I consider myself both working and middle class. I understand this irks people; how greedy to take a piss in both territories. But it is this split life that I want to write about. Being torn up the middle with a foot in each stirrup. The challenges of duel identity and the benefits of the adaptability that come with it. Are we we allowed more than one identity and why is my identity informed by a structure I don’t easily identify with?
I am southern. I am white. I am female. My childhood was middle class. My whole family work or have worked in the public sector. Past generations of my family lived working class lives their whole lives. The best way I can describe having two class identities is like our recessive chromosomes; one part of my DNA lying dormant until it’s needed. Is class generational, passed on like genetics?
I am southern. I am white. I am female. My childhood was middle class. My whole family work or have worked in the public sector. Past generations of my family lived working class lives their whole lives. The best way I can describe having two class identities is like our recessive chromosomes; one part of my DNA lying dormant until it’s needed. Is class generational, passed on like genetics?
There has always been a desperate need in me to feel like I was included, to be liked and to be accepted. Which is important to everyone: to feel a part of a community; to feel needed and important. But I believe the extremity of the desire within me was a consequence of this dual identity. It takes a lot of energy to constantly change the way you present yourself, alter the way you want to be perceived, creating a chameleon like ability to adapt. This can be a very useful tool, but it can also breed mistrust. I am not ashamed of the misconceptions, they’ve helped me survive. A bit like a shit Wonder Women.
Not meeting other people’s expectations of what they perceive a person from either class to be (see previous tick list) created confusion and discomfort. The discomfort presented as an anger toward political correctness, which is really anger toward snobbery.
So there’s a desire to reclassify me in way that suits their ideals. Their need for validation of their assumptions in cohesion with my need for validation of acceptance fosters shape-shifting. I was adapting because of guilt and because of the desire to be understood.
So there’s a desire to reclassify me in way that suits their ideals. Their need for validation of their assumptions in cohesion with my need for validation of acceptance fosters shape-shifting. I was adapting because of guilt and because of the desire to be understood.
But having your identity questioned by other people is exhausting and maddening. However, I have encountered enough emphatically nodding heads of faux understanding to know that being able to subsume the middle class in me, serves me a privilege.
We all want to fit somewhere, feel like we’re a part of something. That unconscious need to be understood is so strong it encourages us to form identities we don’t identify with. It is then implemented semi-consciously by societal structures, to build ourselves communities based on these identities. It’s almost too easy to harbour disdain for the things we aren’t. To find unity with our contemporaries over a dislike for what is different from us. It happens across all fractures of societies. It happens between classes.
I had a sudden and dramatic socio-economic change, starkly shifting into poverty. As a byproduct of severe ill mental health I found myself unemployed and attributing to the hidden- homelessness epidemic. Having nowhere to live is frightening and stressful and incredibly hard to manage when you already are finding the world a difficult place to live and when you have a constant questioning narrative of whether or not you want to live at all. But above all else it’s shaming.
The problem with shame is that it is well fertilised by isolation, it pushes the support away and rejects the love available, until you are living in unshakable loneliness. Shame can make you feel like you don’t want to be inside yourself any more, your body becomes a place you’re not welcome. So we find ways to cope with the loneliness and ways to quieten the narratives in our heads.
Many stories sentimentalise poverty, fashionable rags-to-riches stories, romanticising a bleakness, but there is little that is romantic about a recovering anorexic standing in a food bank queue, or having to know the schedule of when all the discount foods get put on the shelves In your local super markets, or washing in cold water, or shoplifting tampons.
Poverty is challenging for many reasons, but fundamentally because it nurtures desperation: a fear of loss; a fear of having even less. This implements a belief that going against the grain is too risky, its fear of negative consequences overrides its possible gains. I think when you have lived as both working and middle class, there's half of you encouraged to disrupt the system, whilst the other half knows it’s disruption that gets you into trouble - loss greater than the gains. Equally, this fear of loss encourages stability and self discipline. And pride. Pride can be a wonderful creator of autonomy but it can also dictate our choices, especially when the rug is pulled out from under your feet. I was forced into humility, forced into rethinking the demons of snobbery I’d relied upon as barometers of success for so long. And pride can be unshakable, because pride is dignity.
We are proud of who we are, of what we know and so we should be.
We are proud of who we are, of what we know and so we should be.
I don’t believe that straddling across different classes resulted in my ill metal health, but I do know the lack of societal validation and my inability to identify myself did. And this inability to identify was a byproduct of feeling I had to change so much to fit in with what I considered others wanted. I feel it is also important to say I haven’t intended to imply that ill mental health is unique to the working class, we all know that it isn’t. But the consequences of having limited resources and a lack of personal support often have huge financial impacts and poverty compounds ill mental health. Poverty is exclusion and these feelings of exclusion whilst being negatively judged are intrinsic to ill mental health. And poverty is associated with the working classes. Class may not be solely defined by income, but class is certainly a currency worth much more than the Great British Pound.
The desire in us to be understood is also wonderful; it is why we tell our stories. But when we feel misunderstood or judged by our stories, we lose our desire to share them. We stop trying to learn from each other and protect ourselves with the community that we feel understood by.
The human need for autonomy and truth is intrinsic to feeling included and feeling included helps us feel important. Our challenge it to find this.
The human need for autonomy and truth is intrinsic to feeling included and feeling included helps us feel important. Our challenge it to find this.
I am human, not just a list of boxes to be ticked, and my life has had many spins and falls. But class can’t only be defined by box ticking and income. It’s also about identity and the human desire to belong, to identify with others, to not feel alone. But our challenge is to ensure differing communities are not rivals. When we don’t understand, we panic, and that fear creates a feeling of inferiority. This inferiority tells us to puff-ourselves-up, turn our insecurity into a defence. Let us not qualify our happiness by the unhappiness of others. Let us try to understand better. And what better way to do this than through stories. This is our challenge.
If I can’t hear what I want to hear, then I have a responsibility to make it heard myself.
So if middle class girls can’t talk about sex, working class birds can’t have posh accents, dyslexics can’t be writers and women shouldn’t swear, where the fuck do I fit?
Right here.
And there.
And there.
And over there too. Telling my own story. Just like you.
Nama-f*cking-ste bitches.
So if middle class girls can’t talk about sex, working class birds can’t have posh accents, dyslexics can’t be writers and women shouldn’t swear, where the fuck do I fit?
Right here.
And there.
And there.
And over there too. Telling my own story. Just like you.
Nama-f*cking-ste bitches.