Desperately seeking… The expense of being poor

Being poor is an expensive lifestyle.

When you can’t afford things most people take for granted you have to find unusual, costly ways around. So, if you don’t have a washing machine you have to use a Laundromat – this costs about a tenner for one load to be washed and dried – and you have to buy the soap. Remember you only have £208 for a month.

There’s also the constant ache of going anywhere and paying for travel – so you walk – then your shoes break – you’re up the creek now, shoes are just too expensive to replace – you will have to pray to find some on the street.  You desperately need new underwear so you bite the bullet and get the cheapest from Primark – only to get it home and realise it would never fit any human person – you wear it anyway. I have a whole bag of stressful examples like this – it’s tiring, its demoralising and in turn it makes going for interviews harder and harder as you become more and more ragged and more and more desperate.

And all the time you’re applying for jobs that won’t get back to you for months and suddenly you are offered cash in hand work for a few days possibly more. If you take it and don’t tell the job centre you would actually have enough money to regularly buy conditioner but it’s against the law. If you tell the job centre and then they cut your benefit but the work only lasts a few days and then you’ve got nothing that’s just too much to bear thinking about.

After a month of walking and being hungry and partially homeless whilst pretending to be ‘normal’ do you jump a train when you’re really tired or when it’s dark and your feeling fragile? Do you steal a sandwich when you’ve not eaten for 24 hours, you’ve washed in McDonalds and you’re about to go to an interview and try to pretend to be businessy?  Yeah, you do because you need to survive.  This in itself sets you against the system; you’re surviving and they might land you with a crippling fine at any moment for the cheek of it.

I want to stress that this can happen to anyone. If you met me you probably would not think I match the description above. But I can promise you that anyone trying to live on benefits understands this struggle. It is simply nowhere near enough money to live on and there is nowhere near enough support to transcend it via anything other than luck, determination and personal strength.  These become very difficult traits to maintain when you mix in trauma – past or present/ mental health issues/ stress/ being a parent etc in such conditions. These people deserve support and dignity – they deserve the opportunity to heal and achieve their potential and therefore happiness. But we are not currently a society that makes that possible for the majority of underdogs. Why is that?