A few weeks ago, I wrote something true and then texted a friend to ask if I was allowed to say it.
I want to sit with that sentence for a second, because I have run companies and sold one and I still drafted a paragraph about my own life and then held my phone like a teenager asking permission to go to a party. I can’t say this, can I?!?!? Four punctuation marks. That’s how nervous I was.
Here is the paragraph I wrote:
I earned seven figures one year and told almost no one. I traded in my Audi because I didn’t want a luxury car sitting in the parking lot. I didn’t feel I’d earned the right to be seen having it. So I shrank the evidence instead of celebrating the win. For a long time I thought that was humility. It wasn’t. It was shame wearing humility’s clothes.
My friend wrote back almost immediately. Why not? It’s real. You’re real. He said I had zero risk, based on my personality, of coming across — his spelling — deuchey.
Permission granted. From a person I trust. In writing.
And I still flinched.
“I made a million dollars one year” feels like “yuck!” I told him. And he, being a good friend, offered me an exit: maybe the exact number isn’t necessary for the story. Maybe something like I earned 3X my target income one year.
Reader, I almost took it.
The softened version, the math-problem version, the version where the number wears an oversized, lumpy, frumpy coat so nobody has to see its actual shape. I looked at 3X my target income and felt my shoulders come down from my ears, and that relief is exactly what made me stop. Relief was the telltale sign because I had just watched myself file down something sharp because sharp didn’t feel allowed.
And that’s because I have told the story of my Chapter 7 bankruptcy on stages. In interviews. On podcasts, to strangers, with a microphone clipped to my shirt. Twenty-seven years old, engagement called off, seventeen thousand dollars a year, boxed hair dye from CVS, borrowing DVDs from the library after I cut the cable cord, and Two Buck Chuck on repeat. I have that story loaded and ready. I have never once texted anyone to ask if I was allowed to tell it.
The worst financial year of my life: comfortable, practiced. And practically a party trick.
One of the best financial years of my life to date: unspeakable. Requires a permission slip. Needs to be converted into an algebra problem before it can appear in public. (Or anywhere, ever.)
Failure, I’ll hand you at dinner. Success? I’ll bury in the yard and carefully cover my tracks.
And that sentence in my paragraph — I traded in my Audi — is doing some burying of its own. Six words, moving fast, hoping you won’t stop to look. Let me stop and help you look. Come closer:
During the bankruptcy, I had an Audi convertible. I loved that car. Loved the brand, adored driving it, loved what it felt like to be a person who had one. It made me feel zippy and made my personality feel shinier for it being in my life. And then everything came apart, and the bank wanted it back, and the calls started. The repo man called. If you have never received those kinds of calls, I hope you never do. My bankruptcy attorney kept telling a trembling me that it was a scare tactic — that they were trying to frighten me into surrendering the car sooner than they were actually owed it — and she was right, but knowing a thing is a scare tactic doesn’t stop it from actually scaring you. I started riding a bicycle around town so the car could sit untouched, so there would be nothing to see, nothing to take before I was truly obligated to hand it over.
A bike with a basket, all over downtown. To the grocery. To client meetings. Home from dinner with friends. (And this was to protect a car I was going to lose anyway. Sheesh.)
When it was finally gone, I assumed that was that. I figured the bicycle was my transportation now, maybe for good. A car of my own — any car, with my credit — was a distant dream. An Audi was not even a dream. It was a brand that belonged to a previous, younger version of me who had not yet tarnished her right to possess nice things.
Several years later, my husband and I were on our annual Christmas Eve Eve date night — December 23rd, the anniversary of our engagement, a night we protect every year. He blindfolded me for the drive. He led me, still blindfolded, through a set of doors and across a floor, and when the blindfold came off I was standing in the middle of a dealership showroom in front of an Audi with a giant red bow on it. Like the commercials. Like the thing nobody actually does.
He was so excited, and he had chosen an Audi on purpose — not because it was a nice car, but because he knew. He knew it was the brand I had loved and lost and hidden from a repo man while circling the block for the 14th time on a shabby Schwinn. He wasn’t just giving me a car that night, he was giving me back a version of myself the bankruptcy took.
I want to be careful not to make this scene cuter than it was, because what it was, was enormous to me.
And then — this is the part I have to say slowly — about three years later, I traded it in. Voluntarily. Not because I couldn’t afford it: I could completely afford it! The business was working, my income had become something I did not know how to stand next to, and I could not tolerate what the car said about me in the company parking lot.
Here is one detail I’m tempted to leave out, the one that proves what this actually was: trading in the Audi was the worst financial move. I had negative equity in it at the time. I wrote a check — at least three thousand dollars — to get out of the Audi and into an Acura. I paid, in actual money, for the privilege of looking a little less successful. A little more subdued. Maybe somewhat practical?
My husband pushed back. Of course he did — he’s got a rational head on his shoulders, this was not logical at all, and there is no version of him that enjoys writing a check to lose value on a car he once wrapped in a bow. But I was adamant. Truly: adamant. Eventually, he did the thing he does, and he gave me his honest opinion all the way through, then let me have the decision that made me most comfortable. I didn’t drift aimlessly into this shrinking fit, I really fought for it. I argued with a man who loved me for the right to be smaller.
Read that again, because I have to: the me who once rode a bicycle to protect a car she couldn’t afford grew up to pay at least an extra three thousand dollars to get rid of a car she could. WTF?!
It would be tidy to blame one villain here. There was a comment — someone on my team once looked at something I owned and said, “you make too much money.” I will never forget it. I remember where we were standing, who said it, what she was looking at. Because it was a she, and that still sits crooked with me: the dig came from another woman, someone who could have known better than anyone what it took to make that money in the first place.
But she wasn’t the cause. She was the weather, and that comment came in a dozen costumes over those years, from several directions, usually dressed as a joke — the little remark about the vacation (“again?!”), the raised eyebrow at the ability to outsource so many tasks around the house and annoying life admin, the must be nice that arrives smiling. Nobody has to say the whole sentence out loud when everybody has agreed on it in advance: a young woman’s success is fine as long as she keeps it where no one has to look at it.
I’d love to tell you I brushed all that off. I did not, I absorbed it, the way I had been absorbing the temperature of every room I’d ever been in, for years. And so, the car went back.
It’s taken approximately 20 years, but now I realize the repo man never got my Audi, my shame did.
The bank sent professionals. They called and threatened and pressured, and I rode a bicycle through it and they never got the car until the day the law said it was theirs. Then, years later, my own discomfort walked onto that showroom floor where my husband once led me blindfolded, and drove off with the one he’d wrapped in a bow — no calls or threats, no fight at all. Well…one fight….with my husband, who was on the car’s side. I happily handed over the keys and a check.
And here is what I keep coming back to from the text thread: my friend — a man — needed zero seconds. Not zero seconds to tolerate the paragraph. Zero seconds to be excited about it. Hell yes! he wrote. He met my best year with the enthusiasm I have never once been able to offer it myself. There was no math in his head about how it would land, who it would bother, what it would cost. I had a day’s worth of math exercises behind me. He wouldn’t have had to second-guess a word of it, and that’s not a criticism of him — that’s the whole point. That gap, between his instant hell yes and my I can’t say this, can I, is the gap I’ve been writing around this entire essay.
Somewhere in that thread I finally said the true thing to him: maybe it matters for other women to see it. That someone with all the odds against her — the bankruptcy, the bicycle, the seventeen thousand dollar year — could build a company that pulls seven figures to the bottom line. That it’s possible, and that she doesn’t have to be ashamed of it, and that she can even, eventually, say so in public with her name attached.
I couldn’t quite claim the number for myself. But I could claim it for her, whoever she is, reading this. Funny how the door opens when you hold it for someone else.
I have had years of practice at this. I sit with other founders and tell them, gently and often, that the win is allowed to be real. I believe every word of it. And this week I fell straight into the trap anyway, in real time, with my own damn thumbs.
Knowing better is not the same as being done with it.
I have never had trouble showing you my soft parts here. The bankruptcy, the bicycle, the box hair dye (this is especially and doubly risky for a blonde) — I will hand you the fruit all day. It’s the fang I keep apologizing for. The sharp thing. The capable thing. The thing that built the company and earned the number and deserved the car. I spent years presenting as all fruit, no fang, because fruit is the singular thing a woman is allowed to bring into the room.
But I was never all fruit. And the fang was never the problem.
So, for the record, with no frumpy coat on it: I earned seven figures one year. The business was working. I was not letting myself feel any of it — which means I denied myself both halves. The sharp true sentence, and the sweetness of the win it named.
Not anymore. I refuse to hand over any more keys.
If you have a number you’ve been converting into a softer number: a salary you round down, a win you call “a good year,” a fee you apologize for on the way out of your own mouth, I won’t tell you to announce it tomorrow. I’ll just tell you what my friend told me, which turned out to be the truest thing in the whole thread: It’s real. You’re real.
Say the number.