To be the girl who arrived with nothing, I have to keep having nothing

Letters from The In-Between, No. 21

I have been sitting here doing math instead of writing, which is how I know something is off.

The fridge broke in March. The dishwasher in April.

This morning I opened the tab for the savings account before I opened the notebook. Everything I earn from writing on Substack goes into it. I named it emergency.

August is the lowest month I have had in a twelve months.

The low month is not the thing. What stopped me is what I was looking at while I did the math. The money I make from the work I care most about lives in a container I labeled for disaster.

For years I told myself I kept hitting the same ceiling. This morning I do not believe that. I know exactly how to start over, and I have never let myself past the beginning.

The bread

I know when that woman was born. I can put my hand on the exact aisle.

I was twenty one. Fifty dollars folded in my pocket, a paper dictionary, no English. Not broken English, none of it. The plan, if it deserves that word, was eight months as an au pair to three children, ages four and six and eight, who spent those months stopping me mid sentence and making me say the word again until my mouth got it right.

Someone took me to a grocery store in the first days.

In Poland there was one kind of bread. The kind you bought after standing in a long line for it, the kind everyone bought, and you did not think about it any more than you think about which sky to stand under. Here there was a wall of it. White, wheat, rye, seeded, sliced thin, sliced thick, in bags, in paper, brands I could not read stacked above brands I could not read. All of it in a language that was still only sound to me, the way water is sound.

I stood there and I couldn’t move.

For thirty years I have told this as a charming little scene, and it wasn’t charming. My face went hot. My hands were doing something with the strap of my bag. Behind me the store kept going, carts, voices, someone waiting to get past, and there was nothing in that wall I could sound out and nobody I could ask, because asking requires words. I had fifty dollars and a dictionary I wasn’t going to open in public.

I stood there long enough that it became embarrassing. I had crossed an ocean and I couldn’t choose a loaf of bread.

Here is what I noticed only this year. I have no memory of what I put in the cart.

Thirty years of telling this story and the ending has never been in it. Not once. I do not know whether someone reached past me and picked something, or whether I took the nearest bag to get out of the aisle, or whether I left with nothing. The standing is what I kept. The part where it resolved did not seem worth carrying, so I did not carry it, and now it is gone.

The fifty dollars has been in my bio for almost thirty years. It opens talks. People learn it about me first and then hand it back to me at the end of the night. She came here with fifty dollars and a dictionary, and look at her now.

I was proud of it. I am still proud of it. She was brave in a way I am not sure I could be again, and she deserves to be talked about.

A story you tell that many times stops being a memory and starts being a major part of your identity.

The arithmetic

Fifty dollars only means what it means next to zero. 5 and 0 or 50…

There is nothing mystical about how the zero gets kept there, and I want to be precise here, because I did not break the fridge. I opened an account, I gave it a name, and then I routed my writing income into it.

Emergency is not a goal. It is a room with a door that only opens when something goes wrong. Money that goes in there is not on its way to anything. It sits there waiting for a bad day, and bad days do happen.

The savings account was the second thing I did. The first was the price. I turned on paid subscriptions within six months of starting to write here. Then I set the number low, left it there, and took another eighty or ninety percent off it every time I made an offer. I was keeping the numbers low, because I did not believe anyone would pay to read me, and underneath that I did not believe I should be paid for work I love doing.

I have taught Future Scripting pointed forward. Write it in present tense, in detail, and your nervous system goes to work making it familiar, then making it true.

What I did not account for is that the origin story is also present tense. Every single time. I came here with fifty dollars gets the same rehearsal as anything I write on a Sunday morning about the year ahead, and it has a thirty year head start. Your nervous system believes what you write in detail. It does not check the date on the page.

The opening balance

So I am putting it down. Nothing about her needs throwing away.

Fifty dollars was never the whole story. It was the opening balance. It can become five thousand and then fifty thousand and then half a million, and the girl in the bread aisle is not diminished by a single digit of it, because she is the reason there is anything to count at all.

So, the pen. The same three steps I teach going forward, turned around and pointed at the story you already have.

See it (in your mind’s eye.).The last time someone asked how you got here, you had a sentence ready. Put yourself back in that room. Hear yourself deliver it..

Write it (by hand.) Put the sentence on paper, then write it again with the number moving. Present tense, same girl in it, except now the arriving is where the counting starts. Mine goes like this:

I arrived with fifty dollars and a paper dictionary, and that was the opening balance. The number has been climbing for thirty years, and I am the one who moves it.

Act it (as it already happen.) Say the second version out loud. Something will argue back, and it will be fast. Write down what it says in its own words. Then use the new sentence the next time someone asks, before you feel ready to.

The coffee has gone cold. The house is starting to move. It’s time for me to go and live it as it already happen…

With love and courage from the in-between,

Magdalena

P.S. What sentence do you lead with when someone asks how you got here? Hit reply and send me the line. I read every one.

---

👉 If you enjoy reading this post, feel free to share it with friends! Or feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack.