Twisted Diamonds

The ways we talk about money affect the whole world.

My old stompin’ grounds, the Upper West Side.

As a young theater student in the early-90s, riding the New York City subway was sublime. I had seen it in the movies so many times during my childhood in Vancouver that racing along in its gritty, clattering depths felt like a glamorous dream come true.

The cross-section of humanity on the trains was astounding. The lowest and highest and middle of the city, often crammed in superclose. I soaked up details for clues about how to be a person in the world. The downtown kids with their stringy hair and ringer tees, emitting low-hum discontentment vibes. Wall Street secretaries, you could tell them instantly from the sneakers and ankle socks they wore over their panty hose, just like Melanie Griffith in “Working Girl.” Construction workers in hard hats chomping huge morning bagels, cream cheese smeared across their prickly mouths.

But of all the subway denizens, the Upper-East-Side wives were the most compelling. I had never seen wealth the way they wore it, real designer outfits meant to impress. But once they arrived on the platform, they did something that fascinated me. They threw long trench coats over their Chanel suits, and twisted their wedding rings so that the huge diamonds were hidden inside their palms.

There was one other thing they did to try and pass unnoticed. As the train pulled up and they stepped inside, they changed topics of conversation, from things like the merits of private schools to the weather forecast. They also pitched their voices lower, both in tone and volume. They slid beneath the surface of all the other noise, allowing it to mute them down to almost nothing.

I’ve seen women do this in all kinds of spaces for all kinds of reasons, mostly for safety. But I know one thing for certain: there is a deep connection between women’s wealth and our voices. Our relationship with wealth, money and prosperity is deeply fraught, an obvious fact that you can hear in the ways we talk about those things. So much self-consciousness, so much anxiety. In conversations about money, we are miserly with our words out of pure fear.

I don’t know how to solve this problem. I can’t solve Capitalism, or Patriarchy, for that matter. The world is run by people who want to keep those systems in place at all costs. Yet most women want the world to be better than it is, and when we attain wealth we are consistently more philanthropic than anyone else.

We might feel that we need to protect our wealth by shutting up about it in public. Fair enough. But if we talk to ourselves about money in a way that is fearful, anxious and judgemental, we can’t access true generosity, the kind that changes lives and makes the world more like it should be. Believing that wealth and abundance are kind, caring and responsible forces is a good mindset shift. If we affirm this to ourselves over and over, it can have a powerful effect on the way that we actually use money in the world

So here is this week’s Power Voice journal prompt:

1. What is your everyday internal chatter about money like? What beliefs do you repeat to yourself, and what are the exact words you use?

2. If you have beliefs that make you feel anxious, fearful, distrustful or stingy, EX: “Money is hard to come by, and I should keep it to myself and my loved ones”, stand up and say with our Power Voice, “Money doesn’t have power over me. I decide how and when to spend it. I have enough money to be occasionally generous, even with strangers. The more I give, the more I can help heal the world.”

3. Reflect on this exercise: how does it feel to say this out loud? Did you connect with some power? I do this as a practice each time I pay my monthly bills, and then I donate to a cause that I believe in (here’s a good one that needs a lot of help right now).