Please sir, can I have some art?

So my new office is finally done. Up until now I’ve been working in my dining room but we found some surprise money and converted the old upstairs kitchen into an office. This is the one space in the house that is truly mine and I plan to make it not just a workspace, but a refuge. That being the case I plan to decorate it in a way that makes me sigh with contentment whenever I look around the room. 

Yesterday we went to the Queen West Art Crawl - an event where hundreds of artists set up booths in a downtown park - in the hopes of finding something to put in my office that would make me smile. Howard took Mae off to the playground while I looked around and I soon found a booth full of beautiful steel sculptures, candle holders, and coat hooks.  I quickly found two items that I liked and settled down to the task of deciding which to get.  I stood there looking back and forth between the two items – a wall sconce for a candle at fifty-five dollars and a tree shaped candlestick at a whopping thirty-five dollars. I stood there in a state of mental paralysis and as I tried to make my decision I noticed that I was getting more and more anxious and miserable. I was feeling sad, angry, guilty, even a little hopeless.  When it came down to it I just couldn’t feel okay about buying something that would be purely ornamental.  More than that, I couldn’t feel okay about buying art.

I love art. I grew up with a deep appreciation for it. My great grandmother and my grandfather were both graduates of the Ontario College of Art and my living room holds four of my great grandmother’s works.  I want my house to be full of art. But the thought of spending money on it fills me with a witch’s brew of negative emotions.

Is it that I don’t think I deserve it? Is that what it comes down to?

When I was growing up we didn’t have much. My clothes were either second hand or hand-me-downs and things like family vacations and Scholastic Books were the stuff of fairy-tales.  I understood that these were things that other kids had that I couldn’t have. But we were okay. We were always fed and my mom even managed to get us into some dance and drama classes. I didn’t feel poor. I’m sure it helped that I had no interest in designer clothes.

When I left home at the age of sixteen I was living on student welfare and after I graduated I lived on welfare for another three years.  My parents would do what they could, giving me groceries here and there so, once again, I never starved.  But I always felt the scrutiny of my caseworker. When I moved in with new roommates she first accused me of lying about the number of roommates I had and then accused me of sleeping with my male roommate. 

The rules for how you were expected to job search were designed not to help you find work, but rather to ensure that you spend your days running around town in the most inefficient way possible. Let me give you an example. I was required to inquire about at least three jobs a day, not on average but each and every day. That meant that if I approached twenty places on Monday, I still had to go out every other day of the week or else I would get in trouble.  Of those three places, each one had to be at a different address. This meant that if you were looking for retail work, as I was, you couldn’t go to several places in the mall in one day and leave it at that without getting a warning letter. So I could approach fifty stores in the mall in one day, and not only would I have to keep looking every other day of the week, I would have to go to at least two other locations in that day in order to meet my requirements for welfare. This is not only inefficient, it is a waste of precious bus tickets and utterly demoralizing.

To add insult to injury, most of the programs designed to help people get back to work or refresh their skills were only available to those on unemployment insurance. 

From welfare I went straight to OSAP (student loans), which was marginally better but I still felt the powers that be breathing down my neck telling me that I was not permitted to have anything more than what they deemed acceptable.  Ten years after graduation we are still paying off that debt.

So after all that time, I am left with the legacy of living on little.  Where I get filled with anxiety at the thought of spending fifty-five dollars - fifty-five dollars that I know I have – on some art for my wall.

Because people like me don’t get to buy art.

This is what so many people don’t understand about living without.  It’s not just about struggling to pay the bills. It’s not just about the immediate hardships. It’s about the deep psychological impact of being under constant scrutiny. From the welfare workers to the student loan officers to the person behind you in the checkout line passing judgment on your food stamp purchases.  People who rely on any kind of social assistance are told that if you’re poor, you’d better be damn poor. 

So here I am. With my own house, new clothes on my back and organic kale in my crisper, still short on funds but with a much-improved standard of living. Money in the bank earmarked for making my office a place of solace, staring at a candlestick and waiting for someone to tell me it’s okay for me to have nice things.