A Substack Only a 32 Year-Old With a History of Back Pain Could Write

Awake, writing a Substack at 2am, but it's cool! It's alllll good.

I cured my chronic back pain by telling myself it wasn't real.

I learned to do this from a book, and it worked. This quick fix was a relief, and it wasn’t. The brain can convince you that you're beyond repair, while the structure stays unknowingly intact. The misdirect can bring you to tears in bed on your thirty-second birthday: "I'll never control my body again," but it was only your brain — the organ that offers you your entire reality — detecting pain where there is none. The “pain” is actually stress and anxiety packed so deep and wide within you that it presses on your spine like an injury — but no problem! You had your body all along. The trick is to just convince yourself that you are actually safe.

You can kind of laugh about it when you forget how long it took find healing. I'm a vibes girl; I believed what I felt to be true.

I've become obsessed with the possibility of contentment. Of regular achievements. Experiencing life not as an upward trajectory, but simply a current moment following and preceding other moments, neutrally. Occasionally this outlook releases me from assumptions I learned in school: that everything I do must lead to an ultimate reward (money, legacy, purpose, excellence). And it loosens the grip of a desperation I discovered when I started doing standup or writing songs, clinging to a hope that some talent might be honed which could rescue me from my reality of being broke, being lonely, being normal. As expected, putting aside grandiose, materialistic, selfish ideas is the key to a sense of freedom, an untangling, a decoding. A release of pressure.

But then, of course, I see anyone receive a material reward of any kind and I reconnect all the dots.

Watching the Grammys one year, I noticed that the one thing guaranteed to make me cry (weep, really) is an award show acceptance speeches. Seeing someone overwhelmed by something that is the opposite of dread. Witnessing a dream-come-true, which seems like the only miracle left. It's a joy I can't fully understand, but it moves me that someone can, for one second, tell themselves "I am what I wanted to be." And there are losers too, but they don't focus on that too much in the broadcast, so I can focus on the miracle of winning while forgetting the other dreams that got so close but leave squashed, or put on hold, bypassed and politely asked to quiet down for the evening.

I have to admit that there is something ugly running deep within me that feels like I'll die if I never do anything — write a book, join a band, make a movie, have a family, tell a good joke, become remarkably beautiful, have a famously perfect personality (plus a fully functional, pain-free lower back). If I did any work worth noting, I'd let it define me! So what!

And if I accomplished one of those things, any lifetime achievement, I would wish I had conquered them all. It’s greedy. (At this point in my existential spirals, I remind myself I’ve been meaning to start volunteering. It would be possible to be useful without being at the center of the world.)

There just aren't enough lives to live, and the one I have is programmed with little to no excess or fanfare. I am a literal accountant (the exact job every artist says they could never do) and I survive the best I can. I have a family, I have friends, I have pets, I keep beloved knicknacks around my home, I vote, I just started reading books again, and I can sing as long as the notes aren’t too complicated. The pity party can end: I don’t have nothing. And people write books and crap like that all the time, I could certainly crank something out if I wanted. I just haven’t! And have no plans to! No problem.

The act of counting my blessings feels at once validating, essential, and an exercise in admitting that I can only count small blessings, some at a frequency that only I can hear. And that, from what I can tell, is normal.

Dying to be someone while you technically are being someone is a kind of torture. A pain signal to the brain. No discernable injury.

It's the recurring, self-centered, fruitless whirlpool of my adult life: Can I be content with myself, as is? What if there is no secret to unlocking my potential — could this be my full potential? (I wince.) Am I functional? Have I been safe all along?

It could be really beautiful to accept the reward of merely waking up in a manageable, small, and sweet life — the smallness itself can be a luxury — without constantly seeking something big: a project, a discovery, adoration, fame, a title.

Well, I won’t sell myself short. I did cure my own back pain. I'm basically a doctor.