Compression

Poverty is not a fun state of being.

There’s just no way to get out from under the burden of judgment and debasement to one’s sense of well being.

When it first happens to you, you can believe, “Hey – this will only be temporary.”

Like when a husband leaves you and children without income, that’s an unusual circumstance.

Then you climb out from “the streets” and rebuild everything by opening a business offering housecleaning.

You get through the packed-in neighbors drinking constantly and fighting, the man abusing his girlfriend – which your kids are now exposed to in their teens after you strove to ensure they’d never be exposed to such things.

You get through the younger landlord living a door down from you and showing up on your doorstep in only a hospitql gown, straight from a night in jail after an accident from her own drunk driving.

You get pulled into trying to help her to secure a better life for her to lend stability for her and your own family.

She tries to get you to parent her and take over the bills, but you don’t go this far, sensing the dangers in liability.

She doesn’t pay the monthly mortgage due to her addictions, gets behind on paymemts, and her past party friend who is likely now on meth and cocaine talks her into trying to evict you so they can raise the rent by another $1000.

You fight her off for two months and get your family out of there, not paying the last month’s rent because you know there’s no deposit because she already spent it.

This all looks “great” on rental history when you seek replacement housing. Oh yeah, you’re considered a “prime” candidate for tenancy.

“Unlikely.”

You can’t use her as nearly four year’s reference now from money earned and paid by yoor own hands, and you can’t use the rental reference before that because your husband disappeared and made you homeless, causing a similar ending rent-unpaid nightmare.

Which, even though you sought her out while still poor and are to this day still trying to make good on 10 uear’s ago agreement, she refuses to give you all that time before credit.

Then, you move to a new state where you can’t compete for administration or other work: you are too qualified for factory shlopping, and 14 credits shy of your Bachelor’s degree against others who have their but don’t have your same work qualified experience.

You innovate to get into the health field and work your way up the ladder in a passive-aggressively hostile work environment where people refuse to trust your high standards and excellent professional etiquette.

When they at last find a reason, they fire you – by their own fault of exposing you to COVID.

Then that employer lies and tangles unemployment benefits as you must petition for, wait for, and experience multiple reschedulings of the hearing.

Hearing ruled in your favor, but system locks up as recalibrating payments.

Check back in a month.

Check back in another month.

You forge a way to get to a better community with a great job – and then get fired again, again arbitrarily. Even though you file a new claim for UI, is also gets tied up by the old one’s still being stuck in processing.

(Today’s specialist you called today admits in astonishment she’s never seen such a complicated mess in the system as your should-be-straightforward claim.)

Designed for and capable of so much more than an average wage earner, repeat “failures” try to crush you.