I don’t particularly care for this woman, but she’s so right:
In addition to grief and heartache, Iyanla also experienced financial ruin. At one time in her life, Iyanla was receiving million-dollar checks from publishers, but over the years, she lost it all. “I didn’t really have a clear understanding of the value of money other than you need it, you get it, you spend it,” Iyanla says. “I had six bank accounts, and I didn’t know what they were for, where the money was.”
Iyanla was so used to living paycheck to paycheck, she says she was a millionaire with a welfare mentality. “The pathology, the pattern for me was that, in order for me to get money, all money had to be gone,” she says. “The day before payday, you’re looking for pennies and borrowing money. That’s how I was. All money had to be gone before more money could come in.”
***
As another self-sabotaging, lower class woman once “explained” to me, “spending money makes me feel rich!”
“You know what I mean?” she added. It was a desperate, hope-full plea, and her eyes begged me to say, “yes.”
“But having money makes you rich,” I snapped dryly. I was feeling superior. “When the money is gone, you aren’t “rich” anymore, right? That’s what the word “rich” means…”
Her face curdled into one of those squiggly Charlie Brown smiles, and her eyes welled up and stopped their begging. For all I know, she’s still on the dole. She was very smart, gifted with a stunning soprano voice, and strikingly beautiful. But she’d expected she’d have been rescued by some wealthy man by now. She knew that rescue became less likely with every passing day, not only because she was getting older, but because she was turning from Scarlett O’Hara into Blanche Dubois and couldn’t seem to stop herself. She met a nice-ish enough fellow, though, another lower class person, not very ambitious and as it turned out, quite passive-aggressive. Maybe they are still together. I don’t know. I can’t hang around with people like that. It’s contagious.
One of the consolations of ugliness is, if you’re a smart girl, you look in the mirror around 12 or 13 and realize you are going to have to support yourself. You take yourself in hand
