When so much mental activity is devoted to basic survival, little is left to engage in long-term thinking or to muster willpower—as Bolin well knew. “I need to smoke to relieve the pressure,” she told me as she feverishly rolled her own cigarettes one evening when I took her out to a bar, where she also found relief in the form of plentiful margaritas. She was self-medicating, she said; other times, she used Xanax for anxiety. She also took a daily antidepressant. As Linda Tirado, whose raw and honest blog post on her own minimum-wage existence catapulted her into the national spotlight in
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