THURSDAY · THE PERMISSION SLIP
When was the last time you spent money on something purely because you wanted it, and did not feel a flicker of guilt afterward?
You will spend on the kids without blinking. On the house, the groceries, the gifts, the things everyone else needs or wants.
You will spend on the kids without blinking. On the house, the groceries, the gifts, the things everyone else needs or wants.
But something for you, chosen only because it would please you, comes with a tax. A small internal argument about whether you deserve it, whether it is too much, whether the money could go somewhere more sensible.
So you put it back. You choose the cheaper one, or nothing at all, and you call it being responsible.
Some of that is real budgeting, and real budgeting is wise. But a lot of it is not about the money at all.
It is about a belief you absorbed a long time ago. That your own wants come last, that spending on yourself is the one indulgence a good woman does not permit herself.
Notice how differently you treat everyone else's wants. You find the money for their comfort and their small pleasures, and you are glad to.
Only your own desires get means-tested. Only you have to prove you have earned it first.
Here is the permission, and I want you to actually take it. You are allowed to spend money on yourself simply because something would bring you pleasure.
Not because you earned it, not because it was on sale, not because you found a way to justify it to an invisible jury. Just because you wanted it, and your wants are allowed to cost something too.
Start small if that feels easier. The good coffee, the flowers, the book at full price.
The amount is not the point. The point is letting yourself be someone worth spending on, in your own eyes, at last.
WHAT SHE SAID
Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. She understood that having something of your own, money included, is not a luxury but the ground you stand on to have a self at all.
ONE THING TO NOTICE
Today, notice the guilt that arrives the moment you consider spending on yourself. See whether it shows up for anyone else's wants, or only for yours.
See you tomorrow.
