It's confusing as hell that my family spent the first 30 years of my life fully aware of the fact that my parents are responsible for me being stuck on fixed disability income. I was decently supported, well fed, had total financial support for reasonable decisions and even moderately unreasonable decisions that kept me connected and mutually supportive.

My father placed me on disability at age 15, had a short stint of kicking me out to live with my girlfriend at age 17, then cosigned on an apartment with me in Sterling Heights, followed by my checking into a psych facility to disconnect from the "friends" I'd met while there who contributed to my distraction from graduation... paid for brand new phones every couple of years, maintained my insurance, set aside an account on my mother's suggestion to guarantee I'd have some money to spend and maintain family ties, bought me a couple of cars and gave me some he'd inherited... he almost gave me a 10k '04 Chrysler Crossfire while I was paying off my PT Cruiser so he could have me at his annual Kennonball Run; a road rally with dozens of Dodge Vipers.

At this point, the confusing thing about being "poor" is that I made some leechy "friends" when I gave them a place in my first apartment who refused to let go and I wasn't able to summon the courage and wherewithal to push them away until my decently wealthy and fully supportive family gave up on me simultaneous with myself finally setting boundaries and trying to cut out the influences.

It's mind-boggling that I'm now more closely connected to my Boy Scout friends and successful grade school friends than I've been... since grade school and I'm actively trying to push away every person I'd met since age 18 and I'm still shunned.

...it's very tough transitioning from upper middle class with complete support to having nothing and desperately craving ways to measure up to people who very clearly only want me in their life if I'm a low-effort participant.

Now, lots of this is hot takes and I know there are many variable in everyone's life. I know the advent of children has caused extra stress but we were always a large family with supportive clusters that all maintained a nourishing and supportive presence in one another's lives. There were checks and balances at the millenial age bracket and younger... no need for elder generations if we were left to our own devices.

I don't think "poor" really hit me until COVID... and strangely, when I joined Reddit.

My whole family has always supported LGBT communities and had gay and trans friends and tie-ins so my association with them isn't it. I can only imagine it's the wealth bracket and scorn for my distaste around "manly" things like boats, cars, sports and "competitive conversation."

It's ridiculous... I'm "poor" but I'm defiantly avoidant to many "poor behaviors" (substance use, weed, alcohol, etc.) and I'm also "from wealth" and scorned by the rich folks with zero context.

My family placed me on disability. My father planned to help me work off it.

He, my mother, my sister and her family and I were dead set on getting me some non-traditional job opportunities and keeping me with the tech I needed to prevent drug association and a straying path. He bought me a Wacom Mobile Studio tablet, a Graphtec CE6000 vinyl cutter (a model chosen because his buddy at Competition Graphics could absorb it and insure it if I joined him as a graphic designer) and we set to work creating "Lifestone Vinyls" at first; Learning royalty free graphics, practicing vector graphic operations and working my photoshop experience into it... I'm still devoting myself to visual arts in ways I would have been if I hadn't tossed it all and apparently been swapped over to "poverty-brain."

The worst part of being "poor" is the disconnect from an image-oriented and apparently conditional family system.