Journaling Prompts for Class and Working-Class Identity
Class shapes so much of how we move through the world—our relationship with money, with authority, with the future, with what we feel we're allowed to want. And working-class shame is real: the way certain backgrounds get coded as lesser in professional spaces, academic spaces, cultural spaces. But class identity is also a source of enormous strength—values around hard work, loyalty, realness, and resilience that more affluent environments often lack entirely. Writing about class means holding both of those truths at once, honestly, without having to perform gratitude or resentment for anyone.
Journaling Prompts
What do you carry from the economic circumstances of your upbringing that still shapes how you move through the world today—around money, around asking for things, around what you feel you deserve?
When have you felt most out of place due to class background? Describe the specific moment—what happened, what you felt, what you did with that feeling?
What do you deeply value about where you came from that you've noticed people from different economic backgrounds sometimes lack? What are you proud of, even if you rarely say it?
Is there something you want—a career, a lifestyle, an aspiration—that feels like a betrayal of where you came from? What would it mean to give yourself permission to want it anyway?
What stories do you carry about what people like you are and aren't capable of? Who told you those stories, and have they been accurate?