Thank You, Daddies
WHEN I WAS an undergrad, I took a sociology class, one of many in what ended up being my minor. Our professor, who was a very short king, assigned us the task one day of breaking into groups and designing a monthly budget for a family of four living at the federal poverty line: $16,700.
Per year.
Itâs true, rent was cheaper then. I paid $365 for a bedroom in a house of five just off-campus my senior year, and it was so much more expensive than every other house we looked at that my best friend and I agonized over whether to get it. A gallon of milk was about $2.84 and a gallon of gas was a fucking dollar, so you can see how a group of barely grown children with no kids would sit down with their pens in a big, clean classroom at Ohio State, scoot their desks together, and, with no internet, make a list of numbers and assumptionsâThis is what childrenâs clothes cost; they can just always take the busâthat added up to the conclusion that being poor is easy.
We were triumphant, practically giddy, with surprise and superiority. How simple it was to make life for four people work for $1,391.67 per month! They just had to have no unexpected expenses, and survive on the bare minimum of everything. You donât need âentertainment.â No restaurants, or moviegoing, or nights out.
Poverty was fake, we kinda felt. We had made it work on paper in 30 minutes.
Today, I have food stamps and Medicaid. With them, a friend still had to pay my rent this month. Without them, I canât imagine how Iâd be alive. Poverty, Iâve learnedâand sharedâis so stupidly, intractably real.
Gabriel Mac
So many of you responded to my plight, signing up for paid memberships. Or sending donations. Each email notification of incoming assistance pulled at the fibers of my heart, stretching it open, closer to the belief that Iâll safely find my authentic way in this world. I feel raw with admission, having entirely dropped the projection of success I wore like armor for so many years, when I fit capitalist ideals of accomplishment. I ache with vulnerability, bashful after people responded not by turning their backs or judging but by reaching out. Offering money, and words of encouragement.
Thank. You.
My monthly income, before credit card processing fees, increased 25 percent, to $778.
Yes, it is still about half of the federal poverty line.
Even with my 20-year-old ignorance, I couldnât have made that work on paper. Itâs a miracle that I figure out a way, have figured out ways, to make it work for the last few years. If you were thinking of becoming a paid subscriber, but just didnât get around to it: I still need you. If you want to Venmo me, hereâs my account. If you wanted a convenient button for donating by credit card, whether one-time or monthly, here it is.
This trans person needs your help.
Donate đ¤đđłď¸ââ§ď¸The keen-eyed observer may notice that Iâm dumping sewage from my RV in that photo. That costs $10 at RV parks and boat ports. Itâs the kind of expenseâalong with a worn-out shoe sole, which I also have in my trustiest pairâthat I couldnât have anticipated in my sociology classâthat I canât even anticipate now, as costs of living arise as one lives. Because I was raised in the suburbs, in albeit horrific conditions, these werenât concerns of mine as an undergrad. Thatâs a way I was lucky, among many ways I wasnât.
Itâs hard to count the ways Iâm lucky now, sometimes. Poverty is crushing that way. Because of it, I feel like I donât know what Iâm doing, where if my income was abundant, or even sufficient, I would assume I was on the right track. My therapist directs me to feel into how things have been fine in the strictest sense: I have a food bank. I have shelter. When I canât pay rent, as this month, I have friends to help.
Today, I bought something that I feel like I shouldnât have. With donations to help barely lift me above water, Iâve internalized the message that it would be stupid at best and fraud at worst to spend even one cent on a new cat collar. Iâve been wanting to get one and recognizing that I canât, then wrestling with the possibility once some funds from old friends and strangers hit my account. At some point, I burst into tears, thinking, I deserve joy too.
Gabriel Mac
My undergrad sociology-class self would be horrified that I was acting like a welfare queen, the trope of which was alive and very well throughout my upbringing. Even the self that earned six figures in my thirties would find any ânon-essentialâ spending I do totally inappropriate, like a $10 bottle of wine the other day. Impoverished me knows, or is still learning, that poor people need to live, with all the little tangibles that entails, as much as anyone else. Sometimes more than anyone else.
I know my supporters know that. That they support my life, which is my expression, of selfhood and gender and joy. Itâs not just my rent but eyeliner and a day-drink, a cat with a super gay collar. Itâs heartbreaking to not be able to support myselfâmy Selfâwhen Iâm the fullest version of it yet. But I keep trying. And thereâs nothing in the authenticity game, really, but the trying.
