Narrative Essay On Being Poor

I’ve never been the type of person who thinks much about poverty. I’ve seen many people in my family who have struggled with poverty and even my own family has struggle at one point in my life. In fact, we went bankrupt at one point because my mom had a gambling problem and this happened when I was a kid so I never really notice how much of a struggle we were in. Now my mom has her gambling problem under control and she went to meetings, but on those few time when she has gone to the casino with her brothers there is a part of me that fears that she might go back to that point in her life and now that I’m older I will notice the toll it will have on my family. I see my uncle living in poverty every day, seeing him barely making it by the end of the week to provide for his family. Poverty is something that I’ve seen in my life, but it is something that I don’t really think about until we started talking about it in class. All of our in-class activities and the readings we’ve done on poverty has really changed …show more content…
I also started noticing the difference when I read Scalzi’s (2005) Being Poor article. This article really got to me when I read it and it got me thinking of things that I’ve never really thought of before. For example, when he says “Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal” (Scalzi, 2005). Or when he writes, “Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so” (Scalzi, 2005). Reading both of those lines really got to me and got me thinking how I have taken my life for granted. It has made me realize that I am privilege and never in my life had I ever had to worry about anything that Scalzi wrote about. I never realized how hard “being poor” really is and I’ve never really taken into consideration how many of these Americans who do live in poverty try to work and make a living, but they still continue to be