Pennies for Your Thoughts

On Worth and Work

One of my grandpas was a collector. He collected varied and interesting things. Like cast iron mechanical banks. These banks, spread throughout the house, were so heavy. And tricky. Each bank like a game.

My favorite was an elephant. There was a small space in its trunk, the perfect size to hold a penny. And the elephant’s tail, when gently pulled, flung the penny into a small opening in the elephant’s back.

Sitting on the living room floor, my grandpa would dump out a coffee can of pennies and tell us to look for special ones. By special he meant, any penny that might be worth more than 1¢. He told us about Flying Eagle, Indian Head, and Wheat pennies. He taught us to look for errors in the minting and for unique dates associated with important events, all of which enhanced their value.

This was the beginning of my belief that to be worth anything you had to be special. And the messages I received told me daily that I wasn’t anything special. That the qualities making me unique also made me flawed. And not the kind of flawed people pay extra for.

It wasn’t just coins, but also baseball cards. He told us that if a card had an error, like a flawed penny, it was special and worth more money. One Christmas I received a box of 500 cards. One by one I examined them. Paying more attention to possible flaws than the names of players or teams. To my excitement, I found a card where the bat in the player’s hands looked like it had string wrapped around the bottom of the handle. Closer inspection showed the ink was smeared.

Visions of wealth and reward danced in my head. This special card was my ticket to being rich. There was a collector shop next to the grocery store. With confidence, I pulled the card out of my pocket and placed it on the glass counter. It was in a plastic case for safe keeping. The shopkeeper didn’t even touch it before asking, “what do you want with this?”

Boldly I announced, “I want to know how much it’s worth. It’s an error card. My grandpa says it’s really valuable.”

His response was dismissively cold. I left the store feeling frozen and foolish. Yes, that spot on the bat showed a printing flaw, but the player was not someone who was known or famous. With or without bad ink, the card was worth less than a penny, according to the shopkeeper.

Just like that, my dreams were crushed. And my understanding of worth was further skewed.

I overheard my grandpa telling someone about his banks and how much they might be worth one day. He said that everything has two values. The one that matters is the one people are willing to pay. A catalog might say a bank is worth $100, but it’s possible you can only sell it for $50. And it’s possible someone might be willing to pay $500.

I spent years wanting others to recognize and validate my worth. Striving to increase my value. As I connect with more and more creatives and writers and artists, I’m reminded I’m not the only one.

In our society, personal worth and value are so intimately entwined with what we do, sadly at the expense of who we are. The vast differences and inequalities in compensation speak volumes about what we as a people value most. Just listen to billionaires blaming people who work multiple jobs to pay their bills for national budget deficits. Or shaming people who must choose between paying for medications or rent this month. It’s hard to make sense of a country where a handful of people have enough money to travel to space and eradicate global hunger while so many struggle to heat their homes in the winter and ration meals to stretch their weekly food budget.

I’ve worked for minimum wage. I’ve also worked in institutions that offer a “minimum salary” which varies by state and doesn’t match the work load or expectations of the job. That often means working harder and longer than people who make much more while being told “your day will come” or “be grateful you even get the minimum.”

These last few years, I’ve been unraveling a tangled sense of self-worth and a twisted understanding of my value, both of which were largely complicated by my grandpa and the church he brought me into.

In 2022 I left a full time salaried and benefited position, to follow a dream. To start 10 Camels. To make a life from writing and speaking. There were critics and their concern was often about money. How was I going to survive? What about health insurance? As if I hadn’t thought about those things. There were also supporters, friends and strangers alike, cheering me on. Some of my biggest supporters were the same voices saying, “we’d be honored to have you speak at our event, but we can’t offer any compensation.”

Just after 10 Camels got in the water, life took a turn I couldn’t have prepared for. My mother was diagnosed with cancer and given a dim prognosis that prompted a move back to Michigan and a change in job. I became a full-time care-giver. This role is the most important I have ever had. It is the most meaningful work I have ever done. It was all at once, the most beautiful and horrible season of my life. I have no regrets. While there was no pay check, the benefit was something much more tangible.

I am acutely aware that not everyone with a critically ill loved one can assume this role in the ways I did. Physical, emotional, financial, and a list of other reasons can make this impossible or so much more difficult than it already is. And I’d be wrong to not acknowledge the host of health care workers who navigated that journey with my mother and me; many of whom are overworked, overlooked, underpaid and generally unappreciated.

Doing that work—caring for another person with gentleness and compassion, for not only their body, but also their spirit—invited me to consider my own holistic wellbeing. Being totally responsible for someone in such a vulnerable state, prompted me to examine my own vulnerabilities. Advocating for someone else’s worth and value, opened me to the truth about my own.

My worth does not depreciate because of my experiences, or my queerness, or the scars etched into my flesh and my being. Nor are my wounds—like minting errors on coins or printing flaws on baseball cards—to be exploited or manipulated.

My value is not determined by a title or credentials or an annual salary of a certain amount with health care benefits and a matching 401k.

Our worth and value are about who we are and not what we do. Or the compensation attached. And, let us not ignore that the system by which compensation is determined is marked by flaws and errors.

Last week, after much consideration, I turned on paid subscriptions for Wednesdays at the Well. It wasn’t easy. And this new level of promotion feels risky. Those old messages of doubt and shame returned. Trying to convince me that what I’m doing isn’t real work or that it has no real value. That poetry is just silly. And that “turning words into water” is meaningless magic.

Over the holidays, while cleaning out some junk drawers, I came across a little pouch filled with coins, mostly pennies. I sat down on the floor and dumped it out in front of me. Running my hands across the pile, I thought about those heavy banks and the tricks they played with pennies and with my mind. I thought about taking that baseball card to the shop and walking out defeated. I thought about my time in ministry and how even to the very end, the church I loved, cared more about their preservation than my worth or value. I thought about and then discarded those skewed understandings of worth. I named aloud my full value.

And then one by one, I put those pennies in a piggy bank, like dropping wishes into a well.

A wish for a world where capitalism is not the system that drives us.

A wish for a society where children are safe and free and fed.

A wish for a healthcare network where the sick are treated with dignity and decisions are made from what is best and not from what it costs.

A wish for a community where one person’s worth doesn’t determine another’s value.

A wish that we are all liberated to love who we are, to create what we love, and to love a broken Creation back together.

With Water and Wonder,

Rebecca & 10 Camels

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You don’t want to miss next week’s edition of Wednesdays at the Well. We will be premiering our first (professionally produced) poetry video here and sharing more about Unraveling 2.0.

Our first Friday Field Trip is January 31st. No permission slip needed. Just imagination and a paid subscription to Wednesdays at the Well.