Negative Space: At the Intersection of Disability and Writers’ Online Complaint Culture

By Amy Long

I noticed it first in my MFA program. Despite the opportunity costs inherent in leaving the workforce to return to school, most of my peers spent more time complaining about writing than they did writing. “I have to write a story for workshop,” they said in whining, exasperated tones when we passed in the halls or met in our shared offices. The complaints baffled me. Weren’t the pieces we had to write for workshop the reason we’d pursued the degree? Why had these people even applied to MFA programs if they didn’t want to write?

Our program offered us full funding, livable stipends, and good insurance in exchange for the low course loads we taught. Rent was cheap. We rode the bus for free with our student IDs. At the student health center, we got free counseling, even psychiatric care. We had instant friends and faculty who treated us as peers. We got Fridays off. We had little about which we could reasonably complain. Most of us did anyway.

I was different. As soon as I finished teaching my 11 am Writing and Rhetoric class on Mondays and Wednesdays, I hurried home to eat, take a painkiller—maybe two—and write until the sun set. I reserved Tuesdays and Thursdays for doctor’s appointments, therapy, errands, but just as often, I woke up, took two oxycodone, had a Coke and a few handfuls of cereal, and sat down to write on my laptop.

Given my disability, I was lucky I could write at all. I’ve had debilitating daily headaches since I was three years old and have spent the last two decades trying and failing preventive drugs, invasive procedures, and expensive alternative therapies. By the time I started my MFA, I knew that only opioids relieve my pain. My off-campus doctor wrote me a dose twice as high as the one I’m forced to accept now that physicians, government agencies, insurance companies, and others have restricted or de-incentivized opioid prescribing in misdirected efforts to curb overdose deaths and wage an unwinnable war on addiction.

I can think of few conditions more damaging to a writer than pain in the place where she thinks, but on my MFA dose, I functioned so well even our program director didn’t know I had a pain problem; on my post-grad dose, I’m lucky if I can write for two hours on a “good” day. Since writing time is harder to find and sustain outside academia, I assumed the culture of negativity around writing would stay there. But I hear echoes of I have to write a story for workshop all over the Facebook groups and Twitter threads that comprise the online writing community.

Online, writers compare the act of writing to torture, abuse, insanity. Their language assumes that anyone who enjoys her own artmaking is, among other things, an uncool goody two shoes harshing everyone’s deprecation buzz. The worst thing about listening to someone talk about how much they love writing is having to nod along in agreement reads one genre-typical tweet. Other writers commiserate in the comments or with clicks on posts’ little read hearts. Negativity has become something of a currency or writerly necessity—a way to make friends, create personas or “personal brands,” gain followers on social media, and signify in-group belonging. The half-jokes and memes serve as a rhetorical bonding exercise that all but requires a body unencumbered by anything approaching disability.

To not feel your body while writing—to not need to tune out pain, to rest, to wait for your next dose of relief—is a privilege too often ignored or left unquestioned. Instead, we allow participation in semi-ironic social-media threads to act as a never-ending networking event at which writers interpolate writing as an act of self-loathing or a cruel taskmaster to whom we voluntarily report. Complaints about writing broadcast to others not only that you write but that you “get it” in a way hobbyists (coded feminine) never will. “Real” writers, we are made to understand, pour so much of their minds and bodies into their work that they’re driven insane, even tortured or abused, by blank pages, flighty muses, narrative or poetic structures with which they choose to experiment. That their metaphors often invoke mental illness or physical pain reinforces and highlights the normative, implicitly abled bodies behind all those 240-character laments about a craft I practice from my bed.

But what might a disabled writer’s comment look like under that kind of tweet or Facebook post? If I say Yeah, it is hard to nod along when other people say they love writing; I haven’t been able to write since my pain flared last month, and I miss it so much that just seeing your tweet breaks my heart, I break the genre’s unwritten rules. Real hurt, actual illness, complaints expressed not metaphorically but as descriptions of writers’ literal pain aren’t funny; they don’t invite retweets or good-natured riffing or even lend themselves to metaphor. The different ways abled and disabled writers express frustration or displeasure with our shared art reveal inequities sustained and kept invisible by the cult of negativity: what we have that you don’t, the barriers we face that you can’t see, what you take for granted that we can’t.

Although my subpar pain management means I never feel as good as I did in my MFA years, I still write most days; it isn’t easy, and often I feel left out of this ritual we enact to signify belonging. I don’t hate writing. I love opening my latest draft and putting new ideas into it. On days when my head hurts so much I can’t look at a computer screen, I don’t relish the opportunity to take a “cheat day” or “go easy on myself.” I hate that my head so often robs me of precious writing time. But I’m even more angry with writers who take their pain-free heads for granted.

I’m disappointed so many of us feel compelled to hate this magical thing we get to do and that we don’t have more affirming ways to strengthen our collective ties. I don’t know exactly what forms those might take, but a discourse centered on the joys and frustrations of creative work might give us all a more robust, inclusive vocabulary for discussing what we love about writing and a more honest way to talk about the challenges we face, whether shared or unique to our communities. I don’t want to censor other writers or dismiss the pleasure I assume they derive from expressing negativity; we all need to vent. But our current approach too often excludes the voices of disabled writers and others who must steal our writing time and can’t afford the time it takes to tweet about the abundant opportunities healthy, abled writers are lucky enough to squander.
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Amy Long is the author of Codependence: Essays, selected by Brian Blanchfield as the winner of Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2018 Essay Collection Competition. Her work has appeared in Diagram, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, including as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2019.

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This Blog essay is part of our September 2020 special focus on Experiences of Disability. Read our guest-edited special issue of the magazine for more.