Interesting article. I see many of these characteristics in myself but never related it to being poor until now after reading your article.

As a small child, my family was desperately poor while my father worked his way through school. I remember eating bean stew every.single.day. I was so sick of it. We also always moved into and lived in 'fixer uppers', and the years we lived there, we'd fix them up. But moving in at first was always hard. One house, my father had to lift part of the floor up in order for the floor to be level and not slope! When he got a government job as I headed into my teen years, we were able to break that and go middle class.

However, I have spent most of my adult life as a poor single mom. In the past few years, I finally broke that and went low middle class. And, yeah, most of what you mentioned is true. I especially became very private due to the lack of trust issues. I still have them. I'm forever wondering about others' motives with me. The fact that I have also been badly burned in relationships has not helped.

Losing my job this past year* (I've gotten another to replace it now), may I add another one?

When you lose your pretty good job and fall back down, you don't freak out, because you've been here before, and you've got this. No fear; just disappointment. You do what you can to pull yourself together and try and climb back out. Resilience and grit is our gift.

Thanks for a great article.

* ( I was badly abused on a psychological level at my last job, which was very traumatic for me. I really had nobody on my side though I worked very hard for others. Coworkers that hardly knew me or not at all would gossip, slander, and lie to my boss and each other about me, even though I was a mostly quiet person that just hid and worked in my department, but was nice, however, casual, to everyone when I had to go to another part of the facility. I was blamed for things I had no knowledge or part of, and my boss was always looking for a reason to reprimand me and get me in trouble. Everything I worked hard at and successfully accomplished for our department and the facility were sniffed at as unimportant, and followed with comments about how I fall short, when I really wasn't. To her, nothing I did was ever enough. Meanwhile, she coddled and favored my coworker who enjoyed spreading lies about me around and who was very nasty to me at times without reason. Including in front of my boss, who did nothing.

As a result, my new job is largely done remotely, because I worry that if I spend too much time around my coworkers and boss, they will just turn on me out of the blue and I'll be in the same boat again. I secretly start to feel anxious and uncomfortable if I'm there too many days in a week. So, yeah, I totally get what you said about that.)