At nine I emptied my Pokémon wallet into my mother's hand. I've been refilling it ever since.
There’s a sentence I don’t really like to admit, but that I think of often: I would like to be rich again.
Not rich in the sense of luxury. Not in the sense of exterior signs, of brilliant things, of the performance of having more. I believe what I miss is the security of not fearing the lack of money.
I’m something like eight years old. My father, my mother and I are leaving to do the groceries, as every week. Another complicated week, where money is counted before, during, and after the passage at the register. A week where promotions no longer really suffice. A week where my mother collapses in front of an aisle full of unattainable foods.
Me, I have a reflex one shouldn’t have so young.
I extract my small wallet from my fuchsia pink Pokémon bag, the one my father had offered me a few years earlier at the camping market in La Grande Motte, in the south of France. I open it, I take the few coins inside, and I empty them into my mother’s hand. It was certainly only a few centimes. But for me, it was a treasure. My treasure. And I was giving it to my family. I didn’t know it yet, but something decided itself in me that day.
Money became a sacred mission. To have money for me, for my family, for those I love. To work hard at school. To economize. To not act foolishly. To construct something solid. To purchase an apartment at twenty-five. It wasn’t only ambition. It was a form of protection. I believe I was trying to construct a wall between my family and my worst fear: lacking money.
Later, for a moment, this wall held.
I could do my groceries without watching the amounts too closely. Privilege fresh products. Try things I had previously prohibited myself. Say yes more easily. Purchase a gift without my brain immediately opening an interior spreadsheet.
I could offer my father the soldering station he so wanted, but which remained unattainable for him. I remember the smiles too large, the gratitude too long, the joys almost too intense for a simple object. But it wasn’t a simple object.It was the proof that, this time, I could give something other than a few centimes. I could give comfort. Facility. A bit of reparation, perhaps. I don’t believe I felt powerful. I believe I felt tranquil.
And that is what money offered me for a time: one problem subtracted. A bit of silence in the brain. Less negotiation with myself to purchase something non-necessary. No excess. Not a gilded life. Just facility. The facility of choosing without trembling a little on the inside.
I recognized her immediately. The fear of lacking. She doesn’t need to make much noise to occupy all the space. She installs herself in the background, like a low music one can no longer extinguish.
The fear of lacking clients. Of lacking time. Of not doing enough. Of not advancing fast enough. Of having to run harder while the legs become soft. It’s a very efficient fear. She knows how to disguise herself as discipline, as ambition, as responsibility. She knows how to assume the voice of reason. She knows how to say: march or perish, but in an almost professional tone.
And little by little, she extinguishes something. The light that permits one to read. To write. To be curious. To regard one’s surroundings without immediately searching for what they might generate. To be oneself without having to prove that each minute is profitable. What I hadn’t understood is that wanting to recover money didn’t necessarily mean wanting more. Sometimes, it means wanting less fear. Less calculation in the background. Less tension in the stomach. Fewer small invisible negotiations. Less of that impression that each decision, even minuscule, must pass before an interior tribunal.
At one moment, I found myself in places where money was everywhere, but where meaning seemed absent. Spaces beautiful, expensive, perfectly staged, full of people who seemed to play at being seen. Everything was brilliant, but something rang hollow. I believe that is when I understood I didn’t only want to “have money.” I didn’t want to enter a parade of look-at-me. I didn’t want money to become an armor, a stage, or a manner of disappearing behind a more brilliant version of myself.
I wanted it to become calm again.
I wanted enough money to remain gentle. Enough to be generous without panic. Enough to not transform each purchase into moral proof. Enough that my nervous system would cease its accountancy while I tried to live.
Then I closed a chapter, and opened another. I remember New Delhi. It had been seven hours since I had been below this escalator, with another hour before our connection toward Bangkok. My cat waited with an almost humiliating patience, as if he had understood the situation better than we had.
For the first time in a long while, I had truly counted. I had chosen economy. The discomfort of an eight-hour layover. The seats too hard. The wait too long. The greasy croissant garnished with egg purée and boiled vegetables. I had chosen not to take the easiest solution.
On paper, it resembled a loss of comfort. But internally, something was returning to its place. I regarded the numbers, the zeros, the commas. I postponed certain pleasures to tomorrow. I said no to non-necessary things. And, strangely, I didn’t feel punished. I felt myself returning. As if facility were no longer only something to purchase, but something to redefine.
Not the facility of being able to take everything. The facility of knowing why one chooses. Of recovering a form of alignment. Of no longer confusing comfort with flight, or economy with failure.
In Bangkok, I awoke in a hotel room with this small internal music still there. A distant alarm. A mysterious and disquieting chime, almost inaudible, but quite present.
The old friend had returned to seat herself in a corner of the room. The fear of lacking.
I don’t believe the work is to pretend that money has no importance. I don’t believe either that one must respond to fear with an immense quantity of work, until one no longer feels one’s own body. Perhaps the work is more delicate than that.
To find the equilibrium between wanting to be secure and not letting the fear become my entire personality. To want more money without becoming hard. To want comfort without shame. To want gentleness without forgetting that gentleness too needs its conditions.
Today, I decide to pay for my hot Americano with the small coins that linger in my bag, purchased at a vintage market in Bangkok.
I rummage in my satchel while smiling at my preferred waitress. For a few seconds, I feel the fabric, the receipts, the useless objects that inhabit the bottom of bags. Then my fingers finally find the cold metal of the coins.
Those infamous undesirable coins. I place them on the counter.
This time, I am not emptying my treasure into someone’s hand to try to save the day. I am no longer that little girl with her fuchsia pink Pokémon wallet, though she exists still somewhere in me.
This time, I am paying only for a coffee. Slowly. With coins resembling those that, one day, had resembled a familial emergency. I don’t know if this is exactly to heal.
But perhaps it’s a beginning.
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