An Outsider's Tale

I was raised by my grandparents—a household in which the influence of the Great Depression still echoed. Through work, diligence, common sense, and industriousness, my family developed a form of wealth, but you might not recognize it.

My family owned land, even owned livestock, in the earliest part of my life. We lived on land that provided for the bulk of our needs—well water and vegetable gardens, rows of corn, milk and meat, eggs. We went grocery shopping for the "fancy stuff."

As I got closer to adulthood, really in my early teen years, this wealth started to dwindle. Though my grandparents were married until death did them part, a couple of family divorces—paired with some infidelities and at least one somewhat impressive financial crime—started tearing things down.

This sort-of-wealth my grandparents had built over a lifetime started bleeding away, in the form of bits of land having to be sold, and money saved having to save some troubled family souls.

These were not bitter losses. These were willing sacrifices. And if they hurt my grandparents on some level, I never knew it. That’s part of the wealth. They did these things, and young Kevin never had to know about the pain of it.

We still had a home, and land, and we didn't go hungry. Life was still good.

Poverty came later. And mostly just for me. And it was all my own doing.

Going my own way

Like the Prodigal Son, I left home, embarking on my own path, willful and stubborn and entitled.

What came for me was a famine. Years of poverty so profound, it shocked and confused me. It didn’t come all at once, but when it came it was like a sudden storm. I had lived in a shelter all my life, and had no idea such a storm could even exist. I was not prepared.

I couldn't afford food. I really couldn't afford shelter. I was continuing my existence by taking out more and more debt, mostly in the form of credit cards and student loans.

Both of these were so easy for someone like me to get—a freshly graduated high school student with no credit history, no job, and just over a thousand dollars in savings. Hitching me to lifelong debt was as simple as signing some papers and taking my free baseball cap.

The credit card companies are predatory and evil bastards, but they can’t hold a candle to the institution of student loans.

I'd been sold on the idea that education was the most important thing in life, but I’d been fooled about what education really meant.

College logic

I'd let the world convince me that college was the only path to success. That going to college was the only way to be anything in the world. And I’d fallen for the lie that this kind of education was worth any sacrifice, any amount of debt. Nothing was more important than university.

And a private university—that would mean even more, even better opportunities. That huge price tag for the exact same equation you could get for a third of the cost elsewhere… so worth it. Paying more means getting better quality, I believed. Actually, though that never appeared in writing anywhere, and though the financial advisors of my private university would deny ever even implying it, that was the clear message as I was selecting a school. Private means better. Worth the bucks.

So I signed every loan document, committed to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt—fair trade for a secure future.

It didn’t take long for the reality to become apparent, though I was too fooled to even consider the irony of my situation.

I was attending a private university, accruing nearly a quarter of a million dollars in debt, but I was reduced to stealing packs of ramen noodles and fast food condiments so I could eat. I justified stealing the cheap stuff as "hurting others the least." I wouldn’t dare shoplift anything that cost more than 10-for-a-buck. That would be wrong. That would make me a bad person.

I paid rent with borrowed money, though not enough borrowed money to do much else. I didn't even have $5 for gas. And when I got very sick—severe ear infections in both ears—my boss was kind to me and paid for me to get treated. Otherwise, my plan was to tough it out, work through it. Be a man.

Nowhere for the Prodigal’s return

My grandparents died during this time. The lifeline I had, the family I could have returned to like the Prodigal Son, that was gone before I came around and stopped being stubborn, started realizing what kind of straits I was in. No one else in my family was in a position to help me. Some needed more help themselves. Some even came to me, asking for whatever I could give, and I gave it.

There was a month in there when I paid rent but stole ramen, and boiled water for it on rusty BBQ grill I’d fished out of the dumpster. I treated myself to some honey roasted peanuts I’d nicked from my boss, and felt ashamed with every bite, spread out over 30 days.

I should pause a moment to say: My family was not as poor s some others in this country or in this world. By many global standards, we were wealthy. I couldn't afford food, but I had an apartment. I had a vehicle. Two, in fact—a truck and a motorcycle.

Both vehicles were useless if I couldn't afford gas, of course. And both—well, they really weren't "mine." I had a truck loan and a loan on the motorcycle I simply did not need.

I sold it eventually, and kept the money, defaulting on the loan, because being honorable has no nutritional value. I defaulted on a lot of debt, during that time in my life. I had creditors and debt collectors calling at all hours, saying vile and hateful things. They accused me of being a deadbeat. They told me my life was ruined forever, that I could never own a home, that I would go to jail, that I was a bad, awful, despicable person.

They made me feel like I’d be doing the world a favor if I just died. I was less than worthless, a parasite.

I felt like I deserved all of that. I felt like I was disgusting, vile. And I felt like I'd brought it all on myself—because I had. My choices were bad. My actions led to pain and suffering, for me and for others, and to a level of poverty I’d never known was possible.

Worse than poverty. Nothing I owned was really mine, it was all on credit. My life was debt.

Origin of an Outsider

My whole life, I've perceived that I was abandoned, unwanted. This is true in certain respects. I was the product of a fling, my father walking away from my mother and back to his wife—all of them not even in their 20s. He didn't even know I was on the way. He sired a daughter who is only two months younger than me.

She’s wonderful, and has an incredible family and a beautiful life. I met her, late in our lives, but I’ve stopped intruding on her life. I felt like it was intruding, anyway. I don’t want to be a reminder to her of any of the pain surrounding her own life. I was raised by mother’s family, but she was raised by my father’s side. Things happened. Nothing I’ll discuss here—it’s her life, her privacy. But I do have some experience with that side of my lineage.

When I was born, my father's side of the family threatened my mother, if she ever claimed I was his son. They threatened to shame her publicly, to drag a bunch of guys into court to claim she'd slept with them all. They would paint her as a whore.

So it was better for me to be a bastard than for her to be a whore. I respect that decision—there was really no one to advocate for my mother, no one who could protect her. She and my grandparents did what they felt was right.

Most of my family did.

A strange quirk to this story:

My father's sister ended up marrying my mother's brother. Parse that one for a minute. But basically, they were my aunt and uncle both ways. No incest required, just a combination of some poor life choices and a true, lifelong love. Until my uncle’s death, he and my aunt were one of the power couples in my family, examples I still think of when I ponder what a successful marriage looks like.

But it was my blood aunt and blood uncle, constant parts of my life growing up, who most vehemently denied my lineage. I was not my father's son. It would not be discussed. I was never even told who my real father was, until I was nearly 20 years old. And even then, there was a strong hint that I was getting privileged information, something I should keep to myself. Don’t stir any pots. Don’t cause any stinks.

This is the way. In my family, at least. We have a long history of waiting things out, even if the waiting stretches into a lifetime. And this isn’t as bad of a philosophy as one might think. There are many problems in life that are best left to run their own course. Just not every problem. Wisdom is knowing the difference.

I was not wise, and I believe that at the time neither was anyone else in my family. Not in this way. In this way we were willfully blind.

I finally met my father, by the way. I was 38 years old. And it caused some grief with my aunt and uncle. There were angry phone calls and cutting comments. There was angst. Oh was there angst. And then… there was acceptance. The denials stopped, at least on my father’s part. We all acknowledged that the truth was true, whether anyone wanted to believe it or not. I look just like the guy, after all. Just. Like. Him.

So in the end, nobody cared that a 38-year-old man met his father, and they came to an agreement of mutual ok-with-each-other-ness, even love. Everything turned out fine. We’d waited it out.

This was confusing to some. It upset some apple carts. At one point my aunt said to my mother, "So all these years, I was the only one who cared about this secret?"

Don't judge her harshly. She was acting on what her own mother demanded. My paternal grandmother was apparently a strong willed woman. I never met her. I hold no animosity.

But I've strayed from the path a little here.

Enter the Doofus

I was not aware that my family was broken. But I was aware that I came into the world unwanted. I was an outsider. And then I went and ended up being smart, and a little weird. I saw the world in a different way from everyone else. Everyone. So I was ostracized.

I had very few friends in school, until high school. That's when I learned how to pretend to be like everyone else. Where I fooled myself into believing that being smart wasn't a good thing. Only the stupid have friends. Only the doofus is loved. So, I acted stupid. I acted a doofus. Though of the secret kind. I was a clown, showing off, affecting an air of don’t-give-a-crap, while simultaneously acing essays and pulling off last-minute Hail-Mary speeches and presentations. I even won some scholarships for work I did in ten minutes, having forgotten to do it over a two-week lead time.

I’m not bragging when I say I was smart. I’m condemning myself for wasting a lot of really good opportunities to act with intelligence. I had no idea that I was further alienating myself by being both the smart guy and the show-off idiot. I was just trying to survive adolescence.

By the way—unlike most Americans, I loved high school. I was that rare breed of student who knew how good we all had it. The system was pretty week for challenging students to be their bet, so if you could just be mediocre you were going to get by fine. I learned how to skate on my secret smarts because of high school. Something that did me absolutely no favors later in life, where getting the kind of success I’ve always wanted requires discipline and responsibility and self-guided education.

I was in my mid-thirties before I started applying those lessons to my life. A late bloomer.

But I was talking about feelings of abandonment.

To that point in my life, I’d been born as someone only half-wanted, at best. My family did love me, even if they couldn't understand a damn thing I ever said or did. But there was a definite vibe there—an undercurrent of Kevin as the Mistake. Kevin as the Threat, too. Because if I pushed too hard, asked too many questions of the wrong people, there as always the curse of my paternal grandmother—the curse that would name my mother as a whore. Even decades later, when that should have long lost its power, the threads of that curse held on. They made me a constant reminder that I was not planned, and I was, to some degree, not wanted.

Unconscious Otherness

My mother, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles—none of them expressed this to me openly, you have to understand. And so, in a lot of ways, this isn’t real. This didn’t exist. There was never that moment where I was rejected. They can’t see it that way.

They didn’t realize how much I could sense. They weren’t aware of my ability to understand people. Something I use all the time, have used all my life without quite realizing it. I read people. I intuit things. I always have. Awareness wasn’t always there, but intuition was. And looking back, I see all the patterns now.

I was not wanted. I was an outsider. And it manifested in the form of consternation and frustration.

Many of my family members definitely did not understand me, and tended to lean away as much as possible until my adolescence was done and we all snapped away from the middle and went our separate ways. I haven't spoken to anyone from my early life for 30+ years. Cousins I played with as my only friends, every single day of my life left, built careers, started families, and had very good, very wonderful lives. And they never looked back to see where I was on the trail.

And this is good! This is right! None of them owed me a thing, and as the saying goes, “Phone lines go both ways.” I am as much culpable for our loss of connection as they are. I love every single one of them. I’ve never stopped. And my gift to them was to let the connection between of die, because I could sense that my “otherness” was a problem. Me being part of their lives meant having to bend… to contort. They had to reshape themselves with every encounter they had with me, and that wasn’t fair. I couldn’t keep asking them to do that, as they were growing into their new shapes, fitting spouses and children, and all the trappings of life, into the shape of themselves.

I would always be a nodule, never a component. A relationship with me means having to assume an unnatural and uncomfortable shape. I get that. It’s easier if I shape myself to what they need. And for my family, that meant keeping only the faintest whisper of a line of connection. They deserve that kind of respect from me.

University of Poverty

I went to college, which was not something most people in my family did. It's hard to say which of us was smarter in that decision—college brought opportunities, but it mostly brought crushing, lifelong debt. The opportunities I could have gotten for free, though I didn’t know that at the time.

My education led to my poverty, which stretched for many years. Actually, it was worse than poverty—it was debt. A debt that served no real purpose, because nothing I learned while attending University was worth the lifelong, soul-crushing cost. I would literally have been better off taking a trade job, or interning for a media outlet, or simply writing short stories to sell to pulp magazines. I would have met more people with better influence, and would have learned more transferrable and useful skills. And most importantly, I would not have had to scrape by on next to nothing as I figured out my life and career over a 20+ year span, only coming to a point where I could start paying down that student loan debt as I approach half-a-century in my life.

Take this lesson to heart, kids: No matter what you’re told, college is not worth the cost for most people. Only those going into highly specialized fields can come close to receiving a decent return on investment from college debt. And the margins on that are diminishing. Doctors and attorneys often have trouble paying rent these days. Graduate degrees guarantee nothing.

But education…

Real education has real value

That is the most precious thing. Education is something you can own and control and improve, it’s something you can leverage to make your life propounding better.

I lived in poverty financially, for decades. But when I learned the value of real, self-guided education, I became wealthy beyond imagining. It’s a slow wealth, it’s taking time to empower me to solve the difficulties and challenges of my earlier choices. But it’s enabled me to solve them, this I know.

I am an outsider. I’ve accepted this. And there are other outsiders out there, and I want to give some kind of helpful advice. I want to say, “It’s ok. Being an outsider is ok.”

That doesn’t sound so helpful, but if you think about it, that’s really the message any one of us longs most to hear. We just want to know that things are going to be ok. And for outsiders, for the poor, for people who feel like they have no one to turn to, the message that “It’s going to be ok” is empowering.

Here’s another: “You are the one who controls where you go from here. Own your education and you’ll own your life.”

These days, I’m still an outsider. But I have allies. My wife. Her family. My friends and fellow authors. I’ve come to accept that I’m never going to be fully inside these circles—there’s always some distance. But the key for me was to find people for whom reshaping themselves to accommodate me was not painful. They don’t have to conform to me entirely, but they’re willing to have a Kevin-shaped distortion at the edge of their life. That’s enough. That’s really good.

I’m not poor anymore. I still have debt—i’m whittling it down, bit by bit. I’m looking forward to the day that it’s gone. But I discovered real and actual wealth somewhere along the way. I don’t own anything physical in my life, but I own how I think, how I behave, the disciplines I’ve developed. I know that even if my finances dip again, to the point where I’m swiping ramen noodles and fast food condiments again, I can find a path out. Owning my self-guided education gives me a path. Owning my choices and responses gives me power.

Even an outsider like me can use that.