How I went from shame and silence to finding my first crack of light
By the time I reached my twenties, my relationship with money was not complicated. It was painful. I carried shame I couldn’t name and pain I couldn’t explain, and money — this thing that the whole world seemed to understand — felt like a locked door I didn’t have the key to.
I had two beliefs I held like gospel truth:
God chooses who gets rich. I was simply not chosen.
To be rich, you need to marry well. That was the plan — if there even was a plan.
And underneath those two beliefs was a third, quieter one, almost too heavy to say out loud: once the little money you have is spent, nothing will come back. Nothing. It just disappears and that’s the end of it.
The silence I wore like a coat.
I didn’t just struggle with money — I was afraid of it. I didn’t know how to manage it. I feared talking about it. When someone owed me money, I kept quiet rather than ask for what was mine. When I had a salary, it never occurred to me to negotiate. I didn’t even know that was something people did. I thought you were just supposed to be grateful and not push.
That silence cost me more than I knew.
A new country, the same old fear
Then I moved to Malaysia. I arrived with a couple thousand dollars — money that ran out within six months. After that, it was my sister who kept the roof over my head: rent, utility bills, food, transportation. Friends helped too. And every time someone handed me something I couldn’t repay, the shame didn’t just stay the same. It deepened.
I eventually got a customer service job. Everyone around me was scrambling for extra shifts — nights, afternoons, weekends — squeezing every dollar they could out of every hour. I went along with it because what else do you do? But there are only so many hours in a day, and I was running out of ways to outwork the problem.
I lived in a small shared apartment, renting a room — which did let me save — but the money in my account just sat there, quietly shrinking against inflation I didn’t understand. I never thought to ask the bank about a savings account. I never looked for investment options. Those words — investment, compound interest, passive income — existed in a world that wasn’t mine. It never even occurred to me to open a book.
“For the life of me, I could not figure out this money situation. And it never occurred to me to open a book.”
The quote that broke something open.
Then one day I heard it:
“If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”
I stopped. I read it again. What?
Around that same time, my conversations with God had stopped being conversations. They had turned into screaming matches — or rather, me screaming and being met with silence. I was furious. I was exhausted. I felt invisible to the very thing I had put my faith in.
And then one day, quietly, an answer came — not in thunder, but in the most practical nudge I had ever received:
You have an empty family home. There is Airbnb. Do the math.
I had never done math like that before.
But for the first time, I was ready to try.
· · · Part 2 coming soon · · ·
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over here