I am so weird about money that it takes an act of will for me to buy name-brand pop.

The price difference is trivial. Getting name-brand probably costs me, at most, two to three bucks a week. And the name brand stuff is genuinely better than the store brand stuff. I am legitimately getting a lot more pleasure from my pop drinking than when I only bought the generic stuff. By all logic, it’s a sound investment.

And yet, every time I do it, I have to suppress my deeply ingrained instinct to get the cheapest stuff possible. I have to face it : my economizing is compulsive. It persists even when it makes no sense at all. And this is a problem.

Why? Because it keeps me from being happy and feeling good about my life. I have gone on and on in this space about how important pleasure (especially the kind that activates our reward center) is to mood, and I know that to be true.

And yet, when it comes to investing in my own pleasure, I am a mindless miser.

Where the rubber really hits the road is my weekly budget. I have $100/week to spend. And I don’t have a lot of expensive needs. So more often than not, there’s a little left at the end of the week.

And in a healthier mind, that would be it. Sometimes there is money left, and sometimes there isn’t. Whether or not that happens is not super important. I mean, I budgeted the money that way with plans to spend it that way. Right? If I can’t spend it all, it’s not really in my budget, is it?

And yet, if there is nothing left, I feel intense guilt and a feeling of exposure and danger. I have lost my buffer, and for someone like me, having all the buffers between myself and harsh reality is a necessity.

It’s not easy being this sensitive.

I have been fighting this lately. I have been telling myself that my happiness is more important than my money supply. That I should actually be proud of myself for overcoming my senseless savings craving and using the money to have fun instead. That feeling better is more important than feeling safe. Because I AM SAFE.

But it’s rough going. It’s a real wrestling match. I feel like I am arm wrestling a demon.

And I suppose I am. The demon’s name is Self-Minimization.

That’s one of my theories, anyhow. The same instinct that made me always tell my parents that I was fine, just fine, makes it hard for me to buy anything but the cheapest. Anything more than the absolute minimum makes me feel exposed, like I have revealed a weakness to an enemy who will surely punish me for it.

I guess that enemy would be Life.

And that feeling of exposure is a very top rated member of my Primary Fears squad. I seek safety above all else, like a lot of depressives and victims of anxiety disorders, and the amount I have, in the past, been willing to sacrifice in order to feel safe is truly staggering.

Pretty much my adult life so far, really. When the only way you can feel safe is to hide from the world to the greatest extent possible, it really limits your options. I have spent twenty years of my life retreating as far from life as I can short of total catatonia, and that’s one hell of a disability.

People in wheelchairs get out more than I used to. Depression can turn you into a seemingly voluntary invalid.

The other theory as to why I am so weird about money, and the two are by no means mutually exclusive, is that I just plain have never had much money in the first place.

In fact, I have lived large portions of my life with no cash whatsoever. I lived in a constant state of cash starvation. And when that ended, it was because I got on welfare, and had to figure out how to survive on the pittance they afford you.

So whatever instincts I had towards thrift were very, very much encouraged to flourish.

But it’s more than that. Ask my ex-roommate Dhugal. Every time we went to Costco, it would be the same thing. He would tell me “we can get whatever you want!” and I would be simply incapable of uncramping my mind enough to take advantage of that. I would always be working out how many meals we would get out of something for how many dollars – cost benefit analysis – and he would just shake his head in disbelief.

And that was way before I was on social assistance and had any cash of my own. I was, in fact, many years into my long long cash drought, and I had no personal budget to worry about. I was doing all my worrying on behalf of others.

So I was like this long before I moved to BC and went on assistance.

I honestly don’t know what it would be like for me to have more money. I have had two budget upgrades since I moved here in 99. Both times, I have managed to turn it into a lifestyle upgrade…. eventually.

It’s hard to upgrade your lifestyle when you almost never leave your apartment.

When I was a little kid, I dazzled Mrs. Moase, the lady who ran the local corner store, with my ability to do the math in my head when I wanted 5 of this and 7 of that and 2 of the other.

She said I was going to be a rocket scientist some day. And other kids would be amazed when I left with this huge amount of candy. They thought I must have a huge allowance.

But no. I just had a deep and powerful instinct towards value. Instead of a few expensive items, I got lots and lots of little cheap items, and thus got more candy per penny than them.

Maybe that went to my head.

I will talk to you people again tomorrow.