i think we should break up

alternatively titled: what are we? or maybe: introducing me by nick jonas

Hi, friend. I’ve been thinking about us and our relationship and what we mean to each other—yes, it’s time for the What are we? conversation. Not to stress you out, but it’s a pertinent question. We must be open with each other, clear. I’ve been trying to understand why you’re subscribed to me. I think you should unsubscribe, truthfully. I think you should read this email then really decide if you want to stay with me. You know too much about me, and you know nothing at all, both at the same time. It makes me uncomfortable. I think it’s my fault things are this way.

I went on a blind date last night. I also have been going to many interviews. It got me thinking about introductions. I’m quite lousy at them. Tell me about yourself, people ask me, and I always start with the basics: I’m Amal, I’m twenty-five, I’m a writer. I should get better at summarizing myself. A skill, I suppose. I’m always deeper than that: someone I knew from the corner of my eye struggled with depression, and I found myself going to his apartment everyday for a month. We never introduced ourselves, really—we bore ourselves open, or I did, at least, and from there we began. An essential person from my history, not my present—someone who made me who I am, in some way—and yet his favorite color is lost on me, now. I began asking that question three years later, once I remembered that it’s the little things that matter.

Introductions are necessary. You know, the baseline of things. Maybe it’s my frontal lobe talking, but we try to fast-track the beginning stages of things too often. There’s a foundation that must be made before you slit your heart open before another. Weeks, months, years, before you really truly understand one another. My most solid relationship with my best friend began with reading. Talking about characters. Delving into our favorite TV shows and ranting about our peers, until we understood the grit of each others’ edges and our lives pushed us to open up, truly, deeply.

I never introduced myself to you.

Here I am. We should get acquainted. I deliver my diary pages to you, and yet I never had the common decency to let you know who I am on the outside. You know, the normal stuff. And then we can build: to the deeper stuff, the why we’re here’s, the what are we’s.

Live photo, from my webcam. Amal, circa 2025. In her bedroom.

the first date questions;
the who are you’s, the what do you do’s

You know me, I’m Amal. I am freshly twenty-five, living on my own for the first time. You’ll be receiving this message on April 13th, at a precise period in my life I am calling Purgatory. I’m in limbo, you see, standing at the precipice of what is the next phase of my life, and by God, I want to do it right. I want to do it real. I don’t have a job at the moment so my next steps are completely dependent on a myriad of things which are kind of out of my hands. Being in this phase is why I pushed back against that date I told you about—I wasn’t sure if I should start dating when the ground under me might fall out from under my feet. But, hey, practice—just like the interviews for the positions I don’t want.

So I have four cats—technically—my firstborn, Cas, who lives with my mother in the US. I grew up with him and, yes, he’s named after the Supernatural character. Supernatural will come up later, too. I didn’t raise him well, so he’s a bit of a handful, but he keeps mom busy. Cas healed something in me I can’t put into words. He is a part of my soul.

My second-born, rescue I named Shams, which means Sun in Arabic. I found him under my car at work with a really bad eye infection; he was so weak and almost as big as my hand. Taken too young from his mother, he would keep sucking on my cheeks and the in-between of my fingers. He would scream when I left him alone, when I went to sleep, when I tried to put the food in his bowl, and I swear I never saw him take a nap. He had so much energy he made my head hurt. I adopted Moon, shortly after Shams. Moon—who was named this by his rescuer, which made the Facebook post feel like a sign he was meant to be my Sun’s brother—was just to accompany the other one, to get the screaming to stop, but instead they’d just scream together.

Shams somehow contracted a rare feline disease at about six months, and passed away shortly after thanksgiving of last year. I think about him often. Sometimes I wish I didn’t host that thanksgiving dinner, because I keep wondering if he’d gotten the disease he was too young and sick to be vaccinated for because of all the shoes walking around my house. I also wonder if the vet I was seeing then was just stupid for saying he shouldn’t be vaccinated yet. But some things just happen.

Moon and I mourned greatly before Riku brought some softness into our lives.

Riku is technically adopted, a very demure fellow with incredible manners—he will meow once and tilt his head down for pets. Originally, he is my friend’s cat. I took him in because their mom was allergic. Riku does try to teach Moon manners, but it’s a lost cause.

In order: Cas, Shams the day I rescued him, Shams, Shams and Moon, Me Shams and Moon, and finally: Riku and Moon

A lot of my identity is tied around my cats, really. I could map out my life through lessons I learned just from watching cats, and experiencing their love (and violence). When I moved into my first apartment on my own, I was missing a deep part of myself. But I didn’t think I could ever replace Cas. I didn’t have it in me. But, you know, Shams showed up under my car and I tried to throw him onto a coworker but I was the only one who could take him to the vet that day. Cat distribution system, I guess. Growing up my mom taught me to try to ignore the sick cats—she said the worst pain is getting stuck with a thing you love then losing it. She was right. When I got the call Shams died, I didn’t think I’d survive it. But, you know, life is about love and loss. It’s hard to accept, but that is the way of things.

Okay, I spoke a lot about my cats, but in my defense—this is what men and I discuss, often, during first dates. And, it’s me, regardless of it all, I’m a bit forward with my personal story—obviously. It’s hard to stay surface level when I have all these psychoanalyses and stories and thoughts. But, okay. My favorite color? White. If not white, then I think it’s blue. The colors of the sky, clouds against a soft, baby blue. Currently, I’m enjoying brown—leather, to be exact about the shade. Wood. My favorite movie? Fools Rush In is by far my number one favorite, maybe Pretty Woman somewhere second. For about five years of my life I watched Zombieland every night before my birthday, for some reason. I also loved Poor Things. Tangled. Lilo and Stitch. Shrek 1. 50 First Dates. Killers.

What I listen to? A little of everything, but Still Woozy is always somewhere there. The Marias. Hozier. George Ezra. The 1975. Favorite book is a hard one. Usually I say The Book Thief. There’s also I Who Have Never Known Men, and something about The Hunger Games makes my heart beat faster. I’m not so picky, really, with literature. Everything has something which makes me soft. Shows… well, Netflix’s Maniac. A Series of Unfortunate Events, also the Netflix one. Apple TV’s Shrinking is one of my top favorites. Ted Lasso, of course. Friends when I need to stop thinking. Interview with the Vampire…

I studied English Language and Literature and graduated January of 2023, then did some moving and experienced some culture shock and a few mental breakdowns. My life after that is pretty much documented here and here, and onwards if you go through my archive and “Season 1” of Letters to the Ether. Since I’m in limbo now, I’m just waiting for some news so I can decide what my path is, so my days are usually spent being forcefully woken up by the cats to feed them, doing my morning pages, and learning how to make the perfect Chai Latte. It’s hard to rouse myself out of bed with no real goal or Important Thing to Do. I am both alone and lonely, this month really feeling like my own little Purgatory, but I am learning to make a home out of myself. I’ve spent so much of my life Alone and Lonely, and it’s time I step up to the task of it just being Alone.

The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.

―Ocean Vuong, Someday I’ll love Ocean Vuong

what made me a writer

I’ve been a writer ever since I fell onto a book left behind by my sister after she went to college. Blood Promise by Richelle Mead. The fourth book in the Vampire Academy series. I was shocked that words could do so much to my emotions, and I wanted desperately to replicate that feeling. It started, like many others, on Tumblr. 2014. I inhaled the rest of the Vampire Academy books—and that series (and many others) quickly became my life.

I started roleplaying on Tumblr—if you’ve never done it (or think dirty things when you hear the word roleplay) it was a much simpler time, where we would make accounts as characters and interact with each other as them. Sometimes characters of our own creations, with backstory and everything, inserting them into canon somehow. Other times just the actual characters from the books or TV shows. Often, it was like a club you join. You’d have to apply for a character and only interact with those inside the club. For example, Vampire Academy—someone would create an account as the Academy, and kind of be a mod for all our interactions. They’d make events, announce changes, admit others. Or you could make your own account and interact with others who were also not tied to a… club. Jeez, this feels so long ago, and it sounds so convoluted. But writing with others taught me how to write, really. And I was only comfortable enough to write with strangers, through a screen.

I remember realizing how much fun I had writing when I was roleplaying as Claire Novak from Supernatural and basically writing a scene with a user who was Castiel. They would throw lines at me and shift the scene completely, and we puzzled together something incredibly raw and honest by the end of it. I would refresh every two seconds because I was so excited for their responses, so thought-out and deeply intricate. Then Wattpad, of course, and a collection of crossover fanfiction. The first time I read my own work in front of others—English class, in the sixth grade, a prompt our teacher had given us on fairytales—I had one of my first panic attacks, ran to the bathroom three lines in, and threw up. So you can imagine what a journey it has been to write and share from a place of peace, and not a place of sheer, unadulterated dread.

I never wrote my own, fully-mine story with fully-mine characters until I was twelve or thirteen and entered a writing contest at school. It was a very dark short story titled Reaper, about a boy who attempts suicide, then enters a sort of afterlife with an angel of death who tries to convince him to live, through showing him snapshots of the happy moments in his life. He wakes up in the hospital, wondering if it was just a dream. I’m thinking of rewriting it, actually, but alas, Reaper won first place¹, which made me The Writer of my small school. My English teachers had me write a few plays they’d have the younger ones act out for different events at school, but I can’t remember most of them. People would ask me for help with their essays. Others would ask me for books recs. A Wattpad story of mine went viral and everyone was buzzing about it, etc.

Writing is my only personality trait. I interviewed for a fancy, private school here in Jordan when I was in the 10th grade. She had asked me what my extracurriculars were. I said, “I write,” because my school was so small and poor and stupid, we didn’t have extracurriculars. We had 7 classes and went home. “I write and read,” I said, and I felt as though she was disappointed, perhaps that she believed I was just trying to impress her with a lie. But it was true: that’s what I did, and that’s what I have always, always done.

why and how we met

After high school, I went into English Literature despite my mother begging me not to, and I kept writing. The short stories turned novels turned poems, and my focus has been poetry for a while. I tried Instagram for so long, but it never stuck. When I wrote my first piece here—Home Is Something I Can’t Describe—I didn’t really know why I was writing or who it was for. I’d never written nonfiction. I’d always distorted my story into a collection of different characters, or hid it in-between lines of poetry. But I did, I wrote my story, for the first time. And I hit Publish. I knew about Substack from CJ the X, and thought, well, maybe it was somewhere I could archive my meanderings.

I really didn’t have huge dreams for this newsletter², but some of my pieces such as My Five Year Plan, The Internet Is Turning You Stupid, and Richard Siken Owes You Nothing, and the one that started it all The Girl You Propose To, but Never the One You Marry garnered a lot of attention. I was also using the fake-Twitter feature here a lot, so there were a lot of eyes on my work and many more connections to be made, plus things were still small on this wholesome website, back then. I think it was easier to grow. We joke on Substack notes that 10 subscribers feels like 1,000 followers on Instagram, and that sentiment still rings true—long form content getting five comments feels divine, but those comments being honest, and faithful, and incredibly personal? That means even more. Even deeper: sometimes, at a party, Substack may come up, and someone may say “Oh, I know you, I think” and I will say “If you know me from Substack, you know me very well.”

In this digital world of 30-second clips, someone giving you about 10 minutes of their time to digest your words feels so, so, so special.

Having a little over 2,000 subscribers now feels like a fever dream, and as most creatives do, I started to really regret my choice of “marketing”, and wanted a fancier name, better getup, more meaningful pieces, art—I wanted it lavish, professional. I wanted to be deserving of the numbers I’d never had before. I’ve always liked prettying things up—that’s what growing up on Instagram does to you. But while that’s important, it’s not honest. And I want my work to be honest.

Changing my publication name to Poetic License seems like it turned me into a stranger in your inboxes, which is what triggered a deep thought process of What the Hell am I doing and why am I doing it? Like, what is my purpose here, why do I keep coming back? You need to really know why you’re putting so much time into something, and I’ve been just trying to release what’s on my mind for the past two, crazy, painful years. I didn’t think of it rigidly. I didn’t really, really consider what I was doing.

Truthfully, I love an audience. I am nothing if not a performer. And I’ve always wanted to create. I’m pushing myself to do more creative things over on my Instagram, too, which some of you have found and followed and you do the liking, which, of course, releases the dopamine in my brain. Thank you. But still: is it the audience that keeps me writing? If it was, then I would have stopped long ago because I never got it until I hit 23. What, then? When you started commenting, I kind of realized it: Connection. I should have known ever since I began reading that I was looking for that, but it’s a discovery that my subconscious hid from me until very recently.

“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.”

―James Baldwin,Conversations with James Baldwin

My necklace, which I try to keep as a reminder to keep going.

My friends keep telling me With Love, Amal felt more like me. It does. When I hit 1,000 subscribers I actually bought the necklace pictured above, inspired by this pin I found on Pinterest. I was so happy. So thankful. I wanted to tattoo it on me because it felt like I’d finally found something I truly loved, somewhere to release whilst also being creative and also connecting with people. Truthfully, this newsletter is my pride and joy. It is the best thing I have ever done. But, well—

I guess all of you being here scared me in some way, and I wanted to be cooler for you, so I changed the name and tried the designs and made so many attempts to be better. I’ve changed things back—partly because it feels right and partly because I think for a bit there you were subscribed to a newsletter you don’t recognize…

You must forgive me, this perfectionism kills me, and I’ve spent all of my teenage years deleting and restarting things, even the role-play accounts on Tumblr, even that story that went viral on Wattpad. It’s a blessing that I didn’t go off and delete all my work and start over again here—but, hey, that’s proof that change is possible. I have hands capable of destruction. I’m learning to be more forgiving with myself.

where we’re going from here (the big what are we?)

We are penpals, my love. We always have been.

I am starting over again, in a way. Because this place means so much to me, I need to take care of that love. And because I’m reading The Artist’s Way, I’m understanding on a deeper level how important it is to be consistent and careful and focused. I used to think my creativity only came in sparks, so I’d publish once I felt something was done because I didn’t want to dirty it with any overthinking. This book is challenging how I view things. Starting now, one piece a week, religiously. Scheduled. Yes, I will use the scheduling feature, because I am an adult and I am able to be patient and being organized is deeply important for a brain so ruthless, like mine.

It will be organized and tagged for your pleasure: Letters to the Ether, Poems, Notes on Becoming, Lost Pages from my Diary, and Excerpts from a Novel I’ll Never Write. You will receive either one, depending on how I can get it all done, what stories or life lesson or pain sparks inspiration in what way, etc. And I’ll do less worrying and more writing. I’ll also do more reading.

Above all, I value connection. With you. The subscriber count terrifies me, yes; it runs my blood cold, but it doesn’t matter to me as much as building an active community I can interact with. You’ve roused me out of so many lonely nights with your comments, thoughts, and ideas, and for that I am grateful. You made me more confident to tell people I’m a writer—to apply to jobs I actually want, to join workshops, to try my luck at MFA’s. I tried, for so long, perhaps for my entire life, to convince myself that life can be done without a community. That Alone comes with Lonely. I was wrong, I think.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it really make a sound? I don’t know, I really don’t, but I think it’s always better when people hear the sound, when others witness the fall. Thank you for hearing my sound. For listening to it.

I hope that perhaps you know me better now, not just my sadness but most of my story, and I hope you will keep me as a friend in your inbox, and that you treat me as such, too.

You can always email me directly by responding to this email, which I love that many of you do. I am your penpal as much as you are mine.

With love,
Amal

1. Although my friend was one of the judges, so not sure it counts.

2. This is a blatant lie. I thought plenty of this newsletter, but I never thought I’d actually grow at the rate which I had. I really hoped it would, somehow, that maybe people would connect. But I didn’t expect it, at all.