On Upward Mobility
On Upward Mobility
the experience of being Po No Mo
A reader suggested this essay, and I decided to write it after floating the idea on Twitter to good reception.
It is both amazing and humbling to me that so many of you wanted to hear my thoughts on the transformation in my life. I hope it’s worth your time.
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About once a month, after I see my therapist on Sunday evening, I place a Chili’s curbside order for fajitas. The $23 (including tip, for them to walk out into the freezing rain to bring it to my car) is a modest luxury. $23 for two meals’ worth of food isn’t terribly extravagant, but it’s still a luxury—and one that still feels more than a little wild and crazy.
I make myself do it anyway.
What I’m Going To Tell You
This is a story about the experience of going from desperate poverty to having an above-median, middle-class income.
Because of my student loan debt, I continue to have a strongly negative net worth. Thus, there is a sense in which writing this essay is somewhere between premature and completely insane. I recognize this.
My having a negative net worth will continue to be the case for some time. Crossing over from the red to the black will take somewhere between three and five more years, depending on how long I can make my car last and whether I have to stop throwing extra money at the loans to buy a different car.
Regardless, a drastic change in income—going from desperately poor to above the US median—has brought with it a drastic change in every aspect of my life; many more changes than I can count, only a few of which I was prepared to handle.
What I Mean By “Poor”
In the period between moving to New England and getting the job I have now (which covered about six years, including a year pre-college, to qualify for in-state tuition, and post-college, waiting out pandemic hiring issues) I was about as poor as it’s possible to be in the US without ending up in a homeless shelter. Social workers in three government agencies knew my name. I was on food stamps and Medicaid, and occasionally got rides by lying to friends that I was unable to drive for various reasons (when the truth, of which I was deeply ashamed, was that I didn’t have gas money). I had a part-time job and often did tutoring between classes, but majoring in mathematics is a more-than-full-time job, and working full time while going part-time was not an option because I needed to go full-time to maintain my eligibility for many of the programs and assistance I was using.
My bank account is through a credit union, one that by policy would clear charges on my debit card up through a balance of negative $500. My balance didn’t go above $0 for more than a day at any point for months at a time. This cycle went on for years.
During this time, I repeatedly found that my $179 in food stamps would run out at the most inopportune times, so I sometimes missed meals. Once I didn’t eat for four days. This caused issues of its own, leaving me in a constant state of panic. To avoid the panic of involuntary fasting, I sold everything that I could sell except my body, including things I would give quite a lot to get back. (Items of great sentimental value that belonged to my grandparents.)
Because I couldn’t afford to rent an apartment, I found room rentals on craigslist. Some weren’t bad at all, including one that lasted for several years. Others were toxic and even physically dangerous—people who resented that they needed to rent out rooms to make ends meet, and took that resentment out on me and their other tenants.
Poverty at that level is a state of constant anxiety, made far worse because it is entirely reasonable. I once spent about three weeks with less than one dollar available to me.
In that state, being constantly terrified is not a sign of neurosis. It is a sign of recognizing reality.
Mortal Terror is the Mother of Work Ethic
I worked very, very, very hard to get my degree in mathematics. After realizing that I had better mental clarity in the mornings, I started getting up at 4am to study. I made flashcards for the derivative and antiderivative rules and the unit circle angles, which I spent my bus commute time and/or walking home time (I did both) going over and over. I haunted the tutoring office. I knew every mathematics channel on YouTube. I checked out every "For Dummies” book related to trigonometry, precalculus, or calculus from the library over and over.
This kind of work ethic may say something positive about my character—that’s hard for me to judge—but I promise you that any honest accounting of this would have to attribute a much greater share to mortal terror of failing than any virtue on my part.
I had gone into this knowing that it would be one hell of a gamble. If I failed, the stakes were quite high: I would have all of the debt and none of the earning potential.
I Got The Job
After I graduated, while I was job-hunting and waiting out pandemic hiring issues, I started several side hustles and things got somewhat better. I was still quite poor, but the combination of the side hustles and the government not requiring student loans to be paid during this time let me get by.
Six months ago, I got a job doing data science, working for a large corporation, mostly building predictive models. What that means in English is that I get client data, analyze it, and make recommendations on what they can change to do better, using mathematics to show them what their various choices are likely to lead to. I can’t say much more than that, having signed eleventy-four non-disclosure agreements to protect the privacy of all my clients.
The median household income in the US is about $68,000. As a one-person household, I started my job at a salary above that, and I’ve kept my side hustles going to various degrees, so I have a couple of separate income streams on top of my full-time job. (100% of the side hustles are going to pay off my student loans—thank you again to all the paid subscribers who are playing a role in my approaching freedom. I really appreciate you.) This means I am busy almost all the time, but I like being busy, and the rapid progress towards debt freedom from working multiple jobs is more than worth it.
Pitfalls I Avoided
I accepted two of the eleventy-nine million credit card offers that landed in my mailbox as a student, and resisted the temptation to spend frivolously. I used them a few times for groceries and medical expenses, gas to get to therapy, and avoiding situations that were legitimately dangerous (like the time I walked 8 miles round trip in sub-zero weather to use a printer on campus because I didn’t have $20 for an ink cartridge. I charged ink cartridges the next day.)
Also, I only borrowed above and beyond the cost of my education twice. Once to pay for much-needed dental surgery, and once to buy a laptop.
What Money Changes
People, my first paycheck had a comma in it.
Ten dollars was a lot of money to me. A lot. And my first paycheck had a comma in it.
This meant that my very first paycheck, for two weeks of work, was more money than I had in about two months of my previous life.
It took getting used to, to say the least. Having a decent income was dizzying and wonderful, scary and confusing, thrilling and terrifying. On my first payday, I bought a second pair of jeans. I bought a good pair of shoes. Then I came home from the New Balance store, stared at the wall for most of an hour, and wondered what else I should buy.
It is hard to think of any part of my life that hasn’t changed, which is surprising. I would have guessed that some of my friendships wouldn’t change, but they did. I have friends who are very wealthy and friends who are almost as poor as I used to be and friends at every point in between. With the wealthy friends, I grew more confident. I was no longer afraid of judgment, and I was no longer worried that if I talked about the parts of my life that were hard, they would think I was hinting that they should help me. With the poor friends, I struggled to know if it was ok to share my joy at the parts of my life that were getting better. Mostly, I didn’t.
Massive Mental Weight Loss
The biggest change is that I have an astonishing amount of emotional, psychological and cognitive energy. (Given how many hours I work, less physical energy, but that’s easily worth it.) I had no idea how much energy went to being constantly aware of how much food, medication, and other necessities I had, how long it had to last, and how close I was to disaster. Once the need to do a sort of constant calculus about how far my meager resources could be stretched no longer existed, it was the psychological equivalent of losing 50 pounds overnight. A totally new experience in the world, and very quickly realized.
More Changes
My credit score went up massively when I got a $10,000 credit line increase, out of the blue and without my requesting it. Some computer at Big Data somewhere identified me as upwardly mobile and the company wanted to earn my loyalty, I suppose? I’ve not touched it, but the suddenly available buffer against disaster—which I didn’t have available to me when I really needed such a buffer—is part of how a sort of societal snowball effect tends to keep things going in a good financial direction, once a person manages to get herself there.
Switching from Medicaid to good private insurance didn’t make a difference, as far as I can tell, in the quality of medical care I have received, but it has made an enormous difference in the level of courtesy and personal attention I get from administrators and staffers. Paying over $900, the uncovered portion of a dental surgery, in advance (so I wouldn’t be worrying about that on the stressful day of the procedure), I was suddenly “ma’am” and “Ms. Nerd,” and was asked if I had any special needs or if there was anything they could do to make me more comfortable on the day of my surgery. (That never happened before.)
I spare myself physical pain quite regularly, in ways I couldn’t previously have imagined. My bad shoulder is rarely overworked now, because I have my groceries delivered via Instacart, and when I need physical work done (rearranging furniture, assembling the treadmill I bought so I could exercise indoors in the coming New England winter, etc.) I call a handyman and write a check instead of spending a week alternating heat, ice, and Advil.
The most fun and most rewarding parts of my life changing have been twofold: Christmas shopping for people I love, and supporting podcasters who are doing good work. Christmas shopping is a way of saying “I love you” without using words, something that means a lot to me since it’s often difficult for me to find the courage to express love more directly. Several of my friends are full-time content creators, so I know what a difference regular support makes. I picked two podcasters to support with a monthly pledge as my “entertainment” budget, and every month on the day when those charges hit, I smile a lot more than usual.
Learning to spend money was scary and difficult, but has been made easier for the kindness of friends who’ve guided me. When I needed to furnish an apartment for myself, I took a friend’s suggestion and had the exact bed I wanted made by a local carpenter, complete with drawers underneath and a bookcase headboard. I had to remind myself every night for the first month that it was OK that I had bought this for myself, as it would last all my life and I would never need to buy a dresser. (I also comforted myself that in an emergency I could sell it for $500 on craigslist in about two minutes, ha ha! Some thought patterns take longer to break than others.)
Justifiable major purchases are one thing. It has been more difficult to learn to just let myself enjoy it a little. Buying nice things just because I want them and it does me good to surround myself with beauty is enjoying life on a whole ‘nother level, and it’s not (yet?) easy. My therapist pointed out that because I work from home, furnishing my home is determining the atmosphere in which I will exist nearly all the time. That made me realize that my decisions needed to come from a place of self-respect and self-worth, feigned if necessary.
After a great deal of thought, I settled on a reasonable budget and spent it on high-quality items that I expect to last, things that make me happy to own, including nice bookends. The bedroom picture shows some chess piece bookends, but I also have Christmas, mathematics, and Doctor Who themed bookends.
In Retrospect: the Two Decisions That Set The Stage
When I started college in 2016, I made two decisions that would turn out to be the best financial decisions of my life, so far.
My university had a requirement that people spend four semesters living on campus. Because I would be borrowing my way through school, I appealed this on disability grounds. (If I had the funds to pay my way through school, I might’ve tried it, one semester at a time. Or I might not have. I really don’t know.)
I live with C-PTSD, and alcohol is tied into many of my traumatic experiences. My argument was that requiring me to live on campus at all would preclude my ability to be a student. There would be no way to avoid being exposed to the sight and smell of alcohol regularly and unpredictably while living on campus. I would have to be living in anticipation of potential PTSD triggers happening at any moment. This appeal was approved, which saved me tens of thousands of dollars. Thus, I am not presently paying interest for debt related to a spaghetti plate I ate in October 2016. My student loan bill is still massive, but it’s a good $30,000 less than it would have otherwise been.
The second good decision was to major in mathematics. I knew that it would be foolish to major in something that didn’t result in a middle-class income right off the bat. This meant something in STEM. My science background was—this is not hyperbole—reading the book of Genesis, as I attended an unregulated church school in the rural south.
Thus, the only realistic possibility was mathematics.
My bizarre educational background meant that I had little idea of my true aptitude. But I really loved mathematics when I was a little girl, with word problems being my favorite. I spent the summer of 2015 on Khan Academy (supplementing with used textbooks I bought on Amazon) teaching myself all of high school mathematics, and I got a 700 on the SAT math section.
Does My “Making It” Validate the American Dream?
This is an interesting question, and one almost all the people who’ve known me for a long time have asked me.
Yes, and no. Yes, in that working hard and pursuing a goal with dedication has allowed me to gain a middle class lifestyle, and inside of five years I will be completely out of debt and able to start building wealth.
No, in that I had an incredible amount of help. My university had a well-staffed and proactive disability office. People like James Lindsay answered my emails and gave me the advice I desperately needed, as a terrified student who didn’t understand the academic world at all. I was in therapy the entire time, at taxpayer expense. Friends (who know who they are) believed in me long before it made sense to do so, and their faith helped more than I can say.
If any of these things had been different—for example, if I were trying to do this in a state where Medicaid rules were different and I couldn’t have been in therapy—it is impossible to say if working hard would have been enough on its own.
Overall, I come down on the side of yes, my experience does validate the idea of the American Dream, simply because there are so many places on this earth where girls aren’t allowed to go to school, where disability offices aren’t a thing, where the incredible freedom to take a risk and pursue a dream is not available to ordinary citizens.
America is not equally the land of opportunity for everyone, but it has absolutely been that for me.
If anyone actually made it to the end of this, here’s a bonus picture to thank you.
