When you're stuck, advice can help—but not if it comes from someone you can't hear it from.

I’ve noticed this most when it comes to money. I don’t reject good advice—but if it’s coming from someone who’s never had to stretch a dollar to survive, I can’t help but question it.

I often fall into a trap: I rarely trust input from people who don’t understand my experience. This happens most often with money advice. I grew up in a circumstance where money was scarce. Not having money felt oppressive and limiting.

Some people point out that I’ve become resourceful as a result. That I gained skills and advantages from those difficult years. I made lemonade.

And yet I struggle to receive that as a valid form of reflection. Often, I blame the messenger. How can a well-meaning friend—who, in my imperfect or flat-out incorrect perception, has had ease with money and a privileged background—understand the suffering? How can they speak to something they haven’t lived?

One common refrain: money is just a mindset. And again, the internal resistance flares up. It’s easy to say that when you’ve never been forced to choose between rent and rest, between groceries and gas.

Not having money meant fewer trips (or none), fewer nights out, and years of shared apartments that cost more than just rent. It meant a lot of sacrifice—of time, of comfort, of ease—in pursuit of basic security.

Now, years later, my finances are stable. In some ways, I’ve ended up in the same place as those friends. And yet, when someone says, “You’ve got nothing to complain about now,” I wince.

Because how much effort, time, and energy did I have to expend just to catch up?

I don’t have a precise metric of comparison. But my read—subjective though it may be—is that I had to work much, much harder to land in a similar spot.

I do value what I’ve learned. I’m proud of my resilience. But I have to be honest: there’s still pain there. It still hurts to think of what I gave up just to survive, while others got to live with more ease, more comfort, more room to breathe.

And this is the tension I keep coming back to—how do I receive advice from someone who, in my mind, doesn’t understand my history?

It’s a powerful thing to evaluate advice impartially, no matter the source. There’s a kind of spiritual strength in separating the message from the messenger.

But there’s also grace in knowing the limits of your own psychology. Sometimes, no matter how wise the message, you just can’t hear it from certain people.

Maybe what I’m grieving isn’t just financial struggle—it’s the ease I never had. The ability to not worry. To choose joy over budgeting. To feel safe.

There is beauty in that dance between striving and acceptance.