Free How to Grow Up by Michelle Tea

was it essential, based on the facts of your paycheck, your wallet, your response to the price of a pound of organic grass-fed non-GMO-fed beef? When I was young, my mother would send us to the grocer, Goldstein’s, and we were to order a half pound of the good meat and a half pound of the bad. She’d crumble it all together and that would be dinner, Hamburger Helper.
    I, too, once flinched and cringed at the higher cost of eating well, but after a point, I came to accept it:
That’s just what organic food costs.
I learned that I could buy it and nothing would happen. I didn’t wind up homeless choosing the organic kale over the conventional.
    For me, part of stumbling toward adulthood has included getting real about what things cost, and not getting mad at the world about it. It’s also understanding what I can and can’t afford. This understanding is often psychedelically clouded by what I lovingly refer to as my “scarcity issues.” It’s pretty simple: You grow up with money being scarce, and it gives you hella issues. Mine manifest most powerfully in a terror that everything I have will be somehow taken away from me—probably throughmy own fuckups and carelessness—and I will not only be broke again, but broker than ever. All the worst-case scenarios I’ve managed to avoid, like outright homelessness, will make themselves clear as my destiny. In order to stave off this horror, my scarcity issues counsel me, I must make sure my cost of living remains low, forever. Sure, I might be able to clamber over my issues to make a onetime purchase of a luxury leather hoodie, but I must never, ever make a decision that raises my monthly bills—say, getting better Internet (hence my getting online via a telephone cable snaking across the apartment for waaaaaaay too long), or acquiring a cell phone (I cracked years after everyone else in my life, and only at the bullying of a friend, who was then required to come and hold my sweaty hand for the duration of the transaction). I can’t get cable, because what if that extra monthly expense is the final straw that catapults me into extreme poverty? Same goes for health insurance. I’ll just keep using the free clinics, thank you very much. For years, I did my grocery shopping at Food 4 Less, where the other broke folks wheeled their carts around, collecting our gently dented and discounted cans of soup. My scarcity issues were present whenever I spent more than thirty dollars on anything (later, after much personal work, the number was bumped up to fifty), making me dizzy and flooding me with anxiety, but I slowly learned to tangle with them, to make the purchase in spite of feeling like it might literally give me a heart attack.
    In my youth it was easy enough to cultivate a low level of taste. A pint of generic vodka (or better yet, an economical forty-ounce of malt liquor) and a free poetry reading were all I neededto be happy. But in getting sober, your tastes change. Literally—you can, like, taste things. After decimating your appetite with stimulants, you suddenly are in love with food. You crave sweets, or complicated savories. (Plus, what do people
do
if they don’t drink? They eat. And go to the gym. And become sex addicts.)
    And so it was that I became accustomed to shopping in the fancier grocery stores. You’d never expect that a young woman cruising the bulk bins at a health food store could be having such a profound nervous breakdown, but initially I was. I felt like I was betraying my mother, insulting her struggle by buying pricey food like it was no big thing; like I was somehow checking out of my class politics, aligning myself with the bougie mofos who’d spend twelve dollars on a bulbous heirloom tomato; like an outsider, someone infinitely more at ease inside a grocery store stocked with Oreos and Doritos than one peddling flaxseed crackers and purple carrots.
    After a couple of years I stopped