For years, I convinced myself that the life I wanted — the one I am living now — belonged to other people, people with easier beginnings, softer names, different lineages.
No one who looked like me was doing the kind of work I felt called toward.
My job didn’t even exist when I began. I had to invent it.
No one in my family had ever imagined being an entrepreneur.
the message was simple and loud: when you survive poverty and carry a long African name in France, you take the job you’re given. Work twice as hard. Live your ‘real’ life after work.
I internalized that so early that by the age of five I was aching to get to school, convinced it was my one route out of my neighborhood, my gateway to a “real job,” to safety, to being untouchable. (The meritocracy France oversells).
But the moment I entered those institutions, the very spaces that were supposed to grant me freedom became battlegrounds. Working for other people didn’t liberate me from the conditions of home; it reproduced them with sharper edges — racism, sexism, transphobia, class violence.
I realized that even though I thought work would give me independence, it was simply a new room where the same threats lived. And underneath that was the truth I had always known but never allowed myself to say aloud: people were right about me. I am WAY TOO SMART for a man. I am a raging lesbian and I have always hated working for men. I think their ideas are stupid. I think their dreams are boring. When they speak they sound like the Sims to me. And I always knew my life was my own.
And yet, despite that clarity, I had no idea how to begin. So I negotiated for years with my own need for independence. I tolerated being told what “professional hair” should look like, how to dress, when I was allowed to rest, when I was required to mask everything that made me me. I tolerated it — but my body revolted every single day.
At home, instead of facing that truth, I would spiral into fixation: stalking people who were doing something even slightly adjacent to what I wanted, digging obsessively for proof that their success was built on privileges I didn’t have. SEEE!!? This is why I can’t do it. This is why I’m miserable. Someone like me can’t do it. AH! I win!
Being right and staying small always felt safer than being wrong and expanding into a life that might actually change everything. That’s the trick wounds play on us — the insecurities we built to survive slowly start to feel like an identity, and shrinking becomes the illusion of safety we keep choosing because growth feels like too much truth, too much risk, too much of us.”
And I know you have your own version of this pattern. This is why you open every email I write about money with just a little too much urgency.
You’re the friend everyone assumes is doing well, except you haven’t checked your bank account in weeks because money activates the same terror your childhood taught you to associate with danger, shame, instability. You freeze — not because you’re irresponsible, not because you lack discipline, but because no one ever taught your body that it was safe to have needs, desires, or a future.
I know this state intimately. Even now, with a life I built from scratch, with stability I once believed was impossible, I can still feel that freeze in my ribs when my bank sends a letter. My first somatic reaction isn’t rational — it’s the old script: “I’m in danger. I’m going to lose everything. That’s it! I’m going to be houseless this time!!!.” Because my body lived far more years in proximity to collapse than in proximity to safety. And no amount of money can erase an imprint that deep.
So if you are still reading this — whether or not you join the workshop — I want you to carry this truth gently but clearly: you are not bad with money; you are avoiding the feelings money awakens in you. What you call “money issues” are not failures of character; they are unprocessed fear. We are not talking about numbers. We are talking about years of emotional violence, instability, vigilance, and the lack of any reliable safety to look, to know, to engage.
Money doesn’t activate logic — it activates your lineage, your nervous system, your oldest wounds. What you think you’re avoiding — a number — is never the thing you’re actually turning away from. Your body is trying to protect you from:
being seen in the shame you inherited
being responsible for your own expansion beyond the somatic memory of instability
becoming someone your ancestors never had the chance, resources, or safety to become
And I won’t lie to you: ending cycles is sacred work, but it’s also exhausting work.
None of us were asked whether we wanted to be born into these histories.
“Why am I in it?” is a legitimate question.
But the truth remains: you are here, and the only way toward a life that feels like yours is through the emotions you’ve spent years negotiating with, minimizing, postponing, or avoiding.
Avoidance is seductive because it feels like protection. But avoidance is a slow death — not in a dramatic sense, but in the quiet way it drains possibility, intimacy, agency, creativity. We never avoid only the wound; we avoid the magic, the intelligence, the transformation waiting inside it. The reason I speak so directly about avoidance is because it steals life force in the most silent way, convincing you that you’re “fine” because you’ve avoided what is hurtful and scary while keeping you exiled from the parts of yourself that want to lead. And yes, those parts are inside the wound. Never outside.
You deserve more than survival strategies. You deserve a body that can stay with your own life.
I created a Somatic RESET Guide about our financial and relational lives. It is 9 euros and available on my website for download now. If you are coming to my workshop, The Somatics of Scarcity, no need to purchase it, it’s included.
If you want to go deeper, we will dive much deeper in The Somatics of Scarcity, next Sunday.
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.
On December 14th, 2025 - 5pm CET (replay available if you register!)
