Recently something I’d been looking for my whole life happened. I spotted a $20 just sitting in an ATM dispensary, forgotten. I took it. It was exciting, being that I look at every ATM in case this might happen, a leftover instinct from many lean years.

This would be merely lucky, except it happened right as I was telling my gf about a level-up financial transaction I’d been working on that had gotten traction that day – the moment I’d decided to be as legitimate as possible. “I’d decided”, I said, to “Go get the money and stop trying to beat around any of it.” As soon as the words came out my mouth the universe and my hustler training combined to deliver me $$.

Finding the ATM gift made me think about past times in my life, when that $20 would have immediately gone to boost my grocery budget, or would have meant I could have gone to see a friends’ show and even had a drink while there. How much of a difference that $20 would have made then, and how now I casually spent half of it on a food gift for the party I was headed to. Then, I did not think there was any way for me to have enough, the constant experience of lack informed my expectations, which informed my actions.

“Go get the money” is something I began to tell myself over the years, increasingly as I have practiced separating my learned expectations from my actual possibilities.

It’s a reminder to get my butt to work, to think bigger than have in the past, and to believe I have the right to ask for more. When I’ve come up with side jobs or taken random gigs, it’s grounded me in the reality that no one else is going to go get the money for me, and if I need or want more money, it’s up to me to get it. When I raised my freelancer design rates in 2015, it was a reminder that if my labor was earning less than market rates, revaluing my time was my task. When I changed jobs in 2016, it was my motivation to negotiate up my salary.

Practicing “go get the money” has led me to … having money. Funny how that works. And so, I’ve been meditating on what “enough” would look like for me, after a conversation in Kicking Assets group last month. For me it’s about stability and security from a housing perspective and not really about “not needing to work” since I like all my work, and my confidence in my ongoing employability and hustle is high. Enough would look like knowing my mom lives somewhere secure, and that I’m putting equity into housing for myself. These are outstanding goals that I’m moving towards. It’s also having a cash flow set up so I can buy any groceries I want, save for the future, and have money left to donate to my communities’ many needs and to organizations whose work I want to support. This is an actualized goal.

As for the experience of -finally!- finding money, at the moment I was naming that it was serving me to step into my grown lady pants(uit) and take my asset growth plans seriously, well, I’m absorbing the lesson still but I think it’s somewhere among acknowledging my power to act, never forgetting where I come from, and that when the world hands you money fucking take it.