Choosing Poverty

There’s a meme going around that made me laugh, and then, while I was out running yesterday, it punched me in the face. It’s of cats passing up the plush, expensive beds their owners bought them to curl up instead in a cardboard box or a crumpled plastic bag.

I laughed because it’s true. We have two cats: Cali and Ko. It’s a real thing.

Then I realized that at 42 years old, I’m the cat.

I still choose things that are the equivalent of poverty. Not because I have to anymore. Because some part of me reaches for the familiarity of the cardboard box.

Ko chilling in a cardboard box with Cali waiting for her turn at it.

It shows up in how I shop for running clothes. I'll spend hours researching and then I'll settle on some knockoff pair of shorts. Not because they fit better or look better but simply because they're cheaper. And when they pill or stretch out or fall apart inside a year, I'll just buy another cheap pair and start the cycle over. What never crosses my mind, as I drop the bargain shorts into my cart, is that the Vuori leggings I bought during COVID are still in my rotation—still supple, still holding their shape—because they were made well the first time.

It shows up in how I meal prep my lunches for my in-office work week. Lunches that are filling and nourishing, that make me feel like I'm adulting well. But on the weekends when I travel and don't have the time to do the meal prep, I often end up skipping lunch. I'll tell myself it's because I was overindulgent on vacation that I need to diet anyways. So instead of spending the 14 dollars buying lunch, I snack on junk.

It shows up in how I talk myself out of a haircut. Not because of the cost as I'll have to get my hair cut eventually. But because sometimes I think that haircut is for a version of me who deserves it, and sometimes I don't quite see myself as her yet. So I delay the cut and put my hair up.

That's the part that actually stung on my run. Because “choosing poverty” was never really about the shorts, or the lunches, or the money. The cat in the box isn't broke. It has a perfectly good bed three feet away. It chooses the box because the box feels safe: familiar, small, the right size to disappear into.

So maybe the question was never whether I can afford the good thing. It's whether I believe I'm the kind of thing worth making well and worth keeping. The leggings lasted because someone decided, up front, that they were worth doing right. The lunch is about how I treat myself when things don't go as planned. The haircut is about believing that I deserve good things now.

I don't have this figured out. But I recently bought a fun pair of running shorts from Tres Pinas—I have loved and owned their bright shorts for years—and I wore the flower prints on my run yesterday. Somewhere around mile three, it occurred to me that the cardboard box was never as comfortable as I've been pretending. I'm at a point in my life where I get to choose the bed I want to lie in. It's allowed. No explanations needed.

Me at the end of my run in the Tres Pinas shorts 🌼