Change

Most people (well, probably not *most* people) are working, unlike me, who actually has no concept whatsoever really about what ‘work’ means because I don’t think anything I have ever done has felt like it. As much as I somehow haaated putting even a little time into my business at certain points that never felt like work either. It felt like a trap for a little while, like there was a psychological block to imagining me doing anything else because money came so easily in my business but only the money I allowed to let in which wasn’t very much but it was, until I got trapped in a place where I could no longer rely on the security of my assets in a time where I was depressed and traumatized and what happened to the money, well, I don’t even know. Even when I was running my business I must have had a self-sabotaging streak as far as making money or even preserving it because I felt obligated to do work for clients and then didn’t care about invoicing them for some reason.

I also ended up, a much more senseless situation if you ask me for financial advice, letting whatever recurring payments I may have had going out just keep going out and then I was left not caring one little but about money while all the while I was being financially emotionally abused with money and stuck in the worst place to think or problem solve ot figure out how to get to a safe space or connect with someone safe because without spending  anything at all, for my own purposes, it deindled away and I had none, anymore, and to then be treated in dimunutive disempowering ways that I had previously had the financial security to escape, it was a complete cage with no key out apparently except grace and grace is the time I have spent here, offered the generosity to help me breathe and start to figure things out again and I do not know if I would have found the emotional space to figure anything out if not for my time here and I am leaving tomorrow.

“Don’t forget the invoice!’ is the most common client comment that comes most readily to mind when I get the voice of my clients in my head. They were nice about it but they wanted to be professional and pay me. I never quite got that bit. The other kind of vague but sweet memory I have of a client’s voice is when my first client, is telling me of the hope she felt in the air the day Barack Obama was elected President, from the room my ex and I shared in Halifax. I was feeling it too and at the same time I got to unwind by paying attention to the hilarious Canadian comedic commentary on their elections which happened if I recall to be happening right around the same time, so I kind of got to experience inside myself a comparative politics of hope. But it never felt like work and I don’t exactly know what people mean by work and I volunteered at a concentration camp where I saw Arbeit Macht Frei riding my bicycle out of the gates every day. It is hard to untangle my associations with work.

I don’t have the same association with running a ‘business’ as I do with the word ‘work’ because running a business for me anyway can feel like play if you want it to and it can feel like spirituality too.  I just took out my credit card and made what I discerbed a really easy financial investment to make for myself though it took some processing to weigh the risks and rewards of making an investment because as I well know that less money correlates with the most horrible cage I have ever experienced in my life which just happened to coincide with having no money which, having had it previously and knowing that it gave me the autonomy of being a person who got to make choices and suddenly I was trapped and there was no way to make a choice on anything.

I did not consciously realize that it is for practical purposes primarily a business decision, an investment I could deduct taxes on because it is a business expense, because I was thinking so much about the personal growth and education I’ll get from it and of helping people. Education and knowledge of how to do things and how to make money may be even more important than money itself as money can always be lost but knowledge of how to make a little money can lead to possibilities of investing in more ways to make money, which can always be lost, but it may be your investments in your development that may be a more valuable asset than money itself. I feel all sorts of ways about it but I think it might change my life. This time around, when I make money, I feel an obligation to keep it, or at least I get what the point of that would be.