sometimes, the switch does nothing
Letters to the Ether: fibromyalgia, FRIENDS, & the downsides of over-analyzing
Dear whomever,
I have typed letters to you until the skin on my fingers bled out, over the last two years or so - you have seen me in all my forms, you have read all my ideas, you have experienced both my terrible and my sometimes-not-terrible work. Thank you.
These days, however, I find that I open this app with shaky hands, wondering if I have overdone it. I wish I could go forward without telling you about my fears, but I am afraid. I am wordless these days; silent and anxious. I used to be able to discuss things more - but the terms I need evade me. I used to be able to research and produce pieces that felt resonant, insightful, deep, important - but that type of content feel lost on me; everything I write feels meaningless, just another block of text amidst all of the other blocks of text.
I am afraid the intimacy we shared before is no longer here; Substack has become a social media; a click-baity black hole, another short-form echo chamber, another medium your index finger can use to scroll into the abyss.
But is the problem Substack, or is it just me? Is it us or the company that connected us? I can’t figure it out, can’t understand why I want to. Why are all my writer friends feeling so jaded, lately? We were on a high: we were creating and thinking and doing. When I hit 1,000 subscribers I felt a portion of what I feel now: dread, overthinking, worry. But why? Back then things were still new, fresh, interesting. There were more eyes to be afraid of. But now, it feels there are less, and I’m still upset.
My lens must be dimmed with negativity. And anyway, what is a writer but a glorified critic? What is a writer but a being brimming with jealousy, with green frustration? We are a community that really tries to celebrate others, but aren’t we all gazing hopefully, wishing it was us that got that comment, us that hit that subscriber count, us that got that sponsorship - that it was us that made that fucking money? What is a writer but someone who sees everything, every delicious detail, and every horrendous screw-up? I can take pain and elaborate it into four pages with ease, but can I do the same with joy? With love? With ecstasy? With confidence?
All I do is complain.
I’ve recently been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition that, in retrospect, has impacted me very intimately. Now that I have this understanding of what’s broken in my body, I’ve been making connections: going back to situations where I slumped down and said: I am in pain, and realizing what caused it. Understanding that my “do nothing days” where I sat and slept and ate in bed were not my depression in action, but rather a symptom of my chronic illness, that my body didn’t just want that, but needed it. There are also the times I overdid it on good days then sat, ruined, for at least two. With fibro, everything has a price, and usually it’s x2. You have to pace yourself.
I’ve also been perusing my older pieces, my journal entries, my texts, etc. It’s all coming together, too accurately that I feel I’m making things up. Despite all, I keep doubting myself.
My words have long since explored the symptoms doctors have consistently overlooked: pain, exhaustion, depressive-episodes (which may have just been flare-ups of chronic pain), feeble attempts to move forward; I have made continuous efforts to curate a life that is painless. And yet…
Fibromyalgia means, in the simple of terms, pain - widespread pain - everywhere pain - pain that feels like the night before, you got beat up - pain that never lets up; even sleep doesn’t rest you. Wasted are days I’ve done nothing but lay in bed, in and out of consciousness, hoping that just a few hours more of sleep will bring my body back to life. Lost are the outings and parties and 20-something-nights to my fatigue, my exhaustion, my inability to move.
But I’m not here to talk about my diagnosis, which, perhaps, may only be 99% accurate, if we’re being honest, considering how overarching it feels. Pinpointing what ails me feels like looking for a pin in a haystack, or however the saying goes - I wonder if it is futile to try and extract some bigger meaning, some poetic causation to it this. Why? I am always trying to find that why, the Literature Student in me needing an analysis, a reason…. my instinct to write an essay, something that will lead to some kind of conclusion - would a conclusion ease my pain? Would it make my days easier?
Why?
Searching for meaning is the one thing, with certainty, that I’ve done my entire life: twenty-five years of continuous attempts to figure it out, but that may never happen. That may never happen.
It may never happen.
I’ve gone back and forth on this horrendous thought for the past week. I have been trying to manage my finances to see if I can afford a different specialist, to get a second opinion. Do I trust this? Do I trust them? Do I even trust that my pain is truly pain and nothing else? What if I’m imagining it? I’ve been trying to find the meaning in what I’m going through: in all the constant whiplash I’ve experienced, all the up-and-downs, the good-then-bads, the horrible-then-amazing seemingly formulaic patterns. And then, I zoom out, and I see it like a spider web, I see my entire life: all the conundrums, all the situations that have happened with no causation, no lasting understanding, no real meaning, the spirals interconnecting but, ultimately, leading nowhere.
And fuck, my Substack is tanking. Like all the social medias before it, I am losing attention, and frankly, it’s affected me. The honeymoon phase was so lovely: I was overtaken with the kindness, the compliments, the communication from my readers. But things have significantly slowed, my numbers have stalled, and I can’t help it - I’m getting shy, I’m getting scared, I’m wondering if my illness keeping me from living means it will also keep me from writing - I keep opening the stats, I keep trying to figure out where I went wrong. I keep trying to pull meaning from a thing that is mostly meaningless. It’s obsessive and stupid. I am the most childish writer, just wishing for the book deals, for the money, for the dream life I have always wanted. I can’t read anymore. Every line makes me wish I wrote it, every beautiful page of prose makes me throw out my own.
There, I said it. The numbers are getting to me. Isn’t that why we’re all complaining? Isn’t that why all the notes and the pieces are see-sawing between Substack is great-Substack was great-Substack will never be great again?
I am frustrated at my innate failure. It has all come together, the intricate useless web of my life: I am a failed human, barely making it through life: back pain, joint pain, jaw pain. I am a failed writer, too: numbers paused, comments reduced; my dopamine is running out. I am a terrible friend: losing and losing people en masse, always; unable to answer texts, unable to go to the clubs. Will there be a breath, a release, sometime soon? I have been hopeful long enough. I have been studying the connections, the lessons, the reasons, long enough.
Where is my full understanding, my Nirvana? The reason I go on? Why withstand the pain if I don’t understand the karmic reason I have it? Where is God, so he can tell me why? What lesson could I possible extract from days spent in bed, watching the sun come and go, my joints on fire?
Why?
When I have nightmares, I wake to an empty, lonely apartment. In my half-asleep state I instinctively tap open YouTube, play a FRIENDS compilation, and try to distract myself from the demons of my subconscious. I have watched this sitcom many times, perhaps hundreds, over and over again ever since I was fourteen surrounded by four deep-purple walls. I fell upon it in the early days of Tumblr, and it eased my worry about life and death and the all-consuming teenage rage. When I can afford a Netflix subscription, to this day, you can bet I will eventually play FRIENDS, and it will keep playing as I do things around the house. It is background music, to me: familiar and calming and mind-numbingly stupid.
In the dark of night after a conversation with the Hat Man who stood in the corner of my bedroom, I half-watched clips from Season 4 Episode 15 The One With All The Rugby and my fear dissolved into the nuances of these six fictional characters’ lives. The storyline for this one is as follows: Monica and Rachel lose their girl apartment in a bet and have to move into the boy apartment. Monica has been trying to fix it up, and comes across a switch that “does nothing.” The rest of the episode follows her insane attempts to try and find out what it does.
Monica is known to be the intense friend - she is neat, competitive, maternal; often playing the role of the mom in the group. I’d never quite related to her until this moment, as I slowly came to this out of body realization that she was doing what I was doing every. single. day. She found something with no meaning - something the common person is able to just shrug at - and became desperate, desperate to give it a definition, to link it to something. It would have been easier if someone had lied to her, given her some kind of answer that calmed her mind. How do you not know what it does? How do you not care? She demanded of her friend, and he replied: “Like this” and threw his hands up.
It incites laughter from the live audience, but portrays a deep truth about life we often miss: you just have to not care sometimes.
Since I began Substack, I’ve wanted to write about FRIENDS, I’ve just never really known how to: I’ve never really understood how to explain that the constant condemnation of it for being stupid is baseless because, well - it’s meant to be stupid. The point of it is to limit the characters enough that their interactions become comedic. Funny enough, I wanted to analyze why the show didn’t have to be analyzed: that not everything was required an analysis, really: the reason for it not adding up, the reason for it being oftentimes misogynistic and many times homophobic is purely because it was written in the 90s and the writers relied on the punchlines, not the story. They cared about getting a reaction from the people in the stalls, not about writing Good Characters. There is no deeper secret. No intricate meaning to it all. A sitcom written in the 90s. That’s all it is.
I don’t watch FRIENDS because it’s good, or right, or well-done. I watch it because it’s easy, because we need things that require no examining, no reflecting. Like fast-food: quick and easy and satiating. You may not feel good after, but you’re not hungry anymore, at least.
And yet - I know this - but I have this incessant urge to deeply cultivate an understanding, to pick up the nuance to prove my point; to take notes, to ruin this ease with speculation. I would like to be right. I would like everyone else to be wrong. Similarly, I would like to be successful - and I would prefer it if no one was as successful as me. I like FRIENDS, I always want to say, It has gotten me through my worst. I know it’s problematic, but at least give me a chance. Let me write an analysis on why you should like FRIENDS, too, or better yet: why you don’t have to dislike it.
There is an urgency to be right. No two sides can coexist, really, no two different opinions. Especially now. Especially here. Our opinions are based on how wrong everyone else is, thus making us right. But is there a middle point? Is there a grey area? Are there things that make no sense, are there stories that do not fit neatly into an acceptable conclusion?
By the end of the episode, Monica has drilled holes into the apartment walls and is barely containing her frustration and, frankly, insanity. She eventually tries to cover the mess she’d made with childish drawings, pathetic attempts to distract her from the mess her obsession has brought her to. That clip may just be my brain: I keep trying to hide the wounds I’ve made with pretty Pinterest photos, or Substack stats; give myself a brief reprieve from the ruin my desperation had caused, but knowing, deep down inside, despite it all, that I’ve disregarded my wellbeing in search for something nonexistent.
Sometimes - most times - the switch just does nothing.
Although on the show, they do conclude things: turns out, the switch is actually controlling the TV in the adjacent apartment. Despite this, I found that I was able to pull some kind of lesson out of the clips I’d watched - during a time I truly needed it.
Honestly, it’s a “conclusion” I’ve come to many times before, in some of my pieces like i deleted co-star, then had some fresh berries and in defense of my laziness (shoutout to J!); my subconscious almost understands, but it’s hard to really act on this understanding. I crave, despite it all, meaning. Maybe that’s why I always end up with an essay on my hands…
Most of it is meaningless. The switch is connected to nothing; the builders bought a pack that had two switches for one electrical cord, perhaps; a prior tenant replaced it with the wrong set; etc. Sometimes I write, and I write, and I write, and there is no conclusion. Just ideas; just words; just thoughts and emotions and almost-understandings, but never full-understandings. When I was in college I could neatly package everything into an ending, a conclusion; my essays like gifts wrapped intricately, perfectly personifying the person they are meant for. Now, just words. Blocks of texts. I have created so much meaning out of everything, I’ve reached the other side, where there is none.
Substack sucking is meaningless; Substack itself is meaningless; nothing but a tool for connection that you shouldn’t rely on; there is no deeper reason for the algorithm failing us now other than corporate greed and a huge collection of newcomers, dominating the algorithm, which of course they will. Of course the initial excitement will die down, of course the people who subscribed to hundreds of newsletters are now cleaning out their inboxes, trying to tone it down as to not get overwhelmed. The reason is simple but we keep trying to deny it: we keep trying to somehow bend it back to being acceptable, to it being OK. Maybe if we analyze enough, it will make sense.
It won’t. Substack, despite the short spasm of dopamine it gave us will succumb to what all other socials succumbed to: short-form content, money, more, more, more of everything, more, just keep going, just keep using, just keep consuming as much as you can even if it doesn’t taste good.
Partly, it’s our fault: a moment in time we could see things going perfectly our way, where we saw a beautiful community that wouldn’t simmer out of control. I feel the moment Substack’s shine eroded was the first time there was a piece that shit on another creator, then a response, then multiple responses, and suddenly a feeling of watchfulness, suddenly the heaviness of the possibility that you could be corrected, proven wrong, discarded by the community that once welcomed you. Suddenly Substack was everything else, every other platform.
And so you scroll. So you bite your tongue. So you think about a piece so much it becomes ash in your palms, it becomes nothing, an over-analyzed, over-optimized, over-cooked piece of shit that everyone else has already read, that no one is interested in.
But what could we expect? What could we have changed?
So we scroll. We post our silly thoughts, we recreate Twitter on this orange feed. What else?
When things become this way: when our platforms are used only to share why we don’t like other niches, why we are annoyed by the clichés, why we are mostly better than another, instead of just looking the other way: that’s when they die. That’s when they wither.
Your algorithm is you - it reflects you quite accurately. Look the other way. Shrug your shoulders and throw your hands up; Don’t-Care. It will adjust.
And you know what else is like an algorithm?
Our brains.
And I’m in too much pain to keep pondering why I’m in so much pain. One cannot waste a life trying to explain why they’re alive; they must live.
What’s the lesson to be extracted from all this talking? The only thing I’m sure of is that I have to throw my hands up more often. My Substack numbers are going down because that’s the career I want to pursue: to be a writer is to be ignored, then celebrated, then slowly forgotten. To be a writer is to wish for what you don’t have, no matter what you have: I wanted to be famous until I touched fame, and then I was afraid of the eyes - I wanted my cocoon of anonymity back. Then, when my anonymity returned, I panicked.
My fibro diagnosis? I have tried to figure out if it’s because of all the stress, or if I’ve had it since I was young, if every illness was just my chronic illness acting up, but in reality, well. Something in my body, be it inherited DNA or issues with my spinal chord or an electric zap that zapped at the wrong moment in my brain.
And then there’s this website, this amazing and disheartening website, that is slowly diminishing into short-form and formulas and becoming indistinguishable from the other websites, but my oh my, I have made friends, I have had amazing conversations, and I just have to accept that everything that exists inside of my phone exists for a purpose: money.
And as much as I want money, I want connection first and foremost. So I will try to cultivate it in the ways that I can in our attention-dominated world. I cannot change Substack, but I can change how I use it. And I will try to keep my writing honest, real, and raw. I will try not to compare, but I will some days, and hopefully, most days I won’t.
And that’s that.
I keep wondering, see; but it seems the conclusion I will come to most of the time will probably be “It just is.”
So it is.
Here’s to hoping,
XOXO,
Amal
as a fellow over thinker with fibromyalgia this hit home in many ways, I'm so glad I found your work today
Amal, you write beautifully. Everytime I get a notification saying you posted, I run to read it. This one was so raw and true. Wish you healing and health 🫂