Thread by @QiaochuYuan

a few days ago i took a medium dose of acid and wrote for several hours straight and admitted some things to myself, mostly about money

let's start here: last august my mom gave me $100,000 for my birthday. i resented her for this and also suppressed the resentment

in january i had the thought that i should "figure out money and career stuff" and then i proceeded to mostly avoid the topic, occasionally tentatively having feelings about it but not in a very satisfying way

then i procrastinated on my taxes

i procrastinated on my taxes so hard i was forced to spend the last day before the deadline mostly having feelings about taxes to find out why i had procrastinated so hard

what came up was "i don't want to know how much money i have or made so i can't tell my parents about it"

"and i don't want to tell my parents about my money situation because i don't want them to feel like they failed me"

thinking that thought made me break into tears uncontrollably - like i want to clarify that this is rare for me, usually i can turn it off if i want to

so that was progress. i learned that my feelings about money are intimately tied to my feelings about my parents. i went on to successfully avoid the topic again for another several weeks

then i had to move out of my group house

there was nowhere in particular i wanted to move to so i ended up moving into an airbnb which wasn't very good (too close to a busy street). towards the end of my stay i decided to take a medium dose of acid to see if it could get me unstuck on stuff and. hoo boy

i wrote for maybe 12 hours straight and it eventually turned into a sort of spontaneous dialogue between the person i am on acid and the person i am sober; acidQC and soberQC

acidQC told me a bunch of things i needed to hear but didn't particularly want to

he told me "you've been feeling social pressure to pretend like you have a 'financial health' that is entirely about your savings and your income and it's just not true at all. the truth is that if you ran out of money your parents would send you more because they love you"

"the truth is that your finances aren't separate from your parents' finances and they never have been. you resent your mom for sending you $100,000 because she forcefully reminded you of this fact"

"you feel like you were told by society that the way making a living works is that you do labor and are paid a fair wage for your labor and that's how you earn the right to exist and be a member of society. you feel guilty because you've never done this"

"but that's just not true. you actually do not need to earn the right to exist and you never have. the reason you're alive right now and not starving to death on the street even though you haven't had a job in 3 years is because your parents send you money because they love you"

and i was like oh my god i'm literally harry fucking potter. i'm literally being protected by my parents' love in the form of money and i always have been. how incredibly embarrassing

"the truth is that for you money is a game you play with your parents. the most important thing you do to get money is to not piss off your parents so much that they cut you off"

and then i was like oh my god am i a spoiled rich kid??? am i a trust fund baby kind of??? that's even worse jesus

before i had this conversation with myself there was a three-way internal conflict going on between

1) not wanting to think about my parents
2) various lies i had absorbed from society about money
3) the actual causal reasons i was alive and not dead

and it's sort of insane that i might've needed to do all the therapy shit and trauma shit and whatever else that i've been doing over the last 4 years just in order to work up to... being able to admit to myself that my parents send me money because they love me

my whole picture of the relationship between money and "labor" and "deservingness" shifted. at one point acidQC said "love is literally more real than money. if people love you enough they will literally give you money"

and that got me thinking about camgirls and influencers and gofundmes and all these ways in which money shifts around even though nobody is like building a chair and selling it or whatever

it's relevant background here that i've carried around for a long time a sense of guilt about having disappointed literally everybody who's ever tried to employ me. i don't feel like i've ever been paid for successfully doing the work i was hired to do

and that sense of guilt, together with the three-way internal conflict i mentioned above, was really getting in the way of any of my attempts to think about how i should be making money. nothing seemed good enough

it feels a lot easier to think about now that i am admitting to myself that the real stakes have nothing to do with not starving to death on the streets. acidQC said "the truth is the most important consequence of running out of money will be having to explain it to your parents"

there were so many things i had to untangle here which is why i had to write for so long. one reason this had been hard to think clearly about is that "i have too much money and too many options for how to make more" didn't seem like a sympathetic problem to have

my parents paid something like $175,000 of tuition to MIT out of pocket because they wanted me to have a good education and a good life. they were paying for all of my living expenses in both college and grad school. i never talked about this with anyone, really

i had friends in college who would complain about money problems and i didn't know what they meant and was too embarrassed to ask. when they said they couldn't afford X i didn't know if they meant "that's not in my budget" or "i don't have the dollars in my bank account"

i recognize that i'm speaking from a position of extreme privilege here but this wasn't all upside. my parents took care of me materially at the expense of taking care of me emotionally. it took me until this trip to even kinda experience the money they spent as an act of care

acidQC said - the rest of these have been paraphrases but this one is a direct quote:

"your parents created a world for you where the most real thing was how they felt about you. they successfully used money to make everything else less real by protecting you from it"

and like i kinda get why they did that but it led to me being incredibly sheltered in a bunch of ways. they never even made me do chores. i was very spoiled and in retrospect it wasn't good for me

anyway i could keep going a lot of stuff came up but i feel like i successfully resolved a big confusion that was preventing me from making progress on my life and that feels nice. i feel like i am a little bit more confronting the "actual stakes" wrt money

the stakes are that the less money i make the harder it'll be for my parents to retire. my dad literally told me that. he said he was holding off on retiring because he was worried about me

a few days later i wrote:

"this was never like... this was never a one-player game, it was always a multi-player game and i spawned already in a guild containing my parents who had already been playing for 30 years"

the other stakes are about dignity. acidQC said "you need dignity much more than you need money" and that sort of blew me away a little. like... shit

like when i explain my current life circumstances to myself in a matter-of-fact way it does not look good. i literally have no job, no gf, no friends (in the sense of people i interact with irl regularly), no community, no mission, no purpose, no team, no religion...

i have 8k followers on twitter tho 😅 hi everyone

anyway in conclusion i asked acidQC what i should do with my life and he said "literally just keep writing" and "you're literally allowed to just keep writing you literally don't have to have a plan for how the rest of your life goes that's any more detailed than that"

oh, also, the *medium* dose of acid was incredibly important. some of the most meaningful experiences of my life happened on 100+ ug of acid and/but those experiences were really walled off from my sober life and interpolating between them with an intermediate dose was amazing

lol

https://twitter.com/nastywomanco/status/1414646710308151300?s=20