It’s Black Friday, an unwelcome import encouraging us to part with money we don’t have to adorn ourselves and our houses with things we don’t need.
For someone like me, constantly wrestling with a tendency toward a scarcity mindset, Black Friday offers little incentive other than to occasionally gratefully receive a few pounds off something I need anyway.
I consider buying the pack of six pillar candles on sale at an attractive price but remind myself of how hard it is for me to light them and then watch them burn down and disappear.
My indecision is superseded by my daughter and the difficulty she is having with her boyfriend.
“Come and talk to me about it,” I text.
While I wait for her I busy myself.
I always feel anxious when my daughter is upset especially when I know there is nothing I can do which, as she gets older, is increasingly the case.
I turn to my “De-Stress” essential oil but the drops take so long to fall out of the bottle that I just want to throw it across the room. I have a new bottle but I’m loathed to start it.
The flowers on the table are looking incredibly tired so in an effort to elongate their life, I change the water and hope for a few more days rather than treating myself to some fresh ones.
I look for information on the psychological origins of a scarcity mindset which is, ironically, scarce.
I find an academic paper suggesting that neural pathways are affected by feelings of scarcity which often, like most things, originate in childhood, and that faulty decision-making might, as a result, make matters worse.
I make a mental note to buy the candles.
It’s certainly true that we didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up but we never went without. The thing I lacked most of all was a feeling of emotional security.
But anxious attachment is also a scarcity mindset isn’t it? A realisation I have only just made by writing it out.
Growing up in a family tight for money made me determined to be free from debt, and having parents who always seemed on the verge of separation made me destructively wary of the risk of abandonment.
I return to the essential oil burner and open the new bottle through gritted teeth.
The aroma wafts up through the room, mixing with the smell of rotten cabbage still hanging in the air from old water from the vase of dead flowers.
My daughter comes in and we chat about how difficult it is to have grown-up conversations with young men who don’t understand their own emotions and don’t want to talk about them.
When two people have unrelenting expectations of one another that they find hard to climb down from it looks very much like a scarcity mindset.
While I ready myself to leave for work my daughter slumps down on the freshly plumped cushions on the sofa.
I try to disguise a slight wince as I watch her luxuriating in the comfort of the spruced-up furniture that I had been saving for later.
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