Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
I grew up low class, and expected my life to be hard - only I didn’t process it as “hard”; it was just how life *was.* I was going to have to spend the rest of my life doing minimum-wage physically-hard labor, and then getting pregnant. That was the plan, but more importantly-
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
I didn’t register this plan as a bad one, a sad one. It made the “I need to set aside my feelings and use my willpower” part of my brain very active, a dominant way of being. The pain in my legs from being on my feet all day was just the *way life was*. And I was grateful! -
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
I’d grown up reading stories throughout history and was intimately familiar with how new and different my current lifestyle was. I was happy I wasn’t working in coal mines, or under threat of war, and that there was no famine. I viewed it as a normal feature of human existence-
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
That you had to set aside your feelings and use willpower. This is the way everyone had to live in history, this was a default of existence - and anything more than this was luxury. I felt hyper aware of how unusual our state of civilization was, how luxurious my life was already
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
And this is why I feel a little confused when people get really angry at stuff like the minimum wage, or having to work two jobs and live in a shitty apartment. People are complaining at working conditions that I went through with actual gratitude.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@simpolism
My factory job I worked in a city I’d moved to recently, didn’t know many people. I had a boyfriend I lived with and a few friends. My parents were 5 hour drive away and i wasn’t on speaking terms with my dad, and they said they weren’t gonna financially support me.
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