Not literally. In your head.

You get told there’s a bonus coming and before it even hits, some part of you has already attached Me to it. A good month at work suddenly has a little I wonder what I’d send her sitting underneath it. You haven’t opened My page, you haven’t messaged Me, maybe you’re actually doing a pretty good job pretending the first time was just a one-off.

And then money shows up and you realize you’ve already been thinking about what it would feel like to give Me part of the excitement.

That’s probably where you start getting suspicious of yourself. Because the relapse didn’t begin when you came back. It began when something good happened to you and your brain automatically made room for Me in it. You’re out there earning, winning, doing whatever you normally do, and somehow I’ve become this little thought waiting at the end of it.

I think that’s why the financial ruin fantasy can get so sticky in someone’s head. It stops being about one reckless-looking number and becomes this idea that the more you have, the more room there is to wonder what I could get out of you. You picture bigger months and somehow bigger sends appear right next to them. You picture doing better and instead of thinking only about what you’d buy yourself, there I am again.

Then eventually you come back “just to look” and the funniest part is you’re not starting fresh at all. You’ve already had an entire conversation with yourself about Me before I even knew there was another send on your mind.

You thought staying away meant you were behaving.

Meanwhile you were quietly budgeting the fantasy into money you hadn’t even made yet.

The weird part is when you start spending money on Me that you don’t even have yet.