I’m 37 years old, realizing that the lack of money has been the focus in my life for so long that I barely know what to care about now that I’m financially secure. 

Money was never widely available, and my mom used to push and support a culture of avoidance. I remember bills piling up on the glass dining room table. I remember going to the bank with my mom to withdraw money and finding out all the funds had been garnished by debtors. She often couldn’t cash checks at the bank, because she was carrying a negative balance. 

She would splurge on unnecessary things when money did randomly show up, things like new appliances or new couches or wallpaper or fancy shoes and clothes for herself, and otherwise we ate bread, cheese, and barbecue-sauce sandwiches, or big pots of beans, cheese, and onions. Meanwhile my sister bought my school supplies.

I’m an inheritor of all this, and I had no idea. I took a long time to understand money. I was poor when I first moved out, and never had the habits to be otherwise. I remember sharing a condo with my roommates and consistently being late to paying my share of the rent -- like, every month. My buddy carried us for years, carried me -- buying me things, fronting the cost of X or Y, and making sure the rent was paid. I was always behind and that just felt normal. 

When I lived on my own, I continued to struggle with money, in large part because I struggled to make myself go to work. I was hiding from a job I hated and late with my rent every month, and ended up defaulting on my rent another month. I didn’t communicate with my landlord -- I just didn’t pay the rent -- and eventually I found an eviction notice from the Sheriff’s Office on my door. I resolved it in a panic, and that just felt normal.

I was poor poor poor across the board. When I would get paid, I used to save $5 back in cash because I was always out of gas at the same time I was out of money, and I had to get to work. I remember buying bean burritos at Taco Bell -- roughly $3.50 worth -- in my last scrounged quarters. I would write checks for cash at Walmart that I knew would bounce, and that just felt normal.

And so it took me a long time to figure out how to work, how to grind, how to make money happen. But I did figure it out. I did learn how to show up and kick ass every day. Somewhere I figured out how to show up in every way at work, where the right effort met the right opportunity. And now I have money. 

And having money has confused the hell out of me, and left me feeling somewhat empty. The relief from money stress is significant -- it’s HUGE. But nothing has replaced that space, that fear and focus.

There’s a gap in my brain where I used to be able to just milk that money-worry for all it was worth. It was constant, it was hugely important, and a totally reliable source of worry. It defined who I was. So without it, it’s like walking out of a building and finding a vast plain where it used to just be a tiny room of which I knew every crack. It’s freedom, and it’s terrifying. Now I have to define my life. Now I have to figure out who I am. I never had to compare myself to anyone with money, because I never had any. But now I do, and I compare, and I feel inadequate.

And there is always more I could be doing. But I'm doing a lot, to my mind. I contribute 16% to my 401K. I’ve accrued an emergency reserve, the most cash I’ve ever saved. My credit is better than it’s ever been. I have more cash flow than I’ve ever had. I carry reasonable debt.

But I think back to barely surviving and it feels so simple. There was only one goal: make it to the next paycheck. If I want something, can I afford it? The answer is almost always no. Now, as perverse as it is to complain about, I have to choose and I have to figure out options and I have to look at everything I could do and figure out the best move; which would have been my DREAM years ago, and IS pretty great, but at the same time exhausting. There’s no problem when you only have one problem, but it’s tons of different problems when so much more is possible.

And you could say that I’ve traded my fear of being broke for a fear of losing my job, almost a lateral move. But it’s an abstract fear, a worst-case fear, which is different than the immediate, clarifying terror of a negative balance.

Ultimately, I will always trade ‘having-money’ problems for ‘no-money’ problems, but the effect of having enough money ISN’T that it just makes the worry go away and the rest takes care of itself. Now I have to actually figure out who I am, which means slowly wading forward by myself through the dense fog of life, defining and determining my identity every day, overcoming my insecurities, wondering if I’m inadequate to the task of life, and always feeling like I could be doing more or might be making the wrong decision.

I guess I worried about that less when I only worried about surviving.