Emotional Terrorism: Holiday Edition

I constantly hear about how the holidays can be rough. The addiction community is on red alert and the most unconventional batch of people come together to break bread in a makeshift family. Thanksgivings and Friendsgivings and Girlsgivings, and in Indigenous communities, it’s a day of mourning. Like anything in life that has to do with relationships, it’s a mess. The only saving grace is a season when we all get to enjoy being basic as we sip our seasonal Starbucks, admire the holiday decor, and wear the mask of civility needed to preserve the social schema of “family friendly.” Then there’s the rest of us. The chaos agents, the budding black sheep, the awkwardness of the empty seats, or worse, fighting your psyche with a Joker-esque smile.

Personally, I have opted to stay out of the scene and remain out of the way. The holidays aren’t particularly difficult for me in the way people try to “sympathize” (read: pity) me for not spending time with family or friends, but because my mental health, irrespective of people, absolutely whoops my ass. Depression is at an all-time high, the good Lord above sits my ass down, and I’m constantly sick. The irony is that none of the things I’m actually battling are received with the same fake sympathy as not spending it with family. People are so interesting.

I say all of this to say: one day, after a particularly horrendous Thanksgiving, I decided it was best for me to spend the holidays alone, away from people. Not because of their perverse empathy for my lot, because I didn’t have something they did, but because I got tired of people making me into some sort of charity case during the holiday season. Not spending time with anyone during the holidays is actually liberating for me simply because I don’t want to hear it.

Not everyone is having an A Christmas Story experience. It’s just another day or season for the rest of us, with extra latte flavors. My big sister/black sheep cousin advice is this: if you don’t want to participate in the family-friendly holiday season as some sort of orphan (regardless of whether you still have friends or family around you), then you don’t have to. It will be uncomfortable for other people, but the trade-off is that all of them will make you feel uncomfortable if you choose to participate in something you don’t want to do. I’m not pushing an anarchist narrative; I’m simply giving you permission (that you don’t need) to not participate in the humiliation ritual of family, friends, or work gatherings. Make the holidays your own, start your own traditions, actually enjoy the day (shocker, I know). Friendly reminder: you were born perfect. The rest is a meat suit adjusting to hazardous conditions.

Hunger, The Mother Wound, & Money

I recently finished Emotional Currency, along with working through the journal prompts at the end of each chapter and it was illuminating, to say the least. I was able to identify my behavioral patterns and core beliefs about life through the way I earn, manage, and spend money. (I’ll be posting highlights from the book on my Tumblr page soon.)

Doing the prescribed work in the book left me feeling emotionally healthier, but one realization stood out most: no matter how much money I have, deprivation has always been my baseline. I’ve spent most of my life in survival mode, and money management has felt like my personal Kilimanjaro — a mountain I could never quite climb. In the past few years, being stripped down to the bare minimum and unable to “earn my way out” forced me to face it. The journal prompts helped me finally see a clear picture of my financial health.

What I found was this: my scarcity mindset reflects my low self-worth, which is deeply rooted in a childhood marked by abandonment and neglect from my maternal caregivers. I associate scarcity — the fear of running out, overspending, or being unable to meet even basic needs (like being sick and unable to afford over-the-counter medicine) — with an early experience of hunger. I must have been truly starving, or it happened so consistently that it left a permanent imprint.

Feeding children is typically a maternal role, it’s an act of nurturing that also teaches us how to nurture ourselves. But since I wasn’t fed — in every sense of the word — I never learned how to nurture myself. One way this shows up in adulthood is through unsustainable money management. My mind seems to translate that childhood neglect into a belief: Because I wasn’t nurtured, and I never learned to nurture myself, I must not be worthy of nurturing in any form, even from myself.

I’ve made a lot of progress when it comes to self-nurturing, but I’m still learning to feel comfortable with its external expressions like money management and stable housing. I still struggle with hyper-independence as a response to having my needs neglected early on. It was my ego’s antidote to self-neglect: “If no one else will meet my needs, I’ll meet them myself.”

For a long time, the way I tried to challenge this belief was by swinging to the opposite extreme. I feel powerless and helpless when I engage in self-neglecting behaviors, so my ego’s solution was to try to control every variable through obsessively tracking budgets, reading every financial book I could find, and feeling perpetually tense and constipated around anything to do with money. Needless to say, that wasn’t healthy either, it just reinforced other self-defeating patterns.

The most effective solution I’ve found that’s helped me balance out my neuroticism is surrender. In surrendering, I discovered the idea of self-sufficiency as a healthier lens for engaging with my resources. Not hyper-independence. Not playing God. Just self-sufficiency.

I know it sounds simple — even elementary — but it’s been one of the most transformational insights of my journey so far. Self-sufficiency reminds me that I am capable of caring for myself, whether or not anyone else is present. It shifts me away from the survivalist mindset of “having or not having” toward an abundance mindset: I can have enough, all the time, and grow what I have by investing wisely instead of overspending to self-soothe.

Seeing self-sufficiency as the foundation of my money management brings me a step closer to true financial freedom — and with that, the ability to own my time as an entrepreneur. It’s a building block toward my ultimate goal: freedom. Freedom from living a life where others can leverage my basic needs against me. (More on that later.)

Here are the links to the books I reference:

Mother Hunger

Mother Hunger Workbook

Emotional Currency