To die a peasant
As a disclaimer, I have never benefitted from any sort of social assistance program (welfare, food stamps, and I come from a far more modest background than most people I went to high school or college with, though I got good grades and scholarships and grants because of it), and when faced with poverty have always done my best to work, as the best and only solution.
In France it is very complicated as a foreigner because you have so many legal restrictions on how much and where you can work (according to my visa 12 hours a week, maximum). At my job orientation I was told I was not allowed to have any other boss besides Education Nationale (I have requested a maximum of more work from my employer, and was granted two additional teaching missions), but so it’s not a matter of foreigners not working enough, it’s simply that the legality of them working enough is extremely, extremely restricted, very explicitly. At least it is in my case.
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I was recently informed that my bank would continue to charge exorbitant fees even if I was dead.
After nightmares about being assassinated (the would be killer in one of the dreams said to me, that it was then or in three days if the weather didn’t permit it, giving the latest expected date of my assassination as July 4th), I went ahead and wrote up a will and sent it to my uncle who is a lawyer.
French Men I have dated, those above me who work for Education Nationale, the psychologue at Paris Aide aux Victimes, my bank, they have all just let me drop. Never called back, didn’t help, effectively made me fall harder. I even trusted them! What a stupid, good, inferior, guileless poor fool, right?
These past several months and particularly post-almost-every-single-article-of-the-unviersal-declaration-of-human-rights-being-broken-when-I-was-an-au-pair, no French person has ever, under any circumstances, tried to make sure I am ok, without me somehow initiating the dialogue, despite me constantly reaching out for help from dozens of different organizations and to my superiors. I know two people from my building who are both Americans (one from USA the other from the Caribbean) and their niceness is literally otherworldly due to the general aridity of Paris.
Il ne s’appuie que sur deux sentiments : l’amour-propre et l’intérêt ; mais l’intérêt étant en quelque sorte l’amour-propre solide et bien entendu, l’attestation continue d’une supériorité réelle, l’amour-propre et l’intérêt sont deux parties d’un même tout, l’égoïsme.
And it kills me, to add to my honest struggles, people claiming to help but then just invalidating me all the more, exercising power in a way that really deeply hurts me, there is just no regard for the poor is the message that is sent.
If I needed help and asked for it repeatedly, cried out in November, have told everyone with a pair of ears that I have been eaten alive here, repeatedly, and get a call five months later, call back and that call isn’t returned, and then last week another call I’m not the right person who would handle your case so Bye! but I guess if you want to call me we can talk, I am going to feel a bit chafed by the absurdity of it all.
I want someone to help me, and let’s just be real for a second, does any poor person want to have to tell their miserable story to dozens of assholes who don’t even care, who even mock you to your face (social workers in France have done this to me more than once, and it is grisly and makes me scared of all fonctionnaires)? Poverty is humiliating, shameful, degrading, and my own mother has accused me of being mentally disabled, it’s so embarrassing you know just to be crystal clear: NO! I don’t want to talk about it!
And for all the rape apologists and libertarians who have no empathy for the poor and are literally out there pathologizing poverty, and all the French who nonstop scapegoat poor foreigners for all the country’s problems: no, it does not give us pleasure to be on the “bottom” of the social ladder, to be considered weaker, less intelligent, moins compétent, less worthy, shunned in fact, shamed constantly, given the cold shoulder treatment because people are indignant that we struggle, and that it is not fun. People just shoulder you off. I am not making this up. Some people completely deny the systemic evils that cause poverty and look down on all poor people as if they were clearly an inferior race.
It enforces the rule that because I am poor and struggling, that I am bullied, heckled, mistreated, and no one cares. It has been made so plain to me.
WELCOME TO CLASSISM IN FRANCE
