Why Am I an Outlier?

There's something that has bothered me for the last few years.  A numerical oddity that niggles at the recesses of my mind in the quieter moments of the day.  It's going to sound stupid, but it bothers me because the math doesn't add up.

I grew up very poor.  I've actually eaten government cheese, from the food bank, in the projects, as a standalone meal while my mother waited for her welfare check.  I lived in the worst neighborhoods with the worst neighbors.  I went to the worst schools and wore clothes that were a dozen years out of date thanks to the "hand-me-down railroad".  There was neglect, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and in retrospect (though I didn't realize it until fairly recently) sexual abuse.

Even when I had earned opportunities to get ahead as a child, I inevitably had to turn them down because of money, transportation (aka, money), or the need for me to be at home taking care of my brothers (money, again).

The last grade I graduated was the 8th, having dropped out halfway through my freshman year of high school.  I never went to college, despite brilliant test scores.  I have an ACE score of 8.  I ended up homeless at 18, and had no family to turn to when the speed bumps of life came to knock down whatever house of cards I'd managed to cobble together for myself.  More than once I've lost literally - not figuratively - everything I owned.  I don't own a single artifact pre-dating my 18th year: Not a shred of clothing or a book or a trophy or a sentimental childhood possession - that one article that stretches so far into my past is a shirt that I purchased after I left home.  I happened to be wearing it when I became homeless the first time.  Not a single thing from my childhood remains - save for the facsimile of an adult that emerged from it.

By all accounts, I should still be in the ghetto collecting my own welfare checks with a dozen illegitimate children, a lengthy rap sheet, and - best case - a serious alcohol problem.

Keep in mind that this chart isn't taking all of those factors into account.  This is strictly evaluated by the income level of the parents.  Some of the poor children on this chart had rich grandparents, or a strong family or support structure.  By every predictor one might use to guess my outcome, I should be the model of poor white-trashery.

This is not what has happened.

I'm making 82k a year doing computer work in the healthcare industry for a major hospital system in Southern California.  That's square in the middle of the second highest quintile.  My existing skillset is both rare, and in demand, and this job is going to expand that skillset tremendously.  In a few years I will be able to earn top quintile income anywhere in the English speaking world.  I can write my own ticket.  It took me some time as a mercenary computer technician to get to this place in my career - I am nearly 40, after all - but the fact remains:  I'm not supposed to be doing this well.

There's more to my confusion than the quality of my career...

I've met a lot other people from similar backgrounds.  There is a syndrome that seems to follow them.  All too often they are deceitful, lazy, and not above stealing from others.  They are broken people with anger problems and drug problems and all the problems that come with those things.  I understand why they feel that the world gave them the short straw, but I don't understand why they never took responsibility and never made a plan.  They never fought their way out, too busy with penny-ante schemes;  Too full of excuses and poorly defined bad guys responsible for preventing them from being able to escape.  They eased into poverty like a comfortable overcoat.  There's a sort of unwillingness to empathize with other people - a meanness of sorts that is the hallmark of this type.  And there is depression and manic depression and schizophrenia and PTSD and all of that.  And it's all valid.

My youngest brothers exhibit this poverty syndrome, making it very difficult to isolate some kind of difference.

I try to see the wounded child in such people, but pragmatism demands that you protect yourself from the broken adult - A lesson learned by repeatedly trying and inevitably failing to help others out of a pit I was still climbing out of myself.  Eventually I learned:  Moving up means letting go of those who will not climb for themselves.

I see all of these people, their lack of concern for others and their lack of concern for themselves, and I can't help but wonder:

How the Hell did I make it out OK?

You only have my word for it, but I am an ethical person who goes out of his way to be nice to strangers.  I'll do the right thing, for a person I don't like, even if no one would ever know otherwise.  I'm not saying I'm some kind of pillar of altruistic piousness, but on a scale from 1 to 10 in terms of how decent I am when I stand to gain nothing from the being honorable, I'm a 7 or an 8.  When a storm starts blowing shopping carts around the parking lot, I chase them so they don't run into cars - Not because my car was in any danger, or even because I would hope someone would do the same for me, but because it's the right thing to do.  And perhaps because I feel like the world has its share of people who wouldn't.  Like it is better somehow to do something positive than to merely complain about the negative.  The last time this happened, there were people standing there, filming with their phones as carts went sailing into other people's cars.

I remember feeling angry with those people.  Not the anger of self-validating righteousness that feeds a sense of superiority, but disappointed, knowing they not only passed on the opportunity to serve others, but actively served their mere amusement through the misfortune of others.

Even talking about myself in an unabashedly positive light like this feels disingenuous and self-serving.  I am only comfortable doing so so because I am writing anonymously under a pseudonym (Surprise!  I'm not actually the Count of Monte Cristo).

I kind of wandered off the point, but it was necessary in order to place emphasis on the contrasts I see in myself, economically as well as behaviorally, when compared to the person I was so likely to have become.

And yet, at the same time, I don't feel that I've surpassed what I was supposed to be.  Instead, I look and see all of the opportunities to be a better person that I've missed in some way.  Despite my relative success, It is as if I have failed to live up to the person I could have been.

I've spent two decades of relentlessly pushing my way up the career chain, from sandwich artistry, to call-center tech support, to technical product management, back down to product support in another industry, and now laboratory systems support.  Every step along the way (save for one, where the economy knocked me back down for 5 years), I have striven to build my career, to leave every job with a better resume, and to be always improving.

At 18 I was homeless.

At 20 I lived in a studio apartment in a poor section of town.

At 24 I was living in a two bedroom apartment in a less slummy part of town.

By 28 I was renting a house.

At 35 I moved to the climate of my choosing.

At 38 I am living in an apartment, but it is a temporary measure to be close to my current job and save money and build credit, and experience.  I have no intention of staying in San Diego for a second longer than is demanded by my employer.  Something happens when you get too many people in one place.  It seems like the more people there are, the less human they become.

Poverty sticks to you

At no point do I feel like I've 'made it'.  Not in life, and certainly not in my career.  At best I feel as though I've beaten the system.  I constantly feel like a fraud masquerading amongst the real people.  An unwelcome interloper who has managed to infiltrate the business world by 'passing' as not poor.  Certainly there is someone who deserves this success more than I do.

And the nagging question returns.  Why me?  What did I bring to the table that kept me from going down the path of perpetual failure?  What factor makes me an exception, instead of the rule?  Why am I an outlier?  Why am I not broken?  Why am I not addicted, insane, or incarcerated?  I don't deserve it, so I don't understand it.

Then again, maybe I'm not an outlier.

Because money doesn't cure poverty.  I'm spending $350 a month for the cheapest Korean subcompact on the market, because I've never had any kind of credit before.  Had a longtime friend not stepped up to the plate and loaned me a few thousand dollars I would have been homeless, lost everything, and lost my job in the process.  I wasn't going to ask.  That's how deep and irrational my fear of being found out as poor is.  If this contract were to end tomorrow, I would be utterly destitute inside a month.

There is no safety net.  I got lucky the one time.  Actually, about 13 improbable things needed to line up perfectly for my plan to work - and when one thing fell short (company lied about the amount of hotel time I would have), my entire plan collapsed because the added costs of not having a place to live exceeded my budget for finding a place to live.

I make $82,000 a year, and I am a single cataclysm from irrecoverable poverty.  If this job works, My last three years and my next two combine to give me 5 years of relevant experience as a Lab Information Systems Analyst.  But if it doesn't, I'm left with product support experience but no clinical experience - and I'm back on the train to bottom rung call-center tech support for ~45k.

I make 82k and I am poor.  For most people, $82,000 doesn't sound like poor.  But factor the following - cheap rent for a borderline slum apartment with cockroaches and drug dealers in this area costs $21,000 a year.  State and federal Income taxes combine to run me around $21500 a year.  After taxes and rent, more than half of my income is gone.  The price of my staple food (eggs) has tripled in this region because of local laws concerning the treatment of chickens.  Fucking proposition 2.

And I still have to finish paying off the old bills from the previous place - because everything went into this move.

Perhaps I am not an outlier, and I am doomed to face the same economic problems I have fought to escape my entire life.  But I am trying to be cognizant of the need for planning.  The need for frugality and responsibility.  I am learning that rather than "having something to show" for my money, I need to be using it to build stability, so that one day I might pay my own mortgage instead of someone else's.

At least I have my health.  Which is good, because paying the medical costs for a single heart attack would leave me jobless, homeless, and right back where all of the experts and data insist I belong.

4 plus!?  My score is double the highest score they bothered to chart. With a score of 4 your odds of being an alcoholic are already 8 TIMES that of a person with a fairly regular childhood.  Were the results for 5-10 just too depressing to mention?