I've lived on both sides of the system.
I've been the person one policy change away from losing everything — invisible in a world engineered to forget people like me. So when I tell you the safety nets meant to catch us are being systematically dismantled, I'm not speaking from theory.
I'm speaking from January 2022, when homelessness became my lived reality. I'm speaking from the grinding work of maintaining employment while navigating SHIP and St. Vincent de Paul. I'm speaking from watching systems collapse under the weight of the people they were built to protect — and from knowing that collapse is not an accident.
The numbers are not abstract. They are people. They are us.
The Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program serves over 500,000 low-income Americans. In 2025, the House proposed eliminating all CDC HIV prevention funding — roughly $1 billion — and slashing Ryan White by $525 million, a 20% cut. Congress held the line this cycle. But the damage was already unfolding: administrative delays, grant disruptions, clinic staff layoffs. Virginia has already cut funding, shrinking case management for over 600 low-income and unhoused patients with nowhere else to turn. A Johns Hopkins study projects that eliminating Ryan White entirely could produce 75,000 additional HIV infections by 2030 — a 49% increase.
These are not budget line items. These are lives.
I started writing because I needed to survive. I kept writing because other people needed to know they weren't alone in the surviving. This platform — these essays, these unpolished reflections on what it means to be human when the systems meant to hold you let go — is how I stay in the fight. It's how I afford the time to keep documenting what's being lost, to name what we're choosing to abandon, and to refuse silence as the only response available to us.
I'm not asking you to fix the federal budget. I'm asking you to keep this voice going — while I bear witness, while I write it down, while I refuse to look away.
Every coffee you buy is an act of resistance. Every dollar says: this matters. You matter. Keep writing.
🖤 Support The Unpolished Prophet: buymeacoffee.com/adontaimason
If this one stayed with you, you might also like:
The Receipts, The Performance, and The Gap in the Safety Net