Poverty Is a Disease With Long-Haul Symptoms
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Ask my therapist, my husband, or my diary what one of my largest fears is and they’ll all tell you it’s being poor again.
My family wasn’t always poor. In fact, some would have considered us “well-off” at one point. However, the financial crisis hit us hard. My mom did her best to shield us from it, and for a while, she did exceedingly well. But we started to notice something was up once our allowance started to shrink, then disappeared altogether. Family outings became less and less frequent. My mom started using a special debit card whenever we went grocery shopping. It was when I went to flick the lights one day and they didn’t come on that I realized we were officially poor. It was one day when while playing outside, my brother stepped on a rusted nail and my mother said we couldn’t afford to take him to the hospital, that I realized being poor could kill me.
When I finally moved out and went to college, I spent a couple more years under the poverty line. I like to think I was pretty good at masking it, so while people thought I was just “eating European” out of choice, it was really because all I could afford was a block of cheese and a .50 loaf of bread from Jimmy Johns.
It’s been a combination of incredibly hard work, an amazing partner, a handful of good people, and a quarter cup of luck that I have been able to find myself in a place where I no longer fear I’m going to miss a bill. I no longer feel that poverty is waiting to claim me at any moment. And yet, I’m still not free from the long-lasting effects poverty had on me in my childhood.
Growing up we often had no insurance or very bare minimum insurance. Because of that, I rarely visited a dentist. The few times I did, they would say all the work I needed done but we could never afford to do it. As an adult, I’m currently going about fixing all the things my family couldn't afford to fix. And it's been a fucking nightmare.
For starters, I have moderate-severe bone loss in my mouth. Years of missed cleanings have added up to serious degradation. There’s no fixing this, there’s only keeping it from getting worse through consistent oral hygiene. Those nights where you’re exhausted and just want to pass out on the couch? They’re riddled with anxiety for me. Gone are the days of spontaneous sleeping and “I’ll just brush in the morning.” I’m afraid to miss a brushing or skip flossing because it feels like there’s very little room to mess up. I’ve already lost so much bone and it’s not coming back.
I also had to get four wisdom teeth removed. For years, I’ve had a wisdom tooth that was completely horizontal. It was identified when I was sixteen, but we couldn't afford to remove it. Returning to that tooth at the age of 24, it had dug a hole so deep into a neighboring tooth that it almost hit a nerve. Another tooth had grown so deep that there was a 5% chance I would permanently lose feeling in my bottom lip after having it extracted. There were several other complications that had developed due to my treatment being so delayed, and because of it, my extraction was ridiculously expensive. What’s more, my insurance barely covered it because so many of the things I needed weren't "standard necessities" for the procedure. For example, my upper teeth had begun to dig into my sinuses. It was required that the holes be plugged, otherwise, I would never be able to successfully hold liquid in my mouth again — it would come out of my nose. As far as my insurance was concerned, that wasn’t their problem.
Now, I'm looking into straightening my teeth. I never had braces when I was younger, and with four wisdom teeth applying constant pressure, my teeth have been significantly knocked out of alignment. It’s something I’ve always been self-conscious about and it’s starting to affect my ability to chew. My insurance doesn't cover ortho, which means I have to come completely out of pocket for whatever straightening I have done. On top of that, I’m an actress. My career relies heavily on how I look, so standard metal braces aren’t a viable option for me. If I want something less visible, like lingual braces or Invisalign, it's going to be expensive.
If I had gotten braces as a teenager, I could have worn metal brackets like every other adolescent and been fine. It would have been an obligatory "brace face phase” that I could grow up and laugh at. But now I'm an adult and as silly as it sounds, the stakes for wearing braces have gone up. Wearing standard braces could actually affect my career, so I feel like I have to shell out for discreet ones.
Between teeth extractions and straightening, I'm going to end up spending over $7,000 on my teeth. An incredible amount of money for a handful of bones in my mouth. Money that kids with well-off parents don't have to part with. I’m being charged over $7,000 because I was raised poor. Living in poverty was a situation I had no control over and no choice in, yet it continues to affect me every day, despite my active effort to avoid returning at all costs. It feels incredibly unfair. What’s extremely disorienting is that despite recognizing how unfair it is that I’ve been stuck with this steep bill, I can’t help but feel some sort of survivor’s guilt. It feels wrong to be considering something so costly when I know how far that money can go in a low-income household; it feels dysphoric to pay for something my own caretakers could not; and it feels both risky and surreal to even have the money available when just two years ago I couldn’t entertain the thought of spending $400 on a medical treatment, let alone thousands.
Ultimately though, I am frustrated and upset. Not at my mother, but at her situation — the fact that such a situation was allowed to exist and the fact that that situation is still affecting me today. I could use that $7,000 to begin an investment portfolio. I could make a 3% downpayment on a $230,000 home. Instead, I'm using it to fix my teeth because my family couldn't do it for me. This is how poverty affects people long term. My peers who grew up with money are out building wealth and equity while I'm just now dealing with health issues almost a decade old. By the time I have another $7,000 to actually start investing, the investments my peers made today will have doubled or tripled. They will be miles ahead while I'll just be starting out. Unless I hit some sort of windfall, their lead will only get larger and I will only struggle further to catch up.
And we’re just talking about teeth. This is but one area of many in which poor people — and formerly poor people — are dealing with the long-lasting and far-reaching effects of poverty. We haven’t talked about how these same disparities play out in the rest of healthcare, education, and homeownership. Not to mention the mental health issues that grow so easily in this fertile soil for illness. Suddenly my peers don’t just have a lead in a race — they have found themselves safely on the other side of a chasm that many people, myself included, are struggling to vault across. Many of us never successfully will.
Poverty is a disease with long-term symptoms and side effects. What’s worse, it’s a disease that begets more disease. I haven’t lived at home since I was seventeen, yet I am still feeling the long-haul symptoms of my adolescence in poverty. The problem is not poor people, it’s their situation. We must push our government to make it so that these situations cannot exist. We must remove the blame and shame of poverty from poor people and place it on the government that allowed it to happen in the first place.
I read earlier this year that SpaceX was getting ready to start taking civilians to the moon. A country in which the rich can go to space while the poor spend generations just trying to afford to live on Earth can only be described in one way — sick.
Imani Vaughn-Jones
Atlanta-based actress and writer. Firm believer in active love and the Oxford comma. The world is your oyster — grab some hot sauce.