John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)
for anyone who has grown up poor or working class, how do i claw my way out of this?  i come from a single parent household, my mom is an elementary school teacher with 4 kids in an expensive city.  she barely makes ends meet and cannot support me.  i was homeless and addicted to drugs for most of my teenage years, before getting sober and going to college, but dropping out after 2 years - my mom's child support put me just outside of qualifying for financial aid, despite the fact that she could still barely afford food and rent, so my only option was living at home and taking out 5-6 figures of loans.  i didn't want to be a financial burden on my mom by living at home, so i dropped out and kept working as a bike messenger.  as an aside, my mom is in astronomical debt from a lengthy divorce process with my father, who physically abused me, my siblings, and my mom, tried to kill both me and my mom at different points in time, then successfully put my mom in 6 figures of legal debt by drawing out the divorce process as long as possible.<p>flash forward to now - i'm still a full-time bike messenger.  i barely pay the rent for my tiny SRO i share with my girlfriend.  my biggest goal in life is to get a job as a programmer to support my mom and siblings.  i've been teaching myself computer science for years now, and i know i would succeed if i could get a job programming.  i just don't know how i get there from here.  being a bike messenger (a real one, not a postmate / uber eats person) is extremely physically demanding.  i'm mentally and physically exhausted after work.  i don't have enough time or energy outside of work to complete any of the projects i start, with the hope of having something to show to a company.  i feel like a simple CRUD app is too easy of a project to show my skill to an employer, so i try to work on things like a compiler and a real-time rendering engine, but these are huge projects, and i don't have enough free time to finish them in any reasonable time frame.  i'm confident in my programming skill, but my resume is a list of working-class jobs in machine shops and courier companies.  any advice would be seriously appreciated.<p>(hopefully this doesn't read as too melodramatic or anything, it wasn't meant to be.  i know i'm still a lot luckier than most.)