The Closet That Broke Me Open (Class Wounds Are Real)

I opened a closet while pet sitting last week and stood there in complete silence. $250,000 worth of shoes, and I live on $2,200 a month. I'm Christine J Gold, a midlife recalibration guide, and this week I experienced something that stopped me cold. I was pet sitting, caring for someone's home and animals, and I opened what I thought was a regular closet. Row after row of designer shoes. Hundreds of pairs. And I'm standing there calculating in my head, this is more than I live on in a year, more than several years. And what I felt wasn't jealousy. What I felt was something much older, the wound that says people like us don't have this, the class wound, the scarcity wound. And your nervous system doesn't see it as inspiration. It sees it as evidence of your smallness. But here's what I've learned after years of this work: the dysregulation you feel witnessing excess, that's not weakness. That's your nervous system doing exactly what it was programmed to do by every generation before you. The work isn't to stop feeling it. The work is to understand what it's telling you. Have you ever had a moment like this, sitting inside someone else's abundance while living your own scarcity? Tell me in the comments, because you are not broken, you are witnessing a system.