Member-only story
Fuck the “growth mindset”
…and self-improvement, too.
It is the late 2000s and I’m at my local target with a crinkly $100 bill that I got from my then-husband.
I don’t remember if he gave me the money for a special occasion or not, just that it came with a card that read “buy yourself something nice. You’re only allowed to spend it on yourself.”
We already had kids at the time, and I didn’t spend money on myself, because we were broke all the time. I often had to decide between buying food or diapers. Sometimes we went to our church for food boxes. We never carried insurance on our dilapidated van, because we couldn’t afford it. We had our utilities shut off multiple times and our account closed because it had been overdrawn for over 90 days. All this is to say, $100 was a lot of money to me.
Having $100 to myself seemed ridiculous. I didn’t think I was worth spending $100 on. That it would be wasted on me.
As I looked around in Target, I saw a scarf that was knit from silky, slippery yarn, so the scarf was almost completely smooth. It looked like a mosaic of small red, pink, orange and purple tiles and stretched when I pulled it. I must have stood there for a good 20 minutes touching the scarf and looking at it, then putting it back and picking it up again.
