Who Are You After Financial Independence? Thursday 2-15-24

Financial Independence, FIRE, Money and Life   By   Vicki Robin 

Your Identity Closet: What shall you wear now that you are free? 

In high school all three sororities asked me to join – three different flavors of girls to giggle and gossip with. I must have joined one because my actual memory isn’t of joining. It’s of dropping out in protest to some clique cruelty. When offered options A, B or C – I chose D. Life went on. I didn’t make a habit of rebellion. 

 In fact, I developed quite a High School resume of clubs, groups and honors. Yet I’d learned that you can step outside any box you want to – and survive. 

By my mid-20’s I’d built a serious smoking habit. Serious because I’d picked up a disaffected Galoise smoker identity when I lived in Europe, translated that to Pall Malls in the United States and was burning through a pack a day. It made me feel intellectual and complex. 

One day, at a beach house I’d rented, I smoked a cigarette, quashed it in the sand and headed off for a run along the water. I was soon wheezing and gasping for breath, came back and dropped down on the blanket where I’d left my pack of cigarettes. I looked at it squarely. 

In a short few minutes I saw the cost of smoking, decided I needed to stop and then spontaneously a voice said, I can’t quit smoking but I can become a non-smoker. And that was that. In the 50 years since I’ve visited a few cigarettes for old time sake but have not become a smoker again. 

The Diagnosis 

Fast forward many decades of choosing many roads less traveled. I’m 58 and my doctor has just told me I have cancer. Actually he told me I had an apple core lesion in my colon, which sounded harmless, so he had to emphasize that what he meant was I had cancer. I would need surgery. Still nonplussed I said, “While you’re in there, can you do some liposuction.” 

People with a diagnosis of cancer know what comes next. You start to become an expert in a topic you never wanted to deal with. I read all the literature. About treatments and options and odds. 

For me another logical next step was to call a friend and medical intuitive as I know cancer has meanings, not just symptoms. I told him the diagnosis. He went silent for several minutes, scanning my body at a distance, then said, “You don’t have cancer.” 

I explained that I certainly did and he explained that his inner eye saw no signature of cancer anywhere in my body. I had A cancer, but I did not have cancer. 

This distinction, that I had not taken on the mantle of cancer but simply had a cancer that my otherwise vigorous body could deal with, liberated me to choose freely how I would go through this challenge. 

Frugality Was How I Lived, Not Who I Was 

My next stop was a coach friend who offered to listen to me talk about this cancer to find a vigorous place in my mind as well. I talked – and he listened – for hours. I realized that I had become trapped in an identity that was constraining me but I felt obliged to keep. 

 As the main spokesperson for Your Money or Your Life – and as a warrior trying to address over consumption one reader at a time – I’d assumed an identity of happy frugality. Don’t get me wrong. I was happily frugal for years, but it was how I lived, not who I was. 

When I became one of the guiding lights of the simplicity movement in the 1990s, though, I kept myself pegged at a level of expenses and a set of possessions and a repetitive story to reach our target: millions of people influenced, tons of unnecessary consumption prevented. 

I had a further dilemma. I’d become a role model. “Vicki Robin” meant something to a lot of people. If I changed, they’d lose a point on their compass. 

It was clear. I needed to quit being the me others thought I was in order to free myself to address this cancer. I mentally made a plaster cast of me, the Vicki others presumed I was, and then slit open the belly to let my soul free. I saw 3 Rastafarians with dreads wearing green tights dance out of that opening! 

 To continue reading, please go to the original article here: Lengthy but informative

https://yourmoneyoryourlife.com/after-financial-independence/