Personal essay series · Part 2 of 2
On victim coats, $10 Airbnb listings, and the moment a living room floor changed everything.
Airbnb was a door I already knew existed. I just never believed it was mine to open.
That’s the thing about a scarcity mindset — it doesn’t always look like ignorance. Sometimes it looks like comfort. I had wrapped myself so tightly in my victim coat that the idea of checking whether other people were doing this, whether it was possible, whether I could try — it simply never crossed my mind. The coat was heavy, but it was familiar. And familiar felt safe.
Paradise for them, hell for me
I listed the family home on Airbnb. Three bedrooms. And I charged ten dollars a night. Then twelve. I was providing toiletries, breakfast, weekly housecleaning — and charging less than the price of a meal. No wonder guests would extend their stay again and again. They had found paradise. I had found a new kind of pain.
Because this — this right here — was my money wound showing up in real time. I was too scared to ask for the right price. Too afraid that if I charged what the home was worth, people would say no. That I would lose them. That I didn’t deserve more.
“I was scared to ask for the right price. Not because I didn’t know what the home was worth — but because I didn’t know what I was worth.”
But something had shifted. I was already on my self-development journey by then. I had read John C. Maxwell’s Jumpstart Your Thinking and something inside me had started to stir — a quiet but insistent voice saying: there is more to understand here.
Six weeks that cracked me open
I enrolled in a six-week money bootcamp. I walked in thinking I was going to learn about budgeting and investing. What I did not expect was to spend most of those weeks in tears.
So much had built up. Decades of shame and pain, all tied to money — feelings I had never named, memories I had buried, beliefs I didn’t even know I was holding. They all came rushing out. And then one memory surfaced that stopped me completely. One I hadn’t realized had marked me so deeply.
My mother in our living room. Counting money before grocery shopping — stacking notes into small piles, one by one. This is for the tomatoes. This is for the meat. And then, every single time, the same words: “It is so expensive. All the money is gone.”
It hit me like a ton of bricks.
That was where it came from. That feeling — bone-deep, unshakeable — that once money leaves your hands, it is gone forever. That there will never be enough. That spending means losing. That the cupboards will eventually be empty and nothing will come to fill them.
I had been carrying that living room with me my entire life. Into every job. Every salary. Every negotiation I never had. Every shift I worked and every price I was too afraid to ask for.
What I know now
I am not my mother’s fear. And she was not wrong to have it — she was doing what she could with what she had. But her story was hers. And the moment I saw it clearly, I understood for the first time that it didn’t have to be mine.
Money is not a punishment. It is not a reward God hands out to the chosen few. It does not disappear forever when you spend it. It moves — and with the right knowledge, the right beliefs, the right courage to charge what you are worth — it can move toward you too.
I had to learn that. Slowly, painfully, tearfully. But I learned it.
“The door was always there. I just had to believe I was allowed to open it.”
And that belief — hard-won, still growing — is the wealthiest thing I own.
· · · Part 3 coming soon · · ·
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over here