Reply #9: Youth is certainly part of it

[Lyric]

although I'm not as young as most college students. (I'll be 28 in less than a month)

A larger part is that I'm from a dirt-poor, uneducated, backwoods family, which leaves me with very little of the support and family resources that many other middle-class people have when they're breaking out on their own. I've spent the vast majority of my life living in abject, heartbreaking poverty.. The reason I'm succeeding where the rest of my family wasn't able to is because I won the genetic lottery and wound up with a genius-level IQ, which is making higher education a possibility for me. My sister and brother are barely literate, and I'm the first person *ever* in my family (so far as I know) to graduate high school--much less go to college.

When my Mom looks at me now, I know what she's seeing. It's a combination of pride and wild hope--hope that I can get out of the poverty trap she spent her life inside of, and (although she likely won't admit it) hope that my success will mean that she won't have to go without proper medical care, healthy food, and day-to-day life security when she's an elderly woman. I don't blame her a bit for that. Getting old is a terrifying prospect, when you can't make ends meet when you're young. She has no savings at all, doesn't own anything of value, and is probably scared to death of what retirement is going to hold for her.