What It’s Really Like To Be Well-Off And White
This post is really hard for me to write. I feel ashamed, actually. Before people start sending me hate mail, I’d like to come clean about my current life. I’m in debt. I’m struggling financially. I am a single mother who receives nothing from the sperm donor. I acted with recklessness and got pregnant by someone who turned out to be a sociopath (I didn’t know he was a sociopath in the beginning. It took me 8 months to figure it out. Then I kicked him out and never looked back.)
But I have a totally different opinion about men now. My innocence has been totalled and my insurance company never came through. And it took me over a year to de-program my mind. Bit by bit, I had to extract that toxic mental vile that had been lodged into my brain by a sociopathic male pit viper. This man destroyed my appetite for desire and attachment for six years. Gun shy? More like nuclear war shy.
I am by no means destitute, though, and in some ways, I’m extremely lucky. My caring family saved me from a life of hell. But I’m not yet ready to admit some other things about my life. Well, one thing, we have maids even though none of the members of my family are rich. I know it sounds weird, but it’s true.
I’m college-educated and through my adult years, I developed many valuable career skills. I was a good team player up until the point where I didn’t want to deal with annoying people anymore. But the one skill I always sucked at was kissing up to people (usually men) in power.
I’m transparent.
My emotions just emerge on my face and I find it impossible to tell people lies or suppress laughter when something is funny. I have a habit of getting in trouble at jobs because of my irrepressible laughter.
I love life, I really enjoy experiencing the terrible lows and the sky high highs. Observing and analyzing human behavior is one of my favorite past times. I’ve always been interested in what motivates humans. I kept journals and notes always, even when I didn’t write them down on paper. I kept them inside my mind.
There were many years where I was drinking and not thinking. The only things I was doing were drinking and working. And fucking. I stopped reading books. My mind couldn’t focus on more than a few sentences at a time. I became forgetful. I was always saying and thinking, “Where did I set down my beer bottle?” When I was drinking, I misplaced my bottle often. I just opened another instead of looking for the half-drunk one.
Reading books depressed me because it made me confront the horrible mess my life had become. Somehow, I always kept my shit together externally, even though on the inside it was rotting. I never got a DUI, was never fired from a job and no one really knew how much of a problem drinking was for me, except for the guys who slept with me. But they always left in the morning, anyway.
But this post is about being well-off and white. The truth is, I think the only two reasons I am here on Medium, writing now is because I come from an affluent white family. My family scooped me up when I fell down, over and over again. They allowed me to think freely and to believe I deserved good things in life.
Here’s what my life looked like as a kid and teenager, before I fucked it up as an adult:
When I was a child and into my teens, I never thought about money at all. I didn’t know where it came from, how it got to me or how its flow was maintained. My father was an anesthesiologist and made over $100,000 per year. He wasn’t a millionaire and we didn’t have lavish things like yachts but we went on vacations in Europe, cruises in the Caribbean and I was given whatever I wanted as far as material possessions were concerned. My mother bought me new clothes at department stores and I was given whatever I wanted. There was nothing I longed for that I didn’t get.
My parents bought me a car when I turned 16 and they paid for my college tuition. We frequently ate out at restaurants, fancy ones sometimes where I would order steak and lobster, or brie, or whatever I wanted. I could order dessert and not concern myself with how much it cost.
I was a happy, content child. But I was shy and frequently mumbled to myself. I was scared of people and remember vividly hiding upstairs when someone rang the doorbell. I’d hover over the stairway, listening to the conversations. Anything I created, like a drawing was stuffed under my mattress. I was very secretive and I didn’t want anyone to see what was inside of me.
One summer when I was around 8 years old, I refused to go anywhere without wearing a long, brown winter coat. I felt naked and it was my security blanket. I ran relay races in that brown coat and remember getting really overheated. I refused to ever take it off for about a year (except for baths).
The upper middle-class comforts paled in comparison to the riches I ran into when I became a high fashion model with Elite. At age 15, I started professionally modeling and making a lot of money. I worked in Chicago and Tokyo, Japan. I found myself surrounded by money everywhere I went. My new world was defined by money and greed, lots of greed.
I began to develop a mindset of privilege. I began expecting to get whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I was so careless with money. I remember one time in Tokyo, I temporarily ran out of cash on the weekend. I had forgotten to advance money to my bank account on Friday. This was not a big deal, as I knew I could ask one of the models to give me an advance. One of the male models with whom I worked handed me $300 when I told him I forgot to fill my account. Money was everywhere and I didn’t concern myself with it at all.
The other thing about money: once you have it, and it’s all around you, free things are thrown your way constantly. It seems the more you have, the more comes your way without cost. In Japan, all the models gained free entry into the most exclusive nightclubs (Lexington Queen at the time). We were also given 2 free drinks each night. That club was pretty expensive to get into, but not for us. This sort of treatment started working its way deep into my subconscious. I started to believe I was above everyone else, including the law.
This sort of lifestyle doesn’t lend itself to deep thinking. After I made well over $20,000 within three months in Tokyo, I noticed myself becoming more and more consumed by thoughts of it going away. I began to worry about people stealing it, robbing me, taking my treasures away.
It made me nervous to have all that money.
In order to evade taxes, the other models taught me to wire the money to US banks in bundles less than $10,000. That way, the authorities wouldn’t be suspicious about it. I followed their advice and wired my money back to the USA in bundles of $10k. I never had any problems with the IRS. No government agency made me pay taxes on it.
When you suddenly become rich, you rely on those around you to prevent you from losing it. That’s how it works. You start to become consumed by thoughts of it disappearing. You never want it to go because it represents leisure, comfort and pleasure. It represents your new way of life. You stop paying attention to the homeless man on the street and you tend to think other people are poor because they’re losers. The worst part of becoming rich is you stop thinking about poor people altogether. They don’t exist for you. That is the real tragedy of becoming wealthy.
I guess the apex of my rich life arrived when I went to Spago with my artist boyfriend’s family. You can’t just walk into Spago and expect to be served dinner. No, you have to be somebody in order to gain access. Waiting in line outside the restaurant was a humiliating experience. The doorman’s job was to sniff out the fakes, the undesirables, the nobodys. I felt like a fraud. I was a girl from the midwest who had done nothing of merit. But I knew people who knew famous people. I was safe.
My boyfriend’s mother was a travel agent and her clients were famous celebrities. I was 18 and had only just started drinking alcohol. There was one aspect of me that was not characteristic of a rich girl: I usually wore white t-shirts and army pants with no make-up or jewelry. I wasn’t big into fashion then or now. I remember my boyfriend wanted me to wear dresses. For some reason, I didn’t want to. I didn’t like feeling vulnerable. Wearing dresses was equated with feeling vulnerable in my mind, for some reason. I’m still the same way today.
At Spago, I was given as many glasses of wine as I wanted to drink. I got really wasted and as I looked around the restaurant, I saw Sylvester Stallone and my drunk double-vision produced 2 Matt Dillons. I kept repeating myself, “Why are there 2 Matt Dillons???”
I felt out of place among these high profile people. After eating fancy pizzas with ingredients I couldn’t pronounce and drinking five glasses of wine, I ran out of the restaurant and puked in the bushes in front of the restaurant. My boyfriend’s mother thought I was so cool for doing that. She died laughing, “You puked at Spago!!!!!!” I thought she was silly. I didn’t do it to be cool, I did it because my 18 year-old body wasn’t used to being given alcohol in public! I wanted to impress everyone and make them believe I could hold my liquor. What a joke.
I don’t know how to end this. I’ve spent a lot of time being broke after I quit modeling. It’s only recently that I’ve been learning how money operates. I’ve spent a great deal of my adult life experimenting, learning and creating stuff. I feel like a child still.
I pretty much lost everything in the recession, so now I have a lot in common with a lot of people who are also in debt or broke. My family and I are much closer now. I’m grateful that poverty and loss brought us together. If I was rich, my daughter wouldn’t have bonded so closely to her grandparents. I’m sure my daughter has extended the life of my father. This makes me so happy. I’m happy that I could help create someone who brings my parents so much joy.
I’d make for a much better rich person if it happened again today. My awareness has changed dramatically and I’m no longer scared by the idea of losing it all. I’ve already lost it all and I’m still alive.
And I don’t enjoy being poor. Being poor sometimes means I have to work for assholes just to pay bills. I’m eccentric and have a wild imagination that is dying to break free in massive ways.
Poverty is a slow viral grind that soon engulfs the mind. I want out.
I’m working on a something right now. Here’s a clue: Wilhemina Wonka. I just started my own publication called Into The Raw. There will exist no bullshit in my publication, only the raw stuff you want to read. There is no topic unworthy of deep investigation. I hope it becomes an outlet for people to tell their raw and uncomfortable stories. I’d say, it’s Dirty Realism. And I need to add that I was so inspired by Henry Wismayer recently, I wanted to create a space that is not full of listicled tech bro vapidity. I’m not saying that no listicles will be in my publication, but what I’m saying to writers is this: you won’t need to change your title to a listicle-centric one in order to gain readers. The readers I cultivate in Into The Raw will already be waiting for your raw, deepest thoughts about every fucking thing in the universe. Think diversified, rabid non-monocultured crops, capable of massively taking over the earth and Mars. Think Post Secret on acid. If you like Bukowski, Haruki Murakami, Plath, Diane Arbus or Nikola Tesla, you’ll feel at home. The more insane and amazing your posts are, the more these readers will love you.
Be patient, though, because I want to ensure it is of the highest quality.
To copy the suggestion of Graham Anderson, instead of trying to coerce you into clicking the green heart, I’m going to share with you my current favorite writers on Medium: Henry Wismayer, A. McEnnis, and Alana Massey.
Thank you for your attention today.
Your Partner In Mad Ideas.
Love,
Stellabelle
ps- I put all my posts in one place so you don’t have to scroll up and down for hours to find my secretive shit.
