“The Things Poverty Makes Normal …”

I was doing laundry when I stopped and looked around my apartment like, wait… where are all my towels? 

It felt embarrassing to even ask myself because towels are such a basic thing. Like how do you lose towels? But then I started counting and realized I had bought at least twenty since moving into supportive housing. Somehow, I was down to one. 

Then I remembered. I used some of them to clean my floors because I did not really have anything else to use. They got wet, then moldy, then started smelling, and when I moved I just threw them away because I could not deal with trying to save them. At some point I stopped replacing them. I think part of me stopped expecting myself to have enough. 

For the past year I have barely used towels at all. I hate even saying that because it sounds like something I should have fixed, or something people will judge. But towels do not always dry right when your apartment and your situation do not really let things stay clean and normal. So I adapted. I got out of the shower and stood there until I was not soaking wet anymore. Sometimes I used a shirt. Sometimes I used a blow dryer. Eventually I stopped thinking it was weird. 

That is what I mean when I talk about poverty and housing instability. It is not always some big dramatic moment people can point to. Sometimes it is little stuff that sounds ridiculous until you are the one living it. A missing towel can look like disorganization. Running out of toilet paper can look like poor planning. Letting things pile up can look like laziness. But inside my head it was never that simple. It was always another calculation, another compromise, another thing I did not have the energy to explain. 

I would ask myself things like, what can I live without this week? If I do not have towels, can I just air dry? If I do not have toilet paper, can I get in the shower every time I use the bathroom? If I cannot replace everything, what is the least impossible option? 

After a while, I stopped noticing how much I was going without. The compromises did not feel like compromises anymore. They just became how I lived. 

That is the part that gets me. I can get used to things that should not be normal. I can say it casually now, like “I air dried through the winter” or “I used a shirt instead of a towel,” but when I really hear myself, I am like, what the hell? I realize how much I have trained myself to make do. 

And I know some people will hear this and think I am being dramatic because it is “just towels.” But that is the point. It is never just towels. It is whether I have what I need to stay clean. It is whether I can feel human in my own home. It is whether supportive housing actually supports people beyond putting a roof over us. 

I do not think it is too much to expect permanent supportive housing to come with actual support. Not perfection. Not someone fixing every problem for me. But enough support that basic hygiene does not become something I have to keep negotiating with myself. Enough support that people are not quietly learning to live without things everybody else assumes are automatic. 

Maybe I am expecting too much. Maybe I am not. I go back and forth on that. But I know that when people adapt so deeply to going without basic things that we forget it is not normal, that is not just personal coping. That is a sign the system is not reaching the everyday reality of people’s lives. 

Sometimes it takes something as ordinary as laundry to make me stop and realize how much I have been surviving. People do not just need housing. We need support that sees what is actually happening inside that housing.