A curious thing happens when you offer your life for public consumption: people start to interpret your biography, to explain to you what they think it means. During signing sessions, in interviews, I am often told that my story is edifying, that I am a model of resilience, an “inspiration”. Which is a good thing to say, so I say thank you. But every now and then someone goes a little further and says something that I don’t have an answer to. They say, “You are living proof of the American dream. That absolutely anything is possible for anyone.

But am I? Is that what the story means?

After being tired, here’s what I remember most about being poor: an all-pervading sense of costly compromise. Of course, it was necessary to take the maximum of credits, because the tuition fees were expensive; of course, you had to take that second job, that extra shift, that third hustle raking leaves or mowing lawns or shoveling snow. The only question I ever asked was how long could they charge.

The architecture of my life was defined by money, that is, its absence, until I woke up at 3:40 a.m. The night shift paid an extra dollar, $6.35 from the hour instead of $5.35. Never mind that my roommates turned on music until midnight, so on a typical night I slept about three hours; It doesn’t matter if I dozed off during my lectures or spent the whole winter with a harsh cough and a series of unexplained sinus infections. It was a dollar more! The calculation was simple and decisive.

My academic ambitions almost came to an abrupt end during my sophomore year. A blinding pain in my lower jaw turned out to be a rotting nerve. I needed a root canal and $1600 to pay for it. I decided to give up. My plan was to hitch a ride to Las Vegas, where my brother worked as a long-distance trucker, and get a job at the In-N-Out Burger across from his trailer.

Then a leader from my church pulled me aside and insisted that I apply for a Pell grant, a federal program that helps poor children pay for their education. A few days later, a check for $4,000 arrived in the mail. I had never seen so much money, I could not understand the amount. I didn’t cash it in for a week, fearing what possession of such a sum might do to me. Then the pounding in my jaw motivated me to take a trip to the bank. I have the root canal. For the first time, I bought the necessary textbooks for my courses. There was money left, over a thousand dollars, so I left the cafeteria and swapped the night shift for the day shift. I stopped sleeping during my lessons; the cough subsided, the infections disappeared.