Starve the paperwork or starve yourself. That’s the deal.
Write. Laugh. Hope.
It’s called “assistance”—but it feels like punishment with a clipboard.
Before you ever see a dollar, you’re buried in paperwork.
Forms that contradict each other.
Requirements that move like landmines.
Deadlines that disappear the second you blink wrong.
They say it’s for accountability.
But the real goal?
Exhaustion.
They want you too tired to ask questions.
Too ashamed to keep applying.
Too overwhelmed to fight back.
Need help with rent?
Prove you’re poor—but not too poor.
Got kids?
Show receipts for your pain—but don’t cry in the office.
Miss a phone call?
Your whole lifeline gets erased.
And heaven forbid you earn $1 too much—
suddenly you’re “not eligible,”
as if clawing your way halfway out of a hole means you don’t deserve a rope anymore.
This isn’t support.
It’s surveillance disguised as sympathy.
It’s a bureaucratic obstacle course designed to wear you down before it lifts you up.
Because if you quit trying, they don’t have to help.
If you stop applying, you disappear from the stats.
If you collapse quietly, the system “worked.”
But here’s the truth they don’t want printed:
Poverty is a policy.
And “welfare” is the smokescreen that pretends it’s not.
Write. Laugh. Hope.
Because surviving a system built to break you is a revolution all by itself.
