Even after things got better i still checked my account balance three times a day. Still felt guilty buying something for myself even when i could afford it. Still finished everything on my plate even when i was full because somewhere deep in me wasting food felt almost criminal.
People who never grew up without enough money find these habits strange. Cute even sometimes. They laugh and say you should enjoy yourself now. And they mean well. But they do not understand that these things are not habits you picked up. They are survival patterns that got wired into you before you were old enough to understand what was happening.
Scarcity does not just affect your bank account. It gets into your nervous system. It teaches you to always expect the floor to drop. To never fully relax because relaxing is when things go wrong. To plan for the worst not as a strategy but as an automatic reflex you cannot turn off even when the emergency is long over.
I have met people who grew up the way i did who are now earning good money and still cannot enjoy it. Not
because they are ungrateful. Because their body and mind have not received the message that things are different now. The anxiety is still running in the background like an old programme nobody updated.
And the world does not make space for that conversation. Society celebrates the come up. Loves the rags to riches story. But nobody talks about the psychological weight that comes with it. The guilt of having more than your parents had. The strange grief of a childhood that was harder than it should have been. The way certain sounds or situations can pull you right back to a version of yourself you thought you had left behind.
Healing from poverty is not just about earning more money. It is about slowly, painfully unlearning the version of yourself that was built entirely around not having enough.
That work is quiet and slow and most people around you will never even know you are doing it.
But it might be the most important work of your life.
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