I'll never take my cut and curl appointment out of my budget again
Introducing our new co-educator, Jordan
Hello to the 5,680 hotties who subscribe to this newsletter! Thank you for being here.
I’m Jordan, they/them 👋 In April, I’ll be co-teaching Budgeting for a World on Fire with Leo. I’m so excited to share my perspective on money as a peer support specialist, theater artist, and financial empowerment coach.
Here’s a little more about me in three bullet points:
I live in Chicago, the lovely windy city
Pens, paper, and stationery make my pockets hurt
For the astrology hotties in here, I’m a proud, insecure Taurus sun
A few weeks ago, I got a gender-affirming haircut.
Of course — my inner critic tried to come forth at times. Attempting to tell me things like, ‘You don’t need this right now,’ or ‘You can push this back — pay toward your debt.’ I have only been at my current job for less than a year and am still rebuilding my stability after more than a year of unemployment and housing insecurity. I found myself wrestling between tending to my dysphoria and catching up on my debt.
I had put off my haircut for so long that it was becoming unbearable. I prioritized other things for a while, and I just let it grow out. I tricked myself into thinking I was okay with it, but in reality, it was horrible. I was feeling dysphoric and self-conscious. From a neurodivergent perspective, having longer hair was overstimulating as hell. I didn’t feel good about myself.
I asked myself, “Why should I have to wait til all my debts are paid before I get to do this for myself?” I decided I get to make myself a priority – I booked the appointment.
Two weeks later, my curl specialist, Faeth, sat me down in the chair and asked me, “How are you?” I smiled behind my respirator mask, and tears swelled in my eyes. I began to speak of the challenges I’ve been navigating and the unwavering exhaustion I’d been feeling. Safe to say — I ended up in tears.
Faeth listened to me intently and held space in the silence of my grief. After that, they said, “Would you like to cut your hair off?” I smiled and laughed and said, “Yes.”
When I looked in the mirror and saw myself, I was radiating with sensations of euphoria. I felt more like myself. It was such a wave of relief that had rushed over me. A sense of calm — even if only for a brief while.
I realized this is what makes navigating the murky waters of oppression more tolerable: Gender-affirming care, community care, and surrendering to my ongoing grief – and not just when we’ve gone too long without that haircut or that new fit that you’ve been eyeing, but also when we’re stable; when we have capacity to create a sustainable budget, so that we don’t need to keep operating outside our capacity.
What forms of care have you been putting off lately?
Part of tending to our own capacity is including spending that affirms our self-esteem in our budget, especially in the face of oppressive systems that actively work to erase it.
This can become complicated when we can’t afford basic gender-affirming care.
It can be easy to deprioritize budget items that are traditionally seen as “wants,” “optional,” or “not urgent,” like new clothes or makeup.
But in reality, these are essential, urgent, and crucial to taking care of ourselves and cultivating resilience.
Maybe it’s reformulating your budget with a place for your non-negotiable pleasures? Or, perhaps you have a mutual aid fund built to cultivate more space for future capacity concerns?
Whatever it may look like for you, just know that reckoning with your finances does not have to be done in isolation. It can be a collective or shared process. I would even say that it’s more powerful when we do it together, because money has never been individual – that’s a capitalist myth.
If any of this resonated with you, I invite you to join us for Budgeting for a World on Fire. It’s going to be a soft place to land and get resourced amidst everything going on in the world right now.