Someone asked me an interesting question yesterday. The question: “What is it you really want? To be rich or to be happy?” I started to answer but they shushed and told me not to answer straight away, to sleep on the question and then answer it soon after waking up from sleep in the morning. Not sure why it was important to answer soon after waking up in the morning, but here I am. I’ve slept on it. I’ve just watched a clip from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I’ve never seen the movie. I’m thinking about putting it in the Netflix queue but not convinced yet. It seems like it might be a little bit overwrought with emotion and sappy and I don’t like things that force me to feel emotional, especially if the emotion is overwrought with sadness.

In any regard, after watching the clip I realized something important. I realized that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being depressed because I don’t have money to afford a 10-bedroom mansion or because I’m not extra-ordinarily talented or extra-ordinarily beautiful or in any way exceptional.

I am going to be 38 years old in just a little over 2 months from now. I’ve spent the last 2 decades being depressed because I’m not what I’ve always wanted to be. I’m not the most beautiful woman in the world. I don’t have the sexiest figure. I’m not more talented than everyone in everything. I am not rich and important. I’ve been torturing myself since I was 12 years old. I’ve always wanted to be more. I have never been satisfied with just being me and it has resulted in decades spent trying to escape the reality of who I am to chase the fantasy of whomsoever I’ve thought it would be better to be. It was always one person or another but never myself that I have considered special; and I have been tortured by wanting to be special not by my own estimation but in the eyes of the world.

I don’t want to continue to torture myself. I can’t allow another decade to pass with me refusing to be happy unless and until I catch whatever it is I’m chasing. I might never catch whatever it is I’m chasing and in that case, if I refuse to be happy otherwise then I will never be happy; or else I might catch it and die a day later. Meanwhile the people I care about are suffering. They are suffering by having to worry about me every day. They are suffering by feeling like they are not enough reason for me to see value in life and to be grateful for each day that I get to spend with them. By lowering the quality of my own life I lower the quality of theirs; and because I am center of my household my thoughts and my feelings control the thoughts and feelings of everyone else. Obviously my husband and my son don’t generally feel too happy or too positive because I am never happy or positive, and whatever I feel they feel.

So what do I want to care about most, my misery over being poor or the happiness of my family, myself included? I don’t like being poor, and I won’t stop trying to change my financial circumstances, but I don’t want to continue putting money concerns ahead of everything. I want to be happy and healthy; and I want the people I love to be happy and healthy. That is more important to me than having millions of dollars. In fact that is more important to me than the fact that I have no money. That we are all alive and well and have each other is not something to take for granted because it is not something that will last. I want to learn to measure the value of each day in the time I get to spend with the people I love, not in how much money I have made.

Dear diary it has been a while, but you know how it is with me…. At the moment I am a bit upset. I’ve lost $60 today trading forex. I just keep stacking up the losses. Today’s loss brings my official loss since I started trading to 1,487.38. It’s depressing. I know what you think. You think I should never have started trading forex in the first place; and you think I should have gotten out long ago once I realized I just don’t have a knack for currency trading. What can I say? I made the commitment and I still intend to stick it through until I wipe out my account. That’s probably going to happen sooner than later, wiping out my account.

If it’s one thing I can say I’m good at with absolute certainty it’s losing money. Too bad it’s not possible to become a millionaire by capitalizing on the skill for losing money. Or maybe there is a way to become a millionaire by capitalizing  on the skill for losing money but I’m too stupid to think of it. Someone else will think of it and capitalize on it.

Clearly I am frustrated. I have not been managing life very well. All aspects of my life are pretty much out of control at the moment. There’s been alcohol in the house which the hubby brought back from his trip, so I have been drinking to try to escape my worries, but for that to work I would have to drink all hours of my waking day and that’s not an option. To make matters worse, I’m going to have to do the sex thing probably tonight or  tomorrow, Saturday or Sunday. The last thing in the world I want to be bothered with right now is having to lie on my back with my legs opened while someone pokes away at me. Maybe if he didn’t always reek so much of cigarettes… Maybe if he looked like any of the men below I’d happily attempt to ride my troubles away. Maybe…. Just because a man looks good doesn’t mean you’ll automatically find it easy to jump into bed with him. Besides, the ability to enjoy sex has little to do with how good your partner looks. Still, since I have no sex drive whatsoever I could use some visual inspiration:

Dwayne Johnson and Rafael Nadal…

Notice: This is an excerpt from a fictional novel in progress that is being developed exclusively for richbitchitch.com. This work is copyrighted. You may not reprint without permission.

Virginity is interesting. One minute you have it and the next you don’t. One day you’re innocent and the next someone’s had you and so you’re not worth the same; and it only takes a moment for you to be transformed from one state to the other. Even while lying in bed being penetrated, until you are actually popped you are precious and dear and valuable; but once you’ve been broken you are now used and no one will regard you in the same light. It was Lulu who said that to me although in different words. She said it to me the same day I met Richard Berkley. Or rather she said it on the eve of that day while she and I were lying in her bed talking about Madame Sheila’s efforts to sell my virginity. But we talked about Richard Berkley before we got around to discussing how I was feeling about having my virginity negotiated over.
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Notice: This is an excerpt from a fictional novel in progress that is being developed exclusively for richbitchitch.com. This work is copyrighted. You may not reprint without permission.

Actor Victor Garber (Victor Garber is in no way linked to this story. His picture is being used because the main character describes Richard Berkley as looking like him

When Richard Berkley first came to the brownstone it was I who answered the door. Madame Sheila had been in with a client negotiating over my virginity which I personally thought she was never going to get an offer for in the price range she was demanding. Not that I did not consider myself as special as Madame Sheila apparently believed I was; but the idea that any man would pay even five thousand dollars for something he could get from a street girl for a few dollars seemed completely incomprehensible to me; but then, at the time, I did not understand the mentality of the kind of men who patronized Madame Sheila’s establishment.

Richard Berkley paid his first visit about three weeks after the Charles Kennedy incident had erupted. Things had quieted down around the brownstone. New developments in the Kennedy case had taken the spotlight off Madame Sheila, shining it instead on a famous fashion model. Jada Kimberly, Madame Sheila’s girl who had been a suspect was no longer under suspicion, and with a famous fashion model as the primary suspect in the killing of a well-known New York politician, Madame Sheila and her brothel were soon forgotten by the media, leaving Madame Sheila free to resume the fun business of trying to command a six-figure offer for my virginity.
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Notice: This is an excerpt from a fictional novel in progress that is being developed exclusively for  richbitchitch.com. This work is copyrighted. You may not reprint without permission.

Lolas Wohnung aus "Lola rennt" in der Albrechtstraße Berlin Image Credit: Luiz Eduardo

Granny B’s murder would  change the course of my life. At the age of 13 I entered the New York City Foster Care System; and by all accounts I should have become another statistic; but it turned out Granny B had believed so much in me that she’d made someone promise to help me beat the odds in the event anything should happen to her before I became an adult. That someone was Francis Berkley’s husband Richard Berkley.

It was through Richard Berkley that Granny B had acquired the one-hundred thousand dollars she’d been saving for me and my cousins to go to college. I would eventually come to find out from Francis Berkley that my grandmother had acquired the one-hundred thousand dollars over a period of five years during which Richard Berkley would pay $2000 per episode to act out his master slave fantasies with her.

“Your grandmother was just a worthless whore,” was how Francis prefaced the revelation. “She didn’t mean anything to my husband any more than you mean anything to him.”
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Notice: This is an excerpt from a fictional novel in progress that is being developed exclusively for  richbitchitch.com. This work is copyrighted. You may not reprint without permission.

Money is everything. I used to hear my grandmother say that practically every day as I was growing up. Not that she needed to say it for it to be reinforced. Growing up poor, you come to understand very early in life that money is everything. But one thing a lot of people don’t seem to understand about money is that how much or how little of it you have comes down to a question of how badly you want it and what your limits are as far as what you will and will not do to get it.

Everybody wants money. Well mostly everybody anyway. You have your rare folks who genuinely have no use for money; and more power to them. But I knew by the time I was ten that I would rather be dead than stay poor for the rest of my life.

I used to tell my grandmother that I was going to buy her a house in the Hamptons and a Chateau in the South of France when I grew up. My grandmother used to work as a housekeeper for a rich woman named Francis Berkley; and she would always talk about how Francis, whom she called a rich bitch, would find any and every opportunity to talk about her house in The Hamptons and her Chateau in the South of France as if to rub her obscene wealth in my grandmother’s face.
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Imagine not being able to come up with $235 to get your bank account out of the deficit? Why would you prefer to be poor? No one would prefer to be poor. It’s depressing being poor. My first words to myself most mornings when I wake up are “you can’t kill yourself”. The significance of that is that I wake up most mornings thinking I should just kill myself. Call me pathetic. The fact is, the only time I feel at ease and ready to face the day is when I don’t have money problems hanging over my head. Even if I don’t have extra money lying around I can breathe more freely knowing the bills are all paid and I have another 20 or so days to raise the money to pay the bills the next month. Of course I don’t prefer to live like that; but if I can’t have extra money at least let me have enough to cover the bills. Then, I can keep away the panic that makes me think killing myself might be the solution to my problems.

I admit sometimes I feel hopeless and worthless. I feel like I don’t have anything going for me. Those are the times when I struggle most with thoughts of suicide because I feel like I’d rather be dead than forever be a nobody with nothing. I am perfectly well aware that one doesn’t need to have money to feel filled with hope and worthy, but for me everthing is tied to my success or failure and my success or  failure is determined by having or not having money at this point. If my goal was to finish my novel and I managed to finish my novel, then with or without money to show for it I would feel like a success. Right now my goal happens to be to make money so for as long as I continue to struggle and find myself with no money when I need money I see myself as failing. Failure depresses me.

Go to sleep depressed about money. Wake up depressed about money. Go through the day depressed about money. Forever and a day thinking about ways to make  money. Can’t be happy for lack of financial security. SO GET A JOB!! But it’s not even the money that’s the problem. The lack of money creates some problems that having money would remove; but it’s the failure that’s the issue. The failure to succeed at everything tried.  SO STOP TRYING AND GET A JOB!! My predicament always seems so easy to solve from everybody else’s perspective. I’ve worked too hard to just quit on myself and go invest my time and energy into someone else. I want success for me. I won’t give up on myself and give up on my dreams and sign on to make it easier for someone else to keep going after their dreams and achieve success with their goals that I help them to achieve after quitting on myself. SO STOP SHOUTING AT ME ABOUT GETTING A JOB!!
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The San Juans? Never heard of them. Until a moment ago. It’s friday. Another Friday. Another day. Friday harbour sounds interesting. A ride on a ferry would be different. A ride on the Friday Harbor Ferry? Sigh…. Maybe Washington State is the place for me. Never considered it; but still wondering where I belong. Been moving from here to there since the age of 9. Longing to find my home, you know, the place where I settle down, where the grand children know to find me. Don’t have grandchildren yet but someday I hope. In the next 10 years. My son is still young yet. Being a parent is a huge responsibility. But whenever grandchildren come I hope to be settled and happy and able to enjoy them.

Image Credit: jamieca

Dear diary, I am both excited and afraid at the same time. I am thinking about how my life is going to change. I feel like it’s going to change. I don’t know if it’s just one of those bi polar moments when my emotions are on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. I just have a feeling that my financial circumstances are going to change and I am excited but also afraid.

I guess what I’m fearing mostly is getting carried away and caught up the excitement of having money. I’ve been poor my entire life. I have never experienced financial freedom and I’m kind of afraid that once I start to make money I might lose my head a little bit and lose sight of the goals I have set for myself. Or else I’ll be so afraid of losing the money that I won’t want to touch it.
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