A black-and-white image of a hand tightly gripping a frayed and worn rope against a dark background. The rope appears to be unraveling, symbolizing Elon Musk sucking up the world’s survival safety nets.

Every month, I wait.

I wait for the direct deposit that determines whether I and my cat eat, whether I can afford to get my oil changed so the car I’m living in doesn’t die and leave me stranded and sleeping in the streets, whether I can pay for the cheap storage unit where the remnants of my life are crammed together like a sad little time capsule. I wait with my heart in my throat, because I know—I know—that one day, the money might not come. And that day may be as soon as next month.

Because when you live on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), you are always one bureaucratic decision away from being erased.

And now, the erasure is happening in real time.

Trump’s goons have taken over the federal government. Not through elections. Not through Congress. But through brute force: physically seizing agencies, shutting them down, rewriting the computer code that runs the Treasury, deciding who gets paid and who doesn’t.

Elon Musk—who is not an elected official, not even an appointee in the traditional sense, but a billionaire who believes money equals divine right—is openly bragging about “feeding” the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper.” Ten thousand employees, gone. An entire foreign aid infrastructure, wiped off the map. Just like that.

And now, Musk and his people are inside the Treasury. They’re rewriting the systems that make Social Security payments, that distribute benefits to disabled people, to veterans, to retirees. They say they’re cutting “corruption and waste.” I know exactly what that means. I know who they think is waste. Their hero called us “human ballast”.

It’s people like me.

People who rely on the government to survive. People who don’t fit into their billionaire vision of “deserving.” People they can starve out and push to the margins because we don’t have the power to fight back.

And so I wait.

I wait for a letter in the mail telling me my benefits have been cut because of a “routine review.” I wait to check my bank account and see a zero where the lifeline used to be. I wait to find out whether I can keep barely surviving, or whether this is the month that survival runs out.

I’m already living hand to mouth. What happens when the hand disappears?

The worst part is, I’ve seen this coming. We’ve all seen it coming. They’ve been dismantling the social safety net for years, chipping away at it, eroding it, making it more difficult, more bureaucratic, more humiliating to access. The application process alone is a gauntlet of suspicion and cruelty. Prove your disability. Prove your poverty. Prove you’re suffering enough. Then, if you’re lucky, you get a pittance: just enough to keep you alive, but not enough to actually let you live.

And now? Now they don’t even want to bother with the pretense of pretending we deserve to exist.

They’re gutting the government in real time, and Congress is standing around, hands in pockets, pretending they don’t see the blood on the floor. The Republican Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, claims he “doesn’t believe” this is happening. That they’re just “reviewing how the agency is spending money.” Either he’s a liar, or he’s a coward. Either way, we’re the ones who will pay the price.

I am furious. I am terrified. I am exhausted.

I have spent my entire life fighting for scraps, for dignity, for the disability support that never comes, for the right to simply exist. And now, people who have more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes are pulling the plug on the only thing keeping millions of us from sinking into oblivion.

So I wait.

I wait to vanish. I wait to be declared “waste.” I wait to find out if I still have the right to survive next month.

And I am so goddamn tired of waiting.