Out the Mud: The Grace of Growing Up Poor

Project Baby

Poverty isn't just a financial state; it's also a culture, an identity, and a mindset. As such, getting out of poverty isn't just a matter of gaining more money; it is more about understanding one's relationship to money and learning how to disconnect one's value from the amount of money one has. Social classes have existed since the dawn of civilization and are a reflection of our inherent desire to separate and place ourselves above others in an attempt to guarantee our own security. This means that wealth not only has a physical benefit but also a psychological one, as it coaxes our egos into believing that money somehow guarantees survival, which locks those without much money into a state of perpetually fighting to, and feeling as if they are failing to, survive.

Being locked into this survival mode is how I spent most of my childhood and the first half of my twenties because I inherited the set of beliefs that perpetuate poverty from my mother. It wasn't until she passed, and I had to re-identify who I was outside of her, that I began to understand that I am not poor. Though my mother spent the majority of her time worrying about how bills would get paid and how meals would be made, the fact that we never slept on the streets and never died of starvation is proof that we were never as poor as my mother believed herself to be.

My mother was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, in a housing project made infamous by Jay-Z (fun fact: my mom dated Jay-Z's brother Eric for a while when she was a teenager) called "Marcy Projects". If you're unfamiliar, a housing project is a government-subsidized residential development designed to provide affordable housing for individuals and families with limited financial means. In other words, the projects are low-income housing which are typically populated by less-educated and more marginalized people from the 'lower class' of society. My family is originally from rural South Carolina and the only reason my mother ended up in Brooklyn is because my Grandmother's ('Granny') husband moved to NY from SC in the 60s for work which meant that my mother and her four sisters were all born and raised in the concrete jungle.

Even before moving to Brooklyn, my family had humble beginnings. Before meeting her husband, my Granny, her parents, and her 9 siblings were all sharecroppers who spent the bulk of their days and weeks picking cotton and growing other produce in the South Carolina sun for a share of food and nothing more. So, it's fair to say that material wealth was never a part of my ancestry, though hard work and perseverance certainly were. After getting pregnant with my older brother, my mother decided that she didn’t want to raise her kids in the chaos that was New York City in the 80s, so she and my Granny moved back to Laurens, South Carolina, in 1986 to another housing project that was much smaller in scale compared to Marcy but shared many of the same issues. This housing project, Laurens Terrace, would become my first home four short years later and would have a profound impact on how I saw my family, myself, and the world around me.

Similar But Not The Same, Shrunk & Filled with Shame

On his verse on the remix to "Throw Some D's", Andre 3000 said a line that resonated with me and, I'm sure, so many other Black kids from the hood: "Ain't a hood nigga, but a nigga from the hood. See, mama stayed on me so I turned out pretty good". What many people who didn’t grow up in the 'hood' don’t understand is that not everyone in the hood has hood sensibilities. It’s easy to assume that everyone in low-income neighborhoods is either a victim or a victimizer looking for handouts and quick come-ups. It’s easy to assume that everyone in low-income neighborhoods is willing to resort to crime to make ends meet and will do anything to avoid working for what they get. But my family was the furthest thing from the stereotypical low-income family.

It was drilled into my brother and I early and often that we were not like the other "terrace kids" and we were very seldom allowed to play with them unless my mother knew and had good relationships with their parents. My family is very religious and has been for as far back as I can remember which meant that 'sin' was always a looming threat that was to be avoided at all costs and my mother was very invested in ensuring that we wouldn't get involved with kids who might lead us down the wrong path. My family worked extremely hard for every thing they had and though we did have to rely on government assistance from time to time, it was only because our own efforts were often not enough to make ends meet and not because we were unwilling or unable to make our own efforts.

Though my mother regularly exclaimed that we were 'broke,' 'poor,' and that she often 'didn't know how she was going to pay these bills,' realizing that we relied on government assistance was one of the first indicators that drove home to me that I lived a different lifestyle than many of my classmates. I discovered that not every kid at school ate lunch for free when, one day in seventh grade, I stood in the lunch line behind two girls from my class, one Black and one White. The Black girl started bragging to the White girl that 'she gets her lunch for free.' The White girl, shocked, exclaimed, 'What?! You're on free lunch? Haha, you're on welfare!' to which the Black girl defensively replied, 'No I'm not!' in the way a kid who's been accused of something they don't fully understand would.

Overhearing this interaction made me shrink because I was on free lunch too and had been for as long as I'd been in school. Up until that point, I thought getting lunch for free was a good thing. Though I didn’t fully understand what welfare was, the tone my White classmate used made it clear that it wasn’t something socially desirable. From that point on, I felt extremely ashamed of having free lunch and went to great lengths to make sure no one found out I was on it.

A similarly shameful experience had happened two years earlier with my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Barksdale. We were preparing for an overnight class field trip to Charleston, SC, in the coming weeks. Since Charleston was on the other side of the state and we’d be staying in a hotel for a couple of nights, the trip was quite expensive, and my mother couldn’t afford to send me on her own. Fortunately, the school had a program to help lower-income students attend by receiving support from members of the community, and I qualified for this assistance.

One day during lunch, my friend Stanley had been put on lunch detention, which meant he couldn’t buy any snacks from the lunch lady’s stand, so he asked me to buy him a bag of chips. I felt bad for him, so I took one of the quarters I had and bought him a snack-sized bag of chips for 25 cents. Mrs. Barksdale noticed this exchange and took exception to it, likely because she felt I was undermining her authority. She walked over to me and whispered in my ear, 'If you need other people to pay for your field trip, then you shouldn’t have enough money to buy other people food.' This made me feel so small, and I honestly wanted to break down crying right then and there, but I didn’t. Instead, I waited until I got home, and when my mother asked me what was wrong, I told her. Anyone who knew Delores Irby would tell you that she does not play—especially when it comes to her kids. So, she immediately drove to my school to confront Mrs. Barksdale about what she said to me in a conversation I wasn’t privy to, but let’s just say that Mrs. Barksdale’s attitude toward me was much more cordial from that day forward.

The most shameful experience I had about living in poverty came from one of my own 'friends.' Right before the start of sixth grade, my mom, brothers, and I moved to a small trailer park in a 'not-so-good' part of town. This was a huge accomplishment for my mom because we’d spent the past year living with my Granny while my mother worked to get back on her feet after her engagement to my younger brother’s father fell through. I have to say, I was not excited to move to our new home in this single-wide trailer at all. Although I didn’t fully understand socio-economic statuses at that age, I knew that single-wide trailers were typically reserved for the poorest people in the community, and the fact that we were moving into one really drove home just how poor we actually were.

Sixth grade is also when I started a program called C.H.A.M.P.s, which was designed to ensure that 'at-risk' youth with college potential actually ended up going to college. As part of this program, we were assigned mentors who were college students and they would take us to do activities now and then during the school year. One day, my mentor called and told me he was coming to pick up me and a couple of other students from the program to go bowling. While I was excited about going bowling, I was filled with dread at the thought that my mentor might pick up my friends before me, which would expose to them that I lived in a single-wide trailer—a fact I’d been trying so hard to hide from them. Of course, my mentor picked up the other kids first, and when he arrived at my trailer, my two friends watched as I walked out of my single-wide trailer home. Trying hard to hide my shame and embarrassment, I got into the car, and we made our way to the bowling alley.

At first, everything was going pretty well—we were all having a good time, and I started to think that maybe living in a single-wide trailer wasn't such a big deal to them. That is, until my smart mouth got me in trouble, as it often did. One of my friends wasn’t the best bowler, and I made a joke about her bowling gutter balls. She responded, 'Well, at least I don’t live in a trailer!' which made my other friend burst out laughing. I could have died, lol. As a kid, what your friends think of you holds so much weight, and I think we all created narratives about our lives that didn’t accurately reflect what actually happened inside our households, just to maintain the all-important social image.

But now, I couldn’t hide my family’s financial situation anymore because my friends had seen what my home looked like with their own eyes. I was terrified they would tell everyone else in our program, including my crush, and that I’d be ridiculed as the 'poor kid' from then on.

These experiences are just a few of many shameful memories around poverty that planted seeds of self-hatred deep within me—not just hatred of myself, but of my family, our circumstances, and the experience of being poor. This had a significant impact on my self-worth, self-esteem, and self-image for years to come. You see, money is not just a means to buy goods and services; it is also a socially agreed-upon representation of value. These experiences ingrained in me the belief that my family, and by extension myself, didn’t have much money, which inevitably made me feel like we didn’t have much value either. This sentiment negatively influenced many of my relationships—not just with others, but also with money and myself for years.

I felt called to share these experiences because a child is no less human than an adult; in many ways, children are more human. So, it makes no sense to discount the experiences we had as children as insignificant, because in doing so, we cheat ourselves of the ability to understand why we behave the way we do as adults. We erroneously believe that what made us feel ashamed as children magically disappears once we become adults but that isn't at all true. Which is precisely why when a rapper from the hood all of sudden gets a lot of money, the first thing they do is buy tons of expensive chains, cars, and other items—to soothe the ashamed and wounded child deep within themselves and prove to that child that they aren't as worthless as their circumstances led them to believe. And even for those of us who aren't famous rappers, the shame surrounding living in poverty as children often influences us to participate in consumerism and to live above our means in order to overcompensate for still feeling poor deep down on the inside.

No Mud, No Lotus — Thich Nhat Hanh

Despite all the pain & suffering that growing up poor brought me, I'm extremely grateful for my humble upbringing and if I had a choice, I would never choose to have grown up with more money. In fact, I'm of the belief that IF one has the means to move up in social classes throughout their lives, the lower class of society is the best class to be born into. And that is because being born in the lower class and experiencing elevation into higher socio-economic statuses gives one the broadest perspective of the human condition which grants one the valuable ability to relate to and empathize with people from all walks of life.

It bores me to hear people speak about 'generational wealth' in terms of money only because coming from a family with money in no way, shape, or form guarantees that someone will be a good human or have a good life. In fact, I think there's more than enough evidence to support that being born with a silver spoon in one's mouth often gives people a sense of superiority which makes them menaces to society as opposed to healthy contributions to it. Having a lot of money doesn't make you a good person — in fact, it gives you a lot of incentive not to be. Privileges often act as disabilities in how they create a gaps in our awareness and in our development as decent human beings.

People who are born monetarily wealthy will never know the joys and deep bonds birthed from overcoming seemingly impossible odds with people you care about. People who are born monetarily wealthy will never know the sweetness of having to rely on a friend's kindness for a meal and being able to return the favor. They won’t experience the pride of fixing something with their own hands because hiring help wasn't an option. They won't understand the type of appreciation & humility that comes from shopping at thrift stores or receiving hand-me-downs and literally having to walk in someone else's shoes. They may never experience the creativity that stems from resourcefulness—learning how to make $20 stretch for a week, how to breathe new life into old items, and the magic of making something out of nothing. They won't know the courage that is birthed from regularly confronting spiders, or roaches, or rats, or gunshots, or simply the fear of going to bed hungry. They’ll never know the community that comes from pooling together with family and neighbors to make ends meet, nor the humility that grows from knowing that no one is actually 'self-made' and to survive in this world requires either collaboration with, or exploitation of, others.

Being front loaded with so much shame around not having a lot as a child has made me invulnerable to feelings shame around doing whatever I need to do to make ends meet as an adult. So many people are trapped in careers, families, or lifestyles they hate out of fear of how they would be judged if they chose something that didn't align with the social status they are expected to maintain. But being that my origin is humble, I don't have to carry fear around having to return to my humble origins if I needed to. If I needed to work in a plant to make ends meet, I would. If I needed to clean toilets or mop floors to make ends meet, I would. And doing any of those things would make me feel no less worthy than I do sitting at my desk as a web developer because the breadth of my experiences has allowed me to recognize that one's worth has nothing to do with the job they do or the amount of money they have and has everything to do with who they are as a person. Some of the wisest, kindest, most intelligent, and most inspiring people I've ever met have been people who live at or below the poverty line and some of the most of the most obnoxious, insufferable, delusional, and quite frankly, lame people I've ever met are people who are considered 'rich'.

Growing up with little means that I don't need a lot to be happy. One of my biggest dreams growing up was to live in a two story house with a view of a city out of my window. Though I currently live in a loft and not a house, my loft does have two stories and it does have a view of the city out of my window. And often times when I gaze at the skyscrapers outside of my window, I think back on that trailer that I was so ashamed to live in and marvel at just how far I've come. I think back on how my mother was so committed to the idea that she was poor and yet, the perseverance that grew out of her own experience with poverty and sacrifices she made has enriched the lives of me and my brothers so much. I spent so long believing that my family was 'less than' because we couldn't afford expensive clothes but now I see that, all along, my family was cut from a different cloth. A homemade cloth, weaved together from cotton that was picked with our own hands, which produced a fabric that has kept me warm inside, despite how cold this world can sometimes be on the outside.

The day the doctor told me that my mother was going to die, I walked outside of the hospital to this little garden they have to try and gather myself before I called my family to give them the news and I saw two things that made me feel like everything was going to be okay. The first thing I saw was a butterfly that flew into my field of view and landed on a flower in front of me and which reminded me of a quote that goes, "What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly" and reminded me that even though it appears to be the end of my mother, it is actually just a transition point into another phase of her existence.

The second thing I saw in that garden was a group of lotus flowers growing in a pond. Lotus flowers grow on the surface of bodies of water but they are rooted in the mud that supports the water. But before the lotus can know the beauty and warmth of the light of the Sun, they must first survive and find nourishment in the mud in which they are germinated. And seeing these flowers reminded me of the mud that my mother grew out of and the mud the that I grew out of and how without either of these muddy environments, I would have never grown into the light that has had such a profound affect on my spirituality, healing, happiness, and quality of life ever since I discovered it.

Nothing great has ever been birthed from a place of comfort because when we are comfortable, there is no incentive to grow, to change, or to evolve. Hip-hop is arguably the most popular musical genre in the world and it, like much of Black American culture, was birthed from a place of suffering, pain, and struggle. To the point where, these days, many rappers brag that they 'got it out the mud' which is to say they achieved their success despite coming from an environment that was undesirable and not conducive to producing fruit. But what they don't realize and what I hope you realize after reading this post is that, the mud is always conducive to producing fruit so long as we abandon the beliefs that keep us stuck in the mud and are instead willing to grow out of it towards the light that is always shining above. Regardless of how much money I may or may not have, I will never be poor again because the mud that I grew out of has allowed me the gift to find beauty anywhere and the grace to find value in whatever environment I might currently be growing in.

What's going on with me?

The temperature here in Pittsburgh is rapidly cooling which is bitter sweet because while I enjoy the Fall, the coolness that's coming with it is reminding me of just how dark and cold it was when I first got here. Yet, I am not the same person I was when I first arrived here and have hope that this Winter will be a much different experience than the Winter I had here in January. Otherwise, I'm doing well. I feel like I'm finally seeing fully and clearly the evolution that I felt that I was on the precipice of when I first moved here and have been settling into this new version of myself. I've realized that so much of my work is inner child work and in encouraging and hopefully inspiring others to do their own inner child work.

This week, I stumbled across a video of this beautiful, young, 95 year old lady doing her own inner child work and learning how to play for the first time at 95. I felt so inspired by her and so inspired to share her story to show that despite how big of a number our age is, we can never outgrow our inner child. Our inner-child will always be an integral part of our self-image and in order to truly know ourselves and live a fulfilling life we have to bravely and consciously confront that inner child and help it heal the wounds that this callous world has caused it. I'll link the video below and I hope you find it as inspirational as I did. Thanks for giving my inner child the audience for expression that it so deeply desired for many years and I hope you know that I'm more than willing to provide the same for you, if you would like.

Direct Link:

To Be In Awe - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-rHc8tm5_c

With love,

Micheal Sinclair 💜