Once, in college, I forgot that I swiped my debit card on campus to pay a $5 fee. That caused some pre-arranged bill payments to bounce, which caused fees. Those fees caused more fees. The consequences went on for months.
By the time I was done paying for my momentary lapse, I had been punished so severely that if you offered me the choice between a flogging, beating, or other physical torture instead? I’d have taken the physical punishment without hesitating.
Today, I am learning something about how profoundly adaptable humans are—how easily we can adjust to a level of comfort and being “spoiled,” and how thoroughly that adjustment can occur.
I made the kind of dumb mistake that you make when you’ve been poor all your life and have navigated adult life without parents or other knowledgeable, caring elders guiding you. From my 2021 side hustles, I saved only enough for taxes if my tax bracket didn’t change.
It changed. It changed a lot. (Yes, I have adjusted my withholding so that this won’t happen again. My paychecks are noticeably smaller.)
I just finished all the e-filing stuff a little while ago. Between state and federal taxes, I paid over $6,000.
This took almost every penny of the emergency and other savings I had carefully been building up. It means I will not go anywhere except, maybe, a coffeehouse, when I take the first vacation of my life in August. I have rescheduled a dental surgery for the fall, instead of next month, because the uncovered portion is around $900.
Many of my friends insist that taxation is theft. I disagree. This hasn’t quite changed my mind, but the mental gymnastics it’s requiring for me to not be angry and knee-jerk to their side are sort of amusing. I got therapy and hearing aids for free, all through college, paid for by Medicaid, and I am telling myself that I just paid back a chunk of it. This is mostly false, but enables me to control my emotions.
I am very grateful for the help I got when I needed it, and always will be. But my tax money goes to help the Department of Justice fight for minors to get sex-reassignment surgery, just as much as it goes to pay for the welfare I benefited from. That is simply true.
Where this is causing me real emotional distress is that I have less than $200 in savings now. I will build it back up as quickly as possible, of course, so it’s a temporary situation. I am hopeful of picking up tutoring work as final exams approach (email me if you’re interested) and will otherwise do as much work as I can to fix this.
Still, the sense of horror and exposure is incredibly bizarre, because of how poor I was, and for how long. Until eleven months ago, $200 in my savings account would have been almost unfathomable riches. I would have felt significantly less anxiety, not significantly more.
I have adjusted to the safety and comfort of knowing that there was no minor emergency that could torpedo my life, anymore, and adjusted so thoroughly that the loss of that safety is giving me literal nightmares.
Now I will return to my poverty coping skills, for awhile, and use this to motivate myself never to make such a dumb mistake again.
But I am grateful that I have these skills, and this history. I know what to do and how to fix it. I can, and I will.
I can remind myself regularly that as scary as this is, I’ve been through much, much worse, and for much longer than it will take me to fix this.
This is one way that a difficult history can be a blessing.
And if anyone needs a math tutor, send me an email.
***This is a sort of companion piece to an earlier essay about the transition from desperate poverty to the middle class.