#PovertyIs Broken Connections
The stigma of having nowhere to turn
How does someone become an island, untethered with no clear place to go in a time of desperation?
In June of 2015 I was in a similar spot to the one I’m in now: faced with a promised safe harbor offered by a friend that left me on the precipice of being stranded in a state where I had/have no safety net, no connections. Weeks from having nowhere to live, my health is precarious enough that it’s not hyperbole to say that it is now as it was then: a life or death emergency.
I was so desperate in 2015 that I started talking on Twitter about being poor — grabbing hold of the stigmatized word with both hands and owning it. I was scared and angry enough to risk the perceptions of my competency and professionalism, knowing that in this country we see poverty as a moral failing that can’t happen to good people, educated people, smart people. The stories on #PovertyIs became powerfully repetitive: I immediately saw that we are a hidden, but huge ‘minority’.
After a decade of being open about financial insecurity despite the appearance of significant privilege (I’m white and educated and experienced with masking — aka improvising), my thoughts now immediately go to one of the first things I learned when I came out of that first closet in early 2015: most people don’t think they know anyone who is poor.
If we collectively think of poverty as rare and off-putting, then it’s easy to presume none of our friends or neighbors are in need of our care, compassion, and help.
More cynically, if we think it’s rare then we don’t consider it could happen to us and that disconnect creates an empathy deficit — a chasm across which those of us actively falling through the cracks cannot reach. From this place, all it takes is one misfortune — an illness/disabling event, a breakup, a job loss, a house fire — and we’re in free fall.
What if we don’t have an inner circle when that happens? What if we don’t belong to anyone when we can’t land on our feet? What if our financial barriers, disabilities, and traumas created insurmountable hurdles to the sustained intimate connections that offer a safety net when we are scared and in need?
What happens to those of us no one feels responsible for?
After a decade in free fall, I’m finally about to find out.
In December of 2015, I wrote a piece for The Establishment — “When The Poor Get Taken Advantage Of By Friends And Family” — about how I wound up being taken in by a stranger from Twitter who saw my #PovertyIs conversation highlighted by a mutual friend/colleague.
Why doesn’t anyone ever hear about these stories? Because despite 49 million Americans living with food insecurity, the poor in the U.S. are largely invisible. No matter the state of the economy, 12–15% of Americans are poor enough to be hungry at any given time; we’re just too politically inconvenient to show up in stump speeches and debates, and too exhausted from poverty logistics to advocate for ourselves.
I was blown away by the numbers. If there are so many of us, how can we not realize there are so many of us?? Esther Bloom at The Billfold reached out when the hashtag went viral to ask me exactly that.
“Katie Klabusich Talks Twitter, ‘Broke’ Vs ‘Poor,’ And Being Trapped As An Unpaid Nanny
On the lived experience of #PovertyIs”:
For the piece I did on the hashtag after it happened for ‘.Mic’ I looked up some polling stats — studies done to see what people thought of welfare “reform” (aka destruction under Clinton). Most people thought it had worked because almost 80% of people don’t think they know a poor person. Chew on that. 15% of our neighbors can’t be sure they’ll eat next week, but most people think they don’t know anyone.
I detailed and linked to the studies at the article for .Mic I referenced in my chat with Bloom:
49 Million Americans Live With This — So Why Are We So Uncomfortable Talking About It?
A comprehensive NPR/Kaiser/Kennedy School Poll in 2001 followed up on the perceived successes and failures of former President Bill Clinton's welfare "reform" in the mid-'90s. (Clinton's overhaul reduced eligibility so drastically that the number of poverty-stricken Americans receiving cash assistance dropped by two-thirds from 1996 to 2012.) In just the five years between the legislation and the poll, responses indicate that many think fewer beneficiaries equals fewer poor people — backing up the anecdotal Twitter experience on the #PovertyIs thread: 50% of Americans are sure that none of their close friends are poor; 63% of Americans think there are no poor people in their immediate or near extended family (aunts, uncles, first cousins, grandparents); a whopping 76% of Americans can't conceive that they might know someone at risk of going hungry tomorrow; and 65% of Americans don't even think they know someone who's been late on a bill.
You should know that these stats haven’t changed; one in six Americans currently lives with food insecurity. September is Hunger Action Month, spearheaded by the stellar charity Feeding America. You’ll see me promote charitable organizations very rarely as very few funnel resources effectively to those who need them most. Feeding America, however, is exceptional with 98% of donations being directly distributed, resulting in over 5.3 billion meals to every corner of the country.
Volunteers to unbox, sort, and deliver food are needed. If you’re able to give your time, SIGN UP to be a part of caring for your neighbors.
When I learned how many of us there are I began to consider — in what I now know is my distinctly Autistic style — that perhaps language itself was at least part of the visibility problem. Surely people couldn’t be so callous that they innately do not care, right? I could hear it in casual conversation — the flippant way we toss around the words that those of us who need help use to feel around for who might be receptive to us reaching out. When words are watered down, we just wind up talking past each other.
My Truth out.org editors were kind enough to let me explore this possibility in a news analysis piece about words and the way that their mis/overuse leaves those who need them with no way to communicate when they’re in need.
“Pathologizing the Poor Reinforces Stigma While Deterring Advocacy and Public Policy
The poor don’t rate a mention in our public consciousness or political campaigns because we are inconvenient and pathologized.”
“Broke” and “poor” were my targets at the time. I’d grown angry listening to people forgoing summer vacation or putting off that big screen purchase casually mentioning “eh, too broke right now” while I was too broke for a beer or a coffee — too broke to maintain friendships or pursue romantic interests. Too broke to build lasting connections because the bar to participating in social activities was always too high and mentioning free options created awkwardness every single time. Eventually, illness would play a part, further distancing me from friend groups as I was forced to decline invitations that grew more scarce.
Over a decade of being open about my poverty status, I’d been pushed further to the periphery of both personal and professional groups. Why bother to even invite me if I was going to have to say no — it made the asker feel bad, awkward, guilty. People don’t like being reminded that they’re one unexpected illness, layoff, house fire, or accident from being one of us. They prefer to think of poverty as a moral failing, one they can avoid by hard work and personal choices and disability as too rare to worry over.
While the “middle class” is exalted in political discourse and pandered to in policy, the inconvenient working and disabled poor stay marginalized through intentional erasure. Our numbers are deflated in part by drawing the official “poverty line” at $15,060 (pre-tax) annually. When people can qualify for assistance with food and healthcare at double this random line, why aren’t we re-drawing it if not to maintain the illusion that the poor are too few to worry about?
Food and housing prices have skyrocketed since my Truthout.org article. According to the USDA, food prices rose an unprecedented 25% from 2019 to 2023. In 2022, the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University reported that half of renters spend over 30% of their income on housing. Single-person households are in particularly precarious circumstances with no room for error or even a minor emergency.
Middle class families are finally also noticing bigger and bigger percentages of their income going to necessities with grocery bills ballooning. And while the majority of people pretend that the pandemic is over, the cost of COVID has only begun. Earlier this year, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported that ONE in THIRTEEN adults in the U.S. showed symptoms with the estimated lost wages annually equaling $170 billion.
And still political discourse and news reports focus on the future comforts of the fabled and shrinking middle class, making my words from 2015 even more true today:
The poor, however, need immediate assistance in the form of life-sustaining necessities like shelter, food and medical care. While the middle class can consider which candidate has the best plan for keeping Social Security solvent or the best green energy proposal to keep the planet habitable in 100 years, we need basic services right now to fill the gaps to put a basic level of wellness and stability within reach.
As long as we’re seen as the group tagging along right behind the middle class, the poor will continue expending all available energy just to stay alive with nothing left to change our circumstances. We are human beings living in the richest country on the planet; resources are plentiful enough that none of us should be hungry or sick.
And once you become hungry and sick, regaining your footing only gets more and more expensive.
My illness coincided with COVID, but wasn’t caused by it directly. As people sheltered in place with immediate family and partners, those of us without permanent, intimate ties watched as we became islands.
My fear of becoming an island had kept me in abusive relationships my whole life — ones where I did the work of repairing other people’s transgressions.
When I was 12, I learned there was a significant possibility that debilitating, life-ending illness could show up in my early twenties. In 1991, there was no genetic testing — and there wouldn’t be until I was well past the age range where the disease that killed my birth father begins showing signs. I underwent a year of invasive, ultimately inconclusive testing for Wilson’s Disease in secret, forbidden by my adoptive mother from telling anyone about it and learning through that to be ashamed and afraid of the possibility that I would become a burden. (Wilson’s patients now have treatment options that were not developed until after it likely would have taken my life.)
My parents’ reactions hardly offered evidence that I’d be able to impose on them if Wilson’s developed and our individualistic culture indicated that only a committed romantic relationship might offer the kind of support my life might depend on. “In sickness and in health,” as it were. I didn’t know how to develop secure, loving relationships, though — in part because of my undiagnosed Autism and in part because of my environment and subsequent cPTSD.
I separate those in my mind somewhat — my environmental abuse and isolation growing up and my innate, inherited neurocomplexity ADHD, Autism, and giftedness (a problematic term beyond the perceived humble-brag of claiming it, I know, but it’s a component of my neurodevelopmental wiring). But, like most late-discovered AuDHDers (shorthand for Autistic and ADHD both), even a ‘supportive’ 1980’s childhood would’ve likely resulted in complex PTSD from the abusive cultural norm requirements of trying to navigate a world where sensory input and behavioral expectations create an internal storm that isolates and paints a target for bullies.
At 45, my communication and interpersonal challenges are, therefore, complex and I often don’t realize someone is untrustworthy until my pattern tracking skills note a change in behavior — an experience I share with a lot of mid-life discovered Autistics, especially those of us who were socialized as girls growing up.
A study at the National Library of Medicine in Maryland titled “Experiences of interpersonal victimization and abuse among autistic people” did the inexcusably rare work of speaking with actually Autistic people, going beyond the statistics while also summarizing our experiences effectively here:
Autistic people are more likely to have negative life experiences than non-autistic people, from bullying and ostracization, to being victims of crime, to unemployment and homelessness. This includes being victims of intimate partner violence, sexual assault and domestic abuse. Quantitative work has suggested that as many as 90% of autistic people experience these forms of abuse in some form during their lives…
I highly recommend the book “Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism”, an essay collection compiled by the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network for a compelling and diverse read into the first-hand experiences of what Autism feels and looks and sounds like from the inside when you don’t know your neurological make up is different from your peers.
While you certainly can have the sense that you aren’t experiencing the world in the same way as those around you, what you can’t know is that your difference is valid and that, while you may be rare, you certainly aren’t alone.
In the words of the late author-advocate Steve Silberman (“NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity”) as he explained it on Twitter in 2018: “One way to understand neurodiversity is to think in terms of human operating systems - just because a PC is not running Windows doesn't mean it's broken."
The intense and increasing fear of being entirely alone taught me to overlook red flags during my life and when I lost the ability to speak (verbally or via text) in early 2021, the last of my tenuous connections were severed. As my health deteriorated to a point where my current clinicians agree it’s unclear how I survived at all, no one intervened. No one checked on me; no one missed hearing from me enough to investigate whether or not I was OK.
I realized over 2021 and 2022 that my longest running fear had been realized: I wasn’t integral to anyone’s life.
And that in and of itself makes me my own red flag in our culture.
Award-winning writer, comedian, actor, and musician Lane Moore’s book “You Will Find Your People: How to Make Meaningful Friendships as an Adult” changed how I viewed myself and instantaneously made self-compassion possible as I devoured it in one sitting the week it was released in April 2023. She routinely rants about the stigma of having struggled with friendships on Instagram and while these posts can’t change my circumstances overnight, they are an infusion of self-love that remind me I’m not alone in being alone. A recent thread:
Stop saying "they don't have a huge friend group so they're probably unlovable/damaged/broken" it is so harmful and cheap and inaccurate! So many times someone has a bunch of friends and guess what? They're not great people and their friends aren't either!
And sometimes people have very few friends because they've been hurt a lot and so they're picky as hell now. Which is smart!
So let's stop judging or belittling someone based only by their friends or lack thereof ok? Ok👯♀️
I couldn’t rec her book more highly and encourage seeing her various talents live, following her on your preferred social media, and supporting her current and upcoming projects.
Knowledge and other people’s stories can only take me so far, however. Finding my people now that I know they’re out there is a journey I don’t have time for. Not being alone statistically is a far cry from having refuge literally. While I fully qualify for Social Security Disability resources (SSDI), it’s a complicated process of building proof through a 4-7 month application (the average time SS says it takes to review). I’m going to run out of road unless a friend of a friend somewhere extends a life saving hand in the next few weeks so I can survive that stretch.
On my birthday last month, a college friend I’ve been working to reconnect with sent a care package.
Zebras are the mascot for invisible and rare illnesses, a joke amongst the chronically ill because in school doctors are taught the saying: “when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.” This leads them to brush off and gaslight symptoms (or actually laugh out loud like mine did ) and means years or decades without answers or treatment for, as it turns out, a rather ironically large slice of the population.
According to the National Institute of Health, 25 to 30 million Americans have a disease or illness designated as rare — collectively making us not rare at all. I’m like most of these patients who: 1) spend tens of thousands of hours researching 2) see doctors who at best refer us to long wait lists with specialists, but often just scold us and send us home without hope or testing, 3) eventually by process of elimination manage to connect online with other people who share similar medical history and experiences.
Over mid 2022 through early 2024, I finally pieced my symptom Venn diagram together. I have a mix of: sensory processing disorder, auditory processing disorder, Autistic clinical burnout (not to be confused with colloquially referenced career, etc burnout), Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), and a form of dysautonomia called Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS). I’ve qualified for Medicaid, made it through a nine month assessment that erases the rampant inaccuracies in my medical records, officially diagnoses the processing disorders and burnout, and paves the way to pursue official hEDS and POTS specialists — hopefully shortening the typical six year delay that POTS patients endure due to its common co-occurrence with my now diagnosed conditions.
The answers and treatment I’ve been after for 25 years are on the horizon. I very much hope I’m here to experience it.
