As someone who grew up in extreme poverty (eating ketchup soup made with ketchup packets and hot water, extreme), there are so many ways that poverty affected me, outside of this simple article.

The best way I can describe it is that poverty makes you start out life in a giant hole and you're given nothing to help you dig out of that hole to reach the surface where you can then start thriving. I honestly feel that at 54 years old, I'm finally thriving and not merely surviving in this whole of poverty. Yes, it's taken me this long to get here.

I never went to the dentist on a regular basis. It wasn’t until I had an abscessed tooth and was in extreme pain, that my welfare mother took me to a backwoods, rudimentary small town dentist. I remember sitting in the dental chair with the high-pitched whine of the dentist drill and smoke that smelled like burning hair, pouring out of my mouth. It traumatized me. To this day, I still have issues with my mouth and am finally at a point where I can begin getting it taken care of.

I got a job working at the elementary school in 9th grade one summer. I spent the summer scraping gum off of the bottoms of chairs and desks using a container of something that froze the gum so I could scrape it. I also spent long hot summer days crouched over on the black tarmac, painting the foul lines with yellow paint. I was hunched for so long that I developed back problems and of course, couldn’t afford to get it taken care of. I’ve had back problems ever since and it wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I could finally afford to see a Chiropractor and find some relief. And to top it all off, the State of California cut my moms welfare off because I managed to earn $2000 that summer. Guess how much I ended up getting to spend on new school clothes? Only about $200 from what I can remember.

It wasn’t until the past few years that I stopped looking at the price of things I was putting in my cart and making a mental calculation of the total cost of the shopping cart EVERY TIME I went shopping. I no longer do this and get whatever I want from the store.

I developed a weird sense of wanting to have choices. My wife couldn’t understand why I would open three different tubes of toothpaste until she finally realized what it was I was doing. I never had so many choices and I loved it.

I could go on and on but I won't. I think it's pretty easy from here to extrapolate just what poverty did to my productivity overall.