Accepting government assistance comes with knowing how much others despise you for it, including friends who casually share calls to drug-test welfare recipients. Even the officials handing out aid may call you lucky, which turns a humiliating necessity into something you are supposed to be grateful for.
Under the stigma of poverty, people come to feel they have value as human beings only while they are actively earning. The goal becomes getting off assistance to count as a contributing member of society, rather than simply being secure.
People who clean private homes become nameless ghosts to the households they serve, present for their clients' triumphs, tragedies and secrets while barely being seen as people. That invisibility lets the comfortable classes ignore the poverty working inside their own homes.
The belief that hard work will save you is false when the agency takes most of what a client pays. Cleaners can be left with under $10 an hour after taxes, before paying for travel and wear on their own cars. Low wages and high housing costs keep a working parent on a tightrope however hard she works.
A story of poverty may win wide sympathy partly because the person telling it looks like the readers' own sister or neighbor. That relatability can make one survivor's tale seem universal while others' struggles stay unheard.