On the Lived Experience of Coming Out of Scarcity
I was “broke” for many years. At its worst, I was stealing food from grocery stores, technically homeless for weeks or months, secretly sleeping on the upstairs couch at our workspace, the payments for which we were months behind.
I’m struck now by how it didn’t even occur to me, back then, to look beyond the next time I would be hungry again, to imagine a moment past that gnawing, semi-frantic hope that I could sleep inside without getting caught for one more night.
Was I being “dramatic?” I’m American. I’m white. I was born to an upper middle class family. By the time I was a teenager, we were perceived to be the “rich family” in our small, rural, poor Ohio town. I was a high school valedictorian, and managed to get into Duke, which I was told was great. I graduated in 4 years. My employment prospects seemed promising within the old economic structure. If I had chosen to remain a part of that, I almost certainly could have eased into a materially comfortable life.
But I wanted to build Seeds, to try and help us get out of this. And I’m also a femme-presenting, biological female. Through the years of deepest scarcity, a burning, experiential understanding of how people in feminine energy are shunned within late-stage capitalism was compressed inside me like a piece of coal, hardening into a sharp-edged diamond of feminine rage. Particularly in its most masculinized outposts, like the realm of venture capital - upon which I was dependent in order to get the resourcing needed to make Seeds exist - capitalism denied the value of what I had to offer, of what I was and am.
How many brilliant creative projects, how many truly innovative community initiatives, are stymied, or never started at all, because of misofem in capitalism?
Apparently there are studies surrounding this “psychology of poverty.” Apparently it shuts down the part of your brain that is able to plan long term, making it likelier that we stay trapped in the cycle of scarcity. For too many of us, it becomes a life sentence, a generational albatross around our necks.
I only really feel like I came out of the final vestiges of this energy in the last maybe six months. Recently turned 37, I guess it’s not too late.
The physical manifestation of this showed up most obviously as I moved house.
I had been looking for a new place for awhile. I even made a Manifestation List, all the qualities I was looking for in a true home, something I hadn’t yet found in this lifetime.
After a dispiriting search, I kind of gave up…and as seems to always happen, this house then appeared. After viewing it, I looked back at my list. The home checked every box.
On moving day, I learned that the previous tenant was the actress Amber Heard. It felt strange to recognize that I was about to live in a place just vacated by someone who must be genuinely “rich,” who had been the female lead in an enormous comic book movie, even if it bombed. My new adjacency to someone who inhabited those worlds felt like a tremendous leap. I had moved here from a studio apartment, was struggling to pay my rent just over a year before, had to redeem a SEED back then to ask for help myself.
One of the items on my Manifestation List had been, “monthly payments I can effortlessly afford.” If I had known what that amount might be, back in 2017 when I was at my lowest, I think I would have been staggered.
All of this is a great gift. But now I feel that I am learning about the other side of material scarcity, what comes after you leave that space.
**
I bought some beautiful Italian chairs from the 1970s….because I can do things like that now. They were delivered and set up in a room with a gorgeous chandelier, show here in the listing photos from before.
I stood outside as the men made their delivery, keeping my dog out of the way. Through the window I saw one man gesture toward the chandelier, a certain hostility in his movement. I felt a wave of class tension, maybe with a racial component, and a whiff of misogyny as well. A white woman in her mid-30s, standing outside with her small white dog, as he delivered vintage European upholstered furniture, medical shoe covers so he wouldn’t dirty the hardwood floor. A hundred-year-old chandelier cased in gold. What did he see in me? Probably not someone who not that long ago had no idea how to pay for her next meal.
It made me feel strange. As I continue to furnish the house - there’s a lot of stuff to get when you upgrade from a studio to a 3-bedroom Hollywood Hills dream - I’m struck by the sense that, because of cryptocurrency, I can own all kinds of things I couldn’t before, and that’s wonderful. It can make my life easier. Things are delivered and other people carry them. I can limit the logistical Earth navigation that used to claim so much of my energy and time.
But on the weekends, when I don’t allow myself to lean on the crutch that is the distraction of work, as I think and read and write and reflect, watch films that creatively inspire, the grief will come on the surface. The healing work that is my lot as this particular human goes on. Those layers still must release.
I want this for all of us, the recognition that comes with the lived experience of this shift. I want Seeds to help give this to us. When we’re finally, truly out of scarcity, when we’re materially cared for to the extent that we don’t have to worry anymore…we have the space we need to truly begin to heal.
The comfort offered at the Vipassana meditation courses I’ve attended has taught me that. Your material needs must be provided for… and then the real work can commence.
Through Seeds, I want us to build this net together, so that more of us can surmount scarcity-paradigms for good…and then I want us to have the lived recognition that, even as we break free of those capitalistic confines, we’re still enduring the human experience. We’ve still got pain to release. No tactile item, no matter how cozy or beautiful, can do that work for us.
But an ecosystem like Seeds that supports us in shifting from scarcity to abundance can help take care of the worldly stuff, so that we can face the spiritual, and truly begin to transcend.
To greater healing, for all of us. 💗
-Rachel