Just. Look.
On money avoidance, creative courage, and the disruptive bravery of seeing what’s there.
Picture a stack of mail sitting on the kitchen counter. You pick it up and sort through it:
Domino’s coupons.
Alumni newsletter
Shen-Yun flyers.
And then… a letter.
Your stomach sinks, heat flashes across your body and your mind starts to race in 10 different directions at once. Maybe it’s from your doctor. Maybe its a student loan provider or your credit card company. It could even be from the IRS. You put it down and you walk away.
The next day you walk past it again, trying not to make direct eye contact. Maybe you move it to a different pile so it won’t be in your daily line of vision.
And it just sits there. Doing nothing, yet somehow taking up enormous amounts of space.
Somewhere, deep down, you know the letter isn’t the problem; the letter is just paper. The problem is the racing mind, the discomfort that flashes through you - all the stories we make up about what could be inside and what it could mean - before ever breaking the seal.
The Quiet Cruelty of Avoidance
Here’s the reality: anxiety doesn’t go away when we avoid the letter - it just gets louder. It’s the thought that interrupts you while you’re writing. It’s the low-grade guilt when you buy a coffee on your 10 minute session break. It’s the desperation you wear like perfume into your callback.
Avoidance doesn’t feel like nothing - it feels like everything! And it is a perfectly common stress response. When anxiety spikes, looking away offers short-term relief. But the relief, like debt, is borrowed, and the longer we avoid the more epic the stories in our head become. It’s exhausting!
Sometimes the letter contains something hard. But the story we’ve made up about it is almost always scarier than the reality. And knowing is better than the spiral.
For most of us, money is tangled up with worth; with status. With whether we made the right choices, or whether we belong. And let’s be real - those are hard-ass things to confront on a Tuesday morning. So we don’t. We decide to come back to it later, and later becomes a week, and then a month, and then a low hum of unease we just learn to live with.
And the letter is still sitting there.
You Are Doing Something Hard
Creatives are often told, implicitly or explicitly, that caring about money is somehow at odds with “the work.” That artists shouldn’t worry about rates, should be “grateful for the experience,” and heaven forbid you desire financial stability, lest you be labeled a sell out.
These are all lies. Very old, very convenient lies.
Caring about your money is how you protect the work. It’s how you stay in the game long enough to create the thing you love to create. Yes, the work is deeply personal but you also need to pay rent, resource and develop your craft, and you were probably not taught how to manage money in a way that accounts for any of this. So you’ve been figuring it out as you go, while trying to build a life that means something.
So if you are are sitting with money anxiety right now - avoiding the letter, making up worst-case scenarios, moving through your day unease - please hear this:
You are dealing with something genuinely hard, in a system that was not designed for the way you live your creative life, often without a roadmap. And guess what? You’re still here! You are still creating. You are asking questions and looking for a better way. That is not nothing. That is actually quite remarkable.
So What the Hell Do I Do About It?
Just. Look.
That’s the entire ask. Not to fix it, solve it, build a spreadsheet or develop a five-year plan.
Just open the letter.
Just look at the number.
Let it be what it is without judgement - anyone else’s or yours!
A mirror doesn’t judge. It doesn’t wince, scold, or tell you what it thinks you should have done differently. It just shows you what is there. And once you can see what is there - clearly, without the fog of avoidance - you can begin to think about what, if anything, you might want to do next.
One Small Action
This week, open up one account. Just one.
Don’t do anything with it. Don’t set a goal or start meal prepping to save money. Just look at the number and let it exist without a story attached to it.
Notice what comes up. Notice the feeling - the tightening, or relief, or surprising neutrality. All of it is information; none of it is a verdict.
The path forward - whatever it looks like for you - always starts with knowing where you actually are, not where you think you should be. The rest - the assessment, the plan, the small and steady steps forward - comes after.
And if, at some point, you need a helping hand figuring out what comes next - that’s what I’m here for.
Open the letter. You’ve got this!
