I was six years old the summer I learned that money could get you hit.
The farmers market in Millbrook, Ohio sat two blocks from Grandpa Ray's porch, close enough that you could smell the funnel cake stand from the front steps. This was 1994, in a town where nobody locked their doors and half the kids on the block ran loose until the streetlights came on. Nobody was really watching me. So when I decided I needed a Lisa Frank sticker book and a bag of gummy worms from the vendor by the parking lot, I did what six-year-olds do: I went and got the money myself.
I'd seen where my mom kept the grocery cash — a coffee can on top of the fridge, next to a chipped mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST COOK. I dragged a kitchen chair over, climbed up, took what I needed, and walked myself to the market like I owned the place. I did this more than once. Nobody noticed for a while. In my head, the logic was airtight: you want a thing, you take money, you buy the thing. That's how the whole system worked, as far as I understood it.
Eventually someone counted the coffee can and came up short.
My great-grandfather Ray had lived with us since I could remember — a wiry old man who still chopped his own wood at eighty-something, who called soda "pop" and Sunday "the Lord's day" and didn't believe in much else besides work. When he found out what I'd done, he didn't yell. He went and got his belt off the hook by his bedroom door, the same one he used on his own boys forty years earlier, and he used it on me. In his mind, there was no gray area. A child had stolen. That was the whole story. The idea that a six-year-old might not understand the concept of theft — that a kid could genuinely believe money just gets picked up and spent — never entered his picture of the world. It couldn't have. Nobody had ever offered him a gentler picture to compare it to.
I buried that memory so deep I forgot it existed. Genuinely forgot, for about twenty years.
It came back to me at twenty-six, sitting on my apartment floor in Columbus at eleven at night, going through old bank statements because I'd just realized I hadn't checked my savings account balance in four months. Not because I was rich enough not to care — because looking at it made my stomach drop every single time, so I'd trained myself to just not look. That night, digging into why I did that, the memory surfaced on its own, uninvited, clear as a photograph: the coffee can, the kitchen chair, the belt on the hook.
Writing this now, it still hurts. I've sat across from three different therapists talking about it. It still hurts.
And the money thing wasn't even the worst of what that day left behind. Somewhere in my nervous system, that afternoon wired itself to a very specific feeling — total helplessness, the kind where you can't stop what's happening to you and you can't explain yourself fast enough to make it stop. Starting around thirteen, I began getting headaches that would flatten me. Not regular headaches — the kind where you lie in a dark room and every sound feels like a drill. The only thing that touched them was a prescription-strength medication I now know is barely stronger than what I could buy over the counter, which tells you something about how much of it was actually physical. I saw doctors. I got scanned, tested, poked. Everything came back normal. The headaches kept coming, and by my twenties some of them had graduated into full migraines — the kind with auras, with nausea, with a day and a half lost to a dark bedroom.
It eased up a little once I landed a nine-to-five and started sleeping full nights instead of running on caffeine and adrenaline. A little. Not much.
Then at twenty-nine, a friend dragged me to a weekend workshop outside Asheville, North Carolina — a retreat center up in the mountains that taught a somatic meditation technique, the kind where you go deep enough into your own body that you start locating where old tension is physically stored, tension that's been quietly running the show on decisions and reactions you never chose consciously. It sounds a little woo when I say it out loud. I was skeptical too. On day one, they had everyone pick one thing to work on for the weekend. I picked the headaches, mostly because I was out of other ideas.
Day two, I was in a meditation deep enough that it bordered on sleep — not asleep, but somewhere adjacent to it — and the belt came back. The chair. The coffee can. All of it, in full color. Day three, a second memory surfaced from even earlier, another moment of that same total helplessness, different circumstances, same feeling in my chest. Turns out that exact sensation — trapped, unable to explain myself, unable to stop what was coming — was the trigger. Every single time, for sixteen years, that specific flavor of helpless had been quietly flipping the switch on my head.
The headaches never came back the way they were. I still get a normal headache now and then, same as anybody. But the migraines are gone. Not one since.
And no — I'm not angry at Grandpa Ray. In his world, that belt was correction, not cruelty. Picture a boy who wasn't even ten years old, helping bury the dead during a stretch of American history that broke plenty of families the same way — he grew up dirt-poor in Appalachian coal country, lost two brothers before he was twelve, and the only wisdom he ever handed down at Christmas, birthdays, every single gathering until the day he died, was "work hard, that's all there is to it." He made it to a hundred and one. So we heard that line a lot.
I'm not writing this for sympathy. I know plenty of my friends got hit as kids too — it was just how things were done, a warped little inheritance passed hand to hand. What I actually want is for you to sit with the threads running back to your own childhood, the ones still quietly steering things in your life right now. Some of them you might not even remember — your mind hides them on purpose, because that's what minds do to protect you. I just want you to know the threads can be cut, or at least loosened enough that they stop running the show. The only thing that takes is letting yourself notice the connection is there, and being brave enough to actually do something about it.
The doing something, for me, looked ordinary in the end. Not a ceremony, not a big cathartic confrontation with a dead man's ghost. Just a Tuesday morning, coffee in hand, opening my banking app instead of avoiding it — the way I used to avoid that coffee can — and setting up an automatic transfer: two hundred dollars a month into an account I actually let myself look at. I named the account "Mine." I didn't cry doing it. I just did it, and closed the app, and went to work.
