Poverty today is a very real thing, and not just in distant third-world countries. As I grew up, I learned what it meant to be a poor family. We were always hurting for money. And though we didn’t even have the worst of it, there was still that bitter seed when I heard of my playground friends getting the Barbie Jeep I had always wanted, or that one family got all-new bikes for Christmas, or when I saw that everyone had nice, new clothes while I got leftovers from whatever bag got dropped off on our doorstep that month.

But being poor isn’t just lacking excess stuff, or not being able to see a movie whenever you want. Being poor is having insufficient funds for basic daily necessities. My family once ran out of toilet paper and couldn’t afford to buy more for two days. I’ve survived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and saltine crackers for weeks. We couldn’t afford deodorant for the week of my school’s dance concert my senior year, so I stank up the stage in an embarrassing way. People talked about it, too. But what could I do?

That’s mild poverty. We still have it pretty good. I’ve always had a roof over my head, and I knew that at the very least, I could have a school lunch—if I could choke the strange mass of kind-of food down. And because I had a loving family, we were still plenty happy, despite our faults.

Then one day, I took out a gargantuan loan and went to college at Point Loma Nazarene University. It’s a private Christian university. It’s right on the beach, so the sunsets are perfect every night, and there’s plenty of fun playing in the waves on the weekends. The cafeteria is all-you-can-eat. Someone cleans our bathrooms and lounges for us. There’s a giant flat-screen TV in every hall. Our school president’s birthday party each year has insane, big-ticket items, like laser tag on campus, or a Ferris wheel.

When I’m at school, I can’t help but feel guilty. Especially my freshman year, when my family sometimes hurt for money in a big way, I wished I could trade places with them so they wouldn’t have to struggle, and I could be home and living off of saltines in the stifling heat, worrying that if I turned on the air conditioning, the electricity bill would be just too much. It would be better to live that way than to be resented by the people I love for my high standard of living. Seeing the workers who come in and clean my hall’s bathroom each day, it feels like I’m a slave driver. It’s hard to remember that I’m paying the school, and the school’s paying them; it’s a service to be grateful for, not a forced labor to feel guilty about.

And the students at PLNU—some of them get it. Some of them understand that having someone clean your bathroom for you is a real luxury, or that I can’t go roller skating or to the movies all the time, because I only make so much money. Some of them understand that having more food in front of me than I can eat has been practically unthinkable for as long as I can remember. Some of them aren’t in that situation, but they were, or they’re going to be there soon. Some of them are right there with me.

But there are a few who come from the middle and upper classes—good people, with good, giving hearts who would share whatever they had in a second if someone asked—who don’t get it. They think that enough begging to “please, please come!” will put money in my pocket that just isn’t there. And it hurts to tell them no, because I can see in their eyes that they think I’m trying to avoid them when I’m not. I just can’t go. I’ve seen people take it all for granted, not close people, but people, like somehow they’re automatically deserving of daily buffets and gorgeous ocean sunsets. Newsflash: you’re not. Nobody is.

There’s a great deal of guilt, being a poor kid in a rich kid’s world. At the start of my college experience, I questioned whether or not I should stay, if I was willing to take the risk of being at an even harsher level of poverty after I graduated for the chance to find financial success. Writers don’t make much money, after all. But despite the guilt that boiled inside, friends and faculty and God eventually got it into my thick skull that I really did belong there. Those perfect sunsets weren’t pay-per-view. And sometimes I still panic, thinking about how much it actually costs to go to college. I can only do my best, and hope that it’s worth it in the end.