Could It Be Classism?

I grew up poor. There, now it’s out in the open. Many kids grow up poor; poverty is, in fact, a phenomenon that even the wealthiest countries in the world are still struggling to tackle.

It came to my attention that quite a few people don’t know what being poor implies. From a middle-upper class perspective, poverty is something you hear and read about, yet hardly witness. To a vast majority of people who have not experienced it, poverty is the result of bad choices and a lack of initiative.

Now, I don’t think wealth has the power to make people fundamentally ignorant, but I do think it encourages misunderstandings. The lack of contact, the lack of discussion and of experience enable a sort of mindset where it seems like the world is fair in essence and that if you fail at something, well, you just haven’t worked hard enough. This is where structural poverty comes into play.

I was four years old when I lived in a basement apartment with my dad. I was seven when my teacher would make my classmates share their lunch with me so I could eat. I was eight when my dad sold my toys and everything else that we had. I was nine years old when my school called youth protection services because I was “dirty and underfed”. I was ten when I started inviting myself over to my friends’ houses in hopes of being offered a snack. I was eleven when my mom started eating at a soup kitchen and borrowing money from her friends so she could feed me and my sister. I was twelve years old when she fell ill and social security started paying our rent, and when I had to regularly stop going to school because we had nothing to eat at home. I was thirteen when my mom fell into a deep depression from the guilt of being ill and not being able to feed her own children. I was fourteen when I stopped getting Christmas presents from a charity organization. I was fifteen when I became severely depressed and I was eighteen when I tried to take my own life — thankfully, that failed.

Poverty comes in a lot of different forms and shapes. Not everyone’s gonna experience it the same way. For me, it was the constant lack of food as a child, which led me to develop eating disorders as an adult. Poverty at a young age is going to have a lot of implications and psychological consequences in your adult life.

There’s a big misconception about poverty that needs to be tackled, especially among the middle-upper class. It seems like to a lot of people, poverty is laziness. Poverty is not wanting to have a good job, not wanting to be smart, not wanting to travel and “experience the world”, not wanting to eat less carbs, not caring about your health, not caring about contributing to society. This kind of mindset justifies the unjustifiable, it makes poverty seem like a choice and makes the wealthier, healthier people feel like they are responsible for their success while others are responsible for their own demise. They should’ve just done better and worked harder, right? In this case, meritocracy is just a fancy word for injustice.

Wealthier people can’t imagine the emotional and psychological toll of being hungry all the time, of living in a poor environment all the time, of being socially secluded, of not being able to afford new shoes, let alone a plane ticket. As a child and young adult, I was angry at everyone around me for having food, a home, warm clothes and a clean bed on a silver plate. This anger still gets a hold of me sometimes.

But while it’s true that most people can’t imagine what it’s like to be poor, poor people also can’t imagine what it’s like to be… rich? No, not that. Just normal. Good old middle-class normal. Two-three meals a day, stable job, Netflix subscription, traveling-with-the-family normal. This ordinary lifestyle is, to them, unattainable.

Did I grow out of poverty? Yes, I did. I pay my own bills, I got an education, and I even have a Netflix subscription. I still struggle with money, but at least I’m old enough to work for it. I still support my mother financially.

Would you look me in the eye and call me lazy? Would you tell my sick mother she could’ve just worked from home and started her own company if she needed money so bad? Would you have told my father to do more than just sell all of our belongings? Would you tell me food’s not that expensive if you shop wisely? That if poor people are depressed, they should meditate more, workout more? I’m not asking you to shed a tear for every poor person you encounter, but I am asking you to take a step back and think about what’s essential to you. Is it essential to someone who’s hungry, who’s cold, who’s scared? Be grateful for what you have. Be empathetic, be understanding. Be there for those who don’t have the simplest things that you take for granted.

These people want to eat healthy, want to discover the world, want to achieve their goals, want to have friends. They want to wear new, clean clothes, to play an instrument they can’t afford, to visit countries they’ve been dreaming of. But to them, day-to-day life is exhausting, and these goals are so much harder to reach than for the rest of the world. To them, life is a struggle, a very lonely and hungry struggle. When you hardly have a penny, your basic needs are all that matters and everything else becomes unimportant.

That, my friend, is poverty.