bones.
19 Let it be to him like the garment which covers him,
  And for a belt with which he girds himself continually.
20 Let this be the Lord’s reward to my accusers,
  And to those who speak evil against my person.
21 But You, O God the Lord,
  Deal with me for Your name’s sake;
  Because Your mercy is good, deliver me.
22 For I am poor and needy,
  And my heart is wounded within me.
23 I am gone like a shadow when it lengthens;
  I am shaken off like a locust.
24 My knees are weak through fasting,
  And my flesh is feeble from lack of fatness.
25 I also have become a reproach to them;
  When they look at me, they shake their heads.
26 Help me, O Lord my God!
  Oh, save me according to Your mercy;
27 That they may know that this is Your hand—
  That You, Lord, have done it!
28 Let them curse, but You bless;
  When they arise, let them be ashamed,
  But let Your servant rejoice.
29 Let my accusers be clothed with shame,
  And let them cover themselves with their own disgrace as with a mantle.
30 I will greatly praise the Lord with my mouth;
  Yes, I will praise Him among the multitude.
31 For He shall stand at the right hand of the poor,
  To save him from those who condemn him.

“My true relationship is with myself — all others are simply mirrors of it.” — Shakti Gawain

“I’m ashamed to admit that I want to be loved.” The thought surfaced as a whisper from the recesses of my psyche. It felt uncomfortable, like the loss of a voice due to disuse—the muscles had atrophied. Yet, as I repeated it over and over, the voice became clearer and stronger. I also noticed that the more I said it, the more my peripheral awareness came online. I struggle with certain sensations, like the feeling of my mother’s wound being heard, but as I repeated the phrase, even that dormant “limb” began to flicker back to life.

The experience itself was profound, but the setting was anything but. I was venting in my journal, as I usually do when I need to get hurt feelings off my chest. The topic of today’s tirade was my high school best friend, who had just aired me out like trashy grocery aisle gossip. Considering how my hero’s journey has manifested, I instantly understood that this was a surface manifestation of an unconscious belief I had yet to address—a background program of lack was running. I knew this because most of the relationships in my life that pre-date my healing journey were essentially trauma bonds. Now that a breakthrough was coming, and my “fan club” (the old patterns) started acting out, I had to take a hard look at the glue that cemented our bond.

A practice that has helped me become more conscious of my unconscious programming is a combination of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and embodying the “observer” mentioned in The Power of Now. After ranting on paper, the epiphany hit. I took a metaphorical seat back in my psyche and ran the tape of our friendship. We became friends during a sensitive, extremely impressionable time in anyone’s life: the transition from child to adolescent. I struggled greatly to adapt to a new, public school, especially since my cousin, a senior, was raining hell on the rest of my high school career. To top it off, I was dirt poor with very little family support, so I felt entirely on my own at a major crossroads in life—a feeling that is extremely isolating. To add insult to injury, I attended a predominantly white high school in a wealthy neighborhood, so to say I didn’t fit in would be an understatement.

I remember having a couple of high school crushes (cringe, I was extremely awkward) and was still navigating new social constructs. As I shared these interests with my friend, I now realize that I started to internalize the narrative she was creating: a story that I was somehow unworthy or unacceptable, basically suggesting I was aiming too high for romantic interest. That same narrative continued throughout our friendship, especially as I battled emotional unavailability due to a tumultuous relationship with my dad. This narrative was buried deep, sealing an internalized belief from my caregiver that it was shameful to admit that I had needs, most of all, love.

As my unconscious remained unconscious, I continued to select friendships that mirrored the emotional makeup of my caregiver and enabled my need for invisibility in relationships. (For the ignorant: this does not mean there’s a good guy or a bad guy—read that twice.) Naturally, this pattern played out in romantic relationships in its own way, but I prioritized my female friendships over romantic connections because, quite frankly, I suffered from a distortion that men were useless. I hadn’t had a consistent, healthy male role model, and that lack of consistency created a belief that I couldn’t rely on men for anything. I had been abandoned in too many difficult situations by male caregivers and the like to feel comfortable (let alone safe) prioritizing a romantic relationship. Naturally, I became the friend who was the romantic cynic, doling out dating advice on the regular. After a while, I created a whole character around that belief system. As life became more difficult and my heart calcified, I had to become stronger, so admitting I had any sort of need, even down to the basics, became a shameful act. If I could not ask for my basic needs to be satisfied, who was I to ask for a higher need like love?

It’s been a month since I bared my buddha belly and got vulnerable about my struggles with sobriety weight, so I thought a status update was in order.

I’m more curvy than I am round now, thank sweet mercy, but still have some progress to go to my ideal size and weight. The other day, as I was gauging my progress through my very scientific method of picking up my belly and dropping the fat, I realized that not only was I terrified of becoming like my aunt, but my body had become a monument to my struggles with addiction and mental health. Somewhere in my psyche, I had the misconception that if I was able to lose enough weight to get back down to my old size, that would mean I would somehow be able to salvage what was left of my old life. I had gotten to the other side. Restoration would be in the room, preferably in a size 6 (okay, 8). I was definitely trying to take the route of bypassing instead of accepting it for what it is, releasing it for what it was, and moving on with my new body. Exactly how my road of recovery has been.

As I mentioned, The Brightline Diet was my diet of choice for its focus on nervous system regulation, a.k.a. the keys to my mentally stable kingdom. I started out like any good addict: I started on the extreme end of things by tossing out all food that had ingredients with sugar and flour. Needless to say, I looked like something straight off the Chappelle Show by day 4. I decided tapering off was most likely best and started swapping out ingredients for healthier options like white rice for brown rice. I tried looking up alternatives for my favorite recipes, and the results were… horror-inducing. If I took out the ingredients that weren’t on the approved list, I would end up with maybe the protein and that’s it. But have no fear, because around here, we keep going. I kept it simple and stuck to the basics—protein, starch, and vegetables. I’ve been eating salmon, broccoli, and brown rice for about a month now (thank you neurodivergence), and I haven’t gotten sick of it, and it’s paying off! I got weighed in at a doctor’s appointment, and a single tear almost rolled down my cheek at the progress in digits. I can also walk for almost an hour without getting stitches in my side and hating my life, I haven’t seen this much growth in my yoga practice in such a short amount of time, I don’t feel heavy and exhausted after meals, and I’m starting to look more like Marilyn and less like Norma Jean.

I bought a book on the diet and intend on getting the cookbook so I can eat more than the same three meals a day eventually, but I’m also still learning more about the actual diet. In the meantime, the game plan is to start juicing, be consistent with sauna sessions, and throw in some other exercise other than yoga. Now that my diet has regulated for the most part, or at the very least, I’ve figured out its rhythm, I will challenge myself in the exercise department. I want to buy a bike and be young, wild, and free on two wheels once again, but I think I’ll just stick to walking as a form of transportation. I’ve gone back and forth on the exercise bike, but I’m a purist, and quite frankly, there’s just way too many damn people. I’m breaking out into hives just thinking about it.

I went into detail ad nauseam to showcase how I layered new habits on top of each other in order to reach my goal of a healthy weight. The BMI is a scam, so I’m going for quality of life over calorie counting because BFFR.