It feels too vulnerable to tell you my secrets related to money ... but I'm going to anyway
The system is not set up to support artists/creatives, women, people with chronic illness, neurodivergence ... most of us. And yet, despite knowing better, I regularly blame myself for my money stuff.
Yesterday I shared a letter I wrote that was a pep talk of sorts to the artists/writers/makers/creatives who are feeling anxious about money. I wrote it, of course, because I needed to hear it myself.
But there were a whole lot of things I didn’t say about money. Because they’re the things I’m trying not to hear inside my own head as I work through a particularly challenging money time.
I find it much easier to talk about sex than money. About mental health. About personal trauma. About pretty much anything. I don’t really want to talk about money. And that is precisely why I know that it’s time I do. That I share my secrets that run deep beneath the surface of my entire creative life. Because everything I’ve shared with you before is true … but I haven’t shared this.
I’ve been “doing the work” around money for pretty much my entire life. By which I mean therapy and personal growth work and being honest with myself and skill-learning and communicating with the people in my life about it and learning and re-learning and getting more comfortable. It’s still the hardest thing for me to share publicly. And I guess it’s mostly because of this: the questions I’m sitting with create a near-paralyzing fear, and I don’t have the answers for them, so it feels weird and wrong and vulnerable and stupid to just stick all of that mess out there for you to sit with.
But here it is.
Things That Embarrass Me About Me, Money and Creativity
In a nutshell (The TL;DR section):
I say that I support myself with my creativity but it is a lot more nuanced than that. On bad days, it doesn’t feel true at all.
I regularly pretend to be much more chill about money than I am.
I have never expected a partner to fund or support my life in any way. I’ve sometimes done the opposite. Still, I occasionally find myself resenting people who can create full-time because their partner pays the bills.
My mother recently lent me tens of thousands of dollars to help me get out of a hole. She’s still working a job she doesn’t particularly like in her 70s. Borrowing this money is mortifying. Admitting that this isn’t all that much different from having a partner pay my bills is even more mortifying.
I don’t play the lottery (anymore) and yet still my financial plan B is basically win the lottery/ sell some random thing for a million dollars/ stumble upon some secret inheritance (which, if you saw my family tree, you’d realize is less likely than the lottery).
I have absolutely no retirement plan. My plan, if I’m going to be really honest with you, is to live as well as I can until I can’t … and then not drag this life thing out any longer.
I’ve erased that last bullet point and rewritten it five times. I want to qualify it. I won’t right now.
Based on the numbers (likes, followers, etc) there have been times when I “should” have been earning big six figures and I was barely earning mid 5’s and I blame myself for not playing the game right somehow.
I have written 9 books, some of which I’m super proud of, some of which I’m not at all, and basically none of them have ever earned me much money. (Twice a year one of my publishers sends me a royalty check for ~$2. They just announced they will have a $50 threshold before issuing payments in the future. So I guess I’ll see my next check when I’m 70.)
The writing that has earned me the most money in life has always been drone-like content writing for other people, often about things I didn’t care about, sometimes about things I actively didn’t believe in.
At times, a significant chunk of my income has been derived from writing about money - personal finance, frugal living - and I never lived by what I was writing.
I have returned to higher education more than once because I knew it would get my school loans which would kick the financial problem down the road a little bit.
Actually, it’s not true that the last two points embarrasses me. It just feels like maybe they should.
The System, Privilege, And How What I Know In My Head Often Can’t Drown Out Anxiety
I feel obligated to say something here about privilege. I’ve had enough education and done enough work and known enough people from a variety of different backgrounds to know that there are ways in which I am privileged to even be having this conversation with you.
Nobody in my family ever earned a lot of money, but we also were never precariously unhoused. Not everyone has a mother that they can turn to when they need to borrow money, however embarrassing it may be to do so. Not everyone is able to just go back to school to get some loan money. There are certain boxes I fit in (white, cisgender, perceived middle class, average weight, etc etc) that have allowed me to access loans and credit and get jobs and all of the things.
This is no small thing.
And, here’s what’s another really vulnerable thing to say, because I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to say it: knowing all of that, I still don’t generally feel privileged.
Oh how I want to qualify and defend that.
But I won’t, except to say that in addition to being aware of privilege, I am aware of intersectionality, and I am aware of patriarchy, and the same system that has afforded me certain privileges is the system that keeps me trapped in most of the money stressors and embarrassments and problems I experience.
You can read all about these things in many other places. Here’s what’s important:
Many of us are finding it difficult to pay the bills, let alone set aside money …
Especially as creatives
Especially as people with chronic illness
Especially as neurodivergents
Especially as women
This is due primarily to a system that does not support a healthy, sustainable way of life for most of us.
I am aware that my privilege means that if this were a spectrum, I’d be somewhere further along than a lot of other people.
This is not a spectrum. We are in this together. The problem is system-wide.
And yet … I regularly blame myself for not earning enough, not saving enough, not being enough, not knowing enough. If only I could do things just a little more right somehow, I’d be financially set and it wouldn’t be an issue.
This is clearly not true. I hate that I regularly believe it anyway.
I am constantly anxious about money
I have managed to pay all of my bills on time for almost my entire life. (I’m gonna skip the part in my early twenties when I let some credit cards go unpaid because no credit card company should have ever given that much credit to an 18 year old.)
It is a point of pride for me. No matter what else I’ve done “wrong” with money, I’ve always paid my bills on time.
But I have basically never not worried about it.
I live with a ridiculous amount of debt. I have wondered to the last second if I’d find enough work to pay the rent that month, and when I haven’t, I have used this card to pay that card.
Once a month, I sit down and “do money” and that day is pretty much always a bad day. It doesn’t matter how many candles I light or breathing exercises I do or mantras I say or crystals I rub, the beat-myself-up voice is really f-ing loud. (Okay, it’s true, I don’t light candles, say mantras, rub crystals and I often forget to breathe.)
I usually pretend that I’m confident, self-assured, or at least “okay” about money. It’s not always a lie, exactly. I believe most of the things I say out loud about how it’s all going to work out and how lucky I am to have the life I do (freedom to design my own time being the number one reason I chose a creative life, beyond the imperative that I couldn’t imagine doing anything else). I believe those things, and I say them so I can remember to believe them.
But I’m also basically a duck paddling frantically about money. And I am embarrassed by the noticeable splashing about that seems to be happening lately, the cracks in the facade. In the past couple of years, I’ve found myself practically begging people to support my work.
On Crowdsourcing Funds and Coming From a Frantic Creative Place
Four or five years ago, I read that idea that if you could find 1000 fans to believe in your work enough to give you $100 / year, then you’d have six figures. And I set out to make it happen. People have been buying my work in some form or another for a very long time. Surely, it couldn’t be that hard.
If you go back to my earliest Substack posts, you’ll probably find a few that say I’m trying to find those 1000 people, won’t you be one. I’ve erased most of those, because I’m embarrassed by them again, because I actually thought it would happen and when it didn’t, I felt like, “duh, of course it didn’t, why would I think it did?”
But more than that, because I have begun to have extremely mixed feelings about artists supporting one another in this crowdsourced/ subscription-based/ don’t know what to call it way.
I fully bought into the whole crowdsourced funding thing for a long time. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Go Fund Me … I’ve used them and benefitted from them and I’ve also supported a lot of other people through them. I was a huge fan of Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking and still believe in some of its core tenets even though there’s also a whole lot of problematic aspects to it. I had a Patreon and I moved it to Substack and I truly believed in the subscription model of all of us supporting one another in this way.
And I do support other artists. I picked up the term “artistic tithing” somewhere along the way and I practice this, making sure that a minimum of 10% of my earned income, if not significantly more, always goes directly to other artists and makers and crafters and writers and performers. Because I believe in this. Because it makes my heart happy to support work from others than inspires me.
And yet … I've also become really jaded about this in recent years, due in no small part to the world of Substack. And I think I’ll write more about this in a separate letter because it’s the point but also getting away from the point. The jaded part that matters here is this: does it ever feel like we’re all doing our best to support one another’s creativity but all struggling to actually support ourselves creatively? And if so, isn’t there probably a systemic reason for that? And so, is this a system we should really be participating in in this way? Or, anyway, should I? Does it still make sense for me?
When I say that I’m embarrassed by the cracks in the facade, what I mean is that it’s become increasingly obvious in recent months / years how desperate I am for money, and I am mortified that somehow that’s the thing I’ve been writing about and putting out creatively into the world, and I don’t feel like I’m the only one doing it but I hate that I’m doing it.
I have been frantically creating and asking for money. I have tried to launch several big and small things in the past year, all of which essentially failed of you count it by monetary standards. I have constantly changed prices on anything I can sell - wavering between, “I need to raise the price to get what I’m worth” to “I need to sell this at absolutely any cost because rent is due”. I have created dozens of PDFs in recent months, burning myself out a little bit while also being excited about what’s emerging, mostly because I just keep hoping if I throw enough stuff against the wall, it’s going to stick. I have begged people to Buy Me a Coffee, Venmo Me, subscribe to my Substack, purchase the chapters of the next book I’m writing … gimme, gimme, gimme. And I have produced and produced and produced in an effort to be worth any time gimme I do get.
On Working for Others
And I’ve also applied to five million jobs, which I’ve mostly heard silence back on, which has made me question whether my skills are at all marketable anymore, whether they ever were. Some days, I tell myself, “this isn’t working because you’re meant to create and if you keep creating, the money will come.” Some days I tell myself, “you have never had a real job so what makes you think you can now?” Some days the inner voice is really damn mean.
I recently started doing some work on a project that I think is pretty cool but I’m getting paid way, way less than I think I’m worth or for that matter that I need to actually pay the bills and for some reason I’m running myself ragged putting in tons of hours and finding myself crying with exhaustion and discontent in the evenings because I forgot to eat/breathe/smile. I recently re-read the book Nickel and Dimed and in it she says something like, “what you don’t realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re really selling is your life.” I am counting up hours for a paycheck and I’m glad to have some work but I also absolutely feel like I’m selling my life.
And yet, gratitude, and pride
I want to wrap things up here by saying that despite all of this, I have a lot of gratitude for the life I’ve been able to live creatively. And I have a lot of pride in having made this life for myself.
There are a lot of nuances to it and sometimes it doesn’t feel true, but at the core, it’s true that I’ve supported myself as a single woman in San Francisco, living with chronic mental health challenges, without having to “go into an office” or otherwise work on someone else’s schedule. I promised myself when I was in high school that once I grew up I would never wake up to an alarm again, and I have kept that promise to myself, and my health and wellbeing are better because of it.
I didn’t get 1000 people to pay $100 a year to support my work. But I’ve had somewhere between 50 and 100 people supporting it at any given time. And I have a few people who have been supporting my creative work for over a decade because they actually believe deeply in what I do and get something out of it. That’s no small thing.
When I say that I believe it’s my job to put my work into the world as authentically as possible and it will find who it is meant to find, I deeply do believe it. I see evidence of it regularly time and time again. Ultimately, I do believe that this is what matters.
That doesn’t erase the challenge of: “how do I do that and pay the bills?” I don’t necessarily believe that this creative truth about putting my work out there equates to a sustainable financial life in America in 2025. I am struggling a lot lately with how to reconcile it all. How do I keep living the way that I know is best for me and my health and my loved ones and my life … how do I keep authentically creating the things that I know I am meant to put in the world … while also realizing that what’s healthy for me and right for my creative heart isn’t necessarily aligned with financial reality? I don’t know. I don’t have this answer.
Do you?
This is where I usually say, if you liked the work, remember that it took work, please support it if you can. It feels super weird to say that here. And yet …
Good for you. I share many of the same sentiments. It’s difficult to talk about, so thank you for putting yourself “out there”.
I am supported by a spouse. I still don’t have money to support what I do. I am not embarrassed by the support because it is a partnership. I am both angry and hurt that I can’t have the support I really need.