I just want to start this off by saying that I am not seeking to gatekeep, nor do I wish to see others gatekeeping in the comments.
I have recently been made increasingly aware that there are different levels of poverty all of which have different access to resources, different challenges, and different levels of mobility.
Just a bit of background, I grew up in the 90s and 00s in a rising Middle class family, my parents slowly rose from making around 30k-100k before their hostile nature as addicts and narcissists got the better of them when I was 11, they got a gnarly divorce, were really abusive and used all their money on drugs of choice so that the other couldn't win any. I then spent years of my life rebuilding my father's home for sale, wiring, building walls, plumbing you name it to pay off his debts. When I was 15, he sold it, I helped him find a property in a less expensive area with a job that he could lease to own, he bought it and started his climb back up again to kick me out a year later because he forgot to file the paperwork to move me out of state and it was more trouble than it was worth to keep me. He set me up with a rented room in a house in my hometown with $1k to pay my bills until I was 18. That didn't meet the bills, so I started befriending and sleeping with folks in their 30s so they would pay my grocery bills.
After I was 18, I ran out a 2 year college scholarship while couch surfing, took off a year and a half once it ran out to work as much as I could (not a ton because I have several disabilities from my parents hitting me as a baby and child) while I built up a case to apply for student aid without my parents financial records because I was abandoned, couch surfed more finishing school (bad financial choice even if I am addicted to learning) and then drifted between homelessness and bad relationships to have a roof and food. For years I lived on 4-8k a year as it is hard to hold down a job when you need so much accommodation at work, and could only ever manage about 20 hours a week.
I frequently was frustrated because the system tended to treat me as too poor to be poor, no EITC due to age, I was awarded $12/mo (not missing a 0) in food stamps due to my low income, was told I shouldn't bother applying for disability as it wouldn't be believable that I survived on so little, was rejected from financial aid for an ambulance my employer called for me then refused to pay for leaving me with a 300 credit score (I did not have the level of information access to know I could fight after they denied my worker's comp), and other such issues.
A few years ago, however, I met my wife, we both left abusive relationships to be with each other and finally this girl got a break. My wife is also in her late 20s, but she is a software designer and freelancer and makes like 140k. To say that it is culture shock would not even begin to describe the experience. To go from homeless girl supplementing the hussle with sex work to upper middle class housewife has shown me parts of the world I never had imagined and it is always obvious how much I stick out like a sore thumb. Most notably, many of the people who I had previously thought of as wealthy still struggle to get by. I was shocked to learn that people who make 50k, 60k, 70k, 80k still struggle with debt, live paycheck to paycheck, and don't have the credit to buy a house.
So far I have learned that there is somewhat a scale, with the bottom seeming to be people who are so poor it takes a literal miracle to have any form of upward mobility, like I was. People in this category seem largely to have been given up on by society and have little access to or knowledge of social services.
Then there are the people who hit this sweet spot where they have no hope of moving up because they need the services they are given to live and those are all ripped out from under them if they even look like they are having so much as a blink of success from the outside. They are left in debt paying far higher bills for the same things as everyone above them. Society blames them for their struggles because a few times a generation there is a rags to riches story of someone who starts the right tiny business at the right time and somehow that implies to the wealthy that they all can do it.
Then there are the people who are too wealthy for social services and instead spend every dollar they make over the category below on those same things because God forbid our society believe that people deserve quality of life. They are one tiny accident away from losing everything.
Then there is the margin of people that can pay their bills but they could never have a house or a car?
TLDR, I have only ever seen the system from the very bottom and reletively high up and have absolutely no sense of scale or reality and I want to understand what my fellow people are going through. If anyone feels up for talking about their experiences and what the world is like in the middle, I would be very appreciative. Is ithis emerging sense true that there are different levels of poverty that all suck in different ways and reach up much higher than I thought? Thank you for your time and attention.