I'll probably still be bleating about this until my last breath, but I’m one of the many “lucky” people who had an incredibly traumatic childhood — relative to the country I live in, of course, because God forbid you say you had a rough time on the internet without some jobsworth reminding you how worse others have it.
I grew up with an abusive parent. The other one crumbled under the weight of their own trauma and still struggles with severe mental health issues. My brother started terrorising me pretty young — right after I was diagnosed with panic disorder at the age of six.
School was impossible. I flitted between friendship groups because my absences were so long, and by the time I returned, the friends I’d had were giving me the silent treatment.
But the single most traumatic thing I experienced — the thing that shaped almost everything about me— was poverty.
It was the one thing I couldn’t reason with. I couldn’t protect myself from it. I couldn’t hide my poor diet. I couldn’t hide my constant anxiety about whether we were going to be homeless. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t gnawed down to the bone by the fear of watching my mum have panic attacks in Iceland, realising she’d miscounted what was in the cart, that she didn’t have enough money, and that she had to pretend she’d brought the wrong card.
I couldn’t explain that to the few friends I had. My family grew tired of my mum’s inability to “snap out of it,” tired of her mental health making it impossible to get back on her feet.
And honestly? That’s why I have so much resentment for the left — despite objectively having very left-wing beliefs. Because the middle-class, Russell Group folk who populate the conversation don’t fucking get it. They argue like they’re giving a speech in a movie.
Poverty almost took away the only parent I had left.
Even now, I live in abject fear of the future. I have an embarrassing scarcity complex. I don’t think I’ll ever be good with money. And trying to explain that to a world that deliberately misinterprets the causes of poverty — the same causes that have put millions of UK families in this position — feels impossible. Unforgivable, even.
The shame this country injects into people who are struggling is inhumane. It writes us off. It tells us we’re lazy, unworthy, and broken — not just economically, but morally.
I genuinely don’t understand what’s hard to grasp. We punish the most vulnerable in society while billionaires and the ultra-wealthy hoard more than they could spend in a lifetime. How can any morally intact person justify that? How can anyone be surprised when we see rises in violent crime, poverty, anti-social behaviour? What do they expect?
