Listen. If you’re involved in a multi-level marketing program — be it eyelashes or anti-aging serums or books or workout programs or oils or energy supplements or leggings or pajamas for cats, for all I care — I’m happy for you. I think it’s great you’ve found something you enjoy doing that also has the potential to bring income into your household and offer you some financial freedom. Really, I am. But I’m gonna need you to stop constantly badgering me about that shit immediately.

I want to help you out. I really do.

I know what it’s like to be strapped for cash, to be driven to pursue a personal venture, to need some independence, to want a purpose outside of parenting and vacuuming up yet another pile of never-ending crumbs. I know what it’s like to need a hobby, a side hustle, a little something to fund the family’s next vacation. I know.

And it is because I know all this that I need you to give it a rest already.

Look, I am also strapped for cash, driven to pursue personal ventures, desperate to do something that doesn’t involve wiping tiny butts, in need of a vacation (sans family, to be honest). It is for these reasons that I don’t purchase something from every single fundraiser my kids bring home. It is why I occasionally have to tell the adorable Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts who knock on my door that I have to pass this time around. It is why my family has had boxed mac ‘n cheese for dinner the past 3 nights, why I use drug store beauty products instead of high-end products that I KNOW do a better job, why all those bills are still sitting in a pile until next payday.

It is because I can’t afford — monetarily or emotionally — to be constantly supporting your program that, if we’re being honest, is hustling you as much as you’re hustling it. 

I don’t need microblading in a bottle for my eyebrows. God saw fit to give me this hot mess, and that’s what I’m gonna have to go with at this moment. I don’t need another pair of leggings that will rip in the crotch the first time I have to lunge to catch the toddler from falling off his chair. I don’t need oils (I have a doctor), more books (our shelves are barfing them up at this very moment), energy supplements (I do, actually, but not at 30 bucks a pop).

I don’t need any of that crap, and if I ever purchased some from you in the past as a show of support, I regret that decision so much right now because it has apparently given you license to hit up my DMs and text messages with non-stop requests to join this online party, come to that evening event, check it out check it out CHECK IT OUTTTTTTT!

I’m not hating on you for finding something that brings you joy or money. I support that shit. What I DON’T support, though, is this behavior that has gone from friendly messaging to straight up stalker-style harassment.

If you send me a message and I don’t respond, sure. Follow up once. ONCE. But after I’ve politely declined or dodged your notes for the 15th time, learn to take NO for an answer. On top of being just plain rude, you are turning what was once an amicable personal relationship into a nightmare avoidance mission.

Go on and get yours. I’m behind that. But don’t count on your ceaseless contact to somehow convince me to sink myself into bankruptcy or loss of sanity so you can achieve your diamond status and maybe one day get that Mercedes the nice lady at the cult meeting seller conference promised was on your horizon.

I’ve got my own shit to get locked down; if and when I’m able to help out, you better believe I’ll hit you up and throw down on some of that. Until then, unless you want me to start incessantly messaging YOU with a GoFundMe link every time I’m running low on cash for groceries, kindly back off.