I was born poor. My mom was a high school dropout and my dad always struggled with addiction. When I was born, my parents bought their first house as teenagers. The got divorced when I was around 7 years old. My dad went homeless and my mom had to scrape by in a cheap apartment in the bad part of town. I remember my dad selling plasma just to get enough money to buy food when I would go to see him. There were times neither parent had money for me to get a haircut. I was growing quickly in middle school and never had clothes because neither parent could afford anything, not even at salvation army. I grew up in that fucking shit so I am more experienced than anyone to talk fucking shit about people in poverty. There are two fucking god damn ways a child perceives poverty when they are there. You either fucking sit there and do nothing and blame the world being against you, or you realize that shit fucking sucks and you break the god damn cycle of generation after generation of fuck ups. My thought was either I am going to die in the same cycle of bullshit claiming everyone is against me, I will die trying to claw my way out, or I am going to succeed in life and not be apart of that. I wanted to at least die trying and that's what broke the cycle.

My family tree on my mom's side is a tree of fuck ups, addiction and poverty. My dads side of the tree? Who the fuck even knows, he was adopted in the 60's because his birth mother who (imagine this) fucked up and had a baby out of wedlock and was poor so who the fuck knows what the side is like but if I had to make a bet I would say probably generations of fuck ups. His adopted family passed away before I was born so who the fuck knows about them. I broke the cycle by not getting married in my teen years, not having children, and not going into debt with items you can't afford.