The Coin Flips: Projections of “You’re Capitalist” and the irony of desperation

I want to point out something that feels uncomfortable to share about.

Sharing my success online has never been easy for me. Partly because I have never been taught to celebrate myself or my work in the world, from a young age. I’ve always skipped over the part where i’m meant to stop and pause and celebrate myself before working on the next creation. I’ve had to actively work on this, to remedy it over the years and I must say… i’m starting to get good at the sacred celebratory pause now.

But I want to speak about the shadow side of entrepreneurial success, just for a moment… The flinch that happens right before I post about something that is going well in my life. A retreat that filled. A book that sold out its first print run.

The flinch isn't typically because of modesty. It's pattern recognition…

Because here's what I've noticed, over a decade of building something in public: the moment you're visibly an entrepreneur, people stop seeing a person and start seeing a category. "Capitalist" gets projected onto you like a costume you never asked to wear, and once it's on, something strange happens to the social contract. People who would never dream of asking a stranger for money suddenly feel a kind of entitlement — to your time, your labour, your generosity, your surplus. As if success were evidence of a debt you now owe others in a room.

I call it the coin flip. Abundance shows up, and somewhere in the exchange, it flips from something I built to something that's owed.

The projection does the work of erasing the person

"Capitalist" is rarely a description, in this context. It's a story someone tells about you that lets them skip the actual relationship. It flattens years of risk, of unpaid labour, of showing up for people at 2am, of building something from nothing on a coastline with a small child and no safety net — into a single, frictionless assumption. She has. Therefore she can give. Therefore I can take.

Once that story is running, asking doesn't feel like asking anymore. It feels justified. Critiquing doesn't feel like critique — it feels like accountability. And the person underneath the projection, the one who built the thing, disappears entirely from the frame.

Scarcity looks outward before it looks inward

Now, this pattern… Most of the time it's scarcity, doing what scarcity does — looking for somewhere else the abundance could be, because it can't yet locate any in itself. Visible success becomes a mirror people don't want to look into, so they turn it into a target instead. Easier to name someone else "capitalist" than to sit with your own relationship to money, worth, and want.

But understanding the mechanism doesn't make it cost less to be on the receiving end of it. It's still a heavy thing to carry, especially when the actual content of the work is the opposite of extraction.

In fact, everything I have ever built has come from some kind of ache that i’ve been longing to serve in others. A desire to do good in the world. Success has never been the goal, but it has been a result of showing up in dedication to a body of work, that serves thousands of people every year with their health.

I was sitting with this whole article, this morning — namely, the title “the coin flip” because the irony of people that try to extract from those that have wealth and success, is that they are repeating the same paradigm they are trying to critique — the capitalistic extraction program. In many ways, they are themselves embodying everything that they are trying to avoid and escape.

The bind of building something abundant in public

This is the tension that I sit with: how do you build something relational, generous, abundant — and still protect it from being treated as communal property the second it starts to work? How do you stay open-handed with your gifts without your open hand being read as an invitation to take?

I don't think the answer is to stop being visible. I think it's to stop apologising for the visibility. Abundance isn't the thing that needs defending — the story that abundance equals obligation is. I can be someone who built something real, who benefits from having built it, and who still gets to decide, on my own terms, where my generosity flows and where it doesn't. Those aren't contradictions. They only look like contradictions through the coin-flip lens.

So I'm writing this less as a conclusion and more as a marker. A way of naming the pattern out loud so it loses some of its grip — on me, and maybe on you, if you've felt this too. Success isn't a debt. Abundance isn't a public utility. And the people who project "capitalist" onto you rarely want to know the actual, textured, effortful truth of how you got here. They want the story that lets them skip it.

I'd rather tell the truth.