As a kid, I proudly learned to spell “otorhinolaryngology,” and my siblings and I had water fights with the blunt plastic dispensing syringes Dad brought home from work. He visited my elementary school on “career day,” in his starched white lab coat and showed us how to use an otoscope to look in the inner ear.

There were many benefits to having a doctor dad and yet his profession is at the heart of what I think of as my raw nerve—a tension I experience in relation to others that I’ve felt to a greater or lesser degree all my life.

Many years ago, an older relative, Mom’s most beloved aunt—a retired teacher who lived on a small income—basked in the sun on the deck of my parents’ summer home overlooking the lake, and I overheard her say, quietly, “Ah, to have rich relatives!”

Ever afterwards I felt uneasy around my great aunt despite our shared love of making jam and owls out of pinecones. I felt encumbered with a new and unwelcome identity—the privileged daughter of “rich relatives.” Did this make me not okay in her eyes? This was an early first encounter with my raw nerve—the discomfort I felt about my family’s wealth and the privileges it allowed me.

A preacher’s kid, Mom married the son of a factory worker from Detroit. My three siblings and I went to the public school down the street—Mom drew the line at private school—but my sisters were active in 4H and owned horses. We lived on the outskirts of town on an acre of land with irises and rhubarb growing in the backyard. Dad bought a boat, then a bigger boat, and we learned to waterski at our summer cottage. My parents paid for my college, all of it, and I left debt free, a huge advantage many, including Chris, did not have.

Always sensitive to other people’s opinions of me, I thought revealing Dad’s profession could result in subtle feelings of aggression, envy or unearned admiration in certain situations. So I masked this information if I felt it might make others predisposed to judge me.

As I got older I noticed privilege was a sensitive topic for my mother and that she more readily clung to her identity as a pastor’s kid. Increased wealth resulted in odd tensions around money; on one hand, she whited-out return addresses on stationary to reuse it; on the other hand, she took us to Europe in high school.

At times I wonder if guilt over privilege literally made her sick. She could have used a break now and then, raising four young kids close in age—and could have afforded a babysitter once in awhile—but she pushed herself to be the best Mom, wife, volunteer, and taker-in of others she could be, and suffered weeks-long depressions in bed as a result.

As a preacher’s daughter, Mom would have absorbed the biblical lesson that it was a sin to have too much money. After all, her father had to preach on Matthew 19:24: “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

“Don’t get the big head!” she forever warned us. No bragging. No showing off. We were to know the value of money and work—and to share. One time she faced me with a wad of sodden dollar bills, my babysitting money, which she’d found in my pants pocket in the wash. “Money doesn’t grow on trees!” she said furiously.

My raw nerve has resulted in my being cautious with what I share about how I grew up, and makes me prickly and eager to prove myself. At times, it tests my relations with others. I’ll flinch at innocuous-seeming comments from friends. No one likes to be seen one dimensionally.

There’s an upside too. My raw nerve was the engine behind my desire to be a teacher and then to leave my teaching post at a private school to move to an urban public school. It sparked my involvement at a homeless shelter at our church. It’s behind my work at an education nonprofit.

Am I, like my mother, working to atone for the “sin” of privilege? Is this a good engine or a faulty one? Will it further or stunt my growth?

It’s a bit of a landmine. All I know is my raw nerve, and yours, is something to mine in art, work and relationships. It’s getting to the bottom of unsettled ground absorbed while young. It’s what worries us about ourselves. If we listen carefully, a raw nerve is ultimately revealing. It brings us closer to the nagging central question of who we are.