Who Are You After Financial Independence?

Financial Independence, FIRE, Money and Life by Vicki Robin 

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

When we discover the possibility of financial independence, we change our identity from working stiff to working towards financial freedom. It affects every choice. Not spending money isn’t deprivation. It’s saving our lives.

Saving money is not longer impossible, it’s easy. Getting out of debt is no longer a goal too far, it’s a fierce commitment to liberate ourselves from debt slavery. FI has nothing to do with being dutiful, with putting on a costume that doesn’t fit. It’s the most exciting prospect on the horizon and every actions conforms to it.

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

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