My name is Moriah Geer and I’m the Moxie Case Coach at Maine Equal Justice. That means that I am one of the people who answers the phone and works to help our clients access programs to help meet their basic needs.

I’m also a person who spent many years living in poverty and I’ve been on many of the programs that I now help others navigate. That experience allows me to connect with our clients in a way that people who have never experienced poverty may not fully understand.

Living in poverty is a different experience. It changes the way that you interact with the world and the way you see your place in it. I know that some of the readers of this blog will be people who have lived or are living in poverty themselves, and others are people who care about and want to help those struggling with poverty, so I thought that for my first blog I would take the time to explain what it’s like to live in poverty.

What I’m saying here will pull mostly from my own experience, but also from what I heard from others in my work every day. My hope is that if you’re reading this and you’ve never experienced poverty yourself, you may come away with a little more understanding of what it’s really like. If you have experienced poverty, then I hope my words help to validate you and let you know that you are not alone.

Being poor can be exhausting; it’s stressful; it’s embarrassing and often dehumanizing.

When you’re poor everything that you have to do and every decision that you make is more complicated. Let’s say I’m a mom whose struggling with poverty (which I was) and my child needs a new pair of shoes for school. After I’ve paid all of my bills, bought food and made sure the electricity stays on I might have like $15-20 left. I hold on to that money, hoping that in a couple of months I’ll have enough money to buy a decent pair of shoes that won’t fall apart, instead of the $15 pair that I know will only last a couple of months. The problem is, I was poor the last time I bought him shoes so I bought the cheap ones and they fall apart long before I can save up enough for good shoes. So I buy the cheap shoes again and we repeat the cycle. I do understand the value of quality, but I end up spending 3-4 times more money on shoes this year. This is a real but simplified example because, let’s face it, I was never going to be able to save up enough for the quality shoes. There will be countless other important things that I’ll have to spend that money on before I had enough saved.

Poor people are incredible at budgeting, believe it or not. They can stretch pennies in amazing ways. When you have just enough money to cover your basic bills, you know exactly how many meals you can get out of a box of pasta or exactly how many miles you can drive before you really, really need to get an oil change. Unfortunately, no matter how good you are at stretching a dollar, if there isn’t enough there just isn’t enough.

One of the worst things that can happen to a parent in poverty is for their kid to get a cold or a fever. Sure, they have Mainecare, but the doctor isn’t going to prescribe Tylenol or cough syrup to be covered by insurance (some do, because they are amazing humans who truly understand, but most don’t think of it). Children’s cough syrup is like gold to poor parents. One cold season can put you months into debt. There just isn’t enough money to buy what you need so you buy the medicine, but you pay your electric bill late. Eventually it gets disconnected and you have to pay extra to get it turned back on. Where did you get that money from? You had to pay the rent late and then your landlord adds on a late fee.

I think that it’s a common misconception that poor people are just bad with money or that they don’t know how to think of the future and make good decisions. The truth is that being poor and just functioning takes up a lot of mental capacity and makes it very difficult to devote time and energy into planning and decision making. I think we can all agree that too much stress reduces your ability function at your full capabilities, and let me assure you, being poor is very stressful.

Poverty greatly increases your mental load and makes it difficult to think about other things. Your brain is so focused on being able to afford the basics like food, shelter, clothing etc. that you don’t have room to think about those things that could possibly improve your situation, like education or connecting with better resources. There has actually been some research that indicates that people will score lower on cognitive tests when they are in poverty than they do when they are not struggling financially . I’ve been there. I’ve felt really stupid at times when I was living in poverty and beat myself up over not doing better or making better choices. Feeling like I was being judged by everyone around me was not helpful either.

The way society understands or misunderstands poverty makes a big difference for how welfare policies are set up to help or compound the harms poor Mainers experience. Our current welfare programs are often set up to make people fail. In order to get the assistance you need in all of the areas of your life you have to interact with multiple agencies and work through a lot of unnecessary red tape. There’s one place for housing, another for fuel assistance, another for food and healthcare and yet others if you need childcare or transportation etc.

It can be like having a part-time job just to manage all of the appointments and verifications you need to get basic help when you’re poor. Many of these programs have additional requirements of training or volunteering, some of them seemingly meaningless exercises designed to punish people for needing help—since they all imply poor people are not working hard enough or that we’re not deserving of help. What really moves people out of poverty is an education or job training, but how is there room in their mental load for those changes when they are expending so much energy just meeting their basic needs?

If we really want to move Mainers out of poverty for good, we are going to need to develop a more realistic view of what it’s like to walk a mile in their shoes and then create programs and policies that make sense for real people. That is going to take working together and listening to and lifting up the voices of people in poverty. Policy makers and agencies who do this work need to consult with the people that their decisions impact and there need to be formal ways for people in poverty to contribute their thoughts and experiences to the conversation. I’m proud to do that kind of work at Maine Equal Justice each day, when I speak to people on the phone and try to help them access the support they need to make changes for the better. You can join our work too—by reading more to understand poverty (including on this blog) and following Maine Equal Justice on social media to stay up to date on ways to become involved.