People make a lot of assumptions. All the time, about all things. Today I'm thinking abt being poor. Before people know you're poor, they make a lot of assumptions abt what *should* be easily available to you. When they find out you're poor, they make as many inverse assumptions.

My ADHD therapist (covered by my Medicaid) thought nothing of telling me to get a blood pressure cuff to use at home. We meet over video appts so buying the tool was implied to be a requirement for my treatment relationship. It's $30 and not inherently covered by insurance.

$30 is kind of a lot for me right now. But it's also kind of a lot for a lot of people at any given time. But there was an assumption, maybe because I already had access to care, that a $30 tool I don't need for anything else or long-tern would be inherently accessible to me.

My PCP advised me to try a very specific OTC item for some health stuff that really affects my day-to-day quality of life. It ranges from $30 to $50, with the more expensive option being more "cost-effective". She can't write a script for my Medicaid to cover it because it's OTC.

Again, $30 to $50 is a meaningful amount of money to me right now - especially when you consider that it could very likely not work for me and then I'd have spent my limited cashflow on something to collect dust in my medicine cabinet. Again, accessibility was assumed.

These are both medical examples but the assumption of easy access as a norm is made by everyone - providers, teachers, friends, the government, neighbors. We just assume as a default that something isn't a real "ask", a burden - complicating and compromising for very many people.

Now FLIP IT and the someone you're interacting with DOES know you're poor. They know that $30 isn't a little bit of nothing to you, you don't have stable financial means at your immediate disposal. This sounds like it could alleviate some of the assumptive access issues, right?

Not entirely true. Completely wrong, in some ways. Depending on the nature of your relationship and the ask, it could be helpful for someone to know you're poor, if that information is used to offer alternatives, resources, workarounds in the same breath they're making the ask.

I think people who aren't poor make the assumption that that's how these interactions go. "Of course when people know you lack some type of access, they offer various options to meet the level of access you do have - that's how it works and should be! Anything else is gross"

I hate to burst that beautiful Glinda the Good Witch pink bubble but that's NOT been my experience. When people know I lack a particular type of access, I get two things: an unwillingness (inability?) to get creative and an assumption that I have NO types of access. Both are sad.

I'd like to think that if ppl were practiced in resourceful creativity, they would offer it. I don't think it's an individual moral failing that most ppl, esp those with the assumed easy access, do not offer something they do not possess as a result of a larger societal failing.

They can know I am poor and be sympathetic to my limitations but if they lack the knowledge and skills to "meet me where I'm at", whatever the situation/ask, they are doing nothing for me, a Poor Person. Their awareness and wokeness doesn't serve me and we're stuck at an impasse.

And, in most cases, it isn't their fault. It's *ours*. It is the collective fault of our past, present, and future that people do not know the ways we can get creative together to access what we both need and want (yes, WANT! because poor people deserve space to just want too)

I think this lack of knowing, lack of practice, lack of creativity when ppl lack financial access renders moot a lot of the conversations around "awareness of" or "sensitivity to" ppl's socioeconomic shit. Cool, you've evolved past assuming people have ready access, good work

But more often than not, that is where I have seen the education end. Acknowledging the reality of financial barriers is considered "arriving". And, while you've progressed past one harmful assumption about accessibility, I have found most people then rest in another assumption:

"Poor people have no access." When ppl discover I am a Poor Person and understand that seemingly benign purchasing decisions are not that easy for me, there is immediately an assumption that I just do not have any access at all and therefore any ask is going to be inaccessible.

This assumption, that poor folks lacking *financial access* DO NOT HAVE ANY ACCESS is also harmful. And, in my humble-but-from-lived-experience opinion, the most disrespectful and frustrating assumption of the two. Maybe even the laziest of the two polar assumptions

Like hell, you already did the half-measure of unlearning presumed access to monetary capital or credit for "small" things like medicine or textbooks or brunch and "larger" things like emergency plane tickets or lawyer retainers or down payments. Why'd ya stop there? Lazy.

It sounds like I'm frustrated with individuals (okay maybe I am) but again, I know that this rewd assumption - just like the initial assumption and just like ppl's inability to get creative - is the result of a collective societal emphasis on financial access as standard...

and a complete dearth of understanding about the many other ways people can fulfill the range of making ends meet, getting what they need, doing and having what they want. And they're not secret ways known only to poor people! Comfy and rich people have this type of acces too!

Which is why the assumption that "poor people have no access" is so insulting and so lazy and so dehumanizing. Because you have the same alternative access and you use the same alternative access - you just use it less frequently and with less reliance. It's called "community".

You either don't see it as a form of access (which is also insulting - and sad) or you don't think that poor people could possibly have it (). You're too blinded by the supremacy of financial access that you cannot imagine someone without money having meaningful alternatives.

This thread is out of control and likely should have been an essay but it's all something I couldn't have innately known previously and that I've also viscerally felt in this season of my life. It's uncomfortable when people assume I can easily access something with money...