Here’s the deal. When you're twenty, twenty-one, twenty-twoish, you're not supposed to have money like that. You're supposed to split dinners and count change and do that stupid humiliating mental math in line at CVS. So when it shows up, real money, adult money, not just adult money but FUCK YOU money. It lands like a drug. And what do you do with a drug? You take more than you should, faster than you should. The thing no one tells you is that making money fast at this age makes your relationship to money... porous. Like your sense of value becomes permeable. The boundaries between “need” and “want” kinda dissolve because when it arrives in strange waves, you stop living on a steady salary logic. A good week means you feelinvincible. A slow week means you feel doomed all over again. You start spending like you have to outrun the fear of the next dry spell. Because if you're honest, the money doesn't feel stable or real sometimes. So you spend it quickly. I'll tell myself I’m being responsible,” and then I’ll do the exact opposite in a way that looks, from the outside, like self-care.Thats the other trick. When you suddenly have access, you want to buy things that say you belong. You want proof. Designer is the most obvious proof. Designer is a language most people here speak fluently. A bag is not a bag. A bag becomes: I have access. You don't. Its a little passport you carry on your arm. It tells people you're not struggling even if you are. The salesperson will smile at me differently, and that smile will make me want to cry because the world is so easy to buy into when you know the code. Restaurants are another way I launder it. When I have a good night, I don't go home. Fuck no. I go somewhere dim and expensive and order oysters like I’m doing now. Sometimes I'll book a last-minute reservation at a place I've seen on Instagram and I'll pay without checking my bank balance. paying without flinching. It’s not even about the food. It’s about the moment your card goes through, and nothing bad happens. Spas are dangerous. You can say you're taking care of your body, and no one will question it. I’ll book a lymphatic and lie on the table and let someone press the city out of me like juice, and for an hour I can pretend my body is just a body. Then I walk out and tip too much because tipping makes me feel powerful. Of course, the dumbest, purest kind of spending is the impulsive little purchases that feel like talismans. The objects don’t settle my nervous system. They just temporarily mute it. They make me feel better for an hour, a day, a week, until the next quiet stretch, until the next dry spell, until the next moment I look at myself in the mirror and remember none of this is stable. So you keep moving. You keep buying. converting the money into things that look solid and tangible. Solid is what you crave when your income is fucked and then royalty unfucked and then super fucked again. I realize the most addictive part of this money is not what it buys. Its the way it lets you borrow a self.