Feelings That Don’t Make Money

This is Part 2 in a series called “How the Fuck Does This Make Money?”, an exploration of how projects and people find stability in the precarious economy.

This first version is about finding sustainability for my own work: Working 2050, a speculative oral history, and Notes on Feednet, a weekly newsletter on stories, work, and the future (which this series is a part of).

How We Feel About Money (And What We Do To Get It)

I think about feelings a lot. 

I’ve written about feelings and how they shape our day to day in various iterations — In Working 2050, this newsletter, and in 800 word 5 AM text messages. 

Talking about money makes people, (myself included) feel a lot of feelings. 

And my own feelings play a bigger role in my financial sustainability (or lack of sustainability) than I would like to admit. 

Ironically, money can be one of the places where we are quickest to dismiss our feelings. Whether because there’s just too much there to deal with safely, or because of how we talk about money, even the most intuitive New Agey people can get very Dr. Spock when we start talking about financials details.

So I’m starting this series with all the feelings I’ve had in the last year or so about making money. Once I started looking at all of the different initiatives and projects I’ve tried in the last year, it was embarrassingly obvious where they showed up. 

Here are some of those feelings. 

But First…

I want to talk about my own financial privilege and power right off the bat.

 I am a college educated white trans man in Chicago, who up until October made enough money to cover rent in a studio ($990 a month) through “digital marketing” (yeah, I don’t know what that means either).  

My medication co-pays are fairly reasonable through insurance, I’m not supporting any children or family members, and though I struggle with executive functioning and mental health issues (pretty common in the uh, global pandemic), I don’t have any physical disabilities, active illnesses, or huge debts. 

I thought for a long time about what I needed in this paragraph: what was I over-disclosing out of anxiety? What was important to share for honesty and transparency? 

Ultimately I don’t know if I quite got it here, or in the upcoming posts, but I am committed to being honest about where I’m at, because the doubt, resentment and fear around talking about these things is more harmful than helpful.

Okay. Let’s get back to the (other) feelings. 

Doubt

In September of last year I met with at least 40 people, saying the exact same thing about my plans over and over again. But somehow, in spite of this, I didn’t find myself doing any of those things I was planning to do, just telling other people about them.  

I was doing a lot of things for the first time, no matter how “easy “they might’ve seemed, and because of this, I was doubting myself, a lot. I avoided making decisions, even little ones, because I doubted I would be able to handle whatever I chose. 

This doubt showed up worst around money, especially money tasks couldn’t bring myself to face. Figuring out what services I should offer at what rate. Filing quarterly taxes. Setting up an LLC. Charging a reasonable rate (because I was so insecure about pricing, I often ended up undercharging groups that could have afforded far more, and way over charging groups with limited cash whose work I cared about. Yikes.)

It wasn’t until I recognized I needed to make more space to make decisions, to notice when I felt doubt and actually deal with it, instead of repressing it infinitely, that I was actually able to start doing some of the things I had been talking about doing for over a year, like plan out workshops.

Resentment

When I left my last job, I was determined to create a public speaking course. 

I wanted to address one of the biggest issues I saw in organizing spaces with few resources and a lot of urgency. Even though I called this problem “not enough time for spokesperson prep,” and wanted to solve it with a public speaking course, the problem at the root was a lot deeper: People did not have enough time to think. 

In retrospect, what I was actually saying was I didn’t have enough time to think: I was constantly doing rapid response, checking social media, coming up with new projects I could support — a way to avoid spending more than a few seconds by myself with my own thoughts. 

So after the first few months of juggling a lot of gigs, courses, and workshops, setting as few boundaries with other people as I ever had, I found myself struggling with a feeling I had pushed out of the way for most of my time working at nonprofits: resentment.

After creating a bare-bones prototype of the course, then spending months avoiding pricing it or doing anything else, I realized I was resentful. Resentful of everything I was choosing to do without boundaries, and the way it drove me more into the urgency and scarcity culture that I wanted this course to alleviate.

…After that things were pretty simple, though feelings aren’t always. I made the course and the library free, quit working on a couple of campaigns, told a couple of people how I feel honestly, and made space to actually think about what I wanted to do next.  

That’s when I started writing Working 2050.

“Activation” and Fear

I wasn’t entirely sure what to call this: it’s more than a feeling, but it’s definitely related to feeling. 

A big part of my struggle to define “work” over the years has come from a lack of predictability around my own ability to get things done on a day-to-day basis. Some days, like many people, I find it very easy to complete every task that I had on my to do list. Other days, I scroll, mostly on Twitter, not entirely sure what I should be doing next. When this was at its worst, I was afraid to talk to anyone about what was happening. This still happens to me. 

I think it happens to everyone, especially during the pandemic, far more than we talk about. But it happens far less now that I understand the underlying cause. 

When I say activation, I’m talking about the fight or flight mode many of our nervous systems spend a lot of time in due to unaddressed trauma. This can be incredibly debilitating, no matter what that trauma might be from.  

 If you’re someone who has ever been totally unable to predict how long/how much time something might take you to do (in a work context or otherwise), if you have struggled with what you might call “burn out “, secondary trauma,” ADD, or anxiety without much success in addressing it: activation, trauma and the nervous system might worth learning more about.

Some good beginning overviews of this include therapist Peter Levine’s book Waking the Tiger, or Resmaa Menakem’s book on racialized trauma, My Grandmother’s Hands. 

— 

All Three

As I was writing this, I felt all three of these feelings pretty intensely.  Though naming them makes it a lot easier to deal with, I kept thinking on loop as I wrote this,

”Most people have to go to jobs where they are activated and unsafe constantly. They can’t just ‘make space’ for their feelings.” 

This is 100% true. It’s deeply unfair. 

Many people, especially people working in  service work and retail, are in harmful, if not abusive or dangerous, job situations. 

They make it work, because they have to. 

But, right now, I have the option of trying to do something else, though a lot of the reasons why is due to unearned privilege and power. 

And to make what I want to make, something that values people for what they bring to the world, gives people room to grow, and doesn’t put me or others stuck back in the hamster wheel of doubt, fear and resentment under precarious capitalism, I have to do something different.

...yikes.

Next week: Starting stats and goals for Working 2050 + Notes on Feednet. The nuts and bolts of how I make money now, my revenue and expenses for each project, as well as my personal expenses, and a plan.