I can feel money tightening my whole life

Dear Delyara, It reaches beyond the bills themselves. It changes what I buy, what I don’t buy, how I speak, what I postpone, what I say yes to, what I deny myself first, how I hear future plans, how much room I feel I have in a week, even how much softness I can receive without a voice in my head asking what it costs. That is what makes money stress feel so invasive. It colonises more than the bank account. It gets into personality. Into appetite. Into sleep. Into tenderness. And because it is so normalised, people say things like “money’s tight” as if that sentence covers it. For me, it never has.