Portside

Some people blame the dog. Some people blame the shoes. I blame global warming.

On an unseasonably warm Halloween in 2023, I wore black patent leather loafers to walk Coco, a poodle mix, across the railroad tracks that border my condo. I slipped. A thin layer of condensation had settled on the rails—so thin I couldn’t see it. Time slowed. The sky tilted.

My head slammed directly onto a rail. My eyeglasses cracked. Disoriented, I jumped up and wiggled my fingers and toes. Nothing else was broken. My left eye bloomed purple and green. Maybe it was adrenaline, but I was so happy to be alive.

I didn’t know I had a concussion. I didn’t know it wouldn’t heal quickly. I didn’t know it would last more than two years, that I wouldn’t be able to read for ten months, and that this was my last day at my job.

On day two, I woke with a massive headache and realized I had lost my keys—something I never did. I made an appointment at urgent care. Despite joking through the cognitive tests, I failed abysmally. The assessment: possible concussion without loss of consciousness.

That was the official start of my concussion journey.

After six weeks with no improvement—I was actually scoring worse on some tests—my doctor ordered an MRI. My neighbors Don and Cathy drove me at 6:30 a.m. since the clinic wasn’t accessible by public transit. Cooperatives, collectives, co-housing—these are the structures “those people” build when locked out of traditional support systems. Mutual aid isn’t charity; it’s survival.

The MRI came back clean.

For ten months after my injury, I couldn’t read or write, skills I’d relied on for decades as a journalist and a historian. I woke up with a headache every day for a year. Screens, fluorescent lights, and the very act of concentration triggered migraines.

I paired rose-colored prescription glasses with bright red lipstick, trying for a Parisian vibe while my brain was bruised. I wore sunglasses inside Trader Joe’s. The invisible nature of a brain injury meant I looked fine while being cognitively destroyed.

This is how “those people” disappear—we look fine. It’s the invisible nature of disability, of poverty, of struggle. You can’t see a concussion. You can’t see hunger. You can’t see someone drowning in paperwork they’re too brain-injured to complete. So society treats us like we’re fine. Like we’re making it up. Like we’re “those people” who won’t try hard enough.

Eleven months after my fall, the sports medicine doctor told me my post-concussion syndrome was beyond his expertise. I was in the 1 percent who don’t heal in six weeks.

This was the body trying to navigate renewal paperwork for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

In January 2024, two months post-concussion, I applied for food assistance. On January 15, I received two letters: one approving me for $535 per month, stating that benefits would continue “until there is a change in your case,” and another—dated the same day—informing me my benefits were up for renewal with paperwork due February 16. I was approved and already on notice that I might lose it—all in one mail delivery.

I submitted the renewal paperwork on time. In March, I received another letter: My FoodShare benefits (Wisconsin’s SNAP program) would end on May 1, 2024. There was no explanation. Nothing had changed in my financial situation—I was still disabled, still unable to work, still supporting a teenager.

Welcome to the American safety net, where forty years of paying into the system earns you four months of food assistance before you’re cut off with no explanation.

The cognitive abilities required to appeal a government decision—reading dense bureaucratic language, organizing documentation, writing coherent arguments—were exactly the abilities my brain injury had stolen.

But this isn’t a bug in the system. It’s a feature.

A June 2025 New York Times article laid it out plainly: “How the G.O.P. Bill Saves Money: Paperwork, Paperwork, Paperwork.” The strategy is elegant in its cruelty. “Instead of explicitly reducing benefits, Republicans would make them harder to get and to keep,” the journalists reported. “By including dozens of changes to dates, deadlines, document requirements, and rules, Republicans have turned paperwork into one of the bill’s crucial policy-making tools, yielding hundreds of billions of dollars in savings to help offset their signature tax cuts.”

Read that again: The “savings” don’t come from fewer vulnerable people. They come from vulnerable people being unable to navigate a bureaucratic system specifically designed to exhaust them.

Ten years ago, when I applied for SNAP after my divorce, the process was simpler. Now? More questions, more deadlines, more verification.

As historian Linda Gordon documented in the book Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, the United States designed two welfare systems: one for workers (mostly white men) entitled to earned benefits, and another for women and children receiving stigmatized, means-tested aid wrapped in paperwork and condescension. I’d worked for forty years, paying into Social Security and unemployment insurance like anyone else. But when I needed help, I got the other system—the invasive scrutiny, the constant reverification, the benefits so meager they’re almost an insult.

A century later, the fight around food stamps is centered on this unspoken rule: Poor people are to be pitied, but are not entitled.

I’m considering selling my car to afford health insurance. I’m living on long-term disability insurance I paid for at my last job, which covers 75 percent of my 2023 yearly salary. And I’m waiting for a final hearing on my case.

My daughter has no idea about any of this. She doesn’t know we were on food stamps. While putting up the Christmas tree, I asked her how she’s been weathering the storm of my brain injury, two years out. “I always think things could be worse,” she said. “We could not have food to eat.”

What am I protecting her from? Not hunger—I’ve managed to keep her fed. It’s the shame. The way even family can look at you differently once you need help.

I’ve raised a daughter who isn’t afraid to ask for help in class. I want her to grow up believing that asking for help is strength, not shame. Yet I have internalized that shame so deeply that I hide it from my own child.

If receiving help is shameful, people won’t ask for it. They’ll hide it. They’ll suffer silently. They’ll protect their children from knowing, which means another generation grows up thinking people like us don’t need assistance.

The system is working exactly as designed. And the shame that keeps it working lives in me and in the politicians who built a labyrinth they knew vulnerable people couldn’t navigate.

Instead of healing in the six weeks after my fall, my symptoms had grown worse. I felt sorry for anyone having a conversation with me. I couldn’t follow a train of thought. I would frequently ask, “What was I saying?”

Three people heard my distress most clearly. I call them the Three Graces.

In Greek mythology, the Three Graces are goddesses of charm, beauty, and generosity. Mine are Angela Rosso, Thalia Ramos, and Justine Martin, whom I’ve known since high school.

Angie arrived first—braving a cold December night to get to Madison, Wisconsin, by 11 p.m. After weeks of phone calls where I couldn’t hold a conversation, she needed to see for herself what the concussion had done.

Thalia drove up from Chicago, too, the Chicana older sister I always wanted, godmother to my daughter, who calls her Tía.

Justine drove up from Chicago as well, in the midst of her own family’s Christmas visit, spending more time on the highway than we spent together.

This is what grace looks like: three women who’ve known you since you were fourteen, who drive from Chicago because you can’t finish a sentence. They sped. They showed up. They didn’t care that I was on food stamps, that I couldn’t finish a sentence, that I’d become one of “those people” our mothers had warned us about.

In September 2024, nearly a year into my recovery, my neurologist asked: “Who are you when all your skills fail you? Who are you when all your coping mechanisms are gone?”

I was a journalist who couldn’t read. An editor who couldn’t write. A historian who couldn’t remember. A single mother who couldn’t care for her child. The concussion had stolen everything from me.

Then she asked a different question: “Who are the people who inspire you, who make you happy, who calm you? That’s your family.” She called it “spirit family”—an alternative to the family that raised me, noticeably MIA during my post-concussion existence.

Dr. Angela told me the sexual abuse I’d experienced as a child had “set the hardware.” The concussion had knocked me back to being that angry, frustrated kid—emotionally dysregulated, out of control.

Sitting in her office, unable to read or write, I knew the answer to her question: I am a storyteller.

Now I can tell stories again. The brain that couldn’t read for ten months can now document systemic failure. I still get migraines most days. But I know who I am beyond my skills: I am one of “those people.”

The American safety net didn’t catch me when I fell. “Those people” did. Not my respectable, property-owning family who’d spent a generation trying to escape being “those people.” Not the system designed to exhaust us with paperwork until we give up. Not the politicians who code us as lazy, fraudulent, and less than human.

But the friends who drove from Chicago in the middle of the night, the neighbors who drove me to appointments at dawn, the Madisonians who brought me food? “Those people” I was warned about—the immigrants, the welfare mothers, the mutual aid networks, the community organizers who refuse to let the system grind us down—they’re the people who saved me.

I am those people.

Elizabeth DiNovella Fernández is a former culture editor for The Progressive.

Since 1909, The Progressive has aimed to amplify voices of dissent and those under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal of championing grassroots progressive politics. Our bedrock values are nonviolence and freedom of speech.

Based in Madison, Wisconsin, we publish on national politics, culture, and events including U.S. foreign policy; we also focus on issues of particular importance to the heartland. Two flagship projects of The Progressive include Public School Shakedown, which covers efforts to resist the privatization of public education, and The Progressive Media Project, aiming to diversify our nation’s op-ed pages. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.