About a week ago, I read an article on the HuffPo from Linda Tirado. Adapted from a post on her personal blog, Linda tries to explain “why poor people make bad decisions.” At the time, I crafted a response to the article and didn’t post it.

Actually, looking at the large amount of material that doesn’t make it to this blog, I noticed that more than half of it deals with my personal experiences with poverty. It appears that I think on my experiences quite often, but I’m hesitant to share them. Perhaps it’s fear of being seen as wanting sympathy or just simply that I don’t want think about it. .

The intro to the article struck me:

“There’s no way to structure this coherently. They are random observations that might help explain the mental processes. But often, I think that we look at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why.”

It’s quite easy for me to have an academic discussion of the causes and implications of poverty. In fact, it’s my job to. It’s much harder to talk about my own experience with poverty, as it’s a collection of disjointed, chaotic and often incomprehensible experiences that don’t fit well into a tight flowing narrative. I’m sensing that Linda feels the same way and wonder if my reticence might stem from the difficulty of making sense of the chaos.

Linda’s credibility has been called into question. The article that she wrote for her blog is being seen and a clever ploy to extract money from sympathetic readers to fund her dubious book project. To make matters worse, she is multi-lingual, attended private schools as a child and has run a political blog since 2011.

Now, I can’t really comment on what Linda’s goals were in writing the original post or whether her claims are true. I don’t know Linda and won’t embark on a mission to either support or discredit her. The last sentence in the above paragraph struck me though since it also describes the author of this blog (me).

I grew up in awful, awful poverty. The kind that doesn’t ring in pictures of well meaning, hard working folks trying to get by under challenging circumstances. No, my poverty is due to a long family history of abuse, irresponsibility, alcoholism, mental illness and violence. My story is so incredibly extreme that it doesn’t usually elicit sympathy, but rather disgust.

What Linda and I share is that we don’t fit the picture of poverty. We’re white, educated and have it together enough in adulthood to string a few sentences along and have people read them.

My “poverty cred” is often called into question. I think this is natural. In America, we have decidedly fixed ideas of what poverty is and isn’t. It’s hard for many Americans to imagine poverty, and wide collection of experiences make it almost impossible to adequately relate a concise narrative.

Honestly, I never know where to begin with my story of poverty, but my top class education and advanced degrees don’t erase it. My younger brother came from the same situation I did (though from a different father) but instead of collecting degrees, he’s in and out of jail (and the hospital when his girlfriend stabs him). I was extremely lucky.

What Linda and I do share is our teeth. My teeth are bad. I have too many of them for my small mouth and my family were too dysfunctional and mired in insanity to do anything about it. In America, bad teeth are like a glowing neon sign that says “I WAS POOR.” If you have bad teeth and are young, people know what’s up when you smile. (What a relief egalitarian Japan was, where even pop stars have bad teeth!) When you run into someone else with bad teeth it’s a moment of bonding, like war tattoos.

I used to be ashamed of them. Now I wear them like a badge of honor, like a middle finger to the world, irrefutable proof that these awful things happened.