Personal essay · Part 5 of the series
On hiding shopping bags, becoming everyone’s personal bank, and the colleague who said the quiet part out loud.
Getting a job in Malaysia was life-changing. I could travel. I could support my mother. I could shop. I went on to live experiences I had only ever dreamed about from the outside looking in.
But here is what nobody tells you: having money and being comfortable with money are two completely different things.
I had the salary. And I was still keeping money at arm’s length — still treating it like something dangerous, something I didn’t fully deserve to hold.
The hidden shopping bags
I was living with someone who didn’t work. Whenever I bought a new bag or a pair of shoes, I would hide it. Sneak it in. Tuck it away before she could see. I told myself I was protecting her feelings — that I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable.
But looking back now, I understand what was really happening. She was never uncomfortable. I was. She was married, financially supported, and spent freely without a second thought about me. I was the one shrinking. I was the one apologizing for what I had earned.
That is what an unhealed money wound looks like when you finally have money — you hide it. From others, and from yourself.
The human ATM
I also felt obliged — deeply, almost compulsively obliged — to help whenever someone around me had a money problem. I started lending. First small amounts. Then larger ones. And at first, I was proud. I could now be the one who helps. After all those years of being helped, I was on the other side.
But the amounts kept growing. And the repayments never came — not on time, not in full. People would spend freely in front of me while still owing me money, and I would stay quiet. I would wait. I was too uncomfortable to ask, too afraid to be seen as difficult, too worried about being called the b-word, or being labeled angry, or making things awkward.
“I was a very bad bank. No interest, no repayment schedule, no questions asked. And I wondered why the balance never grew.”
I wasn’t looking closely at my bank account. I wasn’t reading my statements. Whatever number was there felt like the truth, and I left it at that. A big mistake. Because I was saving — genuinely saving — but I had so many money leaks I couldn’t see, and I was quietly absorbing other people’s financial responsibilities as if they were my own.
What started as pride morphed, slowly and painfully, into resentment. People had begun planning their financial commitments around my paycheck. They knew their personal bank was open. And I, the bank, was too afraid to close the doors.
Dreaming in proportion to your pain
There is something else I remember from that period — something quieter, but just as damaging. I noticed how I allowed myself to dream only as big as my current circumstances permitted.
When I was broke, I barely let myself dream at all. I was waiting — for a saviour, for a husband, for someone to come and rescue the story. When I started earning, I let myself dream of experiences. Travel. Nice things. A bigger life.
But in the back of my mind, the bigger dreams — real wealth, real freedom, real security — those were still waiting for the prince charming who never seemed to arrive. I had updated my circumstances but not my belief in what I was allowed to have.
The book that ripped the last veil
The Millionaire Fastlane did something to me that no other book had done quite so bluntly. It made me calculate how much I was actually earning per hour — and then hold that number next to the money I was lending, never to see again.
I was working 168 hours a month. Sometimes more. Giving that effort — that time, that energy, that life — to someone else, and not even asking when they planned to return it.
The book made it plain: hard labor does not equate to wealth. I had been working long hours, nights, weekends — and receiving a tap on the back as compensation while others built their stability on my generosity.
And then came the moment that crystallized everything. A colleague who borrowed money from me every single month looked at me and said:
“What do you need money for anyway? You’re not married.”
I want you to sit with that for a moment.
That is the cost of staying silent about money. That is what happens when you are too uncomfortable to have the conversation, too afraid to reclaim what is yours, too conditioned to believe that a woman alone needs less, deserves less, can be asked more of.
I had a lot of inner work left to do. But that moment — that sentence — lit a fire in me that has never gone out.
“Being uncomfortable with money doesn’t protect you from it. It just makes you easier to take advantage of.”
I had been a very accommodating bank. It was time to shut the doors and build something for myself.
· · · continued in part 6 · · ·
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over here