A Poor Woman’s Mid-Life Crisis

41 and Living in Poverty.

This is not where I thought I’d be at this point in my life. Poor, living in a shitty neighborhood in a city that was poisoned by its own government, hoping on a prayer and a spell that I get approved to buy the house that I’m living in through a low-income housing program, and trying to stave off the panic of what I’ll do if I’m not approved and have to move on an unstable income that depends almost entirely on the donations of strangers for doing Service Days and running groups on Facebook.

Those are the facts of my life.

At 18, I had a full-ride scholarship to a tech university in my state.

At 19, I’d dropped out and had a kid.

I didn’t drop out because of getting pregnant. I dropped out because, having grown up in poverty, I was ill-equipped for entering college. Undiagnosed autism and unmedicated ADHD made it worse. I was smart. Brilliant even. But I didn’t have the social skills or self-discipline necessary to make it in college at that point in my life, and sex was a nice distraction, then oops, pregnant, might as well quit. I was already flunking out anyway — I was on my academic probation and I was only a Freshman.

But I thought for sure that by my 40s, I’d have figured it out.

When I was 30, I was newly divorced and trying to buy a home through a land contract, and sure I was getting my life together. That I was figuring it out.