"I Was the Broke Friend Everyone Pitied—Until I Learned This One Skill"

Part 1: The Pity in Their Eyes

I didn’t need their words. Their eyes said everything.

Every time we split the bill after lunch, every time someone said, “Don’t worry, I got you,” I felt it—pity. Not kindness. Not generosity. Just that quiet, loaded glance that screamed, "He’s the broke one."

I wasn’t always like that. I came from a middle-class family—nothing fancy, but we got by. Then college happened. Rent. Textbooks. An unexpected medical bill. I went from “comfortable” to calculating how many instant noodles I could get for five bucks.

By sophomore year, I was known as the friend who couldn’t afford anything.

I’d pretend I was too tired to go out because I couldn’t pay for drinks. I’d smile when they covered my part of the group pizza. I made jokes about being poor, thinking if I laughed first, it wouldn't hurt as much. But inside, it burned. Every. Single. Time.

Then came the breaking point.

It was a Saturday. My roommate, Eli, had just gotten back from some weekend gig. He threw $200 in cash on the kitchen table like it was nothing.

“Tutored a kid in math for four hours,” he said. “Easy money.”

I stared at that money like it was a thousand-dollar check. Something in me snapped. I couldn’t keep being the one scraping by, praying I’d find coins in the couch.

“Teach me,” I said.

Eli raised an eyebrow. “You wanna tutor?”

“No. I want to learn a skill that actually makes me money.”

He looked at me like I had just asked for the secrets of the universe.

“You ever heard of copywriting?” he asked.

I hadn’t. Not really. I thought it had something to do with trademarks or law. He laughed.

“It’s writing—like sales writing, for websites, ads, emails. I do it freelance sometimes. You’d be good at it. You’re already a solid writer.”

Something shifted. A new door cracked open in my brain. I didn’t need a retail job or to work 20 hours a week delivering food. Maybe—I could write my way out of this hole.

---

The Late-Night YouTube Degree

That night, I dove into a rabbit hole of copywriting content.

YouTube tutorials. Free Udemy courses. Reddit threads. Articles titled “How to Make $1000 a Month as a Freelance Copywriter.” I inhaled it all. It wasn’t glamorous. I didn’t sleep much that week. But for the first time in months, I felt something I hadn’t in a long time:

Hope.

I started with small writing gigs on Reddit. Some guy paid me $10 to write a product description for a beard oil. Another hired me for $15 to write an Instagram caption set for a fitness page.

It wasn’t a lot. But it was something.

More importantly, I was building a skill. Every project taught me something new: how to write headlines, how to persuade, how to structure sentences for attention.

And the more I learned, the more I realized this wasn’t just “side cash.”

This was a superpower.


---

End of Part 1 Preview:

By the end of that month, I made my first $150 online—and something even bigger happened: people stopped pitying me.

In Part 2, I’ll tell you how one viral $25 gig changed everything, and how I went from “broke friend” to the one everyone now asks, “How do you do it?”