Welcome to the Rabbit Hole: How to be Poor and Still a Baddie (part 1)

This series, How to Be Poor (and Still a Baddie), is a survival guide for when you fall through the cracks—written by someone who’s here with you and refuses to be ashamed.

A view of survival mode.

You didn’t plan for this. No one does. One minute, you’re mostly fine—maybe juggling some bills, but surviving. The next minute, you’re Googling things like “emergency housing,” “food bank near me,” or “can I get SNAP?”

Welcome, curious creature of Wonderland. I know you didn't choose this rabbit hole, but here you are. And you're not alone.

Even if you haven’t slipped below the poverty line, you’re probably feeling the shift, or at least seeing it. So maybe read on anyway. Understanding what your neighbors are living could be the most important thing you do today.

 Let's take a look at the economy:

The system is stacked.

• Wages have stagnated while profits soar.

• The jobless rate has surged in many industries (while corporate buybacks continue).

• Tariffs are raising the cost of cars and parts, homes, even food and clothing. (Housing is up 40% in some regions, and your grocery bill probably feels like a crime scene.)

• Billionaires pay less in taxes than teachers as the safety net is being shredded under the lie of “budget responsibility.”

Entire industries — from healthcare to higher ed — are built to profit off financial instability. And as more middle-class families slide into precarity, the system will keep insisting it’s your fault.

It’s not your fault.

It's actually by design as the few hoard resources from the many without regard for our wellness or even our lives. And once you get caught in the downslope, it pulls you down and spits you out.

We're in this rare moment of seeing the social machinery exposed —the pipes, bolts, and blueprints of an engine being redesigned and rebuilt in plain sight. You’re seeing the gears exposed, the marketing peeled back, the ingredients of instability all laid bare.

But it is your responsibility to fight your way back as best you can.

Welcome.

This is a survival guide written for people who are falling through the cracks for the first time. Maybe you’ve been middle class your whole life. Maybe, like me, you’ve worked 1-3 jobs every day since you were 14 and bagging apples at the local orchard. Maybe you even looked down on people who couldn’t "get it together.” And now, you’re starting to understand.

For me, that understanding started about seven years ago. I wasn’t wealthy during the first decades of my adulthood, but we were okay. Mostly because pre-burnout, I worked my tush off, and my partner from that time was a gifted home finance manager.  I didn’t realize, until everything fell apart, how profoundly my ADHD would interfere with managing money - because I'd never had to do it before. And I certainly didn’t know how to be poor.

Now I do.

Well, sort of. I'm still kicking and fighting, and that's 90% of it.

And I’m going to teach you what I’ve learned—without shame, without pity, and with a little dark sass for good measure, because as Mel Brooks says, "Humor is just another defense against the universe."

I’m not writing this because I have it all figured out. I don’t. Some months I feel broken—like I’ve lost the map and I’m clawing at the walls of the rabbit hole. But that’s the trap: believing those moments define you. They don’t. Writing about it is how I keep moving, how I refuse to go numb. God knows I need to feel successful at something.

It’s also how I remind myself—and you—that anything’s easier if you’re not alone. So take what you need from these posts. Add your own notes in the margins. Share your story. We’ll figure out the crooked way forward together.

Each post in this series will walk with you through a different part of the rabbit hole. You don’t have to read them all at once. You’re here now. You're acknowledging that it's happening. And that’s enough for today.