Embedded Files
Preface
This piece was not planned - it was a reaction. It became a coping mechanism and then a testimony. It is now an account of what poverty does to a person psychologically, from the perspective of someone who was in it, yet who can differentiate systemic failure from the folly of man.
Why care?
Earth is overflowing with noble causes, and there isn’t enough time in life to support them all. The conclusion I’ve come to is that, outside of your own passion projects, the best thing you can do to help the world is be informed, reasonable, and empathetic to others' causes. It’s obvious. It’s really just a derivation of the golden rule - but that doesn’t mean we do it. I didn’t write this to convince anyone of anything; it’s informational, and for as much as I learned because of it, I know it’s just one of the world’s causes. I wrote this because I didn’t do the obvious, and I kind of do now, and I think, after you’ve read what I’ve written, you might do it to.
Format
The heart and soul of this book are the paragraphs you’ll see in italics - these are the stream-of-consciousness thoughts I jotted down when I was going through all this. Anything around the italic paragraph is essentially narration, giving you context for the original thought. Underlined at the end is a conclusion, either for me or for you. Narrations and conclusions were written later, and were my attempt to organize and make sense of the thought I was having at the time. FYI not every section will have every type of paragraph.
Narration
Story
Conclusion
Table of Contents
Being Humbled.
Deferred
We adapted pretty well; we cut our spending back to necessities and really leaned on each other for support, but boy I'll tell you... perusing the housewares section at Marshall’s, knowing you can only buy the oven mitt you drove there for... is a position I hope to never be in again in my life. That sounds pretentious, but really it's a perfect allegory for how it feels, how it really feels, to be poor in America. You're in a place abounding, superfluous with objects begging to be consumed, objects on sale, on clearance, objects that can save you money, objects that can genuinely make your life easier - you can see and touch them like everyone else, and they still fit hazily into your dream of a better life - but you can't have them, they can't be yours. Your creativity is limited; your life is limited. Soon, you learn to stop perusing certain sections, then to stop going to certain stores, then to start revising your expectations. Your dream is deferred.
Lemme help you out; let’s back up.
Hit
I’m a Mechanical Engineer. I graduated from a prestigious school in May of 2013, and immediately moved with my wife to New Orleans while she went to grad school. It took from June to late September to find a job the first time (what seemed like an eternity then), and even still I was drafting for a Civil Engineering company, so it wasn’t exactly my calling. After a year and some months, the morning of December 19, 2014 to be exact, my boss came to my house on my day off, while I was under my car replacing the starter solenoid, and told me that the company would potentially shut down if they didn’t make cuts before the new year, and I was laid off that afternoon.
Now to be fair, we weren’t poor poor for a while; my wife was being paid a stipend for grad school and I took unemployment off and on (long story), so we were only doing a little worse than breaking even until she graduated in May. But after that, it hit. I was still working really odd jobs, mostly consulting, but you could hardly call it part time. I still had private transportation, we still had our apartment, and my earnings potential was still high, so it didn’t feel like we were poor, but even with unemployment, we were losing about $700 a month. The checking account was dwindling.
Then the hospital bill came back for our first born (conceived while still employed) ~ $1300. For the record, we had excellent insurance coverage, so our bill was well under 10% of the uninsured payment. We still couldn’t afford it. We called the catholic hospital’s collections department and they offered my sobbing wife the opportunity to name her price. She was honest, we paid what we could afford, and it was over. Then Sally Mae wrote us a letter. She was less hospitable, especially since the 2 of us had a combined 6 figures in student loans. We made due.
Luckily, I was blessed enough to have a friend ask me to help him out at his not-for-profit thrift shop while I tried to relaunch my career. And that’s where the story really begins. Let’s get back into the middle.
Health.
Food
The first thing to go is the diet.
It took about 12 hours of manual labor for me to revert to Rally’s as a default source of nutrition. $2.99 for a full meal justifies pretty much whatever you can throw at it. To be fair I was still eating well at dinner, but that was mostly in thanks to Erika; left to my own resources I'd only eat healthily if I gave myself time to prepare and nothing extra came up, which, in essence, was never.
I had to make this conscious effort to stay on top of the food pyramid during this temporary period of strife, and that’s what was weighing on me at the moment. See, I know the pitfalls of a poorly-rounded diet; just imagine how quickly personal health falls by the wayside when you’re uninformed and this period of strife is your status quo. The fact of the matter is, it's hard to make a case against fast food's "fullness : cost" ratio. And that's the single bottom line.
So my diet suffered, and my stress level increased. Mix in some serious manual labor and put it in the sun at about 95° for a couple months and you have the recipe for a classic southern anxiety soufflé.
Sometimes I wake up so completely overwhelmed that I accept these new conditions as rational, as if they're a natural conclusion to a life of overachievement. I was on a walk with Erika when I got a call back to set up an interview at a company I actually care about. After I hung up I just stopped and stared at my son; the relief was so surreal I realized I hadn’t actually been calm in months.
Stress isn’t depression, and it’s not unhappiness, those are side affects. How much stress you’re under influences how hard you have to work to not be those first 2, but they aren’t synonymous. Stress is the amount and intensity of things that are happening to you, multiplied by a factor of how in control you are of those things.
Relativity.
Materials
I’ve caught myself saying "that's nice" to things that come through the thrift store on multiple occasions. They weren't nice, they just weren't damaged. I mean, they were nice, but they weren’t nice, you know? They were made by machines, that someone needed an expert level of knowledge to create and control, but they were designed by someone who just wanted to make that product, not necessarily make that product well.
We found an all white basketball with a large, non-LSU tiger printed over 2-3 of the panels in a bin of donations. It was made of that crappy, recess-grade, plasticized rubber, half covered in dried mud, and was deflated to the point where you knew it was once inflated, but years of neglect had left it at an unbounceable pressure. I found it in the trash. Had it been a soccer ball I would’ve left it there, but I remember my best friend’s step-sister giving me a very similarly-built forest green NCAA Final Four edition basketball when I was a kid, and even though I had 3 other balls, and didn’t know what the Final Four was, I cherished that thing. We ended up using it as the money ball in 3 point contests for a while. Not but a year ago, I used an outdoor ball to the point where the “composite leather” had degraded and it became more slippery than I preferred, so I gave it to a kid in the park and bought a new one. Having both of those instances pop into my head within 5 seconds of picking the tiger ball up were enough convincing to take it out of the trash, wash and dry it off, and put it in the store for $2.
For some kid, it doesn’t need to be 7-9 lbs, composite leather, have recessed channels, or even be 29.5", it just needs to not have holes. Some things have value beyond their point of perceived obsolescence, and some were never valuable to begin with. Nice is relative.
Poverty, actually
More than occasionally at Restoration Thrift we get things donated to us that we can’t sell. Most of the time that stuff sits in the yard until we either throw it away or re-donate it. On rarer occasions though, Ben, seemingly being the maven of all-things philanthropy in New Orleans, will find a 3rd party in need of that thing, and we’ll take it to them. We don’t sell mattresses (they're just one of those things that can cause legal issues), but a woman named Miss Giles said she was in need of a few, so one Friday we ratchet strapped 4 sets of box springs, mattresses, and frames down into a mid-2000s Silverado, and drove it across the Industrial Canal overpass to New Orleans East.
Now when I say poverty actually, I don’t mean to insinuate that living slightly under the poverty line isn’t poverty, but there’s poor, there’s impoverished, and then there’s Miss Giles family. Mrs. Giles lives in the projects - not the new projects - the projects you didn't know were there because you thought that building was abandoned. I’ll spare you the details.
We waited for Miss Giles to get back to her "apartment" from work, and after sitting in the truck for about 5 minutes, one of the kids playing in the "corridor" walked up and asked “Are they for me?” I nearly instinctually said no, but before I got the word out Ben asked him his last name. “Giles”, he said, to which Ben responded “These are for you.”
8-year-old Mr. Giles made a face that a picture itself couldn’t capture. It was a mix of hope, joy, and surprise that I’ve never seen Christmas bring a child. And all I felt were tears that I couldn’t let out. He was elated to have a bed. A bed.
A bed.
Mrs. Giles was running late, so the maintenance man let us in the apartment and the kids playing in the corridor helped us bring stuff up the stairs. On the way out we had to check for any stray kids in their apartment (required by the maintenance man), and in the process caught a glimpse of the room the 3 kids stayed in. It was exactly as follows, with nothing omitted: clothes in 3ish piles, 1 old TV in the last open corner, and blankets on the ground. This wasn't a Sudanese poster-child for world hunger, this was a kid who lived 20 minutes away, who attended the school Ben started, whose mom had a job, and whose family cared for his well-being.
Nice is relative.
Relationships.
Marriage
Tight money is the thing to make or break a marriage. Even if you manage it well and do well with little, what erodes the peace is the judgment of what the other brings to the table; when you can’t afford to throw cash at the small things, it’s not who spends more that bothers you, but the value of the work you do in comparison to your spouse.
I came home and dirty dishes were still out, the living room was cluttered, and there were a few assorted items left here and there. The house was not dirty, but it was more entropic than when I had left it. After about 45 minutes of doing minute chores I was so heated that I couldn’t even speak to Erika, if I had spoken I would’ve yelled; I would’ve had a full next day of apologies. Matter of fact we still haven’t really addressed it.
The point I was too aggressively coming to in my head stands to reason that, as a stay-at-home parent you still have a job, you owe it to your significant other to keep the home maintained, or ideally, return it to them in better condition than they left it, since they are working full time to keep everyone in that home; it’s a matter of respecting their effort. Interactions like these are catalysts to overreactions, where patience serves as the limiting reagent in solving not just your state of poverty, but the integrity of your marriage. It’s easy for impatience to become poor communication to become resentment. Many times, it seems the effort it takes to keep 3 people well isn’t worth the benefit of having the extra 2 people.
However...
I’ve got to look at this through a clear lens, so let’s consider this venture without a wife. It should be said first that if I weren’t married I would never be in this situation. I would never leave a place without being sure that the place I was going next was a better move in the long run, i.e. I wouldn’t have moved to New Orleans, I wouldn’t have worked in Civil Engineering, I certainly wouldn’t have worked at a place where I wasn’t valued, and I wouldn’t have 2 other people depending on my decisions with such urgency, but that was the hand I played with the cards I was dealt.
That being said, if I somehow got into the situation I’m in now, sans family, I’d be… okay. I think I’d lean on friends a lot more heavily, I’d explore more geographic locations, and I’d naturally feel less pressure to provide, which would cut out the urgency and therefore some stress. But then I’d have to come home everyday, from whatever I was doing or trying to get going, to a vague sense of purpose. I’d be driven, but by different morals, which if I know myself, would lead to selfish decisions and bad habits; for instance, trying to cure loneliness by talking to the cutie with a nose ring wearing workout clothes in the grocery store, or trying to overcompensate for a loss of self worth by burying too much time and money in personal projects, or skipping church because sometimes it’s boring.
It’s not that I couldn’t do it without my wife and son, but it’s better with them; my boundaries are more opaque, and I live more intentionally as a result. And this may not be true for everyone; I have a few friends whose personal growth seems to supplement them in the way my family does me, but I’m sure they think about trading places every once in a while too.
Sex
If you’ve never tried abstaining, no premarital sex seems like the most ridiculous of concepts. If you have, it seems like the most ridiculous of tasks. Why Christians are called to that has been so misconstrued it makes it seem like we’re just making stuff up. Here’s how I know that’s true:
A side-effect of this new dependence on my spouse (and not needing contraceptives for a while) was that the intercourse has gotten *italian hand kiss* magnifico. Our mutual empathy and respect for each-other’s efforts has made us really like each other, and we’re comfortable enough with each other mentally to let our guard down and be honest about what we want. The trust we've garnered has paved the way to some conversations I’ve tried to avoid having with myself. Conversations about topics so intimate, they could only end in more sex.
Now at this point, I’ve explicitly said sex enough times that you’re starting to get comfortable with it. You started off a little nervous (or excited, ya freak), but now that I’ve mentioned all the emotional vulnerabilities with which its coupled, you know that I’m not just talking about sex for the topical allure of it. The stigma is falling away because you know that I know it’s not just a hollow act, when built on the series of commitments it takes to really make sex good, a holy act. See where I’m going with this? That’s how I know it’s been misconstrued, because the people who feel that anxiety to address it are the ones who should be reveling in it the most. Not for the sake of crudity - intimacy calls for discretion - but because it’s amazing, you earned it, and you should be elated to know that.
The biblical provisions around sex are not a series of rules meant for exclusion, they're an order of events that prepare you to handle the level of self-analysis that that level of vulnerability requires. If you skip a step, you're not condemned for disobedience, it’s simply that God's disappointed you're foregoing a fuller version of yourself for quick physical desires.
Empathy
Without a doubt, the most important thing I picked up from 11 months of funemployment was a sense of empathy. Before I got some, I didn’t care that I had none. And not just empathy, sympathy too. I had none of either. People had told me on multiple occasions that it was something I needed to work on. My view was, “Everyone starts somewhere, then they make decisions, which lead to particular circumstances. If those circumstances suck, that ’s on you. Live with your choices, and don’t expect people to feel bad for you."
Simple, and wrong. Wrong because I thought the point of empathy was the feeling bad part, that that was somehow supposed to be an effective action. I thought people were telling me that when someone was poor I was supposed to cure them with my tender eyes of understanding. "That’s dumb", I thought. It was dumb. It was dumb because it was wrong. Here’s what empathy looks like when you’re doing it right:
It was a regular afternoon at the Thrift Shop. We had a scheduled delivery for a local customer, so we loaded up their things, started up the fiberglass-and-steel-bodied, very diesel, debadged 1989 Uhaul, and went on our merry way. Now, because of a few surprise mishaps at the store, I had postponed putting gas in the truck. The needle was almost on the lower-most tick, which had proven to mean we still had about 25 miles left to go before we were stranded. Since we were running late for the delivery, and the residence was only a few miles away I told Niamiah, “Let’s do this one and I’ll get gas on the way back”. We got about 3 minutes out, to the nearest major intersection, the I-10 on-ramp underpass at Franklin, when the truck cut out in the left turn lane. I tried everything my Mechanical Engineer brain knew how to get it started again, but it was straight dead. The more I tried the more reluctant it was to do anything, so I called Ben and asked him to bring us some gas. This is my life.
Now luckily we weren’t stuck in the actual intersection, just the queuing lane, it was tepid weather, and there wasn’t much traffic at that time of day, so doing the responsible thing and showing my face to direct traffic around the vehicle wasn’t too embarrassing, but I still rather wouldn’t have. After about 20 minutes of that garbage Ben showed up with a small gas can full of diesel; we filled the tank, went through the whole routine to get it ready (old industrial trucks ain’t nothin nice) and turned the key. Whaaaawhaawha. "Surely this cannot be", I thought. "I’m so glad this didn’t work because that means it’s not my fault, but I really hope whatever we do next does, otherwise this is could get stupid expensive.” We tried to crank it again. Whaaawhaaaa. Straight up no, said the battery. Ben pulled his truck up onto the median and somehow maneuvered it close enough that we could go engine to engine for a jump. I won’t keep throwing rising action at you - it didn’t work. Nothing we did worked. So we called a tow truck.
The truck pulls up and the first thing we have to do is figure out where he’s gonna hook up, because since we were at the front of the left lane, if he tried to hook from the front, he’d have to block the whole intersection to do it, and who knows how long that’d take. So the next best option was to pull the truck backwards from the rear. Fine, except to achieve that, he’d have to head into oncoming traffic, and then back into an intersection. It took some coordination, but we got it done. He pulled up, and started to pull out his equipment when we realized, oh yeah, the truck’s leaking air-ride suspension won’t stay pressurized when it has no power, so the Uhaul had been slowly sinking to the ground, so much so that by the time the tow truck had gotten there, he didn’t have the clearance to use the prescribed method of towing. Eventually, he used what I would call a crane technique to lift the truck in the air while attaching some other stuff on the frame. So that part was finished. Now to get it to the shop.
We only had to make it less than a mile. One of the biggest issues stemming from living in a city whose roadways were designed for horse and carriage is that the thruways are very narrow. Once we arrived at the road the shop was on, we powered through some overhanging bushes and had to resolve the conundrum of how to back an 18’ Uhaul box truck with unusable power steering, attached to a full size tow truck, into a moderately sized gate running parallel to the sloped, decaying, narrow street, with cars parked on both sides. We blocked both sides of the street, talked it over and decided on a plan of attack. All said, it only took about 30 minutes, 2 extra trucks, a large black man with 1940s tractor driving hands, a guy named Cesar, and a person on each end of the operation blindly relaying directions to get it done.
I gained a huge appreciation for tow truck drivers that day. I hope they get paid $30/hr or more. The composure you have to maintain to accomplish that technical an operation under that much pressure is worth its wait in muscle.
Now you may say, “Garrett, that’s not empathy, that’s sympathy! You still don’t know what empathy is; you haven't learned anything!” To which I’d reply, “I’m not finished, stupid.” Sympathy is me proverbially tipping my hat to tow truck drivers now, empathy is what happens to your psyche because of it.
Later in the year the driver for Go-Minis, a storage pod company, had to remove two pods from the Thrift Store's unfit-to-maneuver-anything gravel backyard. The short of it is that it was very hard. Looking at him, he seemed like a simple man, but he executed that pick-up with such ingenuity I actually clapped at the end of it. Throughout the whole pick-up, I offered my assistance in directing traffic, clearing space for him, and hooking up equipment.
I extended that same courtesy to the trash man when he had to maneuver through our yard, because even though it was his job, it was difficult.
As a result, both Richard’s disposal and Go-Minis operate with Restoration Thrift on a personal level; they do each other favors that amount to hundreds of dollars in savings. And most importantly, people who live and work in the same city who would otherwise have no interaction, get to enjoy each other's company for the time they interact, instead of mulling through the task, waiting for it to end, and repeating that cycle endlessly.
It is better to assume people do things well and to help them in their endeavors, even if only a bit, than to tell them to do their job. That’s the value of empathy - breaking the cycle of disinterest.
Miseducation.
While this section was written within the 11 months, it was getting towards the end and I could feel it. I was starting to narrate the disparate thoughts with what I thought were conclusions. Upon reading back through everything years later, it's immediately obvious how much I was still in it.
Some thoughts were complete (regardless of whether I still stand by them), but many were very choppy. Rather than clean them up, I left them in their raw format. That inconsistency is, in a way, the clearest example of how I was experiencing time.
(Also, when looking at numbers, please remember it was 2015.)
Nobody Makes Bad Decisions
There's not poor and rich, there’s barely even smart and dumb - there is educated and there is uneducated.
Intelligence is knowing what you don't know. Self awareness. I always hated school, like really hated it. I remember being early in the year in 6th grade and just telling my mom how much I hated going to school. The social aspect was great, and I got great grades, but it always felt so unnecessarily deceiving to me. But what I didn’t know was-
"They're just lazy."
How can you not finish high school? Pretty easily it turns out. It's like waking up late every morning, it feels good now.
This patchwork of thoughts actually became the basis for a significant shift in my view of people. While I don't subscribe to the idea that "everyone's doing their best", I came to a similarly phrased conclusion: nobody makes bad decisions. The phrasing is cheeky, and the difference is subtle, but the nuance is important. Here's the concept:
The difference is in scope, or in non-engineering terms, perspective. Any person, faced with any decision, makes what they believe is the best choice. The counterargument is so obvious I won't even make it. The difference is in perspective. When someone makes what we would collectively call "a bad decision", they've actually run a quick pros and cons list and decided that whatever they're about to do is worth it. Whether they know that it's a decision that will ultimately hurt them or they're operating out of true ignorance, they have decided that their decision is gaining them something that's worth the cost. No one, when faced with 2 things, knowingly chooses the worse thing.
For example, let's say you see a guy shooting heroine. He knows it's heroine, he knows it's illegal, he knows it's costing him money and time and family and opportunity. He also knows how he feels right now. When faced with the decision of whether or not to do heroine, he has to decide which of those 2 things is more important.
When you see someone making a bad decision, remember that they're gaining something from it. There will be a gap in their pros and cons list that's telling them that the bad thing is worth the good thing. Most of the time their gap in perspective is not what they're giving up, but what they think they're gaining. Help them find that gap. Lead them to water.
The Minimum Wage
This will get testy, but I'm right.
I've seen a lot of my friends, even the smart ones, advocating for a $10/hr minimum wage. I've seen a few more advocating for 15. Their argument is to provide a "liveable wage" to anyone who works 40 hours a week. That is the wrong thing to do. It may seem ironic to be reading this a few paragraphs below a passage on empathy, but there is a subtle line between forgotten and tough love, and $10/hr crosses it. $15 is insulting; to pay someone to apathetically work a counter a teacher's salary defaces all of our forefathers efforts, and would be the demise of the economy as we know it. The minimum wage doesn't exist to provide livability, it exists to prevent employers from taking advantage of its employees, let's talk about how those things are different.
The first and very most important thing I can do is define value, in terms of the free market. It's a simple concept - how valuable something is determines how much money it's worth. It's true for objects, it's true for services, it's true for workers. But how do you determine value? Simple, rarity. How difficult it is to obtain something is the only thing that makes something worth more. Now that may be an intrinsic characteristic of the object, like how gold is expensive because you have to mine it out of the earth. Or that may be a created rarity, like how a Burberry sun umbrella is $225 because their history of good taste has overinflated the worth of tan with red and blue stripes. For whatever reason it may be, rarity, not even time, is the foundational principle of supply and demand, and it determines the value of everything we see and do.
So how does that apply to people? Simple. A worker's value is determined by how valuable they are to the place they work - in other words, their irreplaceability. And here's where the testiness comes in: if I can replace you with a person with no experience and get the same results, your value is the same as that of the person with no experience. It's hard to hear; it's even hard to say, but no business' responsibility is to care about its workers; it's to make money. People will argue the triple bottom line, to which I reply, "if there's no business, what good are the other 2 lines".
A business is not a corporation. A business is an entity that exists to make a product or service; from that you get employees / employers whose contractual obligation to each other is to pay / be paid, and work. If you can bust into it, the free market guarantees you that, and nothing more. America was founded on the principle that if you want more you have to do more work. Trying to shift the burden of providing basic necessities from communities to businesses is asking for socialism, which is a good system, but can never produce the kind of ingenuity that underlies American Exceptionalism, and therefore will never have a home in the American economy. The minimum wage is intended to make sure that those gaining supplementary earnings (e.g. high school students, part-time parents, retirees) are being offered a fair wage, not to be the sole provisionary sum to a family of four.
So what do we do about the folks who do the best they can with what they were given for 40 hours a week, and still need help. Simple. A new welfare. People need money to survive. (What they really need is resources, but if you give them that directly, you risk not fully instilling the value of choice.) People need opportunity to thrive. Give them both. Newer project housing seems to work really well to give poorer folks a seemingly higher standard of living, as long as its coupled with living obligations, but there should be a requirement to receive a monthly stipend (no more food stamps) - job training. How does a worker become more valuable? By increasing their irreplacability. How do you become more irreplaceable? (Beyoncés in my head too) By gaining specialized skills. How do you gain specialized skills? Education.
The goal of welfare is to get people out of welfare. If you are a non-dependent, working for minimum wage, your goal is to find a place that will allow you upward mobility, and then to mobilize, upward. Being poor doesn't exempt you from the struggle of having to earn promotions.
There's a lot of truth in this passage; there's also a lot of apathy.
The intention after writing this paragraph was to walk backwards from the cost of living for a middle class family to the cost of employing a minimum wage worker that produces the goods that a middle class family buys, and finally to show how directly those are linked. The general solution was to have basic goods produced by a rotating group of minimum wage workers, typically no older than 22, until they graduated to more advanced work with better vertical mobility.
In retrospect, again, that general solution is a diet version of socialism, which we already practice and wouldn't be outside the bounds of the American ethic. Our country is a certain way and it comes with consequences both good and bad. I'm not sure that we can ever reach a point where there is both no one below the poverty line, and we remain the ingenuitive, productive bunch that we are.
However, not missing the forest for the trees here, the point of keeping this passage in here was not to solve poverty, nor apologize for the harshness in tone. The point was to note that even within this state of poverty, this disparity was still front of mind. The status quo for both employee and employer doesn't serve us, and the feeling of unfairness for both sides is felt from both sides, despite the public narrative.
Unusually Comfortable.
Meredith's Funeral
I've always felt like I could be myself in the hood. You don't have to try so hard to be impressive, and it's a great opportunity to help.
Our friend from church, Meredith, died in her sleep. She was morbidly obese, but she was also in her late 20s. There were no other indications that this was going to happen; I saw her Sunday, and midweek I got a group text that read "our sister Meredith has gone to be with the Lord". I responded "What?!"
Meredith was a true delight; she was loud and caring, joyful and patient. She was like all the good parts of Lizzo. The week after she died, true to spirit, we threw her a jazz funeral. A second line gathered at the church steps, then circled the park 3 times in full Jericho fashion. We weren't best friends, Meredith and I, just church friends - but by lap 2 I was weeping. No one else but the man who, sitting on his porch watching the procession, proclaimed "it's gon be alright young fella", knows this. Him and now you. Truth be told I was tearing up pretty early in the walk, but when he said that, there was nothing left from which to abstain. I stopped at lap 2.
Positives
Trust, time. God. Without God I'd be angry in a different way. Defeated. Many uneducated believe in God, it's a criticism of the scientific. Defeated otherwise.
Above, written during a day of hard work, and below, written that evening.
There are few things in this world that feel as honest as manual labor. It’s farm to table. If you move a 30 pound bag of clothing to a sorting container, your back lets you know that it was you that made it happen, and the one-bag-smaller queueing pile lets you know that it was a job worth doing. Gravity has no bureaucracy, and the simplicity of that fact is rejuvenating. And I’m not foregoing the adage work smarter not harder, I simply believe there's something lost in the negation of that latter clause. As most of any technical job is computer or machine interfacing, white collar work’s primary constituent is analysis. These tasks are necessary to maintain a modern world, but not only is it mentally taxing, it’s desensitizing. There’s such a deep disconnect between work and the purpose of work that we’ve turned it into a noun, as if it’s something that can be attended, rather than done. Just getting out and working - throwing, lifting, directing, smiling, jumping, pointing, pricing, praying, closing, working - is a freedom that every human should experience. It’s the thing that teaches you to enjoy the moments in between successes.
It gets old though.
Advice
"The only way out is the way through"
-Robert Frost via Love Don’t Cost a Thing
Comparison
During our daily morning meeting at Restoration Thrift, the manager said "for those of you who were asking if you can use a passport as a form of ID, I checked and yes, you can." The day before, Mrs. Joy had asked us to bring our driver's license with our current address to submit for a document. After her public clarification, the group was silent for a moment, looking around.
I had found a 5 pack of Hanes plain heather grey cotton dad shorts in one of the storage containers. I asked Ben if they had a home; he said I could have them if I wanted. They were by far the tightest and shortest shorts I'd ever tried on, but I could work freely in them, and for some reason I just liked them. I didn't mind the risk. Embarrassing, but accessible, I wore them to the meeting.
The thrift store's mission wasn't to make money, it was to employ those who needed it and provide things for those who needed them. It was to serve the community. My co-workers weren't my peers. That dichotomy had created some tension because I felt the need to guide them while simultaneously being in their position. Despite that, we were friends.
After the long pause, Niamiah, in jeans and a durag, whispered to our friend, "who's azkin abouta pazzport"? Our friend, in sagging basketball shorts, paused for a moment, took the toothpick out of his mouth and answered, at full volume, "Who in here look like dey gotta passport."
I, in the long sleeve shirt that I had made, and the shorts that I had found, smiled, silently, facing down. I have smiled at the thought of that near monthly since that day.
The Things You Learn
We allowed ourselves to entertain the idea of leaving. In bittersweet reflection, I scribbled down some disparate parting thoughts.
There are a few things that don’t directly pertain to the conclusion of this story, and some might just be local problems, but they’re worth mentioning nonetheless, the first of which is manners. Injecting manners into an otherwise platonic conversation catches poor people off guard, and not necessarily in a good way. A little overpoliteness can get you flagged as inapproachable. Motivations are different. Aspirations are different. People are just weird because of that. Everything is broken. Seems like people don't know it's not supposed to be.
Spanish is very applicable. I used the Google translate app to live translate for a woman who needed a walker with wheels.
Spend 25 immediately. There was no hope of getting something better later so I just spent it when I could afford it ASAP. I adjust my expenditures to my current or projected income. It could work if you use that system, but most people who have the insight to employ such a system are rarely in this situation, so it's kind of self-fulfilling.
Directions are given by landmarks. Everything's been here so long, people just say it's this place on _ and _
Much more willing to share. To Jeremy and Brandon we're the rich kids. Joy's family buys food, Mrs Mary buys food.
I do what I've always done, be a liaison. I'm pretty good at making things, but I've found that there's an excess of inventors and a dearth of mavens. I bring worlds together; always have. I attributed a bit of it to being mixed, but that's neither here nor thur.
Moving On.
Job Hunting
I have a combined 12 months of interviewing experience, have not just revised but reformatted my resume 10-15 times, and have completed enough applications to the point where I don’t really have a good gage on a number anymore. Legally, I’m a professional job hunter. I don’t even submit applications through normal channels anymore, I find contact info for people who can get me through to an engineering manager, or at the least HR, and start a conversation.
Getting better at job hunting does not make it more or less enjoyable; whatever ease may come through experience is balanced by the frustration of repetition. You start to learn how often to remind which people that you’re waiting on an answer (because they definitely won’t get back to you in a reasonable amount of time on their own); you start reading applications in a very specific order, skipping any lines that list any personality traits, because it’s not what qualifications you have, it’s what experience you have, and how you are only matters once they let you in the door; and you start to push a little harder, confidently and humbly, but harder, because there’s really no time for second and third dates, you know after 1 whether or not you could see yourself getting married.
After a few months of dating around, you start to lower your standards - this one may not offer as much, that one may not come with benefits ;) this one may not dress very modern, but they all offer stability, which in times of desperation seems like it can replace true love.
Nearing month 10 of trying, truly, as hard as we could to make everything work, we decided to leave New Orleans. FMLA was ending; our resources were almost gone. I opened up my resume to other states and friends countrywide. Within a few weeks I had interviews in Texas and California. Texas flew me out; they made me an offer a week later. We accepted.
I wrote the following after receiving the offer:
This section has no real consequence, it’s mostly just a vote of sympathy and confirmation for anyone going through similar situations. It sucks, but hang in there.
stop being unprepared.
I walk around like I'm paid
Being poor is very different than choosing to be poor or live amongst them. Empathy vs. sympathy, don't pretend that you are them.
The Last Hurrah
November 22, coldest morning yet. we had $484.80, including a $3k gift from my parents. Everything was half in boxes. Sunday morning before Thanksgiving. Least to count, lets you love the most. You need to love, you need love.
Thanksgiving
Aaron and Monica's Katrina stories
We had lived there for nearly 2 and half years, and not one of our friends had detailed their experience with the great storm that brought us there. Being that it was the 10 year anniversary, it had come into conversation. Around a smoked turkey, mere hours after our son's first crawl, Aaron painted the concept of seeing water in places that water could never be. Ms. Monica recounted the months between when she had evacuated and when she could come back. In recollection, as a group, we took a walk down the bayou and along the river.
Like Jesus himself, three days later, we were gone.
The Head Down Years.
In the years after we moved, my submission for reflection was rescinded and replaced by a blinding resolve to, put nicely, provide stability, or put honestly, prevent what had happened from ever happening again.
I called this time the "head down years". I wish it were a metaphor. The bleaker reality is that there was a moment, maybe 1-2 years into this time where I realized I literally hadn't looked up in over 12 months. My body physically would not let me look at the sky, because a second spent in consideration would be a second wasted, and that was intolerable. It was no longer psychological; it was psychosomatic.
As you're reading, make note of the timeline; graph the frequency if you have to. Compare before and after. It's not for lack of desire that I'm just now finding an ending. This is what it took. That is the toll it had taken.
Coping
I now work for an engineering firm in Austin that designs systems for world class semiconductor fabrication labs.
It's been 4 months since I've thought about anyone's life but my own. It's a bad, completely necessary thing. I literally don't have time to sympathize, I have to spend every waking moment spinning a safety net.
I don't have watercooler chat. If ever there comes a time when my work is being questioned, I don't want there to be a single area where I was said to have done anything less than overperformed. I keep my shit tight.
To build this air tight life, I've overcompensated and ignored, pushed and broken people and things, burned through resources, killed all personal projects and hobbies, and shut off emotion, just to get through to some light at the end of tunnel, which now that I'm basically here, is very dim. I'm exhausted.
Raising a Child
G-
Managing Expectations
How many things you start, which systems are in place. If you expect to not be poor soon, you don't put "poor" systems in place, even though they're helpful ie work lunch practice
An Immigrants Perspective
October 1, 2018. I think we broke it. Some combination of XXBB UP DOWN LEFT RIGHT pregnancy, prayer, work, patience, sun and rain and everything just seems okay. I have no idea what all this was for.
Jan 2019, same feeling. It took about 3 years to overcome the worry garnered in 1.
Doubt
I've built a system where I don't have to trust God. I work hard enough that there isn't a second left to chance. We don't worry about money, but I've never been more lonely in my life.
New Bottom Line
It’s this simultaneous distraction and focus, this constant little spark of an idea that something is wrong. Every instance of the thought that, right now feels good, that you don’t have any immediate worries, is overruled by the thought that all this could be taken away in an instant. It’s this torturous dichotomy that you should constantly be working to get to a place where your stability can’t be stripped from you, but that when you arrive you won’t be able to enjoy it.
I’ve never been one to let a little stress affect me, but it gets to a point where the once miscellaneous column in your budget has to be subdivided and monitored, and you end up taking time away from exploring new options just to make sure you’re maintaining; that concept of "time well spent" just looms, knowing you can’t afford to adjust it. That’s stress.
You find out what you value most when your time and money are stripped from you. Sometimes it's not what you hoped, sometimes it's better than you realized, but either way, it happens fast.
Moving Back.
Writing this in late February, four months before we intend to return to the city for good, it is difficult to find a sense of summation. We lived in New Orleans for 2 years, 5 months, and 11 days; to date, we've lived in Austin for 8 years, 2 months, and 25 days - it could not feel more the opposite. The perspective through which I view Austin is as a temporary time of preparation to return to the home that evicted us.
Comparative Analysis.
We’re moving back to New Orleans in a few months, and the idea of going back to this place that drained our money after 7 years of work to form stability afterwards is, to put it plainly, concerning. It is one of the clearest God-following decisions we’ve made as a family. To a casual observer, it is a bad decision.
We were going through old files and I found the direct deposit slips from all the checks I’d earned from Restoration Thrift. I didn’t want to keep them forever, but I couldn’t let them go until I knew why I didn’t want to throw them away. Late last week (a few weeks later) I got a check from Arete, which is one of my GABSPACE clients in the semiconductor world. The comparison was notable.
Restoration Thrift
Date Amount
12/01/15 682.32
09/01/15 558.84
9/15/15 571.87
10/01/15 773.11
10/15/15 640.21
10/30/15 740.75
11/13/15 415.95
Over the course of 91 days I made a total of $4,383.05, this is averaging between 30-40 hour weeks. Compared to what I was making the 6 months prior, it felt so sufficient and I was grateful.
The check from Arete was for $5,530.55.
Subtracting for expenses associated with that invoice, my profit was $4,946.00. This invoice was for 46 hours of work over the course of January, for this single client. Through GABSPACE I've received much bigger checks for 1 month of work, so while I definitely am not ungrateful, this feels like the low end of what I should be making under these circumstances.
Strangely, these 2 periods of time feel similar. Although marked by drastically different circumstances, my attitude is that of sufficiency and assuredness because my heart is that of obedience.
Community
The mismatch in the feeling of time is from a lack of community. This is not the community's fault; it was intentional. As the direct result of the Head Down years, I made it clear that while we were here I intended to grow shallow roots. We do have our Texas circle but, as a standard, I was here to learn, grow, and execute. And execute I did.
I traded everything for it, but, through the grace of God I now run a business that, in the coming years, will move from an independent consultancy to a holding company whose job it is to employ my community.
When I look back at those 11 months I remember them fondly. They shaped me. They will forever keep me humble. Yet still, I wouldn't wish it on anyone. So my intention is to take the humility, and the understanding, and add the employment. See, it wasn't the lack of money that hurt me, it was the lack of hope. It seems like an unfair trade, money for hope, but, like water for chocolate, it is the the thing that decides the other things. The poor commiserate, but the others are miserable.
An ending.
To give a tidy ending would falsely assert that the end is tidy. I cannot in good conscience say that I'm happier. I can say with absolute certainly that I'm wiser, calmer, and endlessly capable. I feel prepared, in mind, body, & spirit, for whatever is to come.
And yet, through all that, my gauge for if I am who I should be comes back to this thing that I've been silently tracking since I left. The question is simple and the answer is anything but. "Have you learned what you were supposed to?"
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