What Growing Up Without Money Did to My Relationship With It

I grew up in Abuja in a household that had good years and bad years and that never, in the bad years, shielded me fully from the knowledge that things were tight. I saw my parents negotiate debt quietly.

I understood what it meant when a particular tone entered my mother's voice when the topic of school fees came up. I knew the difference between the months when my father's business was doing well and the months when it was not, because the difference lived in the texture of daily life in ways that a child absorbs without being told.

When I got my first stable salary at 23, working for an NGO in Abuja, I did not feel secure. I felt like the money might stop at any moment and I managed it accordingly. The specific way this manifested was twofold and somewhat contradictory.

On one hand, I hoarded aggressively in ways that were sensible on the surface but driven by a fear that was disproportionate to my actual situation. I had an emergency fund that was large enough to be impressive but that I could not touch without significant anxiety, not because I was using it prudently but because any reduction of it triggered a physical response that was about something older than the current balance.

On the other hand, and simultaneously, I also spent on specific things compulsively when I felt anxious about other areas of life - clothes I did not need, meals that were more expensive than my budget comfortably allowed, things that gave me the brief sensation of abundance that my childhood had lacked.

I was afraid of scarcity and also performing prosperity. Both behaviours were about the same thing. I understood this at 27 through a combination of therapy and a financial coaching session that a friend had gifted me for my birthday.

The financial coach was the first person to ask me not about my balance sheet but about my earliest memory of money. The question felt strange and the answer it produced was immediate and vivid.

She said, matter-of-factly, that childhood financial environments create financial emotional responses in adults that are often as powerful as the actual financial decisions, and that until you identify them they continue to run without oversight.

The work of separating what my money situation actually required from what my nervous system was responding to took about eighteen months. I still check myself sometimes. But I know now that when I feel the urge to hoard beyond reason or spend to feel better, I am responding to a decade-old signal rather than a present situation.