There’s a version of success they celebrate. And then there’s the version you live in alone.
I make good money. More than anyone in my family ever has, legally. More than I ever thought a girl from where I’m from could make. And for a long time, I let that be the whole story.
The truth is a little more complicated than that.
Nobody in my family talked about money growing up. And I don’t mean they were private about it. I mean it was chaotic. Feast or famine. Either there was enough to breathe, or there wasn’t, and either way, nobody sat down and said here’s what you do with it. Here’s how it works. Here’s what happens when you finally get some and the IRS comes looking.
So when I started earning real money, I felt like I had finally made it. And I spent like it. On myself, on the people I loved, on experiences I never had growing up. But I was also saving. Maxing out my 401K, IRA, and my FSA. Putting money into a high yield savings account and CDs. On paper, I was doing what the finance girlies said to do.
The problem was that none of those accounts are meant to be touched. They’re locked away, growing slowly, doing their job for future me. So when present me needed liquid cash, it wasn’t there. And nobody told me that saving aggressively in the right places could still leave you exposed. That’s not a lesson anybody in my family had to pass down.
And then tax season came.
The very first year, my withholdings were wrong. I didn’t know to check them. I didn’t know that was even something I needed to look at. So when I filed, I owed more than I had accessible. Not a little more. A lot more. And instead of facing it, I did what I knew how to do with painful things. I kept moving. I kept working. I kept performing the life that looked right from the outside while the debt quietly compounded into something that scared me every time I thought about it too long.
[redacted] thousand dollars worth of scared.
I want to be honest about the shame that lives inside of that number. Because it’s not just about money. It’s about being the first. Being the one who was supposed to figure it out. Being the one the family watches, even the parts of the family who never showed up for you when you needed them most.
When my mother died, I was nineteen years old, about to start my second year of college, still living at home. And there were family members who owed the IRS. I know because I heard it through the rumor mill of grief. The same relatives who turned that season of loss into a battle over my mother’s life insurance policy, tried to pressure us to hand over money we didn’t have to clear their debt. We were kids. We had nothing. And they came for it anyway.
So when I say I don’t talk about money with family, understand that the silence isn’t just preference. It’s protection. I learned early that money in the wrong hands, or the wrong mouths, becomes a weapon. And I decided a long time ago that nobody gets to hold that over me.
But here’s the thing about protecting yourself so hard. Sometimes you end up alone in it.
I have kept up the appearance that things are great because to most people looking in, they are. I carry myself like a woman who has it together, and in a lot of ways I do. But I was also carrying [redacted dollars] in tax debt in silence, too ashamed to say it out loud, too proud to ask for help, too used to figuring things out alone to think I deserved a professional in my corner.
What finally shifted wasn’t a rock bottom moment. It wasn’t a crisis. It was just… readiness. A quiet decision that I was tired of being afraid of a number. That I had worked too hard to keep letting this be the thing I couldn’t look at directly. That it was time to stop performing financial confidence and start actually building it.
So I got a financial advisor. And I’m handling it.
That sentence is simple and it took me years to be able to say it.
I’m sharing this because I think there are a lot of us out here who grew up in chaos and learned to survive it, who crossed every finish line we were told to run toward, and still somehow ended up in rooms we didn’t have a map for. The six-figure salary doesn’t come with instructions. The IRS doesn’t care that you were the first. The debt doesn’t know your story.
Success doesn’t automatically mean you know what you’re doing with it. And there’s no shame in that, even when it feels like there is.
I’m still figuring it out. But at least now I’m not figuring it out alone.
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