What the Map Doesn’t Show You: Legible to Them, Unlivable for Us
What the Official Story Leaves Out—and Why Our Voices Must Fill the Silence
The third and final stop. A reflection on the Budget Bill, media framing, and why narrative is infrastructure. What the map doesn’t show, we live. And what we write, we build—together, from the margins out.
Introduction: The Third Stop on the Route
I didn’t set out to write a series. But some bills are so catastrophic—so sprawling in their cruelty—that you have to keep tracing the damage just to understand where it ends. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” is one of those bills. It doesn’t just cut funding. It severs lives. It collapses infrastructure. It redraws the map of survival—and then hands it back to us as if nothing’s changed.
So I wrote three pieces. Three stops on a route that, in truth, no longer runs.
The first, Optional Until It’s You, explored how Medicaid cuts gut essential support for autistic people under the guise of “flexibility.” The second, No Roads Forward, looked outward—toward climate, mobility, and what it means to be physically, economically, and infrastructurally trapped in an age of policy abandonment.
And this, now, is the third. A reflection. A zooming out. Not just of what was cut, but how the story of those cuts gets told—by whom, in what tone, and with what purpose. Because the deeper I went into these policies, the more I realised that what’s missing isn’t just services or infrastructure. It’s truth. It’s framing. It’s narrative access. The map we’re handed—whether through official language, mainstream coverage, or expert commentary—is often clean, legible, and optimistic. But it was never drawn for us. And it certainly wasn’t drawn by us.
This piece is about what that map doesn’t show you.
About who is made invisible beneath its lines.
About why so many of us—autistic, disabled, poor—find ourselves standing at stops that no longer exist, holding directions to places we can no longer reach.
Setting the Contrast: Disability Scoop’s Framing
Before I published either of my essays, Disability Scoop had already weighed in—first with a piece on Trump’s proposed housing cuts, and later with coverage of the budget bill’s passage. Their tone was familiar. Measured. Professional. The voice of institutional concern.
In the June 26th article, the focus was on housing: “Housing advocates worry states can’t fill rental aid gaps if Trump cuts go through.” That was the headline. Not that people would be unhoused. Not that disabled tenants would be abandoned. Not that entire communities—rural, autistic, chronically ill—were about to lose the ground beneath them. No. The story was that advocates were worried.
When the bill passed on July 3rd, their Medicaid coverage followed the same pattern:
“Congress Approves Nearly $1 Trillion In Cuts To Medicaid Threatening Disability Services.”
Again, not a lie. But not a truth, either. Not the kind you can live inside. The kind of framing that makes structural collapse sound like unfortunate budget maths. They quoted experts from respected organisations. They explained the basics of HCBS. They noted the concern. And then they moved on.
There’s no malice in their coverage. But there’s no urgency either. No grief. No presence. No disabled voice speaking from inside the stakes. No mention of what it feels like to be an autistic adult with no transit options, driving an ageing car that can’t be replaced, calculating each journey like a ration. No space for the kind of fear I carry—the fear that if my car breaks down, I won’t be able to get to work. Or the doctor. Or anywhere. That I’ll vanish, not in policy, but in practice. That I’ll still be “eligible,” still have my “rights,” but no actual means of reaching the services I’m told I can access.
Because that’s not the kind of story Disability Scoop tells. They report on the disability sector, not from the disabled experience. Their audience is lawmakers, administrators, service professionals. They translate complex policy into polite summaries. Their job is to be legible to systems—and in that effort, they make the rest of us disappear.
“Concern” is not analysis. And a summary of budget lines is not a roadmap for surviving what they set in motion.
Their stories make the map look navigable. Mine begin with the terrain—the missed bus, the shuttered clinic, the long walk home with a child melting down in the heat. Because if we don’t tell these stories ourselves, they won’t be told at all. Or worse: they’ll be flattened into bullet points on someone else’s agenda.
What Independent Writing Offers Instead
I didn’t write these pieces to explain the news. I wrote them because I was living inside it. Because no one else was saying what needed to be said—at least not in a way that autistic, disabled, and poor people could actually use. The coverage existed, but the why was missing. The connective tissue. The consequence.
Mainstream outlets reported that services might be “impacted.” That housing would shift to “block grants.” That Medicaid “reforms” could lead to uncertainty. But they didn’t explain what that actually means—not in lives, not in bodies, not in the quiet disappearance of possibility.
So I did what institutional platforms won’t: I explained how “optional” is a legal category with lethal consequences. How the move to block grants is not just a budgeting tool, but a mechanism of abandonment—one that allows the federal government to cut support whilst pretending it hasn’t. I showed how states will be forced to triage who survives, and how the people most likely to be cut loose are the same ones already holding on by a thread.
What readers received wasn’t just policy summary. It was survival context.
A clear breakdown of how Medicaid defines “optional” care—and how that label makes services like AAC, in-home support, and mental health expendable by design.
An explanation of block grant logic, not as an abstract fiscal shift, but as the tool by which systemic abandonment is operationalised—quietly, deniably.
Real-life case studies that name what’s lost: communication, housing, access to school, to care, to community.
A disability-led analysis of how these moves intersect with climate collapse, mobility erasure, and enclosure as policy.
This isn’t just information—it’s orientation. It’s how we name the trap so others don’t walk into it blind. It’s how we recognise the pattern early enough to adapt, to organise, to survive.
The corporate media doesn’t tell these truths—not because they’re hidden, but because telling them would mean naming a system that’s working exactly as designed. What I offer instead is not objectivity. It’s clarity. And sometimes, clarity is the more radical act.
Connecting the Dots: Narrative Power as Infrastructure
Narrative is infrastructure. Not in the poetic sense—though it can be that too—but in the material one. It shapes what gets built, what gets funded, who gets seen, and who gets left standing on the curb when the last bus quietly disappears.
Official stories—like the ones published in sector-facing outlets—are structured to make the system appear intact. They rely on a kind of polite deferral: services aren’t gone, just “under review.” Aid isn’t denied, just “restructured.” Lives aren’t unraveling, just “potentially impacted.” These stories create the illusion that the system is still navigable. That it just needs a little more data. A little more oversight. A few adjustments.
But lived-experience writing breaks that frame. It shows you where the map curls at the edges, where the lines have already faded, where the bridge you’re told to cross has long since collapsed. It points to the redlines drawn not just in neighbourhoods, but in policy—the invisible boundaries that mark whose needs are optional, whose lives are expendable. It names the exclusion zones carved out of budgets and eligibility criteria, where disabled, poor, and chronically ill people are left to circulate endlessly, always adjacent to help but never quite inside its reach.
It asks who ever got to ride—and who was never meant to arrive.
The map says there’s a route.
My work asks who ever got to board—and why so many of us are still standing at closed stops, waiting.
I’m autistic. I’m chronically ill. I work full time as a public school teacher. But even with my degrees and a cleared credential, what I bring home barely lifts me from Broke to Very Poor. I don’t say that for sympathy. I say it because it’s relevant. Because the system assumes that people like me—people who are technically employed—must be stable. That if you’ve got a job, you’ve got access. But that’s not how it works.
When federal funding disappears, it’s not just “programs” that vanish. It’s the local services—the ones you actually rely on. The transit pass your district used to offer. The Medicaid-funded therapist who worked with your student. The nurse who helped regulate a meltdown before it turned into a suspension. The public health clinic where you could refill your inhaler without skipping meals. Those cuts don’t come with headlines. They come with fewer hours, longer waits, and blank stares when you ask if a service is still available.
And here’s the truth most mainstream reporting won’t say: States will protect themselves first. They will prioritise balancing their budgets over preserving the supports regular people need to survive. That’s not cynicism. That’s precedent. We’ve seen it before. We’re seeing it now.
The official narrative doesn’t account for that. It hands you a map with every stop still printed. But when you try to follow it—when you reach out for what you’ve been told still exists—you find nothing. A shuttered door. An empty inbox. A form that no one is reviewing anymore.
That’s why narrative matters. Because if the only stories we get are the ones written for policymakers, then the rest of us will be expected to live inside a fiction. A system that looks functional on paper but has already disappeared in practice.
Why Independent Voices Matter Now More Than Ever
I’m not a content creator.
I don’t batch drafts. I don’t chase clicks. I don’t write on a schedule dictated by trends or algorithms. What I do is witness. I live the stories I tell. I write them slowly, on low spoons days, in the long exhale of a school year that borrowed too much from my body. I share what I’ve seen because others need to see it too—before it disappears beneath the polite language of “reform.”
These essays are not monetised performances. They are dispatches from the edge of the system—part journalism, part survival manual. They’re the kind of writing I used to look for and never found. So I started writing it myself.
And I made a promise early on: all my work will remain free.
No locked archives. No limit on “free reads.”
Because the people who most need this kind of clarity are often the ones who can least afford to pay for it.
Some readers—those who can—choose to support my work by becoming paid subscribers. And to them, I am deeply, genuinely grateful. Your generosity keeps this going. It helps me afford the quiet days that make writing possible. It fuels the clarity that others rely on.
But just as importantly, I love when readers share my work—on socials, with friends, with policy makers. When an article makes its way into a city council inbox or a classroom conversation. That, too, is support. That, too, is how the truth travels.
Becoming a member here doesn’t buy access.
It invests in orientation.
It helps make sure we don’t face this alone.
I’m not writing for prestige.
I’m writing for the ones who’ve already been told they’re optional—
and are refusing to disappear quietly.
The Road We’re Building
There may be no roads left on the official map.
But we’re drawing new ones—with each act of storytelling, each thread shared, each quiet refusal to keep waiting at a stop that never served us. We’re naming the routes that were erased. We’re mapping survival sideways, in gestures of care, clarity, and collective memory.
If these pieces helped you see something more clearly, name something more honestly, or connect more deeply—consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s one way we keep moving, together. It’s how this work continues to exist outside institutions, outside gatekeeping, and within reach of those who need it most.
We know the route isn’t coming.
But we’re building it anyway.
Thank you for walking it with me.
Postscript: The Machinery Behind the Map
This isn’t just bad policy. It’s a structural shift—and it’s happening quietly, by design.
The corporate media tells the story like it’s a disagreement over budgeting priorities. But what’s actually happening is a profound transformation in how the government defines responsibility. The shift from line-item guarantees to block grants isn’t neutral. It’s not a technical adjustment. It’s a mechanism of erasure—one that hides harm behind local discretion and severs the connective tissue of federal accountability.
It’s austerity, sharpened inward.
It’s colonial extraction turned domestic.
It’s the state protecting itself from the people it was meant to serve.
Because block grants don’t just cut services. They cut the pathways to protest. They make it harder to trace where the harm begins and who’s to blame. They fracture solidarity. They atomise resistance. They let the system shrug and say, “It’s up to the states now.” And all the while, the money continues flowing upward—uninterrupted, unaccountable, unrelenting.
This is cruelty with infrastructure.
This is containment with plausible deniability.
And if we don’t name it for what it is, the map will keep being redrawn around our absence.