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‘THOSE PEOPLE’  
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Elizabeth DiNovella Fernández
August 11, 2026
The Progressive
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_ The American safety net didn’t catch me when I fell. The people I
was warned about as a child did. _

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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
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“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_
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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_
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efforts to resist the privatization of public education, and __The
Progressive Media Project_ [[link removed]]_, aiming to
diversify our nation’s op-ed pages. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
organization. _

* Healthcare
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* Welfare
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* SNAP
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* mutual aid
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* sexual abuse
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* trauma
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