I'm Un-Funnying This Newsletter

Don't worry, it's a symbolic gesture.

I tried to take this photo of us in the park but everyone except my husband failed at it.

I started blogging about chronic pain in 2019—a decade too late, if my goal was to become an influencer with lucrative brand partnerships. Luckily that wasn’t my goal, though on the day I started my blog, I wouldn’t say I had an alternative goal in mind. I was a week out of my first hospital stay for a constant, severe migraine which I’d had for a couple months and would continue to have for eight months more. I was 27 years old, unable to work, mostly unable to leave the house, and altogether terrified of what was happening to me. I wanted to feel less alone.

I spun up a blog on WordPress and took a selfie in my dining room to use as a profile photo. In the photo, I’m wearing a blue Patagonia puffer coat—the only coat that wasn’t too big on me at the time. I’d lost 20 pounds since the migraines began. I also wasn’t wearing makeup and wondered if anyone would be able to tell I’d slept for only a few hours. I wondered if anyone would be able to tell that I cried every night.

I sent the blog to my family and friends and started to write. The blog’s title, Yellow Grippy Socks, was a reference to a humorous encounter I’d had with a nurse about the iconic hospital footwear. Funny stuff only, I told myself, because it was the internet. Best to keep it light. And besides, I was a young person navigating the American medical system. Lots of my life was legitimately funny. Also, demoralizing and painful and sad. It was all these things at once. But I feared delving into any of the real difficulties in my writing. I assumed no one wanted to hear about them.

I quit my job and went out on disability. I cycled in and out of the hospital in a vain attempt to improve my migraines and traveled around the country in search of second opinions. Even within these difficulties, there were plenty of funny moments, like when I lost both my big toenails, or when I got ketamine from a rectal ozone therapy clinic. So I transitioned from WordPress to Substack, changed the title to Oops, My Brain, and kept writing the funny stuff. I was giving my readers what I thought they wanted, what I thought I’d promised them. And in many ways, humor was what I wanted, too. It was an escape from my moment-to-moment existence of severe pain and my daily fear of sleepless nights and purposeless days.

Then, when I was 30 years old, I had my biggest relapse. I went to the ER three times but was denied admission to the hospital. I rode out a six-month-long, incredibly severe migraine at home. I began struggling with both medical PTSD and suicidality. My marriage and friendships strained beneath the pressure.

I wrote about none of this online.

I did, however, start writing a memoir—also a decade too late, as sales numbers for memoirs were tanking. It remains one of the hardest genres to break into for ordinary, non-celebrity types. Luckily getting rich wasn’t my goal, though I wouldn’t say I had an alternative goal in mind. I just needed a form, a container that could hold all of this heavy material before the weight of it split me in two.

But humor was all I knew, so I set out to write a funny memoir that made passing mention of the harder stuff. Many of the scenes I started with were easy to funny-fy, like this story about when I went to the ER with COVID. But then I joined a writing group—a group I still attend to this day, full of some of the wisest, kindest, and wittiest women I’ve ever known—and they told me what I least wanted and most needed to hear. They told me, Write about your pain.

They meant this quite literally. Week after week I brought writing that made everyone in the room laugh out loud, and week after week I didn’t describe the actual physical sensation of having 24/7 migraines. The constant grip of a strong hand on the back of my head, the flares that ripped through my body like a starving wolf, the sharp stabs I so often felt in my left temple, the dull burning of sitting near a table lamp, the sting of being outside in the sun.

The emotional pain was missing from my writing, too.

I’d been writing online for three years about the hardest experience of my life and yet, I’d written none of the darkest moments. Perhaps because pain is not a very funny experience. It didn’t fit with my comedy “brand.” Or perhaps I just didn’t want to. Perhaps it was a little of both.

But I’m never one to turn down a challenge.

I began, slowly, to write a scene about a seizure-like migraine attack I had while in the ER. It was a difficult scene to remember, let alone to write. When I finally did write it, it contained not a single joke, and when I read it out loud to the group, they said it was the best I’d ever written.

I didn’t abandon humor writing (obviously, as you’re currently reading a Substack called Oops, My Brain). But on that day, I learned that humor had its place in my story. A place of honor, as so much of my chronic illness experience was ridiculous. I was recently reminded, for example, of a nurse that dressed me down for refusing to use a bedpan. But there were also plenty of experiences that sucked, and I would trade every joke in the world to have not gone through them.

In my recent attempt to find an agent for this nearly-complete memoir (an effort which may never succeed because, as one of my MFA mentors put it, it doesn’t involve me knifing a doctor, running away with a nurse, or doing anything else unbelievably scandalous), an agent suggested I title the manuscript Oops, My Brain. I demurred. Not because I don’t like the title Oops, My Brain—it’s the best title there is, and I consider myself a first-rate genius for having come up with it! But Oops, My Brain isn’t the whole story, because chronic illness isn’t a barrel of laughs. It’s a couple of laughs sprinkled over a barrel of dookie.¹

Please understand, this isn’t a shutdown announcement. Oops, My Brain is alive and well, I hope it stays that way, and I’m too attached to the title to change it now. But if recovering from chronic migraines has taught me anything, it’s that the best stories are the ones that require you to show up as your whole self. So from now on, I’ll try to do just that.

Though I sincerely hope that I can still make you laugh. 🧠

P.S. I just finished my MFA in Nonfiction! You can henceforth refer to me as either “Natalie the Master of All Things Nonfiction” or “Super Writer.”

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1. Maggie Smith writes about the temptation to paper over difficult things with humor in her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful. I highly recommend!