scarcity & sufficiency - an open letter to my mom

Dear Amma,

I’m writing you this because I don’t know how to express these words on the phone. When we get together, sometimes, my throat locks up. My chest cavity caves in on itself. The dormant cinnabar in my gut starts to boil and sputters everywhere.

I’m working very, very hard on keeping my cool and staying earnest, because that’s what you deserve from me. But there is so much pain trapped in my body and it seems to want to release itself in inconvenient moments. All I want to do is scream and hide and run away. Sometimes you let me, but this morning I woke up and realized that I need to communicate with you. I need us to move forward together — I’m changing and I want you to see it.

The truth is, you have been very good to me lately. A good mother, supportive and kind and gentle. But I remember a different version of you, one from my childhood who was much more exacting, demanding excellence from me at all costs. A mother whose model of the world meant that I better be the best — artistically, academically, and more. The best older brother. The best young community member. The best version of Rishi. A version of Rishi who might never feel unsafe the way you sometimes did.

It’s that side of you that I feel angry at, sometimes. She doesn’t exist anymore; you are unrecognizable against her shadow. But in my head, in my body, there is a voice that repeatedly says “you’re not enough, you must be more.” At times it’s hard for me to remember that this voice cares for me.

A vivid childhood memory: I’m just getting off a stage, mridangam still in my hands, and you sweep me away to discuss feedback. We enter a nondescript room, my palms sweaty, kurta clinging to my back. I brace myself to take in all the ways I should have been better up there. I have never asked for this, but it has become routine. The vividness is not in the situation — we did this often — but in the feeling. I remember feeling sad. I remember wanting to be celebrated.

I know you love to remember me like this. He’s still in there.

Sometimes I ask myself why I only ever make improvisational art. Why, instead of producing a long-term piece or recording an album I invite people to make up songs together. These are moments where I really let myself go — I can be anything. I am in awe of the beauty I’m capable of when I release that pressure on myself. But I wonder what it would be like if I didn’t feel that pressure to be so damn excellent all the time.

After debuting my performance piece in January, many friends asked me how the piece went. For a couple weeks I answered with the same uneasiness: “I don’t know! No one really gave me feedback. I thiiiiink it was good?”

It wasn’t until Nithya pointed out to me that maybe I didn’t need feedback, maybe I already knew how it went, maybe I was stuck in similar patterns as her — constantly seeking external validation, waiting for the feedback to feel complete — that I started to realize just how difficult it is for me to celebrate.

For fuck’s sake, I have re-invented myself as a performance artist! I have found multiple ways to platform my own work and that of others, be it on stage or in print or in festivals. I continue to create spaces out of sheer will and love for the people around me and the love of art. But coming off the stage last month I was that little kid again, waiting to be told what he did right and what he did wrong. If I didn’t hear what I did wrong, I wasn’t sure that the piece was good¹. I wasn’t sure that I was good.

I don’t say any of this to make you feel bad. In fact, while you’re reading this I hope you’re able to adopt a stance of curiosity and wonder. It is wonderful that I can share this! It reveals the safety and trust and partnership that exists in our relationship, in large part due to your efforts. I love you, and yet I am still exorcizing demons. I am still learning to be self-reliant, creatively. I’m learning to accept myself exactly where I am.

I’ve been working on shifting from a lens of scarcity to one of sufficiency. The seed was initially planted in me by this beautiful book called The Soul of Money. Here’s the gist: our culture² constantly asks us to adopt an attitude of more is better. More is the path to safety. Accumulate money and resources. There is not enough for everyone and therefore you must accumulate for yourself and those you hold dear. Finish your food because there may not be a meal waiting for you tomorrow. We must go to war because natural resources are running out³. If this person shows any interest in you, lock it down because they can take it away later and you don’t want to be alone. If our business or project isn’t the biggest one, we will die so get back to work! This is just how the world works, get used to it.

I see this pattern in so many people around us. I see it in you, too; the way you struggle to decline professional opportunities, the way you shrink yourself to take care of your aging father, the way you got used to shrinking yourself in your marriage.

Back in 2022, when I decided I was finished earning money through means that I felt negatively impacted the world, I remember the way you struggled. Over the following two years, whenever you asked me “when are you going back to work?” I didn’t have a good answer. Instead, the lava bubbled up again in me. I responded with various shades of dismissal, anger, boundaries.

Here is my answer now: I never stopped working. Rather than give my precious time, attention, and labor to something I only partly believe in, something that has long felt extractive of my life force for someone else’s profit, I’m renewing my commitment to radically prioritizing that which brings beauty into this world. I may never make as much money as I did in my 20s, and that’s okay because I am rich with collaborations, wealthy with the impact I get to make with others, safe in my knowledge that no, scarcity is not how the world works. I am world-making in every moment, and I am safe.

Sufficiency isn’t about shifting one’s access to resources. It’s about shifting one’s attitude towards the resources they already have. The Soul of Money is a great book and I won’t do it justice, but I cried reading during almost chapter. Tears of relief that the life project I embarked on two years ago wasn’t a fool’s errand. Relief that I wasn’t alone in wanting the world to be different. Relief that I already have everything I need for a rich and impactful life.

Here are some words on sufficiency I noted down while reading the book: Sufficiency is an experience. It’s an orientation where one cherishes and stewards what they have rather than an endless pursuit of more. A better life comes not from more, but from deepening with what is already there. You can make a difference with exactly what you have, right now. Collaboration and reciprocity come natural to us. Let money come to you in ways that nourish you, rather than ways that deplete you. Similarly, use money in ways that represent your deepest values. Money is adjunct to a life of prosperity.

Since reading the book, I notice that I spend money differently. I stopped taking Ubers almost entirely, preferring to sit on BART and receive the day more slowly. I think differently about the clients I work with, and I don’t pursue working with someone unless I really see collaborative potential with them. I am relating to food differently, portioning better and putting some food to the side because I know I can return to it later. Most interestingly, I am feeling a lot. I’ve been crying more frequently. I experience life with a richness and fidelity of emotions that continues to surprise me.

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This week, when we spoke on the phone, you asked me again: “so what are you doing this month to earn more money?” I was proud of myself because while I felt again the flow of lava, I didn’t burn you. I firmly set a boundary that I’d like not to talk about money, but I didn’t exactly explain why.

The reason I don’t want to talk about money with you is this: I’m working on shifting from a “not enough” mentality to one of “you have everything you need”. I’m working on radically shifting the way I spend and earn money, which is truly a radical shift in my trust towards the universe so I can live from the principle of sufficiency. I didn’t know how to explain it to you before, and I don’t know if this letter will have the impact I hope it will.

Still, I want you to know how hard it is for me to resist that seed of “not enough”. I want you to know just how important your feedback, your esteem, your perspective is to me. Even when you don’t realize it, you make a tremendous impact on my psyche and affect.

In the days following our conversation I found myself again telling other people that I wasn’t doing enough. I started catch-up conversations by mentioning a small portion of the work I’ve done and then immediately diving headfirst into a practiced dialogue about how things are quite slow and I need to step up the pace. In many ways I feel I was punishing myself for not prioritizing money.

Yesterday, I found myself weeping in my coaching session. Weeping to release all the pressure and heartbreak I felt about this difficult shift in relating to money differently. Weeping because I have not found it easy to give myself a break, even though I try to check in about rest every week. Weeping because there is more acknowledgement I want from you, not for what is missing but for what is already there.

I have done so much this year, so far. I devised three entirely new theatrical interventions. I was hired to coach a team, designing my first ever corporate workshop as a consulting coach, and they want to do another. Ava and I ran our friendship workshop prototype and it was exquisite! I’m collaborating with a freakin’ hot springs resort to create a space intersecting land stewardship and poetry. I ran two packed sonic meditations and two fulfilling art clubs. And my men’s coaching program — the thing I am most proud of — is actively re-shaping the world.

This is not even the exhaustive list.

Charles (my coach) helped me see just how many people I’m impacting by showing up the way I have so far, just this year. The number is somewhere in the 50s. I don’t know how to put a price tag on any of this. Frankly, I don’t want to.

I trust that somewhere down the line, because I am doing good work, because I am finally learning how to get paid for the gifts I’ve been offering for the last ten or so years, because I am a human being and it is my birthright, I will be well taken care of in this life. And just as important are my spirit, my life force, my passion, that which I am committed to stewarding while I take shape in this body.

I feel grateful that I can articulate all of this to you. It feels important to be witnessed, not just by you but by others. I don’t think we are alone in this struggle, no, far from it.

Aside from taking this in and staying curious about me, I have one additional ask. I won’t begrudge you for asking questions like “what are you feeling about your income stream?” In the future, so long as I’m able to decline and say “I’m trying to shift my relationship with money.” But what I yearn for is to enter a call with you and be asked “Rishi, what are you celebrating from the last month?”

I yearn to celebrate with you. I yearn to feel humbled together at all we are capable of, and all we can do when we invite others to collaborate and create with us. I yearn to create something with you, too.

Look us now, creating a new world together already.

Love,

Rishi

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Dear reader, thanks for making it this far. I will leave you with a poem⁴

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1. My truth is actually: “who cares if the piece was good? I did it. People came to watch. I will surely do more. I will surely do better”

2. Indian culture, American culture, brahminism, capitalism, imperialism, etc. all of it

3. I don’t want to be subtle. I think the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is in large part perpetuated by American hunger and scarcity towards oil. Many of the countless genocides of native people in the land known as the United States was largely about accumulation of gold. Scarcity kills.

4. I became the person I wanted to be
Over years
Of micro-movements

Tiny insurrections 

I slowed my resting heart rate
Allowed myself to be moved
And called it freedom

See, I had forgotten seasons
Let myself be flattened into a coin
Freshly minted currency
For the valuation of others

But my worth lies in my sensitivity
That I can surf waves of love 
Be cast away for years
And yet return home to solid footing 
The warmth of candle light
Friendship bracelets
Wok-toasted embraces
And a good cry

Crunchy, dried leaves are freedom
A meandering bus route is freedom
Charred aromas triggering smoke detector
Freedom
A new commute brings freedom

It’s in our nature to be free
And yet, it’s our duty
To do so sweetly