Bearing It Together

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I moved around a lot as a kid. I haven’t lived with my mom since I was 13, and the only information I have about my biological father is that his name was Tony — maybe. I lived in a group home in Montana after I left my mom, then ended up in Tucson with my brother’s dad, who my mom was dating when I was born. We’re not related, but he’s on my birth certificate, so technically, he was my guardian.

I’d experienced so much instability when I was younger that I was determined to stay in one place. I’d actually never finished a full school year until high school. I wanted to make connections, build relationships. I became captain of the track team. I played basketball. I was vice president of the GSA, the gender-sexuality alliance.

The group home I’d lived in was nice, but it was restrictive in ways that would’ve been difficult for the high schooler I was at the time. You couldn’t have your own phone, for example. You couldn’t be out at certain hours, meaning that I wouldn’t have been able to participate in my extracurriculars. I’d cultivated so much autonomy, but I knew if I ended up back in a group home or foster care, that autonomy would be stripped away.

When I was around 16, my guardian got evicted. His credit and renter’s history had taken such a hit by that point that we couldn’t get into another place. He told me I was going to have to move into my car. I was working pretty much full time, but couldn’t get my own apartment, because I was a minor. I ended up moving in with my boyfriend at the time.

There was a huge debacle with my FAFSA application my senior year because I was facing independence. People who work in schools, they’re mandatory reporters. I knew if I told them my living situation that they’d have to report it to the Arizona Department of Child Safety, but I didn’t really know what would happen after that. My worst-case scenario was that they would realize that there was no one here to take care of me and I’d have to go back to live with family in Montana, which — that was something that I was really worried about.

It’s not super confidence-building to not-have a home or to live with your family. There’s stigma that surrounds poverty and being in these types of situations. Beyond just being worried that I’d get flagged and lose my autonomy, I was embarrassed. I kept it very, very much on the down low. None of my friends knew. I used my guardian’s information and ended up getting flagged for federal verification, meaning I had to upload both his and my tax documents. For most people, it would be fine. My situation was different. My guardian was living about three hours away at this point, so the communication was hazy. It was like pulling teeth trying to get this tax information from him.  

I found out that I met the federal qualifications for homelessness. And if you qualify as homeless, you can file independently, which is what I did. I ended up graduating salutatorian. I got full funding from the U of A. I got really lucky. I haven’t talked to my guardian since I turned 18.

The biggest thing my freshman year of college — and I think this is something first- gen students struggle with, too — is this fundamental sense of not-knowing what you’re doing. There’s a lot of messaging on campus that’s like, take control of your destiny, but the reality of what that means isn’t always clear. I realize this sounds negative, but there are so many students on campus who have had these great lives and come in with a background of privilege and things going well for them. They have families that can help them, or exposure to people who have navigated college before. I was trying to figure things out on the spot. It can just feel like you’re behind somehow, or like you’re in a different world.

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At the beginning of my freshman year, I went to this big dinner for the recipients of something called the Arizona Assurance Scholarship. One of the requirements the scholarship involved was joining a program that had a mentorship aspect. I remember going through the options and seeing Fostering Success, [a program focused on building community on campus for students who have experienced the foster care system, housing insecurity or homelessness, and those who are unaccompanied youth]. There was a little blurb about it.

Mostly, I joined to fulfill the requirements. It ended up being the first place where I felt like I’d found my people. I’ve heard this from other people in the program, too: that being in Fostering Success was like being with people who really understood what they were going through.

I remember coming into the Fostering Success office one year before the career fair. I was working really hard on getting a job. I’d printed out a bunch of copies of my resume and wanted to make sure my outfit looked good. So, I came in and modeled for everyone, and they critiqued me. They were like, “Unbutton the top button of your blazer,” “Wear your name tag on that side, not on that side,” things like that. It seems silly. Or like the kind of thing you might FaceTime your mom about, if you had one. But it’s this support I hadn’t had before, or really even known was there.

There was tangible support, too. Fostering Success sent me to the me to the National Network for Youth’s National Summit on Youth Homelessness + Hill Day in Washington, D.C., three years in a row. I got the chance to be in rooms I wouldn’t ordinarily be in, sharing my story with congressional staffers, advocating for legislation to support my community, growing both in confidence and my ability to speak up.

I also participated in an internship in the summer of 2023 through the Fund for American Studies in D.C. doing policy work. I was worried about the out-of-pocket costs associated with taking an internship and turned to Fostering Success for advice. I ultimately ended up getting a scholarship that covered my living expenses and enabled me to participate in the program — an opportunity many in my shoes would not have been able to accept, and a foundational experience both personally and professionally.

One of the things we talk about in Fostering Success is this fierce hyper-independence. I didn’t realize how much burden I was bearing until I had someone else to bear it with me. Even stuff I think I have figured out — it’s nice to just have someone there to help hold it with me. It makes everything so much easier. Because you can do things on your own. It’s very possible to navigate the world and school and friendships and relationships and life alone. But most people don’t, and most people don’t have to. And it’s really nice not to have to.

There was one big moment for me my freshman year. I went cliff jumping with this group of people I’d met on campus. There was this girl who got this huge allowance from her parents. They would send her, like, $600 a week. I was floored by that. And she was complaining about how her parents were a little late sending it. I remember feeling so frustrated and angry.

I was waiting tables 30-40 hours a week and going to classes full-time. I remember thinking, “Man, I would give anything, anything to be sent even $100 a month, $50 a month. She’s sent thousands, and she’s complaining.”

She was like a caricature of this privilege to me at that point — her suitemates were complaining about how she never took out the trash and she was talking about how her maid used to do it for her at home, and so she’d never really learned how to do that. I just thought, “what a brat, what a privileged brat.”

But looking back at it, she was in an entirely new world for herself, trying to figure out who she was, learning how to take care of herself for the first time. I don’t feel the same isolation that I did my freshman year. I used to have almost a “me versus them” mentality. And that shifted a lot over my time at the U of A, because at that point, I was floundering a little bit, just trying to find my place and sort out my life and control everything around me. And everybody else was also struggling with those things, too. I just didn’t realize it until later.

My big dream was to go to law school. I knew that economics was one of the top majors for people who go on to law, so I chose that. My other major, I’d just stumbled into. I had to do required meetings with my advisers early on because I hadn’t decided on a major, and they really wanted me to get on a decided path quickly. And they told me about the PPEL program, which is philosophy, politics, economics, and law.

It feels like a lot of the concepts I studied in economics I knew because I’d lived through them. Like, there’s something called the benefits cliff in welfare economics. It’s where if you make over a certain amount of money, you lose benefits, so people will try to stay to the left of that. I lost my health insurance when I was in college because I was working full-time to support myself, but because I was independent and working full-time to support myself, I made too much money to qualify for these benefits. I could recognize the value in trying to keep your income low, which is something people do. They’ll try to stay below the threshold if they think they’ll lose health insurance or SNAP. People around me in class were a little bit confused, but I was like, “oh yeah, duh, I knew about this.”

My junior and senior year, I did Ethics Bowl. It’s like a debate team for ethical cases: We got a bunch of cases, we made arguments on them, we would go to competitions. It was probably one of my favorite things that I did in college. And this year we were quarterfinalists in the national competition.

Studying ethics has been such a funny transformation for me. I’d taken an intro to moral thinking class my freshman year, and I remember thinking, “this is so stupid. This is one of the silliest classes I’ve ever taken.” We were learning deontology and divine command theory and utilitarianism, and after we learned about every moral theory the professor would be, like, “But that one’s not really right for this and this and this reason,” and I thought “well what are we learning this all for? When are you gonna tell me the correct moral theory?” It ended up being one of my biggest focuses in school.

I graduated in May and moved to Providence, Rhode Island, for a job. I’m going to be starting my master’s in applied economics at Boston College this fall and commuting up from Providence. It’s a huge shift, but I’m excited.

Eventually I’d like to study public law, be someone who advocates for people and works for things that are worth it. But, you know, I’m flexible. I had this idea coming into school that you had to have things figured out, otherwise there’s some sort of instability. You have to know what the future is going to be. And I think that it makes a lot of sense, because, in my case, if you don’t know what the immediate future is going to be, it can be, you know, homelessness. Now that I have a decent grip on my life, I think that things can work out. I think that things work out the way they’re supposed to.