Want to hear something freaking fascinating?  The more you invest in yourself, the more others are willing to invest in you.  When you take yourself seriously, others do the same.

Cheaping out on yourself isn’t noble; it’s flimsy camouflage for low self-esteem.

My mother is the queen of cheap.

Sifting through her kitchen cabinets a few years back, I found a box of Pizza Spins, a snack cracker General Mills stopped producing in the early 1970’s, that she’d dragged along with her on four separate moves.

When I held the box up with a questioning brow, she shrugged and noted that, unlike me, she wasn’t the debauched sort to toss out perfectly good food. She’d been raised, you know, by hard-working, simple country folk who’d barely survived The Great Depression.

This was her reason for hanging on to the waffle iron sans electrical cord, and the cartons of retro clothing and shoes that would only fit a midget, a very thin midget.  And the 12-pound bowling ball my father—whom she’d divorced decades before—gave her on her birthday.  And half-rolls of the gold-flocked wallpaper Dad had hung, cursing and gnashing, in the front hallway of our house in Vernon.  Items, I might add, Mom insisted on packing this past year for her move to Fargo, North Dakota.

I know.  Hard to toss out those kinds of Hallmark memories!

Unfortunately, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.  As much as I love pointing an accusatory finger at my poor, old mother, it’s my closed-fistedness that has inspired this blog post.

I hate spending money on myself.  Before I crack open the ole’ wallet, I feel like I need permission from somebody—God, Walt, my mother, my kids, really, I’m not sure who—to do so.

I still perspire whenever I shell out $100 to have my hair cut and colored.  It’s an awful lot of money for something I could probably do myself, armed with a nail scissor and a $12 box of Lady Clairol.

I also go through all of these weird mental shenanigans each time I stand in line with an outfit I’ve found on the sale rack.  I review what I have to wear with it, if I own something remotely similar (even if it’s from 1987), and if I really NEED it.  (I mean, we NEED air, water, and a little food.  Does anybody NEED another T-shirt?  Even if it has Elizabeth the II’s picture on the front?)

Half the time I’ll shove the item back on a display shelf if the line is just a little too long, then trot out of the store and completely forget about buying anything for the next 6 months.

Walt thinks I have a mental problem, and he says so every time he catches me reusing plastic sandwich bags.  I’m the first to admit he’s probably right.

See, it’s not the next big bubble burst that’s going to have us all sleeping in cardboard boxes and eating cat food that I worry about. (And it’s not,  I’m very sure, why my mom played the frugal card all these years.)  I worry that, if I spend too much, if I fritter away what is allotted me, I’ll be perceived as a burden.

Fear tells me that, If I play small, and I don’t demand much, and I don’t use up the family resources, and I leave a nearly imperceptible carbon footprint, then no one is going to notice that I’m a worthless parasite.

I know better. I know these fears are the residue of an unhappy childhood, and part of what it is to be a human.

More important?

I know that everything changes—how I feel about myself, how other people perceive me, how I enter a room, the opportunities that come my way—when I invest money in myself.  When I decide that that old L’Oreal commercial had it right:  I am worth it.

I discovered this the first time when I went back to school at the age of 38 and dropped some SERIOUS cash getting my writing degree from Harvard.  Cash, some people genetically linked to me have noted, that could have been used for them.

And again when I paid to go to Date with Destiny to hear Tony Robbins, then enroll in Mastery University. Again, when I hired a coach to hold me accountable for my goals. (Who are we kidding. To help me SET my goals.) Again, when I took myself seriously enough to work with a business coach. (I’m still astounded by the fee she fetched! Worth every penny.)

I could go on and on. I really could.

Here’s the thing.

Make yourself small and undemanding, and you get overlooked.

Satisfy yourself with the crumbs, and that’s what you get.

Give it all away, and you’re left empty-handed.

At some point in life you’ve got to stop looking for permission from other people.  The permission you need, you can only get from you.

What might change if you decided that your hopes, dreams, desires, feelings, and ideas were worth it?