seananmcguire:

hobbitkaiju:

undocumentedny:

ivyaura:

ratchetier:

feministxibalba:

ivyaura:

“Money doesn’t buy happiness” ok and poverty buys what exactly

where is the lie

Out of poverty creates strength and compassion. It’s weird how that works.

i sure wasn’t feeling the strength when i was skipping class because i was too weak to walk there after going 2-3 days without food, and i definitely wasn’t compassionate when i was checking every time i walked home to see if there was an eviction notice on the door. stop trying to fucking make it seem like a good thing.

Poverty is not a virtue.  It doesn’t make you a better person.  Poverty doesn’t make you “strong and compassionate” it makes you insecure and stressed the fuck out.  Poverty makes it so you can’t live your life without the everything being undercut by fear.  It makes you hard and angry.  We need to do away with the bullshit myth that being poor is somehow better for you as a person.  You know who wants you to believe that?  Rich people, so you don’t question them.

Mental health worker here. These are things I’ve heard different clients say about being poor:

• the only reason they’re considering suicide is because they’re terrified of being poor again and if they’re dead then at least their kids (whom they love) would get their life-insurance payout and not have to live in poverty while growing up
• that the poverty they live in is inescapable except by desperation sex work they hate, because they’re so mentally ill that they can’t work other jobs–but the sex work makes their mental illness worse because they hate it so much. So it’s an inescapable cycle of mental illness–>poverty–>mental illness
• they’re so poor that they can’t stop their anorexia because they literally don’t have the money to buy food anyway and at least this way they feel good about not eating
• that they can’t come in to therapy that week even though they need and want to because they can’t afford the session

Poverty teaches and reinforces misery and self-hatred. It does not teach strength, it leaches strength until there is nothing left and healing is difficult if not impossible. Often, healing, recovery, and the building of true strength and resiliency are reserved only for those who have the money and leisure time to pursue them. 

Poverty did not teach me to be strong and compassionate.

Poverty taught me to eat out of trash cans even when people judged me for doing it, because otherwise I threw up and passed out from sheer hunger.

Poverty taught me to let a “friend” treat me like shit because his mother thought we might start dating so she made steak every time I came over, STEAK, and one meal at his house could mean saving enough food at home to feed my sisters twice.

Poverty taught me that the police were never on my side.

Poverty taught me I deserved what I got.

I was nine when we plunged into deep poverty, and I would not wish that on anyone, and I especially would not wish it on a child.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Poverty did not make me a better person. It made me a paranoid person. It made me absolutely terrified of the thought of ever being as poor as we were when I was a kid ever again. It makes me question every dollar I spend. It gave me chronic nightmares for years, left me tired and angry and less emotionally stable than I otherwise would have been. It kept me from taking the unpaid internships I should have been doing to give myself the experience I needed to get work in my field, because I couldn’t afford a summer of not making any money and having someone take me back and forth to an internship that wasn’t earning me a paycheck (because you can’t afford to drive, or to buy anything more expensive than a money-sucking junker car when you’re not working, either).  It kept me from making friends in school and in college, because I didn’t have the money to go and hang out and enjoy myself, or the money to live on campus and participate in activities meant for people who didn’t have to go home and grab a few hours of sleep so they could be up at 6:30 the next morning to commute in.  

Poverty meant that I never, ever took risks, even simple kid risks like climbing trees, because we didn’t have health insurance, and if I broke something, that was several weeks or months worth of groceries that we couldn’t have afforded, and I knew that. It means that I have no idea of office protocol about some things because my parents didn’t work in offices. They didn’t come home talking about who did what at the office today. They came home dead tired at the end of the day, talking about how many times they’d gotten treated like shit, and by extension, I learned that work was something that everyone did and everyone hated. There was no concept of loving your work in my family, because no one had a career – they had a job that treated them like the dirt under someone’s boot, because they were poor. Being poor doesn’t make you strong.