This is the first essay of a six-part exploration of how scarcity lives in the body, drives our obsession, shapes our relationship to ourselves, others and money, and keeps us from what we truly need—and how turning toward it can begin to teach us abundance.
This first essay will be free and the others won’t be.
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I’ve been thinking about how scarcity doesn’t begin with money. It begins with sensation. Before we ever learned what a bank account was, before we had words for neglect or love or longing, our bodies were already running their own economies. The first exchange was breath. The first form of debt was the moment we needed something—warmth, closeness, attunement—and no one came. The first experience of inflation was the rise of panic in our tiny chests when needs exceeded supply.
There is a moment I keep returning to lately. Not a dramatic one—just a Tuesday afternoon where I opened the fridge and felt the old familiar tightness in my sternum. Not because there wasn’t food, but because my body still remembers when there wasn’t any. I stood there with the cold air on my skin and realized I was no longer responding to the fridge in front of me; I was responding to the past where desire and need had consequences. Where wanting too much made you a burden. Where asking for more made you difficult. Where needing anything at all meant you might end up disappointed. And in that moment I understood, in a way I hadn’t before, that the body keeps the books long after the crisis has passed. The body is a living archive, after all.
When I look back at my own patterns, I realize that scarcity etched itself into my nervous system long before any adult version of life tried to convince me that I wasn’t enough. My body learned to approach connection like a fragile commodity and learned to guard my needs like a vault. Every heartbreak, every obsessive crush, every withdrawal into avoidance, every difficulty with money or repair or being seen traces back to that early economy: the exchange of need and response, hunger and holding, reach and retreat.
Most of us are walking around with bodies that believe the world is still too small to hold us. We think our pain is individual, but it is structural; we think our behaviors are personal flaws, but they are simply the echoes of unmet needs. Scarcity is not a mindset—it is a memory stored in our tissues, fascia, impulse, breath. And it shapes everything: our relationships, our boundaries, our ability to rest, our capacity for intimacy, our relationship with desire, our sense of worth, our avoidance of conflict, our way of handling money (!).
That’s why this series is emerging now. Because the collective nervous system is frayed. Because the world keeps asking us to “self-regulate” while denying us the conditions for safety. Because people are cycling through heartbreak, ghosting, obsession, burnout, and money panic as if these are personal crises rather than somatic inheritances. Because so many of us are exhausted by trying to build liberatory lives while living inside bodies shaped by scarcity.
This series is an excavation. A map. A dismantling of the internal architecture that scarcity built inside us. Over the coming essays, we will move through three major terrains together:
Emotional Scarcity: how unmet childhood needs turn into adult patterns of obsession, self-abandonment, overgiving, or collapse.
Relational Scarcity: how intimacy becomes a site of danger, how avoidance takes root, why ghosting devastates us, and why accountability feels impossible.
Material Scarcity: how money becomes the symbolic container for every wound shaped by safety, worth, and permission.
Each of these terrains is shaped by one invisible force: avoidance. You know your body has to bring that up !!!
Honestly, this is what I have gathered so far, after making avoidance my favourite topic, and consulting hundreds if not thousands of people around the globe.
Avoidance is the strategy that kept us safe when everything felt too overwhelming to feel. It is the key mechanism through which scarcity reproduces itself. When we avoid conflict (not just with people but with ourselves, with being in a body, with Life), we avoid repair. When we avoid our emotions, we avoid our needs. When we avoid looking at money, we avoid agency. When we avoid intimacy, we avoid being met and loved. Avoidance is the hinge everything turns on, I really think so and I’d probably die on this hill too, yes !
And this series will end with something we rarely talk about: not abundance as a fantasy, but abundance as a physiological shift. The kind of abundance that lets the body exhale. The kind of abundance that says: you are allowed to have needs; you are allowed to be held; you are allowed to stay. Ultimately, what I’d love to share one day are the things that have actually worked for me—how I navigated my visibility wounds, built a 6-figure business from a background of scarcity, and learned to show up for myself while growing my work. I probably will share it one day (would you be interested?), but what I’ve realized is this: all of it—every strategy, every success, every stumble—is rooted in one somatic imprint and one undeniable need: SAFETY!!
Why do you need this series?
- Because your body is tired of living in emergency mode.
- Because your relationships deserve more than reenactments of old wounds.
- Because your nervous system has spent too many years preparing for loss instead of opening to presence.
- Because you are not failing—you are repeating a somatic economy built long before you had language or choice.
- Because nothing changes until sensation changes.
This is not a series that will fix you (you DON’T NEED FIXING!); it is a series that will name you. It will help you see the lineage of scarcity you carry and the places where your body is still negotiating for permission to exist. If we learn the somatics of scarcity—the sensations that accompany it, the patterns we inherited, the places where we tighten or collapse or chase—we can learn the somatics of abundance too!!!! Trust me, I have built a six figure business while still jumping from sublets to sublets FOR THREE YEARS. I realised that while housing is shitty everywhere and I hate this for us, I still had HUGE belonging issues and avoidance patterns to excavate, still.
This is NOT the capitalist fantasy either, but the kind of abundance that allows us to soften into ourselves, to build, to care for one another. I want all of us to thrive, because we’re the ones saving us!
If that feels resonant, The Somatics of Scarcity might be interesting for you. The Somatics of Scarcity: Money, Safety, Worth & the Body is a 3-hour somatic workshop that rewires money shame into nervous-system safety, turning avoidance into agency and scarcity into dignity. If you are struggling with money, I want you to re-member: Financial patterns are not moral issues. They are somatic imprints created by structures that benefit from you living scared.
Ok, see you soon !
And happy thanksgiving to American babes celebrating ! Also Fuck THE US and the Empire y’all !
Stay ungovernable,
Care
Uhhh! Said so well! Thank you for putting words to this! "Our bodies already ran their own economies...the first exchange was the breath" Hallelujah!
yesss thank you! can’t wait.