It can happen faster than you think.
I’m waiting on hold with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) office and as the plinky, plunky music continues with a robot voice occasionally interrupting, I can feel my tension rising. I hate being back here again. It’s the third time I’ve been laid off and have had to file for assistance since the pandemic. I’m loath to say that I’m getting to be a pro at this, but I am. Except asking for government aid makes me feel like the biggest possible failure.
Yesterday I was on a similar call with Medicaid. I pleaded to get the person on the other end of the line to explain to me why the money I made before I got laid off would be used to determine if I qualify when I no longer had that income. She started to speak very slowly to me as if she thought I was stupid. Condescension is one of my emotional triggers, despite how hard I try to control it. But my internal anger made me feel like maybe I was exactly who she thought I was: a lowlife. Really, I was just desperate for help figuring out this illogical system. To her, I was just one of the dozens of calls she was likely to take on any given day. I took a breath and asked her to explain to me how other people get Medicaid when they get laid off. She repeated that this is how the system works. I ended up hanging up the call, defeated.
The robot voice on the SNAP line has just offered to call me back so I don’t have to continue to listen to the music that could surely be used in a torture situation. I hesitate to accept the offer. Jumping out of the queue makes me feel like I will lose my place and not be called back. Or more likely, they’ll ring me up smack dab in the middle of the one Zoom call I have about some potential work later in the afternoon. Their torture music tactics work on me, though, and I finally give in.
Sure you’ll call me back, I think, defeated once again.
I was making a very good salary at my last job, more than I’d ever made in my career. With my bonus, I clocked in at $250,000 a year, a number that made me feel safe. Without a husband or partner to share the bills in New York City, this wasn’t extravagant. Absurdly, it’s just an OK wage in this city. According to a 2026 study, a family of four needs $318,000 to live “comfortably” here. But with just three of us, my salary felt like enough to support me and my two college freshmen and save a little bit for retirement.
I’d just dug out from the debt I’d gotten myself into the last time I was unemployed and was finally feeling secure again. I was truly hoping this might be the last place I’d ever work, happy to retire from this family-owned business. I’d gotten hired under the verbal promise that they “don’t lay people off.” Say no more. I was on board. But when I got the all-too-familiar invitation into an unexpected meeting the day before a holiday weekend, I knew what was coming. Lesson learned. Next time a company tells me they don’t lay people off, ask them to put it in writing.
I sat in my termination meeting listening to what a good job I had done and how much they appreciated the work, but mentally I was already freezing my bank accounts. My mind swam through thoughts: Thank god I hadn’t bought the Womb Chair that I’d been watching on Facebook Marketplace. Thank god I decided not to move to a larger apartment (with a much higher rent) for the kids to have more space when they’re home from college. Thank god I’d already saved next semester’s tuition. Thank god it wasn’t about to be Christmas.
As someone who grew up financially insecure with a single mom, then in a very modest single-income household after she remarried, I’ve internalized the drive to protect my money at all costs. I don’t spend above my means. I don’t take extravagant trips. I truly don’t understand how friends have lives that seem to be filled with new clothes and family holidays to the Greek islands or Iceland. If I can’t afford it, how can they? The credit card debt I had to crawl out of was from paying self-employment taxes, not fancy shoes.
I’ve often quipped to friends that I’m very good at spending to my means, whether high or low. So when I make money, I’ll have nice dinners out once a week or so. When I’m unemployed, I’m living like a church mouse once again. It does make me suddenly feel like an outsider in my city, though. I walk past restaurants teeming with outdoor diners on these first few glorious nights of warm temperatures and feel an unmistakable tug to be one of them. Then a whisper in my brain says, “That’s not for you anymore.”
What I’ll have instead, if the SNAP office ever calls me back for my “interview,” is a blue-and-white card pre-filled with grocery money. It won’t be enough for everything, especially not two ravenous teenagers, but it will help immensely. Even though I need this help, it makes me deeply ashamed to use it. I feel no shame taking my unemployment payments. But for some deep psychological reason, when it comes to food stamps, I’m filled with humiliation. Whether that’s from the media portrayal of the “welfare queen” or my own mother being a little appalled when she learned I was applying for unemployment (I very quickly corrected her that I’d paid for this by working), the feeling comes from a deeply ingrained place.
I’ve used food stamps before and was grateful to have them. When I was laid off at the beginning of the pandemic, they were a lifeline. I was out of work for a full year. So many media jobs had been cut that I was competing with an army of others all vying for that rare opening. Between unemployment checks and food stamps, we survived that very rocky period.
It didn’t seem possible that the job market could ever get worse, but right now may actually be more dire than during the height of the pandemic. Despite the numbers looking “strong,” the reality is people are struggling. Whether it’s AI replacing us, or only certain industries hiring, it’s bleak out there. And not only is finding a job rough, but everything is more expensive. I just got a notice that my gas bill, which has always hovered around $60, would be going up to $249. Thanks, Trump.
SNAP has called back! The plinky, plunky torture music has restarted as they “continue to work on my case.” It only took as much time as it did to write roughly one essay. I was extremely nervous that I wouldn’t be able to qualify at all given the new work requirement rules that Trump has instated. It feels incredibly oxymoronic to require work for someone who is asking for help to buy food because they have no work, but I digress.
Here I am, someone who was making a quarter of a million dollars just a few weeks ago, hoping that the person on the other end thinks I qualify for a couple hundred dollars a month of assistance. I hang up the call—which consisted exclusively of someone asking the questions I’d already answered on my online application—and I’m a little closer to getting some food assistance. Once that comes through and I am finally done with the hellish wait period for unemployment, I’m sure the tension and panic I’m currently living with will subside, at least a bit.
I promise myself that the next time I have a paycheck, I won’t take it for granted. I’ll line up my groceries on the conveyor belt stress-free, not mentally counting which ones SNAP covers and which ones it doesn’t (sorry, toilet paper, you’re a luxury). I’ll tuck my credit card back in my wallet without a care instead of palming the blue-and-white SNAP card so that no one sees. If there is a next time I get a paycheck, I’ll try to remember the taxes I’m paying go into a system that’s meant to help me if I ever need it again.
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Lili Zarghami lives with her teenagers in Brooklyn. She’s been writing for and providing editorial direction at women’s websites like Redbook, HGTV, Better Homes & Gardens and more since the turn of the century. She can remember the addresses of all the places she was a latchkey kid but has no idea what her email password is.
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