Growing Up Poor: Money and Shame.

I grew up poor and in poverty. I grew up with intense shame about my lack of money. Poverty completely fucks up one’s relationship with money (I mean, obviously, right? You’d think so – but I didn’t know that!).

I’m not going to give you some spiel about how ‘money is energy’, and ‘all we have to do is manifest and believe’. That is for a Karen who can’t acknowledge how privilege functions in the world. What I will say is that, I am sitting here, having just paid the most I ever have in taxes because I just had a 6-digit year. In the past year alone, I cleared a personal debt, all credit card debt, a medical loan, and my student loans. And yet, I was able to save some money as well and start investments in a TFSA and RRSP account. 

This might all be normal or obvious to you but, to me, to a girl who grew up poor and had no idea what a savings account was until she hit her 20’s, this feels like a moment.

I grew up watching my mom live pay cheque to pay cheque, and struggle to feed and clothe us. While there were always presents under the Christmas tree, we always knew my mother was crushed under the weight of her surmounting debt, while buying dollar store finds to make sure Santa still visited. I heard about her debt and her money woes often, and by the time I was a pre-teen, I had to pitch in.

Money, and my lack thereof, was a great source of shame. Both growing up and into my adult years.

My relationship to money went from ‘I don’t have enough’ to ‘I finally have some, so I have to spend it all on other people’, to ‘holy shit I don’t owe anyone anything for the first time in 15 years’. (Are these the official three stages of changing your money mind? Yes, I’m sure of it.) I had to work hard to get to this moment: a moment where my relationship with money has completely revolutionized.

It’s not a pretty story. (reader: I cried a lot) 

I’ve written about starting work at 13, and eventually starting my own business at 27. So naturally, my relationship with money would have to evolve.

As a young teenager, watching my mom work multiple jobs throughout childhood with no spousal support and not taking any government support, I resented money. Money was my enemy: it sucked the life out of my mother, it took all my after-school hours away from me, it stole my weekends. I hated it, and I resented that I didn’t have enough of it, that we didn’t have enough of it, ever. Filled with so much rage and resentment towards money, when I got my hands on some (at $6.70 an hour – the minimum wage when I started working), I had to get my hands off of it.

So, I spent it.

I would dutifully hand some money over to my mother for rent, food, and phone bills and the rest would be spent on making me feel better. During my high school years, I worked four days a week, while managing a full course load. The outlet for my resentment was cute new underwear from La Senza (it was cool back then, okay?), lattes at Starbucks with friends, and on-the-go meals in between my busy work and school schedule. I lived off of Subway sandwiches and had a wicked smoking habit, spending $10 a pop on Belmont’s every few days.

At that age, and with that intense resentment, saving money had never occurred. Only when I wanted or needed something (a cute new dress, shoes, a larger cell phone plan, or my tuition for University), did I momentarily think about saving my bucks. None of it went into a savings account, and I was often in the red. After all, I used to think, why shouldn’t I spend it? It made me feel so bad, wasn’t it time it paid for me?

I’d love to say that by my twenties these attitudes shifted and I began to realize how much being alive cost. But they didn’t. Instead, these attitudes shifted over to spending money on drugs and alcohol. I remember one day waking up and literally thinking ‘you know what’s a good idea to make some fast cash? Being a bartender’. So, I saved up my pennies from working at the HMV (it was cool back then, okay?), and took a bartending course to get fully licensed and smart-served. Within weeks, I had a new bartending gig and started making bank.

 Here’s the not-so-fun part: My intense hatred and resentment towards money did not dissipate. It grew stronger.

Now, I was serving people who had more money than me. Getting them their fancy steaks, and making them their mojitos. How dare they have more money than me? And here I was, the backbone of their fun night out, making eleven dollars an hour. I felt like I was conning people into tipping me, and that was my retaliation against their cruelty for having more money than me. Fuck you for having more than me, I would think as I smiled and asked if they wanted another bottle of red wine.

With my foray into bartending, my addiction to lubricating the life experience also grew stronger.

Obviously, I couldn’t stop using and abusing money, when I was using and abusing alcohol. My abuse of money was an abuse of myself. I felt I did not deserve wealth – because I had no inner wealth. I was too busy being drunk AF.

By the time I got sober, I had little money or possessions to my name. I had been working for ten years in rudimentary, basic skill level jobs, bursting at the seams with wanting to be significant, and I have absolutely nothing to show for it. Not even a savings account.

The pinch of being poor really hit me once I was sober. My resentment towards money and everyone who has it was ever-present, glaringly obvious to anyone who had eyes. But for me, I could no longer drink it away.

When I started my business at 27, I thought things would naturally just be different in my relationship with money. I thought, maybe if I had some, then it wouldn’t be so bad, and I wouldn’t be so angry and enraged – I wouldn’t feel ‘less than’ all the time.

 My business was successful. Within my first year of business, I broke the six-figure mark and gained international clients. I had clients contacting me from all over the world, inquiring about my business and my work. I scaled my business up, secured a strong team, and focused on steady, easy-does-it growth.

But within a year, I found myself without, once again: No savings account, a racked-up credit card, and no idea how to save, prepare for the future, or invest. All I knew was want. I was eyeball-deep in debt, between my personal and business credit cards, and unsure of the way out of the dark, high-interest rate tunnel.

I realized at this time, that maybe I had been approaching the money thing all wrong. My very loving boyfriend sat me down and said: just because you have some money, it does not mean you need to treat everyone to dinner.

Pardon me?

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you need to. That means buying your friends their coffees when you go out with them every other day.

Excuse you?

This entire time, I had been afraid to hold on to money of any sort, because I learned very early on that money always seems to leave any way.

Growing up poor, you have no choice but to spend the little money that you make: groceries, bills, electricity, rent. I remember scraping together money for friend’s birthdays thinking ‘I hope I will have enough to eat this week’ – but never once did it occur to me that it doesn’t have to be like this. I would throw $200 in a card on my way to a friend’s wedding, feeling the intense shame that I was down to five dollars in my bank account. I was raised living pay cheque to pay cheque, and I did not understand that it could be anything else. (I’m not the only one with poverty shame, see? It’s a real thing. I’m not making this up.)

For the past twenty years, I have never once been without a job.

And it is only in the past two years that I started saving any of my income. I am not proud of this fact – but I am no longer ashamed to talk about the poverty I have lived in.

Starting, having, owning, and running a business taught me a lot about the value of money. It taught me about demanding what I am worth, and not taking on pittance where pittance feels unacceptable to me.

The truth (for me) is and always has been that money isn’t just energy. Money is a conditioned relationship and response, typified by my past experiences. My understanding of money is inherently connected to the money blueprint created in me in my formative years. With this blueprint, I continued to build a house, once I began to make my own money, reinforcing everything this blueprint taught me. The unfortunate fact is that the foundation built from this blueprint was either completely unsteady, full of cracks, or like that half-assed job your cousin does as a favour.

In my late twenties, I had to rewrite my foundational understanding of money and its relationship to me before trying to earn some.

Only then, was I able to demand my worth, and see the value in saving and investments. I had to get uncomfortable in investigate the stories I told myself about how much I deserved such as the following hall of fame winners: money will come but it will go faster, going in to debt will make you happy because you can buy things, debt is normal and you will always have it.

After astute investigation, a couple of big, snotty cries during a few tax seasons and calls with my accountant, I began to feel the release of poverty shame.

Revolutionizing what money means to me is, of course, ongoing. I haven’t veered completely in the opposite direction where I don’t buy ANYTHING, but I will say I cook more meals at home. I have learned that I can nourish myself with money and my savings habits. I can handle my investments as a way to nurture myself. I can stop hitting the panic button when a letter from the CRA comes in the mail. I can find a reasonably priced course online and consider my options.  

After living in poverty for almost three decades, I can, and do, believe in the value of investing in myself.