At The Bottom Of The Pile

Yeah well, I didn’t go to Yale, I went to UConn, and pretty much flunked out of there, spent years homeless, spent years living in and out of homeless shelters, but the fact is what I learned in that journey was far, far more important than anything I could have possibly learned at UConn or Yale or gosh, Harvard. None of us had anyone hand us $300 million. I rubbed shoulders with a lot of men and women who lost it all, who had no shot at much of anything, but still, day by day, they obeyed the law, did what they could to earn some cash to keep it together for their families. Life at the bottom isn’t about honors or law school plans, it is about living simply and so near the ground one can pretty much hear the worms. Humiliation is what life is about in Trump’s world, but humility, that is the greatest lesson learned at the bottom of the pile. We are all the same, we human beings, no one is above or below. That, and try and make a friend or two along the way, you never know when you might need someone to bail you out…

I didn’t write this, it was a comment, left by a stranger under a newspaper article. I don’t know what the article was about, I assume it was just the usual political bickering. Yet all that stood out was this statement, like a sight of real life.

The bottom of the pile!

My husband and I have been there, not by choice. When you swim at the bottom of the barrel. When you feel you can’t get lower, looking up is the only direction that makes sense.

Fourteen years ago we drove a car without insurance. We hadn’t been able to make payments on the vehicle either, soon it would be repossessed. We sat in the parking lot of a Walmart and watched people in front of the store. A fountain drink was a luxury back then and a coffee from a coffee chain was out of reach. A 5-dollar take-out pizza felt like wasting money. We watched other people living a so-called normal life. The normal life we were forced to leave behind.

We weren’t normal people anymore. No job, no home, no money. That’s when people start to judge you harshly, even though they don’t know you at all. Society is cruel and the more vulnerable you are, the more brutal they get. And right then when you think you can’t take it anymore, that’s when you notice the others around you in a similar position.

The homeless on the corner holding a sign is now someone you want to talk to and you buy a value menu for the old, fragile-looking lady who is sitting in the ditch. You share your sandwich with a stray dog, and put a few coins in the hat of a begging man, because not doing anything is not an option.

It’s interesting how much you notice when you become one of them. We were so fortunate and we were aware of it.

We weren’t drug addicts, we weren’t reckless, we didn’t gamble or drink our money away. We were victims of an economy that had started spiraling down in 2007 and two years later a wave of unemployment and layoffs washed us away. There were many of us, some not as blessed as we were.

We were fortunate, we never lived in the streets, we were welcomed at a friend’s house and when we risked it all and moved out of state because that’s where a job offer had come up, our gamble paid off.

The above comment spoke to me because it’s spot on.

The poorest of the poor are the most generous and the most helpful. Why? Because nothing else makes sense. When you have nothing, everything is valuable, yet at the same time, you realize the things in life that really matter. It’s not material things. It’s not a house or car, it’s not the plastic cards in the wallets or a number given by creditors who don’t judge people, but money.

When you are low, you see the waste, you see and feel the coldness. When people judge you harshly without knowing you or your story, that’s when you truly become human.

When there was nothing, I developed into the woman I always wanted to be and I watched my husband change right beside me.

The love and help we received from total strangers didn’t make much sense. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a church or religious organizations who reached out, but normal people like us who were just kind. Many had been where we were, and they never forgot.

We haven’t forgotten either. We don’t throw things out easily, we help more than we did before and we don’t tolerate name-calling or belittling.

Humility instead of humiliation.