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Growing up, Sunday dinner at my nan’s meant beans on toast if money was tight that week.
Twenty years later, I found myself at a dinner party in Notting Hill where someone genuinely asked if I’d tried the “divine” new Ethiopian place that had just opened. The same person then complained about how their cleaner kept rearranging their bookshelf.
I smiled, nodded, and felt that familiar tightness in my chest. The one that comes when you’re translating between worlds that speak completely different languages.
At 44, I’ve spent more than two decades navigating this space between the working-class Manchester suburb where I grew up and the middle-class professional world I entered through university. And here’s what nobody tells you about social mobility: you never quite arrive anywhere. You just become permanently bilingual in cultures that barely acknowledge each other exists.
The weight of being “the first”
When I got into university, my family threw a party. Not because they understood what I was studying or why political science mattered, but because I’d “made it.” I was going to have opportunities they never had. I’d wear a suit to work instead of overalls. I’d have a pension and holidays abroad.
What they couldn’t see, and what I couldn’t articulate then, was that every step forward would also be a step away from them.
The academic world hit me like a cold shower. During my first seminar, a classmate casually mentioned their gap year volunteering in Guatemala. Another talked about their parents’ friends who worked at the BBC. They weren’t showing off. This was just their normal.
Meanwhile, I was working nights at Tesco to pay rent and trying to figure out what “office hours” meant because I thought it was when professors were actually in their office, not when they were available to students.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote about “cultural capital“—the knowledge, behaviors, and skills that signal your class position. I didn’t have the vocabulary for it then, but I felt it every day. In the way I held my knife and fork. In not knowing what quinoa was. In the panic when someone suggested “just putting it on daddy’s credit card.”
The art of code-switching
You learn to adapt, of course. You pick up the references, the mannerisms, the right way to pronounce “scone.” You learn that “toilet” marks you as working class; it’s “loo” in polite company. You discover that admitting you shop at Primark gets you different reactions than mentioning Cos or Whistles.
But here’s the thing about code-switching: it’s exhausting. Every conversation requires a quick calculation. Which version of yourself do you present? Do you mention the book you just read or the match you watched? Do you admit you don’t ski, have never skied, and that your family holidays were to Blackpool, not the Black Forest?
I’ve mentioned this before, but the real challenge isn’t learning the new codes. It’s managing the space between worlds. At work functions, I’d carefully modulate my accent, smoothing out the Manchester edges. Then I’d go home for Christmas and find myself overcorrecting the other way, dropping my Gs and throwing in “innit” to prove I hadn’t changed.
Neither performance was fully honest. Both were survival strategies.
When success feels like betrayal
There’s a particular guilt that comes with class mobility that psychologists call “survivor’s guilt,” though that term feels too dramatic for something so quietly corrosive. It’s more like a constant, low-level anxiety that you’re betraying where you came from.
Every promotion, every achievement, every marker of middle-class success comes with a shadow question: Why me and not them? My cousin is just as smart as me, probably smarter. But he left school at sixteen because his mum needed help with rent. He fixes cars now, makes decent money, but we both know his life would’ve been different with different circumstances.
The distance grows in ways you don’t expect. You start reading different news sources. Your cultural references diverge. You find yourself explaining your job repeatedly because “consultant” doesn’t mean anything concrete to people who work with their hands.
Meanwhile, your middle-class friends can’t understand why you send money home or why you can’t just tell your family you’re too busy to help them move. Again.
The blind spots of education
Here’s something that stings to admit: education can make you arrogant without realizing it. For years, I thought I was being helpful when I’d explain political issues to family members. I’d cite studies, quote experts, break down complex policies.
I didn’t realize how condescending I was being until my uncle, after a few pints, told me straight: “You think because you’ve got letters after your name, you understand how the world works. But you’ve never had to choose between heating and eating. You’ve never been laid off with no warning. Your fancy theories don’t mean nothing when you’re living paycheck to paycheck.”
He was right. My education had given me frameworks for understanding society, but it had also insulated me from certain realities. I could analyze poverty, but I’d forgotten what it felt like. I could discuss working-class politics, but I’d lost touch with working-class life.
The historian E.P. Thompson wrote about the “enormous condescension of posterity” toward working-class people. I’d become part of that condescension without even noticing.
Finding perspective in the gap
But here’s what I’ve learned from living between worlds: the discomfort is actually valuable. When you’re never fully comfortable anywhere, you notice things others miss.
In middle-class spaces, I see the assumptions people make about “chavs” and “benefit scroungers.” I hear the casual classism when someone jokes about “council house” behavior. I notice how discussions about “diversity” rarely include class, as if economic inequality is somehow less important than other forms of difference.
In working-class spaces, I understand the deep suspicion of experts and institutions. I get why “they’re all the same” resonates when politicians seem to come from the same schools, the same backgrounds, the same narrow slice of society. I see how resentment builds when your lived experience is constantly invalidated by people with credentials but no context.
This double vision is uncomfortable, but it’s also clarifying. You realize that neither world has a monopoly on truth or virtue. Both have their blind spots, their prejudices, their ways of dismissing what they don’t understand.
The bottom line
At 44, I’ve stopped trying to fully belong in either world. Instead, I’ve learned to value the perspective that comes from standing between them. Yes, it’s lonely sometimes. Yes, the imposter syndrome never fully goes away. But it’s also given me something precious: the ability to translate between worlds that desperately need to understand each other.
Class mobility isn’t the simple success story we like to tell. It’s messier, more complicated, full of gains and losses that can’t be easily measured. You gain opportunities but lose ease. You expand your horizons but struggle to explain the view to people on either side of the divide.
Maybe that’s okay. Maybe the discomfort is the point. Because in a society increasingly divided by education and economics, we need people who can speak both languages, who can challenge both worlds, who refuse to let either side off the hook.
The gap between worlds isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a space to be inhabited, honestly and with purpose. Even if it means never quite feeling at home anywhere.
