By Erynn Brook

“Everyone I’ve ever talked to who has been poor and is not anymore has the same story of the moment they realized they weren’t poor anymore: grocery shopping.

Either at the checkout or in the aisles. I had this moment. I remember it clearly. Mine came when I was loading my groceries onto the cashier belt and I realized I didn’t do the math.

When I was poor grocery shopping was complex math, holding numbers in my head, constantly remembering pre and post tax prices for the things in my basket, combined with survival math like “if I go to bed before the hunger hits then half a bagel is enough for dinner.”

Exactly. When you only have $10 a week for groceries - which was my budget 13 years ago - that $0.05 can be the difference between accepted or declined on the card reader.

Also this. I didn’t know how to cook meat because I couldn’t afford it. I was vegetarian from my mid teens to my early twenties because meat would’ve been an entire week’s worth of food.

There’s a big difference between being broke and being poor. I was poor for about 2 years. I was broke for the following decade.

When you’re poor there’s no flow. There’s no wiggle. There’s no credit. There’s no extensions. There’s nothing. It’s not good days and bad days. It’s all survival. Your manager at your cafe job saying “hey do you wanna take home the muffins?” At the end of the day makes you cry.

That $50 from grandma on your birthday means the world when you’re poor. But also, you know it can’t change your life, so maybe you buy yourself that book you’ve been visiting and decide you can have a whole bagel a day for a couple weeks.
When you’re broke, you have flow. You have credit. You know you just need to get by for a few days or a week and you’ll budget better next paycheck (but maybe you won’t, you’re still learning).

When you’re broke you worry about how you would pay for an emergency. You get scared. You decide to plan better. You hide a $20 in your winter coat pocket because it’ll be a nice surprise next year when it gets cold and you don’t have mittens.

When you’re poor, every day feels like an emergency and you’re drowning in it. The difference between being broke and being poor isn’t a number, it’s a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s a direction. It’s flow and movement and space to think.

But I think about the grocery thing a lot. About the time when I didn’t have to do the math anymore. All the stories people have told me about their moment of realizing they weren’t poor anymore, and how it all had to do with grocery shopping.

Survival. Food. Rushing through the grocery store trying not to look at the things you can’t afford. Seeing pasta on sale and welling up cause it meant you had an extra $2 to work with that week. Being afraid of messing up the math and not having a dime “just in case”.

I think about how little I survived on, and how much it hurt, how it consumed me every day. Trying to calculate mealtimes so that I would be able to fall asleep before the hunger became too painful to ignore. And I think it’s a fucking shame we let anyone live this way.

And it was so natural. I didn’t even realize it until I was at the checkout. It just happened. I wasn’t shopping in poverty. I was broke, but not poor, and it changed my world.

All this to say: I don’t trust a damn study, expert, article or opinion about poor people if it can’t differentiate between being poor and being broke. If you’ve never cried in a grocery store because it’s too hard to live, you don’t know what the problem is.”