How to Grow Up

by Michelle Tea

  As a witchy woman, I am comfortable with the word magic, but if it conjures up images of dweeby guys pulling bouquets of fake flowers out of collapsible top hats, call it something else. Call it connectivity—your connection to yourself and the world around you. Call it intuition, your sixth sense. Call it the power of positive thinking, like the business world does. At its simplest, it can be the humble It’s all good of a friendly hippie. To me, they’re all the same—one person’s pagan spell is another’s Christian prayer; it’s about setting intention. Personally, I like to cover my bases, casting spells and saying my prayers. Even after discarding Catholicism I held on to the saints; I loved their stories of martyrdom and perseverance, how supernatural their tales were. Like me, many of them were persecuted by their contemporaries. Like me, most of them were girls. In my early twenties I became interested in Santeria, an Afro-Caribbean religion that was created when slaves were forced to hide indigenous spirituality behind a devotion to saints; today, practitioners still use the Catholic imagery interchangeably with African gods and goddesses. I’ve always thought we’re just simple humans calling out to energies and forces too big for us to understand. The face we put on it—be it the Catholic Saint Barbara or the cross-dressing Santeria deity Chango—is mutable, and can be determined by what best captures our imagination.

  Prayer gets a bad rap in our culture, because there are a lot of nutty people abusing it, trying to push it into classrooms or use it to punish people. Not shockingly, my own prayers avoid such negativity, tending toward the more floaty, nondenominational spiritual utterance—a request for help, guidance, or strength from the Big Unknown—a thank-you to no one in particular for the beauty of a sunset or the love of a smart-aleck friend or a scrumptious meal. Most days I have at least one moment when I cast a glance around my life and see the cozy adorable house that I live in, my foxy adorable love that I live with, my bathroom shelves full of smelly beauty products, my closet full of thrifted finery, and I think, Holy shit! I can’t believe this is my life! Thank you. My most common prayer is probably Holy shit—thank you! And there are always a million things to say Holy shit—thank you! for. I have all my limbs. I wasn’t born in a war-torn country. My house has indoor plumbing. I’m not hungover and puking right now. I’m not trapped in a small town somewhere. I’m safe. I’m not in jail. My family wasn’t murdered by the government. Not to get all grim, but the darker edge of human experience has no dropping-off point. Who knows what random maneuver of luck and fate saved me from unknowable disaster? Holy shit—thank you!

  Some people are into affirmations—repeating high-self-esteem phrases to yourself in the mirror or leaving them jotted on Post-its stuck all over your boudoir as a reminder of how excellent you are. These, too, are sort of nondenominational prayers, prayers that you’ll wake up and realize how awesome you are. I like affirmations. Some years ago, inspired by a writer I heard talking on a panel, I began saying the Money Magnet chant. Someone had asked the writer how she supported herself, and she admitted that whenever she started feeling worried about cash she’d stop and say this affirmation/prayer/spell/wishful thought:

  I am a Money Magnet

  Money comes to me

  Money loves me

  Money is sexually attracted to me

  Money wants to be near me

  After a few chants, something would happen—her mom would send her a check; a freelance gig would come through. A writer friend from a working-poor background similar to my own scoffed when he heard this: Perhaps one needs to have check-writing parents for such affirmations to work. I decided to do my own research, adding to the end of the chant:

  I love Money

  I am Money

  Did a pile of cash land on my doorstep? Well, it did seem like opportunity knocked a little harder when I was in the Money Magnet groove, for sure. The sudden offers to do a paid reading or write an article kept me chanting away each day in my favorite prayer spot, the shower. Standing beneath the spray, I’d close my eyes and recite the chant. And like magic, the next day, I’d learn that a grant came through.

  Would I have gotten the grant anyway? Was the granting based on my actual application and the quality of my work, not how melodiously I intoned a few phrases in the bathroom? Probably. And, as I do make my living on the haphazard accumulation of speaking gigs and freelance writing, perhaps those shouldn’t be surprising either. But there was another, unexpected magic the Money Magic chant worked on me: It transformed my relationship to cold, hard cash.

  When a system is oppressing you, it’s easy to take the most glaring physical representation of that system and demonize it. The system itself tends to be invisible, an infinite string of transactions and reactions stretching into antiquity. As a poor person sensitive to the stings of classism, I decided early on that I hated money. Money was evil; money was the problem. I avoided financial exchanges when possible, putting on free events, doing free tarot readings, giving away my little books of poetry sometimes. When money was inevitably involved in one of my projects, I shuddered and pushed the responsibility onto someone else: You deal with this; I hate money.

  Once I got sober, I lost a lot of the booze-fueled bravado that had helped me cope with the harsh realities of being poor. With alcohol, I achieved a persona of tough-assed bitch who didn’t give a shit about cash and thought you were a damn fool if you did. Stripped of inebriants, I was just myself—smaller, more vulnerable, broke, and a bit lost. Plus, the practices I was learning in 12-step programs were about compassion—not judging people, not hating. Suddenly, I was thrust into these small rooms filled with people I used to love to rail against when drunk—men, people with more money than I had. But now we were all the same, gathered to discuss how fallible we were, how we had fucked up, how we were trying to be better people, for ourselves and for our worlds. Whatever delusions we’d used as coping mechanisms had withered in the stark light of sobriety. After about a decade of demonizing and avoiding money I realized the disadvantage I’d set myself up for. I was underpaid, if paid at all. People handling the cash at my events sometimes helped themselves to it, probably figuring if I hated the stuff so much, what would I care? And, perhaps worst of all, I had no power. Not believing in a system doesn’t make it go away. After working my butt off organizing a huge literary event only to watch, again and again, the person handling the money being treated like the mastermind while I was little more than ignored, I faced the hard fact: Whoever has the money has the power. When I exiled myself from the financial aspects of my work, I cut myself off from avenues of respect, control, and autonomy as well.

  The thought of facing the rest of my life as a broke person, without alcohol to lessen the sting, filled me with despair. I had to figure out a way to make this part of life less painful. One of the most powerful things I’d learned since getting sober is to love and accept life on life’s terms. Alcoholics have a hard time doing this; we’re little id-driven crybabies, guzzling and complaining about how nothing in this life goes the way we think it should. Accepting and even embracing the world as it is can be radical, and it can have powerful, positive results.

  I decided to apply some of this sobriety dogma to my money problems. Money loves me was a really good start—that money could be benevolent and loving was a revolutionary notion. I imagined the spirit of money as a tenderhearted fairy who longed to share herself with everyone but kept getting kidnapped by dastardly villains. A sort of less cranky Tinker Bell, this money loved me and loved all the downtrodden!

  Okay, money loves me. But for me to love money? That was preposterous. Yet I knew that in order to heal my abusive relationship with prosperity, I was going to have to start approaching this part of life not with fear or anger or hurt, but with love. Couldn’t I love a fairy-esque money with a generous spirit, too easily captured by brutes? Embedded in this fairy tale, my desire for cash began to feel like a righteous conspiracy to break money out of the prison the 1 percent h
ad locked her up in. Free money!

  What about I am money? What was that about? It was partly an impulse to get as close to money, this thing I’d avoided, as possible. But it was something else, too: an acknowledgment that, like it or not, I was part of the money system. I did work and get paid. I took my money and spent it, on stupid shit as well as on necessary objects. Acting like I was somehow outside—or above—the money system was ridiculous. It was time to join the human race. I am money. Money kept me fed today. Money kept me under this roof. Money bought me this computer, the clothes on my back. Letting go of value judgments, dropping the idea of myself as poor or rich or whatever, I saw myself in the center of a web of prosperity. I had all these things, this life, and I was grateful. I am money.

  Money comes to me, money loves me, money is sexually attracted to me, money wants to be near me. Slowly, the subconscious notion of money as a giant war machine, as the dreadful Moloch of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, faded. Money became something silly, something flirtatious. Images flashed as I spoke the chant in the shower: The little money man from Monopoly! Me, naked, on a bed of cold, hard cash, throwing it into the air with abandon! The money pixie, freed from her dungeon! After a lifetime of making money antimatter, I needed to make it something light. It did the trick. Less and less did it seem like money was an evil force with unlimited power over my life. Increasingly it felt like something I was in conversation with—no longer something that wanted to destroy me, but something that wanted to build me up.

  The chant didn’t “fix” me, of course; it was just one more tool I had to use in the lifelong task of dismantling my scarcity issues. There were others. In my support group I started meeting with a woman who had more time sober than I had. In her I was able to catch a glimpse of the sort of person I might someday become if I managed to keep dodging the lures of booze and coke—she seemed healthy, in body and in spirit. Having established her sobriety, she was able to deal with other issues that had been festering beneath her drinking. Alcoholics don’t emotionally grow when they’re using; once we get it together, we realize that there’s a whole banged-up psyche that needs our loving care. And one thing we were both dealing with was money issues. It’s something a lot of alcoholics have to face up to once they’re sober, even people with middle- or upper-class backgrounds. Nobody makes good financial choices when they’re blitzed all the time. Chances are you can’t hold a good job, and you’re spending all your cash on booze and drugs. You wake up in the morning vaguely remembering a trip to the ATM, even though your wallet shows no sign of such activity. You do absolutely nothing to plan for any sort of future, because the only future that matters is when you can have your next drink. My friend’s basic alcoholic money issues were compounded by the fact that in her own early sobriety she fell prey to a secondary shopping addiction. In the wake of this mess, paying bills became terrifying, a morass of self-loathing, disappointment, and frustration. But a year or so of wrestling with her alcoholism had taught her all sorts of magical tricks. At bill time, she started pulling an empty chair beside her at the table and asking her idea of God to sit down and keep her company while she faced her fears.

  I know some of you are throwing up in your mouth right now. These methods may be a bit too deep in woo-woo fairyland for the more logical hard-asses out there, the word God too triggering. I respect that. But the idea that she wasn’t alone while staring down the barrel of her checking account gave my friend a glimmer of relief. Enough to lick the damn envelopes and get the checks in the mail.

  At this point I had enough time in 12-step programs, and had followed their advice with enough dogged desperation, that I could see that they were working. I just felt better. I wasn’t as freaked out or stressed out. There is this phrase about people who come into 12-step culture and get super blissed out when they find it working for them: the pink cloud. I was super duper on a big pink cloud. At heart I’m really a hedonist—I just want to feel awesome, all the time. For a while, drugs and alcohol helped me achieve that. Now that using had stopped working, it looked like this new world of self-investigation and higher-power communication was doing the trick. I thought about how my friend invited her HP to bill time, and wondered how I could come up with a similar trick to help me with my own money issues.

  For me, the money terrors came when I was purchasing something I didn’t need, which in my austere mind was anything outside rent, electricity, and Internet, plus maybe a few cans of beans and a sack of rice. Chills ran up my spine as I brought a seven-dollar bar of Fresh soap that smelled like the armpits of tree sprites to the register. My stomach would plummet as I walked the frock I’d found on the Urban Outfitters sale rack to the counter. I’d break out in a sweat as a cashier rang up a stack of books. They’re books, I’d scold myself. You can always buy books! Once, in the bathroom of a soul food restaurant in Tacoma, Washington, I sat on the toilet and read a poster taped to the back of the stall door. It was a cheesy thing listing ways to have a happy life, the sort commonly illustrated with folksy roses and birds and decorative, beribboned straw hats. Never regret money spent on books or flowers was one of the commandments. Ever desperate for something permitting me not to have financial regret, I cosigned the sentiment before I could flush the toilet. Yeah! Books and flowers make life worth living! I’m never going to regret buying them ever again! The books are even tax write-offs! This ridiculous poster actually had a lasting impact. But like most tools, it wasn’t enough on its own. My money issues are so unruly, I need an arsenal. My friend sat at the table with her higher power, so what could my own Stevie Nicks spiritual guide do for me? Well, she could start by giving me a trust fund, I thought cynically. And then I realized she already had.

  What if the money in my bank account wasn’t my money, but God’s? What if the cosmos was taking care of me, and I didn’t have to worry about it all the time? My life as a freelancer, like my life as a sober person, was still new enough to be unfamiliar and scary. I was always doing stressful calculation—I’ve got enough for this month, but what about next month? When next month turned out to be fine, it was, Sure, I’ve got enough for the next few months, but what about in half a year? When I asked myself how much money in the bank would make me feel secure, I honestly couldn’t come up with a reasonable number. The thought of something else taking responsibility for my finances filled me with crazy relief. I’d learned to turn my cravings for alcohol over to this Stevie Nicksian deity—why not turn my money panic over as well?

  So I decided I had a trust fund from God. I didn’t have to sweat it. Maybe sometimes the balance would be lower than I wanted it to be, but I was going to trust that I would always have enough to do the things I was meant to do in this life. What if I wanted to spend three months lolling on a beach somewhere, daydreaming? Sorry, not in the cards. Not part of Stevie-Goddess’s plan for me. What if I suddenly needed to go to New York City to do something writing related? Apparently, my higher power approved. The funds were available.

  Like all of these fanciful tricks, they don’t stay lodged in your mind in a constant way. Again and again I would totally forget that I had a trust fund from God. But frequently, in the throes of minor panic, I would remember, and start to calm down. This shit works. Of course, for it to make any sort of nonsensical sense, you not only have to believe in some sort of god, but it has to be the kind of god that actually wants you to have money and happiness and an all-around excellent life, including the occasional luxury. This can be hard for some people to wrap their heads around, as many of us were raised with the notion of a punishing god who is sort of like a demonic Santa—seeing you when you’re sleeping, knowing when you’re awake, always waiting to bust you for some sort of totally human infraction. “Oh—God’s punishing me!” How many times have I heard someone say that? It’s always after they’ve shared a relatively harmless piece of gossip and then stubbed their toe or something. Really? Your god is that petty? In my own Catholic upbringing I was taught never to say
a prayer for myself, or for material things, but only for other people to be okay, and also for God to pick up my soul if I happened to croak in the middle of the night. I do believe that praying for other people is mandatory, and that following a directive I learned in 12-step—to pray to know God’s will for you—is ideal. But I don’t see the harm in throwing in a few prayers for things like money, or a robust sex life, or a pair of really great shoes or a vacation. If you are unfortunately saddled with a petty, Mean Girlsy, or otherwise grumpy god, I suggest you get rid of him. One thing people don’t understand about gods is you can always trade yours in for a new one, a DIY god created in your own image.

  My favorite poet, Eileen Myles, has a poem called “A Blue Jay,” with these lines:

  I begin

  to believe

  in a God

  I could

  build like

  a porch.

  I began

  to have

  a need

  like that.

  She shall

  be fat &

  wrap her

  arms around

  me.

  If you’re going to fool around with all these airy-fairy new-agey ideas, you’re going to have to find something to pray to. I call this thing “God,” because it’s an easy shorthand, but I understand that the G-word conjures an image of a rageaholic lightning-bolt-wielding dad for some people, so I intersperse it with “Higher Power,” “The Universe,” and “Stevie Nicks.” My Stevie Nicks god wants me to have everything I want. Like a quality therapist, she has unconditional positive regard for me. She understands why I would like to have that Creatures of Comfort dress with the eyeballs and hearts on it. Stevie Nicks god knows that when I look good, I feel good, and Stevie Nicks god always wants me to feel good. She wishes she had an extra $575 she could pop into my trust fund right now so I could snag that cute frock, but she just doesn’t. Don’t ask why—Stevie Nicks god is benevolent as all get-out, but she’s still a god, after all, and it’s her prerogative to work in mysterious ways. I don’t get to know or even understand her whole plan for me. But I can trust that she’s not going to punish me for wishing for a high-waisted felted wool Chanel skirt or a pair of Stella McCartney eyeglasses or a monogrammed Goyard bag. Stevie Nicks god wants all these things, too!