Growing Up in Poverty: The Silent Weight We Carry

When you grow up in the city, you don’t always recognize how much the environment you live in shapes who you are. For a lot of us, poverty isn’t just a word—it’s the air we breathe, the blocks we walk, and the options we don’t have. It’s not just about money. It’s about access, opportunity, and safety.

Food Deserts and Empty Choices

Imagine being hungry, but the closest “grocery store” is a corner gas station or a fast-food chain. Fresh fruits and vegetables are rare, and when you do find them, they’re too expensive for families already deciding between the light bill and rent. That’s what a food desert feels like: not being able to fuel your body the way it needs. So we end up surviving off chips, soda, and dollar menus, which turns into long-term health problems nobody talks about until it’s too late.

Safe Spaces Aren’t Always Safe

For some, “going outside” means playing in backyards or parks. For us, it means being hyper-aware of who’s walking behind you, where the nearest streetlight is, or whether gunshots are going to cut through the night. Safe environments shouldn’t be a luxury, but too often, that’s how it feels. Violence—whether it’s community violence or police violence—becomes a background soundtrack we’re forced to tune out just to get by.

Systemic Cycles We Didn’t Create

People love to point at the surface: crime, drugs, dropout rates. But few dig deeper into why these patterns exist. When schools are underfunded, when parents are working two or three jobs and still can’t get ahead, when whole neighborhoods are left without investment for decades—of course struggle becomes a cycle. Poverty is not a result of bad choices; it’s a system designed to keep certain people locked out of prosperity.

The Emotional Toll

We don’t just carry bookbags—we carry stress, trauma, and survival skills that most kids in wealthier neighborhoods can’t imagine. Anxiety, depression, and anger live with us daily. But therapy costs money, and mental health resources are either out of reach or not built with us in mind. So we bottle it up, or we express it in ways that get criminalized instead of understood.

Why This Matters

This isn’t just an “urban issue.” It’s an American issue. Poverty, lack of fresh food, unsafe environments, and systemic violence impact entire generations. It’s not just about us struggling today—it’s about the opportunities our children may never get tomorrow if nothing changes.

But we aren’t victims without power. We are resilient, creative, and resourceful. When given real access—to education, healthy food, safe housing, mental health care—we thrive. And thriving youth means thriving communities.

✨ The truth is, poverty and violence don’t define us—they reveal how much this country still has to fix. We’re not asking for handouts; we’re demanding fairness, opportunity, and the chance to breathe without carrying a weight we didn’t create.