Spent
Memory Recalled: December 28, 2020 | Age When Memory Happened: 33 and 43
When I was 43 years old, I received a text on my phone: “Can I borrow $2500 for an apartment deposit? I’ll be sure to pay you back. If not, I’ll live out of my car for a while until I can save the money.”
I texted back: “WTF! I’m supposed to stay with you over Thanksgiving. I already bought a plane ticket. We are too old to live out of your car. OMG.”
I was scheduled to visit my lifelong friend in San Francisco for Thanksgiving. He had begged me to fly out to see him instead of playing with my kayaking buddy who had just moved from Asheville to Portland. This special Thanksgiving trip got postponed to the following summer due to my friend’s financial problems. The trip itself produced another unforgettable text.
That following summer, when I was about to turn 44, my brother texted: “I think my wife is cheating on me. I just received an anonymous email. Please call me.”
*
Social media helps me confirm the dates when my memory lapses. Secrets further sear and scar my brain, leaving me energetically spent.
My Google calendar has become my new memory balance sheet. My YouTube vlog accrues accounts of my repeated diets, exercises, and efforts to be at peace with (read: control) my body. I repeat these efforts incessantly, incessantly, incessantly. Often, my memory and life feel like they’re looping like a skipping record. A ping, poke, or prop from staff, family, or my smartphone structures snap me to the present.
What year am I writing about? Let’s see, let’s check what I posted on the internet … July 3, 2012, as the second text. Thanksgiving 2011 was the time frame of the first text.
{I must do better with memory and time spans. Why can’t I remember time like other people?}
Now, what was I writing? Oh yes...
I must be scattered because these memories are hard.
Hmmm.
Let’s get another cup of coffee, and then maybe I can coax it out?
God, I love organic dark roast. Those friends at Fair Trade make me feel less guilty about my consumerism, addictions, and excessive American conditioning. This protein-packed muffin is tasty too. I must remember to be a good citizen of the Earth and recycle its cardboard box.
*
I kept secrets all my life. Midlife, I explode every time someone would ask me to keep a secret. When someone innocently says, “Can you keep a secret?” my body shakes with disgust. No, I don’t want to keep any more secrets. I’m literally spent from keeping secrets. But due to contracts, agreements, and common sense, I must continue to keep secrets. It leaves me exhausted.
Money eases the pain of being spent. Addictive spending, whether it’s cash or time, can consume a life of its vitality. My husband and I call mindless spending of cash without partnership ‘financial infidelity.’ It rears its ugly head in our marriage from time to time, despite my best efforts to keep the beast at bay.
Secrets skip consistent, safe beats in my story.
My brother’s divorce bound me to more family secrets. “Keep it secret for the good of my children,” said my brother. I was to never mention what I knew until they became adults. That was that, and we’d never talk about my former sister-in-law’s indiscretions again. It was best to dust that under the rug and go about life.
That was eight years ago. His children are now adults.
My brother and I continue to interact with life differently. He’s a more grin-and-bear-it type. I’m a loud, proud, and you-will-hear-my-cries-no-matter-what type. What can I say? The Dairy Princess finally cashed in and now makes a lot of money with her gift of gab. Spinning stories in the electronic age is a fact of life. I am living inside the information age that makes available instant access to knowledge, but why is it so hard to access internal truth? Do secrets shield my truth? How can I stop the surrounding spinning of stories and become still? The answer thus far has been to put my body through a new ‘aha’ experience -- the body might keep the secrets, the score, but the truth always comes out sideways.
With so much swirling news accuracy (or inaccuracy) during the pandemic, keeping secrets for and from others became unbearable to me, pushing my brain, memory, and happiness to its edge. For four months, June through September 2020, I lead my community in a fight against an asphalt plant trying to rezone property 1,100 feet from my chicken and bee homestead. We had moved to the Great Smoky Mountains for the Green River, a treasure in the Smoky Mountains and a mecca worldwide for whitewater kayakers. My husband kayaked the Class 5 section, “The Narrows,” more than 300 times.
“You kayak them Greens?” a tuber asked him one day as we floated by in our hard plastic boats. Greens? He must mean the Green Narrows, in other words, the treacherous section of the river to kayak. “Yes.” My pride in my husband’s athletic ability shone as I’d affirmatively answer the tuber, diminishing my own skills by responding, “I’ve kayaked the Green, but mostly the Class 3 section.” My husband and I would laugh at home over coffee, mimicking the tuber calling our mutually beloved river, “Them Greens.”
During the four months to save the Green River from pollution, I’d daily get calls from one of the 11,000+ rural neighbors we had united through our earned and social media marketing prowess. Callers would whisper on the phone, “Can you keep a secret? Here’s what I know about that neighbor/business owner/community leader. That’s why this asphalt plant might get its conditional rezoning approved. ‘Them’ good-ole boy networks are so corrupt! Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
To survive the pandemic, the asphalt plant, protests, and politics spiraling my life as a publicist, I channeled Erin Brockovich, who despite her lack of education in the law was instrumental in building a case against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company of California in 1993. At first, I was having fun with my husband and our friend, a local kayak company business owner who helped us spearhead the movement to give locals a voice in zoning laws to save both their homes and our beloved river. Soon with the secrets, conspiracy, and local-boy’s rumors, what started as an empowering endeavor to give the community a voice became heavy and hard. Nasty emails, ungrateful social media posts, angry untrue accusations about my intentions, and more unbearable secrets left me taking a Facebook sabbatical to renew my energy.
I’d leave my house and consciously choose to lose myself on hikes nearby at the Carl Sandburg National Historic Site, climbing up to overlooks to ponder my future both in the Smokies and my role as a global leader in human development, marketing, and business. I’d mountain bike in DuPont Forest, allowing the trees to whip away the pain of the pandemic. Consumed with emotion and concern for myself, my family, my clients, friends, and loved ones, I’d disappear into the forest and ask Mother Earth, Creator, God -- my dad -- what to do next.
In month four of the fight, the asphalt plant owner withdrew his application. He cited the fight made him tired, too. By law he would have to wait six months to reapply. I realized I had a few months to do something else other than field and sort secrets. A local paper called the campaign my husband and I spearhead the “Mother of all NIMBYs” but it left me tired, angry, and reflecting on my life’s purpose: how can humanity reach its fullest potential with me keeping silent?
Is silence the answer, ever? How are we to discern between silence and stories that traumatize? When does keeping silent help and when does it hurt? When faced with a probing, antagonistic journalist, I’d default to truth. “When in doubt, just tell the truth,” I’d coach clients as I’d train them to excel in media interviews. “The truth always prevails,” I’d teach others and tell myself. Lies are evil, just like stacks of paper. I loathe stacks of paper. That stack always has some tasks undone in it. Clean it up. Always cleaning up the stacks of paper -- just like my mother. Clean, clean, clean it up. Cleanliness is next to godliness!
Secrets are evil. Clients want me to keep secrets. My friends and family want me to keep secrets. Secrets make me feel out of control. Out of control with secrets. Got to control the chaos. Control the chaos. Incessantly. Incessantly. Incessantly. Chaos is evil. “Daddy, are you there? I can’t keep any more secrets. Please help me.” I touch the coin he gave me to calm me down.
The Bible keeps us from evil. Reared with the Bible read daily at my house, I hold the prayer of Jabez coin inside my medicine bag. Before my father died, he had given me a coin with the prayer on it. “This will bless you as you start your business, baby,” he said as he placed it in my hand. I keep it on my altar at home or in my medicine bag when I travel.
The prayer of Jabez coin I hold frequently to ground myself reads:
“Bless me indeed, enlarge my territory, that Your hand be with me, keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain.” 1 Chronicles 4:10
God was good to me (when his wrath wasn’t storming). Dad was good to me (when his wrath wasn’t storming). I am rich in more ways than one: a loving marriage, money in the bank, a home I love, hobbies that light fire in my heart, and a purpose to help people find their voice in truth. My father’s wish for me before he died had come true.
He and I had watched The Twilight Zone episodes together when I was a teenager. The character in the episode “Man in the Bottle” unleashes a genie who gives the man cash and power, turning the shop owner into Hitler. My father stood up during each commercial screaming, “Wish for happiness dummy. Wish for happiness! Michelle, just wish for happiness!”
I never forgot from my father’s outbursts during this TV show and his strong passion for my happiness endured until the day he died. I was holding his hand, present and empowered, when he took his last breath.
I had forgiven him for the PTSD that raged through his body, causing him to hit me, correcting me as the Bible had instructed. “Girl, if we knew back then what you know now from reading your fancy child development book, I might have done things differently and not spanked you so much. Just forgive me and move on. Stop fighting me. Damn it.”
Fighting you? I had protected you. In another show we watched together when I was in my teens, he had also stood up and preached to his audience: his children. I had protected him from his rage by never sharing with him the secret I had about our neighbors until I was 20 years old. “Larry had sex with you?” he questioned, bewildered and disgusted.
Dad’s rage was unpredictable. The expose on child molesters mesmerized our whole family as it flashed on our basement TV screen in 1983. When the commercial gave us a break from the secrets of society, my father stood up and said on his way to the bathroom, “If anyone did that to my children, I’d take my 22-gauge shotgun and end him. Period, end of story.” His heavy footsteps took him out of the basement family den to our first floor and he was gone to the bathroom. I could hear his steps through the house as I pondered the incessant question in my brain, “Should I tell him what our neighbor did to me? Should I tell my mom? My brother?” Dad’s rage from his daily dramas as a nurse both from the Korean war and now the Veterans Administration hospital played out in our home. One minute loving and stable. The next minute raging, Biblical proportions out of control.
Back in the 70s and 80s, no one spoke about child molesters or sexual assault. Today, in 2020, it’s on the news every day. From priests to Olympic athlete doctors to Hollywood producers, sexual crime is portrayed in our entertainment, but very little discussed over the family dinner table. Instead, PTSD from overwhelming events continues to be the secret our society shares.
“Oh, that happened to me. No big deal. I just moved on,” clients would say to me on the phone.
“Me too,” I’d respond. “Yes, we just move on, don’t we?”
Feigning being empowered is a skill most in the mind, body, spirit industry know how (and teach) to do well. It’s the burden of the secrets we share in society that sheds light on what gives or steals happiness. Truth is the only antidote.
Years later, when I had completed my Native American Vision Quest, the coin my father gifted me was nestled inside my black leather medicine bag. God had been good to me, despite his rage. My father’s abundance had been good to me, despite his rage. My “six figure debtor to six figure earner” success had been featured in a 2009 book by a Wall Street Journal columnist called, New Job, New You: A Guide to Reinventing Yourself in a Bright New Career, by Alexandra Levit with a foreword by Stephen R. Covey, author of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
In the chapter on my life, Levit discusses how I went from a theater producer to a nonprofit education designer to media entrepreneur. In my 20s, I had been a children’s entertainer dressed as a princess, pirate, or Barbie to pay for college. After that I took a job with a nonprofit that was out to reform the Catholic church, a subject close to my heart. I had mentioned my neighbor molesting me when I was in fourth grade to my parish priest during confession. Instead of turning my molester in to the authorities, I was told to say a few prayers for penance for having premarital sexual relations.
Levit continues the story of my early adulthood. After working in community leadership and activism both at college and with Amnesty International, I moved back to Louisville where a boyfriend still lived. He had helped me find a job at a publishing company called Little People’s Workshop. Early Childhood News magazine recognized the developmentally appropriate learning curricula, puppet videos, flannel boards, and daily stories that I produced by giving me their prestigious awards. My materials also received the Parents Choice award a few years in a row.
Little People’s Workshop went out of business and became RISE (Resources and Instruction for Staff Excellence). There I was the project manager, directing national satellite, TV, and internet training for the National Head Start Association and the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
The chapter continues to follow my rags to riches story. During my years in the nonprofit world, I was also pursuing global leadership courses at Landmark (www.LandmarkWorldwide.com). In those courses, I realized my career choices were largely influenced by my father and that I was naturally attracted to entrepreneurship that allowed for independent cash flow. Levit quotes me saying, “I began to see that money wasn’t something evil people pursued. I’d always been community service oriented, but now I recognized that securing funds for a business that I controlled would allow me to make a difference in the lives of huge numbers of people.”
I also developed a passion for adventure. During time off from managing projects at RISE, I’d drive to West Virginia on the weekends to be a professional whitewater rafting guide on the New and Gauley rivers. The thrill of being an entrepreneur and an outdoor extreme athlete appealed to me more than anything else had up to that point in my life. To pursue both, I needed a career that would allow me to work (and play) from anywhere rivers flowed. To control my schedule, income, and hobbies, Levit reports, I would start my own media business. Instantly, student loan debt “lit a fire under my seat and led me to seek a much higher pay bracket,” Levit writes about my journey. She continues, “True to her risk-taking nature, Michelle moved to the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina with her new business partner before her plans were fully fleshed out. She had taken courses with the United States Small Business Administration and SCORE during grad school and now supplemented her income by waiting tables at night.”
Levit reports on how my PR firm, Wasabi Publicity, Inc., solely represents people who make a difference. Then she quotes something I said to my mother who had asked why I insisted on taking so many risks in life. Levit quotes me, “I don’t [take risks] to escape life, but rather to prevent life from escaping me. I’ve learned to go with the flow, which is hard for a Type A person to do. But when I intentionally release and stop getting in my own way, I find that the results and the money come rushing in.”
Levit completes the chapter on my life by confirming the six-figure salary I had come to sustain over decades and my eagerness to “suck the marrow out of life before I die.”
One thing she didn’t report was my twenty-year plan to be a philanthropist, which was something I created in the “Money Seminar” at Landmark. This, too, has come to pass and I’m thrilled to be a founding member of the movement #Givefluencer. We say in 2021, “The new influencer is a givefluencer.” Giving is a lifestyle. Giving is living.
*
My father’s wishes that I find happiness in my life had not only come to pass, but it was historically noted in a book by a respectable journalist and evidenced by the company I kept. The coin had worked, and I transformed the addictions binding my brain into triumph and success. It wasn’t always easy for me nor for the people who loved me.
I wanted to respond to the 2011 text from my San Francisco friend with “I have the money for you. You don’t have to live in your car.”
Afterall, I had earned that money and with the help of my business partner and my husband, had saved it for my stability and future success. I had the money to lend my friend and wasn’t going to be told no by anyone no matter what. My dad was dead, and I had control over my own life, damn it.
From years of attending Debtors Anonymous and personal development courses to empower oneself around money, I had set up structures in my life to make it impossible for me to access money without going through my trusted business partner -- who coincidentally was also a former seminar leader in one of my personal development courses -- or my loving husband, who used to manage a bank. My mother and father had laughed about me dating a fiscally responsible man. “Does he know you have a six-figure debt?” my father asked me. “He won’t be your boyfriend after he finds out, I assure you,” my father warned. My mother laughed saying, “That’s for sure.”
My parents were painfully prudent with their money. After my father died, I had tried to manipulate my business partner into allowing me to access more and more money each month. He was the first person in my life to stop enabling my mindless spending, yelling at me on the phone one day in 2004, “Michelle, you need to tell me your nut; the money you need to squirrel away each month to make ends meet -- what is your financial nut? Then you can be paid that amount and not keep draining the business of its safety net. You have a spending problem. Now that your dad is dead and you can’t borrow money from him, you simply cannot keep taking money from the company. You have to stop. Get yourself help.”
Through the years of managing a successful firm, I’ve allowed my business partner to do just that: form the safety net that would pay my salary and the salary of our staff. This wall proved difficult now that a dear friend was asking to borrow money. My business partner said, “No.” No money from the business would be loaned to any friend. Sigh. I’d have to ask my husband, but he was no more receptive to the question than my partner.
“No. If you’re going to lend a friend or family money, you might as well just give them the money and not expect it paid back,” my husband said, his former loan officer and repo man slip showing. “I will not support giving that money to him. No.”
I was stuck between my desire to help and keeping my word to my husband, business partner, and my twelve-step sobriety, which in Debtors Anonymous is called solvency. Unsecured debt of any kind was no longer allowed.
I found myself driving to the bank in secret.
I preferred banking digitally. I had set up my life to work virtually since 2002 and rarely found myself sitting across from people face-to-face. I sat anxiously for the bank manager to join me at her desk.
“Hello, Michelle, how are you and your husband? It’s been years since I saw you at our branch here in Saluda.”
“Yes, it’s been years. I’m fine. How are you? Please don’t tell my husband I’m here, though. I’m here to borrow money for a friend and he doesn’t know it.”
She looked at me. There was an awkward pause of silence between us. She reflected downward and then looked up at me. “Okay, let me see what we can do here.” She then clicked on her keyboard. She stood up, collected papers, and after a few minutes laid the papers to sign in front of me.
“Here we are. You sign just here, and I can get you the money your friend needs,” the bank manager instructed. She pushed the papers toward me. I scooted to the edge of my seat, toward the papers, and grabbed a pen. Bank customers and tellers bustled around us. I had started to sign my name when her hand blocked the pen and paper. “I could get fired for saying this to you. But please don’t sign that.”
Our eyes met as she became the wall, the structure between my addiction to put others’ needs before my own. She looked at me, kind and loving, and pleaded, “Please don’t do this without telling your husband. I know you said your friend needs this money, but your marriage. Think of your marriage. Your husband. It’s not right.”
I put down the pen. Defeated by my own failure to overcome my addictions and seeing God, my father, friend, and husband reflected in this bank manager’s eyes, I weakly said, “Okay,” and left the bank.
That night I sat at our kitchen counter and drank coffee too late in the day for proper and restful sleep. My husband came home, and I confessed, “Babe, I need to tell you something. I’ve been financially unfaithful.”
He listened, held my hand, and sighed deeply as I cried and told him about my bank visit, the manager’s plea, and my inability to control my codependent spending and addictions that were conditioned inside an excessive, capitalistic culture. He forgave me.
My lifelong friend received the loan from someone else. He paid it back and successfully completed amends inside his own twelve step program. Today he’s sober, happily married to a loving man, and no longer texts me to borrow money. He and I talk on the phone about making daily amends and pursuing happiness through life-long learning, self-inquiry, reflection, and righting wrongs for which we’re responsible. It’s accountability. In other words, having the ability to account -- to account for how we spend and invest money, time, resources, and our words. This great task in life I no longer take for granted. Serving others inside one’s purpose is wholly different than being a slave to one’s addictions and co-dependent conditioning and the difference is only discerned internally. It’s your inside balance sheet.
I wave at that bank manager when I see her out and about in my community. Through pandemic masks, neighbors thank me for saving their homes, for fighting the asphalt plant, and giving so freely of myself, my time, and resources. Most people in my life have little to no knowledge of the real secret and burden silencing my self-care since I was 8 years old. I’m writing now to right that wrong.
✧༺♕༻✧
W.R.I.T.E. THE TRAUMA™ — Reader Reflection for “Spent”
Self-Care Note:
This chapter explores secrecy, money, addiction, obligation, and the exhaustion that comes from carrying what was never meant to be carried alone. If your body feels tight, overwhelmed, or restless while reading, pause. Drink water. Breathe. Return when you’re ready.
Why This Matters
Secrets don’t just live in the mind. They live in calendars, bank statements, text threads, bodies, and habits. Over time, secrecy drains energy, distorts memory, and creates patterns of over-giving, over-spending, or self-erasure. This reflection invites you to notice where your life feels spent — and why.
W — Write
What secret are you currently holding that costs you energy?
How does keeping this secret show up in your body, sleep, spending, or schedule?
If your life had a balance sheet, where are you overdrawn?
R — Relate
Who taught you that keeping secrets was safer than telling the truth?
Were you praised for being “strong,” “responsible,” or “helpful” at a young age?
How has loyalty — to family, friends, causes, or money — shaped your choices?
I — Interrupt
What pattern do you repeat when you feel overwhelmed or out of control?
(Spending, giving, fixing, disappearing, working harder, staying silent.)What belief fuels this pattern? (“It’s my responsibility,” “I can handle it,” “They need me.”)
What would it look like to interrupt that belief — just once?
T — Tell
Who is a safe person you could tell one honest sentence to today?
What truth are you afraid will change everything if spoken?
What might change for the better if you stopped carrying this alone?
E — Embody
Where does “spent” live in your body — jaw, chest, stomach, shoulders?
What restores energy for you without costing secrecy or self-betrayal?
What does solvency look like in your life — emotionally, financially, spiritually?
✧༺♕༻✧
