The High Cost of Being Poor

How financial, work, and relationship trauma created a perfect storm

Tajah McQueen finding joy amidst the weight of survival

I assumed that the flippant and ignorant things people said in the comment section of news outlets on Facebook wouldn’t have the power to hurt me. Intellectually, I know that the internet gives folks a heightened sense of confidence that enables them to say some of the darkest and hurtful things about people they don’t even know. That they may not even mean the things they’re saying and even if they do, I don’t know them! But as the date grew closer and closer to November 1st, and I saw more and more Facebook comments suggesting that me and people like me, SNAP recipients, should starve for being so lazy and not “just getting a job,” it started to ruin me.

I normally reject the idea that there is a correct path to take in life. We’re all so varied and life is so incredibly nuanced that it feels impossible to think that there is only one way to spend our time on Earth. However, being in this precarious situation has backed me into a Groundhog Day-like rumination in an effort to figure out where along my own path I’d veered off course.

On paper, I did the things that many of my peers were also told to do, the things that should lead to success and financial stability. I was in the advanced program in high school, I earned my bachelor’s degree from a four-year university, I left behind service industry work to take on more traditionally professional and career-serving roles. And as a rare flex as a millennial, I bought my own home as a single parent without the financial help of my parents. Yet I find myself having to stretch the last $100 in my SNAP account until I receive payment from the government, whenever that may be.

As I said earlier, I don’t believe there’s a specific path in life that each of us has to take in order to be successful. I also fully believe that no one is truly lazy and that you deserve to eat regardless of your employment status. But I do feel that it’s necessary to talk about my accolades in order to get people to understand that I’m not the negative stereotype that’s being pushed to define SNAP recipients—and that those accolades have done nothing to protect me from ending up here.

Growing up, my family’s financial stability had its ebbs and flows. I remember times where we were bored out of our minds because there was absolutely nothing on all 80+ channels of our cable TV. There were afternoons spent laying on a friend’s bed while everyone gathered around me to look at all the new backgrounds because I was the first with a full color flip phone in my grade. I also remember my mother sobbing on Christmas Day because our Angel Tree donor gifted my little brother with office supplies instead of the art supplies my mother requested. I also recall having to sit out of the major end-of-year field trips you take in eighth and twelfth grades because my single mother of four couldn’t afford to do that for all of her kids, so none of us did. During those harder times, we were fed through SNAP/food stamps.

Even with so little, my mother made it work. Thinking about it now, with just one child, I don’t think I could carry the weight of the pressure of knowing that I was fully financially responsible for four human beings. While that pressure definitely took its toll on our family, it showed me how to be resourceful and how to survive. That there is always a way out and up!

It also helped that my mother never taught us to feel any less than because we relied on assisted services occasionally. The food she was able to purchase, while sometimes absolutely random because of program restrictions, became some of my and my siblings’ favorite meals growing up. A few meals that come to mind are rice and ground beef or turkey or open-faced grilled cheese. It wasn’t until about five or six years ago that I learned my mother hated those meals and even the mere mention of them because they reminded her of the hardships and all the things she wanted to get us but wasn’t able to provide. We weren’t made aware until much later that my mother had to make the decision between food or diapers when we were very young, trying at times to wash diapers for re-use or turning towels into makeshift diapers until her next paycheck.

My mother is an incredible person who was able to navigate us through the harshest of situations, but she’s still a person. There were many times when she would sit us down with tears in her eyes and explain the predatory nature of some of these programs. “You have to make enough to prove that you’re trying, but not too much because they’ll kick you off even if you still need some help.” So it was best if we figured out a way to be successful enough not to get caught in the trap.

While white friends of mine who came from financially stable households bragged about how much they were getting from food stamps/SNAP in college, I ate one meal a day after the scholarship or loan money ran out. Even though I had two jobs for the majority of my college experience, I only made enough to buy books and pay rent when the dorms became too expensive. I simply went without, unlike my peers who didn’t grow up with the fear of being ensnared by government assistance.

After college I continued to fight through my own ebbs and flows with financial stability, sometimes working one full time and one part time job to make ends meet. It wasn’t until I started dating and moved in with the father of my child that I felt relaxed enough with two incomes to begin to let go of the financial trauma from my childhood and start enjoying money in a way that didn’t instantly fill me with buyer’s remorse.

We often took trips to Cincinnati, Nashville, New York, and my favorite place in the entire world, New Orleans. I’d gone from being bewildered about how my peers could travel to visiting New Orleans about three or four times within a three-year time frame. I thought that this is what success looked like. I finally felt like an adult, that I’d achieved the true financial freedom you can achieve with a partner.

That freedom didn’t last long. As our relationship continued, the control my ex needed over me grew stronger. “Allowing” me to quit a job because of ongoing harassment I was continuously experiencing from a co-worker that, along with the stress of being in a controlling relationship, led me to a stay in a mental health facility. He encouraged me to take as much time as I needed away from work because he would be able to provide for the three of us.

Him offering to take over all our financial responsibilities so I could put myself back together again seemed like such a dream at the time. Until he would punish me by taking away the car or the clothes he’d given me whenever we got into an argument. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s an example of financial abuse. It took me a very long time to understand that not only was it not acceptable simply because he made the money, but it was also a glaring red flag signalling for me to escape.

Leaving during COVID was a blessing in disguise for a number of reasons: One, so many people were realizing that the relationships they were in no longer suited them, so it wasn’t as scandalous to hear about a couple ending things. Two, the stimulus checks provided me with enough money to cover the first month’s rent, the security deposit, and new furniture for my new rental home. I purposefully allowed my partner to keep the house we were living in as is, even though some of the items were mine long before I met him, so our child could have some semblance of normalcy.

Shortly after moving in, I was offered a contract remote marketing position with the same organization I had left after they made good on their promise that I would in no way be in contact with my former coworker who had caused so much harm. That position gave me the confidence to find another more permanent role after my contract had ended. I finally had the “dream job” of working in an advertising agency. This, I thought at the time, was going to be the thing that would give me the financial security I’d been seeking my entire life.

Before I worked at the ad agency, I thought the job was going to be a fully collaborative explosion of creativity and teamwork. I envisioned a space that valued different thought processes and ideas. A place to push the boundaries of what marketing looked like. I can’t speak for all ad agencies, but this, unfortunately, was not my experience. It seemed as if every meeting boiled down to “How can we as an alcohol brand make non-drinkers drink and drinkers drink more?” or “How can we make people believe our evil company is less evil?” Although I was included in creative meetings, my thoughts weren’t considered as they came from the mouth and mind of a person who didn’t look like the brand’s target audience or the others in the room.

At this point I’d started looking into buying a home because the government had temporarily stopped penalizing people with public student loan debt. I was coming up on a year in my rental property and knew the landlords had plans to raise the rent that I was barely able to cover even with my full-time job. I reached out to a former boss for help finding a new job when he suggested I apply for a small environmental nonprofit covering natural and manmade disasters in several states in the American South. I was offered the role and my bid was accepted for my new home within the same week.

When I put in my notice at the ad agency, the IT manager, who was responsible for setting a date and time for me to drop off my work laptop, asked me when my last day was and when I’d be starting my new job. When he realized those two dates were a day apart, he made a joke about how I must have been dying to start working because I didn’t even give myself a break. I very seriously looked at him and told him I couldn’t afford to do that. The thought had never occurred to him.

My time working for the environmental nonprofit was bittersweet. I aided in the direct help of people who were currently dealing with the fallout of an environmental crisis by supplying information or providing the space for them to tell their heartbreaking story as a warning to others who may not have been prepared. On the flip side of that, I dealt with the brunt of having a boss who, although she believed in me and my work, often let the pressures of running a small three-person (and later two-person) organization get the best of her. She lost her cool in moments of panic and stress. I was the only person on the receiving end of her outbursts.

A week after she extended my contract another year, giving me both a raise and a role title change, she notified me that the organization had officially run out of money. In a month’s time, I would need to find something new. So a little over a year after becoming a homeowner, I was jobless and depressed.

Our society doesn’t do a decent enough job of educating people about workplace abuse and how the harm doesn’t magically end when the job does. Much like financial trauma, it follows you wherever you go unless you have the resources to break the cycle. Feeling defeated, I began working at a restaurant as a server to make some money to cover bills and clothing for my child while I applied for COVID mortgage assistance relief and SNAP. As soon as I was approved, the countdown started for me to find a job that paid enough to allow me to survive.

I spent the next year applying to hundreds and hundreds of jobs, some I knew I was overqualified for, just to get a generic “Sorry but we went with an applicant that was better aligned to the position” email, if I even got anything at all. I had never felt more pathetic in my life.

Being broke when you’re younger can bond you and make your connection with others closer through sharing anecdotes about showing up to college events because you know they’ll offer free T-shirts and, if you’re really lucky, free food. But being poor stops being acceptable after a certain age. It’s only comfortable to talk about being broke when you can’t eat at the restaurant you really want to try or you can only get the cheaper gym membership and not the oneswith the extra perks.

It feels like no one wants to hear that you can’t afford to pay your electricity or that you’re falling behind on your mortgage. It’s as if mentioning your financial struggles is contagious and whoever you’re sharing this with will catch it if they listen too hard or too closely. Being broke, truly broke, is an isolating, painful experience that most bear the burden of alone.

I felt like I was drowning in my own misery, loneliness, and stress. I was at the end of my mortgage assistance, and I hadn’t landed a single job. I started to feel a deep ache in my chest and wondered if this was going to be the thing that killed me. If this was going to be the one time I wasn’t able to pull myself and my child through.

Eventually, I was able to pivot and started my own business to help small companies with their marketing needs. When that ended, I began working at a local independent bookstore. While these roles helped and are helping to keep me somewhat afloat, I still don’t make enough to survive on. After hundreds more job applications, I still haven’t been successful in finding a full-time role.

The fear of losing my home and the ability to take care of myself and my child is ever-present. It wakes me up in the middle of a peaceful night of sleep. It demands to be consulted whenever I schedule a job interview, questioning the odds of whether or not I’ll actually get the job so as to not waste gas on an opportunity that may not pan out. It prevents me from making future plans as I have no idea when this situation will change and I’ll be able to thrive.

One of the biggest blessings throughout all of this was my access to SNAP. No matter how humiliating and cruel the application process and required documents for renewal are, it means that my child and I will always have food. It was the one thing I thought I could count on when I needed it. And now, I don’t even have that.

Tajah McQueen is a mother of two, one human and one Persian cat. Unless you ask the streets, where she is also considered mother. Bookseller by day, tv watcher by night. Reluctant activist.