**They Say “You’ll Be Fine”—But If You Ever Boiled Water Just to Take a Bath, You Know There Are Parts of Growing Up Poor That Never Leave You**
They say, *“You’ll be fine.”*
They say it like time is a solvent, like adulthood washes everything clean, like money earned later can retroactively soften the years when it was missing. And on paper, maybe they’re right. You grow up. You survive. You pay your bills—most months. You learn the rules of the world and how to pass as someone who was never hungry in a way that felt embarrassing.
You can be doing well now. You can have a steady income, a decent place, maybe even some savings. And still, there’s a quiet voice in your head that never shuts up. It doesn’t scream. It doesn’t panic. It just *calculates*. It runs numbers automatically, constantly, like a background app you never installed but can’t delete.
Growing up poor trains you to live in contingency mode. You learn early that comfort is temporary and conditional. Hot water can disappear. Electricity can be cut. Food can run out before the week does. So you learn to adapt—not in a heroic way, but in a practical, slightly ashamed way.
You learn how to stretch things that were never meant to stretch. Soap. Meals. Shoes. Time.
Boiling water for a bath isn’t just about hygiene. It’s about ingenuity born of necessity. It’s about standing in a cold bathroom, pouring kettle after kettle into a tub, trying to get the temperature just right so you can feel normal for ten minutes before going back to being aware of everything you don’t have. It’s about learning, at a young age, that “basic” isn’t guaranteed.
That lesson sticks.
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