This is a throw away account. I'm writing this because I'm the embodiment of poor and the embodiment of lack of social mobility.
As a child of divorce, I lived in affluent suburbia. However, everything was devoted to keeping the house and to food. There was next to nothing for anything else. I had three jobs going through high school. When I was in school I was told that I couldn't qualify for financial aid because of how much money my father made. His life was dedicated to revenge on my mother and he spent HUGE swaths of money to avoid paying $200/month in child support. Getting money from him for tuition or getting him to sign on the student loan forms was an impossibility. Ironically, I had none of the advantages of being poor.
Graduating average was going to be 96%. They kicked me out at the last minute almost. Truancy. I had the flu for a couple of days. Doctor's note required. The father trying to make my mother's life a living hell by yelling everyday at school administrators did not help either. Nothing in my life was stranger than having a school administrator that I had never previously interacted with tell me that they want to kick me out of the school simply to make life easier for themselves.
Finding employment in 'my field' had not been easy. Usually I worked at mind numbing non-WDS Windows 7 deployments for a one or two month stint. I have not been able to ever get work 'in my field' that paid over $20,000 USD per year. I've had employment where I was programming at minimum wage and the clients were billed $3000 USD per day for my work. Respectfully negotiating was of course fruitless in this situation. I've been in this sort of situation several times. The worst people seem to find me and take advantage. Usually, pay to billing factors are between 5-10.
I started to not want to interact with employers in person. I started making my living making making Android Apps for clients on RFQ sites until 2014. I was getting paid from $50 to $400 per app or app framework. One client took one project and now has over 100 million users across a dozen similar apps. I was hoping I could start to charge more but that never seemed to happen. The best thing that happened was that I had people halfway around the world constantly hounding me to work at what was essentially still minimum wage.
I am lucky because I took an early interest in Bitcoin. I'm willingly hiding in the lowest caste of society. I'm trying to work on myself. I'd like to be treated like a human being one day by an employer, when I am ready.
I'm not writing this to ask for help. I'm writing this to say that the stigma of being at the bottom is very very real. And while it, at least for me, has predominatly been an internal battle of asserting self-worth, there are definitely people who saw the precarious situation that I was in and use it for their advantage. Or to revel in being cruel.