My deeply Southern family raised me to never talk about money. We were poor, sometimes we lived in our car, and sometimes we were hungry. But we never said it out loud.

Now, as a single mother of three children with significant medical needs, I have worked several jobs to pay for her children’s care and medical attention.

Still, I ended up with $100,000 in debt. I was ashamed until I started talking about it to people in my life. My friends’ reactions were surprising and ultimately brought us closer together.

My family taught me that poverty was a state of mind.

“Always broke but never poor” was said so often growing up that it was almost a motto. But the truth was that at least four generations before mine would be qualified to call themselves members of the “working poor” class.

My family was clearly divided into two groups: those who were willing to admit that they were depressed and those who pretended to always be fine. My parents were part of that latter group. They believed in maintaining middle-class appearances, even if the refrigerator was empty. I finally fell into the same bucket.

I never learned how to manage money. The only thing I knew about financial well-being was that more money is better than less.

I found myself in debt as a single mother.

As a single mother, I became extremely stingy, always working multiple jobs and saving as much as I could.

I raised my children in smaller apartments, made home-cooked meals, and took them on their first vacation when my oldest was 12. Even though my kids’ bills were high, I always found a way to pay them.

That was until my daughter’s last surgery cost me almost $100,000. Until the day I opened that medical bill, my way of dealing with debt had always been to sacrifice everything I needed to do to pay it off as soon as possible.

But this was different. It would take me years to reject him, no matter what he did.

I felt like I failed because of my debt.

When I first racked up a lot of debt, I felt like it was a personal failure, even though I knew intellectually that I didn’t create my children’s medical diagnoses. I was also not responsible for the increased cost of childcare or the fact that medical insurance did not fully cover medically necessary procedures.

Still, I kept my debt to myself and didn’t tell anyone. I feared the trial.

But the debt was going nowhere until I figured out how to tackle it. My family’s history with money made their potential suggestions unreliable. I had to look at my friends.

Talking about money changed everything

I nervously revealed my debt to my closest friends and, to my surprise, they had some great advice to offer me. Many shared that they had been in similar positions or even declared bankruptcy.

With friend after friend, I not only discovered a repayment strategy, but I learned an entire lesson in financial wellness that I had missed by staying silent about finances for decades.

So, I decided to handle this bill differently than I had handled others. I decided to pay it in monthly installments, but I would also use part of my income to continue having fun with my children.

I was surprised to find that knowing my experience helped my friends too.

The more honest I was, the stronger my friendships became.

“How can we lift each other up if we don’t learn from each other’s experiences?” said my friend Ashley.

My friend Kat agreed. She said that after talking to me about how I was carrying my debt without sacrificing my joy to pay it, she felt more confident entering into a payment plan for a necessary medical procedure that insurance refused to cover.

My friends Andrea and Jacqueline said they try to avoid debt, like I did for years. They both also told me that they respected my decision to not let what I had to define my life.

I realized that hiding debt only makes us feel more alone. Sharing it helped me see how my friends would react to taboo news. I know not to trust them to listen to me and not make snap judgments or put me down.

It was scary to share, but taking the risk gave us the opportunity to learn from each other and improve our lives together.