How to Grow Up by Michelle Tea Page A

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 complainingabout 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 had 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 ofmyself 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