Grade Eight · By QueenB.Divine
I don't want to crypto on your mental health so Make a little room for this one. This chapter connects a pink graduation dress, eighty stolen dollars and a money lesson that took years to understand. Allow 5–6 minutes for a quick read, 7–8 minutes at an easy pace, or 9–11 minutes with time to reflect. There’s a pause halfway through, because sometimes a story brings up something you weren’t expecting. Read at your pace. Your life already has enough people telling you to hurry up.
Notice this: one of my most important investment lessons came from Grade Eight. It involved a pink dress, some safety pins and money that did not belong to me. So, before anybody asks for my childhood investment portfolio, please understand that the accounting department was going through something.
Grade Eight was an utter mess. By then, I had collected enough hard lessons to open a bank. I just didn’t know what to do with the deposits. Some experiences sat there for years before I understood their value. Now, when I’m trying to build something, learn about money or make a better decision, I find myself withdrawing a little of that bankrolled wisdom. Apparently, childhood has been holding my funds.
But before we get into all that, how are you? And I mean it. You don’t have to give me the polite version you use while holding your grocery bags.
I was at the grocery store recently and asked someone working there how she was. She rolled her eyes a little. I understood. When you hear the same question customer after customer, eventually “I’m fine” probably starts coming out with the receipt. I said something along the lines of, take it as a compliment from the universe. Maybe it keeps sending people to check on you because it wants you to be okay.
She smiled and said that was an interesting way to look at it. That’s some of my bankrolled wisdom right there: finding another way to see an ordinary moment. Of course, nobody owes every customer a cheerful performance. Sometimes you’re tired, your feet hurt and you would like the scanner to ask how it can help you. But when someone asks me how I am, I try to accept the opportunity to check in with myself. A few seconds to notice how I feel, without guilt.
Now, back to Grade Eight, where my decision-making needed considerably more supervision.
I was stealing. Clothes, things from stores—taking what wasn’t mine became something I did. My wardrobe was looking surprisingly fashionable for someone whose life had very little stability. I had found the five-finger discount, and I was using it.
At the time, I felt the world had already taken so much from me that I deserved something back. That was how I justified it. Looking back, I can understand the hurt behind that thinking and still say plainly that taking from someone else was wrong. The person whose money I took had not created my circumstances.
That’s uncomfortable to admit. But if I’m going to tell my story, I can’t dress every memory up so I come out looking good. Especially this one. The dress already has enough explaining to do.
Graduation was coming, and I didn’t have anything to wear. Somewhere in that chaos, I “found” eighty dollars.
Okay. I stole eighty dollars.
I bought a beautiful pink dress. It sat off my shoulders, and I felt pretty in it. It was a little too big, so I pinned it here and pinned it there. There wasn’t much available to work with while I was moving between unstable places to live. I did what I could with what I had.
And I was happy. That matters to this story, too. A child can be struggling badly and still want a graduation dress. Still want to look nice. Still want one evening that feels like she belongs in her own life.
We celebrated at Mother’s Pizza. Does anybody remember Mother’s Pizza in Toronto? Oh, that pizza. Some memories arrive carrying emotional baggage; that one arrives with cheese. For a little while, graduation felt good. I had made it through something. I had a dress. There was a celebration. Someone connected to my family showed up, and I remember how much it meant to see someone who knew me.
A little check-in before we go further. Stories about childhood, money and family can stir up feelings before we’ve even found words for them. Notice your shoulders, your breathing and the room around you. Feel where you’re sitting. You can pause here, get some water or come back another day. If a memory has surfaced, gently ask yourself: What do I need right now? You don’t have to turn every feeling into a lesson before you’ve had a moment to feel it.
Around that stretch of my life, I found out where my estranged brother was living. I hadn’t seen him since Grade One. When I went to his home, he refused to let me in. He told me, “You made your bed, sleep in it.”
Well, I did. Except my bed was in a building stairway.
I was barely getting through childhood, and I was being spoken to as though I had deliberately selected every part of it. So yes, having someone show up at graduation meant something to me. When you’ve spent enough time feeling forgotten, being remembered can feel enormous.
That evening was a little green blip in what I now describe as a long bear market in my life. You see a bit of movement and think, here we go, things are finally changing. Then life drops again. But the good moment still happened. I’m allowed to remember it without pretending everything afterward was easy.
I also had something I wanted to move toward: singing. I wanted to attend Wexford Collegiate in Scarborough and follow that interest into high school. If you’ve followed the earlier grades, you know music was already part of my story. There was still a part of me looking ahead, even while the rest of me was trying to get through the day.
Years later, at our twentieth high-school reunion, I told the woman whose eighty dollars I had taken. She said she hadn’t even known the money was there. She’d forgotten about it.
I had carried that memory for years. She hadn’t known there was a memory to carry.
Her reaction surprised me, but it didn’t change what I had done. It showed me how differently two people can experience the same event. I had walked away with a dress and a lesson I would spend a long time unpacking.
That lesson came back when I started wanting to learn about investing. Stocks, crypto, putting a few dollars somewhere and understanding how it all worked. My first thought was that I needed more money. Maybe I could borrow some. Find it here, ask for it there. I wanted to get started.
And then I remembered the pink dress.
Graduation would have felt different if I had earned the money to buy it. I would still have needed those pins—let’s not give money powers it doesn’t have—but I would have known I had created the means to get something I wanted.
For me, that became an important part of changing my money mindset. I wanted to experience earning a little through my own creativity, work or ideas, then deciding what to do with it. I wanted that evidence in my own hands: I can make something happen.
There’s a distinction here. Borrowing with an agreement is different from stealing, and accepting help does not make your achievements worth less. I needed help as a child. I deserved it. What I was searching for as an adult was the confidence that comes from learning how to generate something myself.
How do you start again when you’re afraid of losing what little you have? For me, part of the answer is remembering what I know how to do. I can create a Youtube channel ..which feels like a hopeless journey but hope floats, write my blogs . I can share. I can work toward something. That doesn’t guarantee an investment will grow, but it gives me something steadier than the hope of a quick return.
Maybe that’s a question worth asking about your own money story: what did you learn to do when you felt you didn’t have enough? And does that response still serve you now?
Understanding how I paid for it gave me a lesson I’m still using. I can love the child who wanted to feel beautiful and take responsibility for what she did. Both belong in the story. don't crypto on your mental health means building your inner world on inner courage ....that doesn't mean you can't get creative ...that's another grade My pink dress gave me a happy evening and a lesson Earn something. Create something. Give yourself a chance to recognise your own abilities. Sometimes the first thing you grow is trust in yourself.
Self-love and self-care will get you there. Follow the Grade One–Eight journey at Cellphellow.com and join me on YouTube as I keep unpacking the lessons I carried out of childhood. What early money memory are you beginning to see differently?
One love,
QueenB.Divine
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