“And yet I was debt free by June 5, 2015 and in 2015 my taxable income, it was like $23,000, ya know, not very much money. So you could easily point to my story and say, ‘Well, she did it. She bootstrapped.’ Ya know, now I have a business; I make middle class income. I control my time and I can easily be seen as a success story. But the flip side of that is well, I’m white-passing, I’m able-bodied, I speak unaccented English. When people look at me, they trust me so it was easier for me to get a job. I was healthy enough that I could work five different part time jobs seven days a week, I didn’t have a child I needed to care for. I was able to take these risks and do this sort of scrappy (laughter) debt pay off journey because of the layers of privilege. So I like to say, ‘I call bullshit on my own bootstrap narrative.’”

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