The financial system needs our fears to keep running
Some of my exhaustion wasn't mine. It came from further back. What I learned by following the thread — about dispossession, invisible pacts, and what it costs to honor them without having chosen them.
The financial system needs our fears to keep running.
The fear of lacking, of no longer being worthy, of losing what took years to build — of no longer being recognized, of falling, of disappearing.
And the answer it whispers to us? Do more. Even more. To exist.
I've lived that. I see it in many women (and men too). I see it in an entire generation exhausting itself performing just to stay in the race.
But what took me longer to see is that some of the exhaustion I carried wasn't mine.
It came from further back.
In my lineage, there is a dispossession of women that was never really named. Just mocked, wrapped in family myths, absorbed in silence. And the men who followed tried to "make it back" — at the casino, in real estate speculation — as if repairing injustice through risk were the only possible path.
It wasn't weakness. It was an inadequate response to an unacknowledged traumatic fault line — that chronic tension between having to prove yourself, holding on no matter what, and never truly receiving the recognition expected.
Except that fault line, I carried it too — as a belief and a family conditioning. An invisible pact I hadn't consciously signed, but honored anyway. And which generated, in my own path, repetitions of past patterns whose influence I now recognize clearly.
Freeing myself from that didn't feel like a victory.
More like a tenderness toward those who came before me.
And a decision: to govern in accord with myself.
Not against the current system. Not despite it. Just — a conscious choice to stop feeding what replays from the past.
It's counterintuitive. Because the answer isn't to do more. It's to withdraw. Withdraw what forces us to betray ourselves. Even when it's the only system we know. Even when the unknown is scarier than familiar exhaustion. Even when "they won't win."
The body, though, isn't fooled. He keeps the score. It tallies what the mind refuses to calculate.
I have no universal answer — and that's intentional. That answer lives in each of us. It cannot be delegated.
What I know: it often begins by recognizing what we carry. And what, in reality, isn't ours.