No one will understand that title but me, but Trekkies are my people.

When writing my last post about money avoidance, and specifically thinking about how that script came to be a dominant one for me, I have thought a lot about firsts. I haven’t ever been the first woman to do anything, but I am the first person in my family to go to college (I’m not counting cousins, Chuck). And I think people underestimate what a huge deal that is. My parents did not leave home for college, they got married as soon as my mom graduated from High School, and got jobs and started a family. So did my grandparents. By the time I graduated in 1998 though, college was a nonnegotiable for most of us. But I was 17, and letting go of their first child, turning them loose on a college campus at age 17, was NOT easy for my parents. I understand this now, by the way, but I certainly didn’t then. So I lived at home and commuted to university my first two years. I am incredibly grateful for the fact that I had a good school less than an hour from home. SIU Carbondale was transformative for me, and I’ve always been proud of the accounting degrees I earned there. The experience itself, I probably squandered much of – but the resulting degrees and career opportunities changed my life.

While I’m not exploring an uncharted path exactly, I am in incredibly unfamiliar territory. The family I grew up in worked and earned in order to survive. I don’t claim the same story as someone who is a first or second generation American. I do believe there are similarities in the experience of first generation wealth. I also acknowledge that it may be more difficult to wrestle with cultural wealth assumptions, and I would add that moving from working class poor to middle class to accumulating wealth contains its own culture shifts.

I grew up thinking, right or wrong, that people with money were simply… different than us. Entitled maybe, or even undeserving in some situations like inherited wealth. Even those who were newly wealthy, earning their own way, were doing so because their parents or someone could afford to send them to college, and that education paved the way to earn more. We were the good guys, thankful that the middle class existed and thankful that we were part of it, yet working our asses off to try and stay there. People with money live differently. They live in different neighborhoods and homes. They drive different cars. They hire people for manual labor, like mowing the lawn and landscaping. Maybe even for housework. They vote differently. They’re different.

When you grow up with this narrative, the last thing you want to be is “one of them” instead of “one of us.” The us/them story is incredibly powerful (Malcolm Gladwell tells this best of all in his brilliant book Talking to Strangers), and we always want to stick with “us.” Yes, we wanted to be different than our parents, we wanted to blow the small town and find a bigger pool of potential partners and careers. But we didn’t want to become “them.”

Whether I like to admit it or not, I think I’m now a “them.” Globally, it takes a net worth of about $1.1m to be in the top 1% of households in terms of accumulated wealth. While in the US I can still count myself as part of the 99% (it takes $11.6m of net worth to be in the top 1% of richest households here), that doesn’t really ease my mind.

Instead, my mind is full of the Bible verse that states (paraphrased) that it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven. Did I forget to mention that part, that rich people go to hell? This wrestling match between the part of me that wants to be wealthy, to accumulate for retirement, and the deeper layer that still believes I am fundamentally wrong to be accumulating, it is constant. And it results, for me, in money avoidance – in the form of overspending. The more I save, the quicker I’m not only different, I’m damned.

I believe in the ‘name it to tame it’ theory. I believe that naming a thing, digging deeper for the root cause and not just treating the symptoms is the path to healing. A budget won’t heal my deeper desires or fears about the accumulation of wealth. Realizing that part of me, buried in my subconscious, is terrified of wealth, this changes things. It helps me understand the why behind doing what I do. Now my first steps are to process and heal from the past, clear the thoughts and make way for new thoughts. Only then can the symptom resolve.

I love to talk to people who are finding ways to heal the emotional wounds in their lives. If that’s you, I’m right here.