*This article was updated as of 4/18/2023.
This Substack is an experiment.
It’s clearly not designed to financially support people who live isolated from social networks. I let that idea go, already.
Producing high-quality work for free is now an expected social norm; the question is - who benefits?
This platform is like all the other “opportunities” that somehow always rely on friends, family and social networks to generate income.
Anyone wondering what happens to those who lack all three may yet learn a few things: Digital Bootstrapping 101.
“Letters to the Abyss” is now my writing-frame: it’s thematic. Readers are optional; I expect nothing from anyone.
Social Networks for Survival, a Substack Saga
The political economy rewards social networking more than any skill I could possible conjure: In this monastic apartment.
The reasons I went into deep isolation don’t matter much anymore; however, I might touch on one since it somehow manages to illustrate a larger point.
The point is: I know I’m not the only one compelled to live in a sour pickle of social isolation-by-necessity; I just might be more able to articulate some of what it’s like to endure.
That’s all.
Q. What brings me to Substack?
A. To vent.
Artists are not the most authentic class of sufferers - but we do somehow find the words. Sometimes.
Example: 2003 – 2023: Four vertebrae in my neck were dislocated; medical insurance claim: denied. The smug insurance claims adjuster couldn’t manage to spell my name right, but did manage to assure me that I wasn’t injured.
I guess the real “experts” know these things…
There is an instinctive cruelty in this world towards people in pain that cannot be underestimated: The healthy and financially stable ones are often the most vitriolic.
There is some fear there.
Repairing my health came to depend on social self-exclusion - coupled with a rigorous monastic discipline and ritualized self-care.
On a bootstrap budget. Too much; it’s all too much. Too many contradictions.
The larger point: These two realities exist in contradiction to each other: Income reflects one’s relation to social networks more than any skill or talent.
Social isolation is, effectively, social death. Even if done by necessity, financial purgatory follows quickly.
Substack changes nothing in this respect; it merely amplifies this dysfunctional socio-economic model, which deserves to be criticized. The model itself is my target.
Survival adaptations during this period cannot be undone. Total recovery still possible, perhaps; but that time is lost. This system took those years from me.
I need to vent. A lot. And often.
“Everything is commodified; the public health system has been defunded since the 1980s; since the Reagan administration, there’s been a replacement of clinicians with administrators.”
“And so you have a situation that’s compounded the illness; essentially ravaging the general society.” - Dr. William Bronston
Revenge on the system that denied my medical claim when I needed medical diagnosis and specialized treatment? Sure. Why not.
Rebuilding from scratch, sure. But, I don’t look to society for help; better off without it, says hard experience. Even so, extreme isolation is hard to do while paying the bills.
I managed. I became a commercial writer.
That’s why it ChatGPT’s impact on the paid writing industry was so catastrophic: My income fell to almost zero, overnight.
Venting online about all this helped for a little while: Some well-meaning soul suggested that I could make an income writing stories on a Substack.
Ha. Ha.
Joke’s on me…forget the tip.
The impacts of social isolation for the last 20 years can’t just undone because suddenly some Substack app appears - demanding work be done on it for free in the hopes of…something or another. Someday. Maybe.
IF.
Please like. Please subscribe. Please comment…blahblahblah. Is that really what people have allowed themselves to be reduced to? Substack benefits from it.
But, it didn’t used to be this way.
This new world of technology is a spawn of its creators’ personality-type: A social-economic regime governed by the psychosis of normativity that is social media.
Alienation and atomization of social relations generated group norms that are highly questionable, on the sanity scale. Oh, well.
Pain is a commodity now.
So…go ahead: Consume it. For 20 years: Nerve lesions causing unremittent soft-tissue pain insomnia total muscular atrophy nonstop cerebral pain central nervous system inflammation from even mild stimuli photophobia-phonophobia vertebral nerve-root lesion optic nerve explosive pain days without sleep, food aversions and spinal inflammation triggers muscle spasms….sorry, what were you saying to me just now?
No. It’s not over, yet.
Ongoing secondary soft tissue traumas reinjured from relentless pace of work to survive with all savings depleted to pain management to get up and do it all over again. Every. Day. A. Millimeter. Marathon.
Hamster wheel of going no where, fast.
Hell yeah, I prefer it to slow. The. Fuck. DOWN.
Hope one or two eyeballs lit up.
Language breakdown: Entirely. Total muscular atrophy, from inhibited nerve-supply, crushed; cut off at the root.
This sort of thing doesn’t heal overnight; it’s been 20 years of 20 years. Earnings below $20k each of the 20 years. But. Can’t stop working.
And. Work. Is. Re-injury.
But I needed to know what was wrong. Since the system denied me care, the only one who cared to figure it out had to be me. Clearly, barter was involved.
The American medical system was closed to me entirely: The insurance adjuster had made sure of that; no lawyer wanted to touch it, either. My claim was denied.
Just to get an MRI, I arranged a trade with a chiropractor from Iran by sending my resumé. I had managed to finish my clinical training program, certification, national examination and licensing on a shoestring budget.
My mind was still razor-sharp back then: After a five-minute interview, he hired me as a 1099 therapist; at the time, I was licensed, insured and a member in good standing of AMMA. I worked for months at his office before I disclosed that I was suffering horribly. He asked a few questions about my symptoms.
He referred me to an office to get an MRI immediately.
He reviewed the images. He treated me that very day. This is the reason I’m able to write at all. Thank you, Dr. Rashtian. A real healer, and a rare human.
(But, look what it took to get a legitimate medical need met….ffs, already!).
What we have is a medical illness management system that essentially makes everybody a ‘hostage’ to which we pay ‘private ransom’ – we pay insurance bills.” - Dr. William Bronston
The subluxation in the bones was partially reset, and the abnormal kyphotic curve in the neck reduced.
But, the soft tissue damage had already gone untreated for too long. Nonstop cerebral-spinal pain for 20 years can drive a person insane, under the right/wrong conditions. And it did: I am now quite mad.
Even the most gifted chiropractor can fail to appreciate the debilitating impacts of secondary soft-tissue damage; and the medical insurance system is at war with them, too, as it turns out.
The for-profit politics in the medical industry was now fully visible to me.
Relocating was necessary, but I miss working as a rehabilitation therapist at his office. He was a real healer; not a mere businessman with a medical degree. I located another doctor who did soft tissue rehabilitation and chiropractic via Active Release Technique, or ART. This expense I paid out-of-pocket; insurance refused to accept him.
Even though the treatments worked (or, especially?...)
This therapy recognized the role of fascia and nerve lesions in chronic pain; it manually creates space around the nerves at the site of the lesion.
By now, the most “productive years” of my life had been spent. On this shit. On this…economic sterilization via systemic medical benign-neglect.
And I am not alone.
Tell Me One Thing, Ruling Class and PMCs: Why should I care about your neck when you couldn’t care less about mine?
Fair enough, then.
Twenty years ago, I was unable to move at all. Today, I am writing loveletters to the Abyss…oh, what an accolade: Every day, yet another millimeter marathon.
Exhaustion isn’t even a word to me.
Recovering each millimeter in range/quality of motion, a struggle. It requires spending all my surplus value on continuous rehabilitation. Yes, even today.
This is the phase that would be called occupational therapy if there was an actual medical system in this dysfunctional hellhole of a corporate-state.
Example: My employment contract as a 1099 rehab therapist at an M.D.’s office. He brought me into his office to make a patient tell me that my therapeutic protocols were “better than pain meds.” Hmm, I wonder why.
They billed insurance company $160 for every treatment hour I did; I was paid $12. Similar non-negotiable terms at physical therapy and chiropractors offices. Eventually, I just let my license expire; why even bother.
So, at least all that surplus value isn’t going to the top of this economic ponzi scheme anymore - a small consolation prize.
Just the facts, m’am. Just the facts.
More Than Words
Extreme and unrelenting pain breaks down language over time.
Elaine Scarry’s book, “The Body in Pain” made a great observation. This lovely line crossed my eyes back in college, in the year of your lord, 1998:
“To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.”
I was such a cute college kid back in ‘98; so…positive.
By 2002, I had enrolled in the clinical therapist training program. Was doing well. That’s when the car hit me. Because one can’t get a proper education in this system without an unhealthy dose of irony.
Even in the institutional of the clinical school program, there was a sadistic and punishing culture towards any students who dared to show up to class with an injury - even as the subject of the classes was soft-tissue treatments for injuries like ours.
Do you find that odd?
So did I.
The pandemic revealed to the public what I knew back then: This society is toxic; its medical system, pathological.
Ignore at your own risk.
“Pain is language-destroying.” - Elain Scarry, The Body in Pain.
Topic: Poetry
Poetry, a dialect to express the inexpressible: The inner world.
Social hostility towards poetry is hard to miss, but I rarely hear much about why it takes on such a visceral character. I have to wonder: I always did.
I still do.
Even the dismissive tone most often used reveals a gut-level hostility; it seems to be clearly aimed at the way a poet sees fit to use language.
Utility of language erases the human by reducing our capacity to communicate as human. What is more human than a personal account of suffering?
A feature of the English language, perhaps, which reacts with hostility to the audacity of wordsmithery.
Or is it nothing more than an authoritarian impulse to dictate the rules of communication? How many can instantly see the “author” in authority; or the authoritarian implied?
How dare you write by your own rules!
Learning a little Arabic soothed this particular wound, as it seems to me to be a mite more amenable to mystic expressions:
انتي مفارقة أحد You are a paradox.
Embedded in every writing is some sort of demonstration that I fully understand the rules that I select for breaking.
Not everyone gets a thrill to do it this way, but there is more at stake for me if I make a mistake: I lose real income if I fail to perform my business writing duties as if a bot.
It feels ….dangerous.
And what a lovely internal contradiction.
This system demands that written language always conform to logical algorithms that produces copy that reads like ChatGPT: Have you seen how cleanly it can write? Impressive.
It can even analyze poetry and spit out a few lines of rhymes. That’s all a poem is…isn’t it?
Let’s get back to that messy matter of intrinsic value for a moment, shall we…
Externalities.
Artistry has two parts: One of them has to do with the audience’s receptors.
The other part is how the practice of the art affects the person who gets to be called an “artist.” If my art is being expressed in writing, it’s still affecting me by the act of doing it: Intrinsic value.
My question becomes: Is intrinsic value itself being manipulated into having an inverse relationship with the external world?
The more value in the content, the more suffering was “done”….like work.
Free work.
The extraction and hyper-exploitation model is still very much at work here at Substack (in case there was any doubt).
This is nothing more (or less) than a questioning of the extraction of ever-more surplus value. The fact that it’s being done through creative works doesn’t make it less relevant; it’s the opposite.
Artistic vision is a pre-requisite for propaganda (for the 99%….obviously).
The only thing at stake is the power of interpretation itself.
This is a site of struggle.
Perception.
Don’t cede this ground so easily; the system of hyper-exploitation is salivating to claim it, in its entirety.
Never under-estimate intrinsic value.
The “means of production.”
Being.
Me. – Reflecting on “Letters to the Abyss”
*Dedicated to the spirit of revising; re-vision.
Enjoy.
There is no reason to be in my world if you can’t bear the sight of texts like these.
How, Violin, do you feel about the Substack as a tool for self expression or release? Do YOU benefit from it? Do you find it somewhat therapeutic? Does it free you from material constraints, if even for fleeting moments? Does Substack provide you with a space for introspection? Where would/could you similarly express and challenge yourself otherwise?
Just asking'... :'o
I can relate. I live with chronic pain and I have yet to earn any money online but I've labored freely for years trying to educate people on ethics and such. I've never gotten much appreciation for anything actually, so I can almost feel your pain in your lovely word smithery. To me this has just become a public journaling experience to try to stay alive while being gang-stalked.