Eighty-hour weeks, an empty train fare, and the kind of feminine peace that only full pockets can buy. This is what it taught me about being unmovable.
I had $3.75 to my name. Not cute-broke, not "I've got $350 till payday" broke. I'm talking standing in a bodega in NYC, doing the math in my head between a coffee and my train fare home — and choosing the coffee, having some premonition of what would happen if I didn't have my fix for the day.
I knew empty pockets. I knew the water diet, the tight weeks, the kind of paycheck-to-paycheck that isn't a saying — it's a lifestyle you live in your body before you ever say it out loud. I lived it, fully, with no shortcuts and no one coming to save me from it.
I want to be honest about what that chapter actually looked like, because it's easy to romanticize "the struggle" once you're far enough away from it. It looked like checking my bank balance before I checked my texts. It looked like saying "I already ate" when I hadn't, because I didn't want to explain why I couldn't split a bill. It looked like walking past stores I used to love going into, not because I'd lost interest, but because window shopping had quietly become the only kind of shopping I could afford. There's a specific kind of tired that comes from constantly calculating — not your future, not your goals, just whether you can make it to Thursday.
And underneath all of it was this low, constant hum of being one bad week away from a problem I couldn't fix with effort alone. That's the part nobody warns you about. Not the lack of money itself, but the lack of margin. No room for a flat tire, a late check, a slow month. Every single thing had to go right, and things rarely go right on command. I started to notice how small I'd made myself just to fit inside a budget that had no give in it — quieter requests, smaller wants, a whole personality folded down until it took up less room.
The moment a woman has some f*** you money, nothing — no place, no relationship, no job — has the power to keep her stuck.
Last September, my birthday month, I wanted to do something for myself. Not something extravagant — just something that was mine, that no one could take back, that didn't come with a string attached to someone else's permission. So I picked up two jobs — a daytime gig and an overnight one. Eighty hours a week, most weeks. I was exhausted in a way I'd never been before. I was also the happiest I'd been in a long time.
There is nothing romantic about exhaustion. I want to be clear about that, because I'm not here to sell anyone on burnout as a virtue. My body kept the receipts — the heavy eyes, the naps I took in fifteen-minute windows, the way I started measuring my day in shifts instead of hours. None of that felt good. None of that, by itself, was the point.
The point was the numbers. I'd open my banking app just to look at it — what I had, what I was building, slowly, shift by shift, like I was laying bricks one at a time with no one watching and no guarantee of how the wall would turn out. And as tired as I was, I wasn't stressed. I wasn't worried. I wasn't fazed by a single thing in my life. For the first time in years, the low hum underneath everything had gone quiet.
That coin was looking good. Not just good — great.
And here's what surprised me most: I felt feminine in a way I couldn't fully explain. Not in how I looked — in how I moved through the world. There was a softness available to me that hadn't been there before, because softness is so much easier to access when you're not bracing for impact. Maybe it was the money itself. Maybe it was what the money was protecting me from. Whatever it was, every overnight shift was worth that feeling.
I've heard money is spiritual. We've all watched the TikTok spiritual guru baddies say it on repeat — manifest it, raise your vibration, the universe rewards alignment. But baby, I've been spiritual my whole life. I prayed before it was a trend. I believed before "inner work" had a hashtag. And where was the money?
I don't say that to mock anyone's faith — mine is real, and it's mine. I say it because somewhere along the way I had to admit that belief alone never once covered my train fare. Alignment didn't pay my rent. What changed my life wasn't a higher vibration. It was two jobs and eighty hours a week.
I don't say that lightly, and I don't say it because money is the whole of who a woman is. I say it because I have lived both versions of myself — the one calculating bus fare and the one watching her account grow at 3am — and I know, in my body, which version of me had more access to her own peace.
Nobody ever sat me down and explained that a woman's safety isn't just about who's around her. It's about what's underneath her. A savings account is a kind of floor. It's the thing that means a bad day doesn't have to become a bad decade. It's the difference between leaving because you're ready and leaving because you've finally hit a number where you have no other choice. And I think a lot of women already know this instinctively, even if no one ever said it out loud to them — which is exactly why we don't say it out loud enough.
This isn't an essay about chasing money for money's sake. It's about what money quietly buys a woman that nothing else can: the right to mean her own "no." The right to stay somewhere because she wants to, not because she's stuck. The right to be soft, because she isn't constantly defending something.
If you're somewhere in the middle of this right now — counting coins, doing math you didn't sign up to be a mathematician for, wondering if the tired ever stops being worth it — I want you to know two things at once, because they are both true.
The first is that you are allowed to be exhausted and still believe this is leading somewhere. Tired is not proof that you're on the wrong path. Sometimes tired is just what the path costs for a season.
The second is that this isn't really about the hustle. It was never about proving you could survive on four hours of sleep. It's about what's waiting for you on the other side of the discipline — a version of yourself who isn't scared of her own bank account, who doesn't flinch when something unexpected happens, who can say no and mean it because she has somewhere to stand.
I think about the woman counting $3.75 in a bodega and the woman watching her account grow at 3am after a double shift, and I don't see two different people. I see the same woman, at two very different distances from her own peace. She didn't need rescuing. She needed time, and a plan, and the willingness to be tired for a while on purpose.
With love, and in the very full, very hard-earned pockets that made the rest of this easier —