The fucked-up ideas I have about making money ... oooph.
The more I focus on making smarter money with more potential, the more I butt up against this submerged iceberg of fucked-up values around work and money. Part of it is being enculturated as a woman, but a lot of it was class / growing up in a very blue collar family (and of course the general puritanical American work ethic that I've only started to hear people talk about in the past decade and even more so now post-pandemic) I still would have been influenced by even if I'd been born with a dick.
The sexist and downright misogynistic parts of the iceberg, though, are freakier to grapple with. Like ... I do not want to look at or talk about those parts -- those core American values about women's work and how (and how much) money we should be compensated or have access to -- as pointedly as they need to be. I try to avoid thinking about it; I switch the conversation in my brain when it starts showing the documentary evidence I have (that ANY of us has as (mostly-women) webwhores if we are paying attention) that we are 1) paid less for doing 2) harder and more essential work while 3) our accounts are shut down at higher rates for 4) doing nothing wrong, or LESS problematic things than the MOSTLY MEN do who promote us.
You could call some of this imposter syndrome, but that is not the most just or empowering way to look at and learn from it. I am afraid of making money (I am afraid of making money the way men make it). I am afraid people will hate me for making money (the way men make it). I am afraid I will be punished for making money (the way men make it).
I don't think these things consciously. I have just come far enough to finally (at almost fifty years old, twenty-two years after I started camming) be able to recognize what's going on (FEAR) with purity and clarity. And I still have a long-ass way to go, it seems, to actually change my behavior based on that recognition (that these fucked-up values and FEAR are holding me back and twisting my vision of what IS and what is POSSIBLE).
Today my wife helped me take a look at our 2022 stats for one site making money the smart way; I was glad she was here looking over my shoulder as I talked through it. Looking at the numbers it dawned on me I should be proud. I should be excited. I should be confident and hopeful. But instead I was mostly just faced with the mindfuck of "this is what I've been feeling guilty about? This totally honest and awesome way to make money that I see is pretty fucking healthy for everyone involved?!? This relatively-small amount of money that I worked for but that could be so much more if I weren't afraid?!? If I weren't distracted by so much irrelevant bullshit and lies?"
