Free Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado Page B

on the receiving end of customers’ misery, I’m never sure whether to actually be mad at the customers. Maybe theytried to be polite and just didn’t have the energy. Because when they were at work, someone else came in, and so on, and so on, and so on.
    Maybe it’s because, as I mentioned earlier, I spend a lot of the time depressed. Always have, always will. Give me medicine, I get less upset about being depressed, but the fact of it never leaves. Sometimes I am clinically, trouble-getting-out-of-bed depressed. Other times, I am just low-level, drag-myself-through-my-day depressed. Some people might call me pessimistic because I always expect disaster to occur. But looking at my life, I think that’s bull. When I expect doom? That’s what I call reality.
    Mostly, I ignore the depression. I developed a caustic sense of humor. I discovered mosh pits to vent. I listen to seriously angry music. When that doesn’t work, I soothe the emptiness with terrible food and old jazz. If that doesn’t work and I can afford it, I go in and see someone about getting some medicine for a few weeks. That means making appointments any place I think I might be able to get in, assuming that I’ll be turned down for service, and showing up to them all until I find someone who’s willing to do me a solid and give me a week or two of anti-anxiety medicine. If I can’t find anyone to do that, I just sort of check out for a while.
    Those times, I can’t get past the part of the day where you’re supposed to put on pants. I’ll stare at the pants. I will tell myself to put on the pants. I will get stern with myself about them. And then I’ll lose a few hours to a discussion with myself about how much I actually really do deserve all thepunishments I will heap upon me if I do not put on the pants. When I zone back in again, the sun will be down and it will blessedly be time for bed again.
    Sometimes I can convince my boss that I have a terrible flu. Sometimes I just don’t show up, and those times it’s half and half whether I’ve got a job to go back to; it depends on how understaffed they are. Sometimes I haven’t been employed in the first place.
    Not all poor people are chemically depressed, but a lot of us are situationally depressed at any given time. And that’s because our lives are depressing. I realize that might at first sound simplistic, but I don’t think it’s a lot more complicated than that.
    When I think of myself and all the poor people I know, there is only one person who I would have called irrepressibly sunny. Her name was Melissa, and she seemed indefatigable. Nothing, and I mean not eviction, not being without electricity, not being called names—nothing brought this woman down. She once told me that even when she felt terrible, she liked being a bright spot. I’d known her for six months when her kid got in trouble and the school intimated that it was because she wasn’t doing enough for him. And that’s what finally broke her. She got into a terrible funk, withdrawn and silent unless you forced something out of her. She started noticing all the things that were wrong in her world, and that was the end. She was one of us.
    That’s the worst, watching someone lose hope. I’m not swelled with it personally, but I always like to see people whoaren’t only pretending to be in a good mood, people who are truly optimistic about life. Those people are contagious, even to a curmudgeon like me. It’s heart-wrenching to watch that fade, like watching a star die or something. I can’t think of anything poetic and tragic enough to describe it.
    —
    I recognize that the attitude that I fall into—hell, that I cultivate—as a ward against the instability of being poor isn’t always helpful to me. But it’s not as if I can just go in and out of it, like putting on or taking off my makeup. The attitude I carry as a poor person is my armor, and after so many years of fighting and clawing and protecting myself