Posted November 3, 2024 by Alice Wong Guest Blog Posts

No, we don’t all have the same 24 hours in a day: On chronic pain and freelancing in an unreliable body

Anna Hamilton

One of the (supposedly) hot tips for creative people is that “we all have the same 24 hours in a day.” From bizarre LinkedIn posts to rich person fuckups during television interviews, this motivational chestnut is everywhere to the point of oversaturation. What the well-meaning hustle culture types who say this don’t tell you—or don’t believe, because why wouldn’t they–is that it is not true. Maybe the people who can’t devote time to their dream projects or side hustles are simply too exhausted from eight-plus hours at their day job. Maybe they have kids whose needs come first, and little to no help with childcare. Maybe, like me, they can’t count on their bodies being pain-free or energized enough to be productive for the bulk of those 24 hours.

I know this because I have a body that does not match up to my level of ambition. I would love to “follow my passion” but some days being able to shower is an epic achievement in itself. In trying to be an actual writer, I am regularly thwarted by chronic pain and fatigue due to fibromyalgia bullshit expectations of what it means to be a writer.

I’ve had fibromyalgia for almost twenty years. It is one of those “mysterious” health problems that can seem, from the outside, like something that is not a huge deal; its main symptoms are widespread muscle pain and chronic fatigue. Some people–including conservative goblin and former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions–might think that “widespread muscle pain” means that I should take some ibuprofen and just get on with things.

If only it was that easy. My fibromyalgia pain sometimes feels like the intense pain that some people experience after they work out too hard, but without any sense of accomplishment. Or it feels like I’m being squashed by a giant foot, Monty Python opening credits-style. My pain isn’t “weakness leaving the body,” as the fitness bro slogan goes—it’s just there. I experience muscle pain nearly all of the time—in varying degrees of severity–plus I get chronic fatigue episodes every few weeks. It is not fun.

Also not fun: trying to build my platform as a freelance writer and take care of myself at the same time.

There are a lot of times that I can’t help comparing what I am doing to what I think I should be doing. Some days, “productivity” for me is getting a thing done that is otherwise not accepted by the majority as productive, in the capitalist sense—getting enough rest, or exercising. One day, simply staying awake without relying on caffeine might be my goal for the day. At my last full-time job, an entry-level state government position, there was seemingly endless administrative stuff that I had to get done since the unit was understaffed the entire time I worked there. It was not unusual for me to come home from work completely drained of energy. Most weekdays, I would come home from work, eat dinner with my partner, Liam, around 6 PM, watch one or two episodes of a TV show, and then pass out in bed before 10 PM. I did not have time to work on any side hustles or dream projects.

It took me almost a year to make the switch to freelancing after I left my last full-time job at the end of 2015. I am not as physically impacted by working as I used to be and that is in large part because Liam, who makes several times what I do in terms of money, supports both of us financially.

I have physical limitations that make freelancing–even with its terrible pay, constant rejection, and inconsistent work schedule–a better vocational option for me than working full time in an office. I can get things done during the week, but the shape that the whole “getting things done” part takes is different than that of a nondisabled person.

Most days, I can deal with the pain on an emotional and psychological level. When the pain confines me to bed or relegates me to otherwise not doing much, however, my brain starts up again with the “but why can’t you just…” chatter. I should be doing more is one toxic thought that occupies my brain-space on those days—usually when I’m in so much pain that sitting up for more than a few minutes at a time is excruciating.

The frustrating part about productivity hacks is that for abled people, they are a cool way to do stuff and save time and be more productive. For those of us who have chronic pain and fatigue, deal with mental illness, are disabled, or are neurodiverse, a productivity hack can mean something very different.

On my extremely high pain days, “productivity” has a different definition. Is finding a way to lie down without making my pain worse—and so that I can still watch TV or read, to focus on something other than my pain—productive? Is finding a way to get most of my nutritional needs met on a day that I can’t eat more than one meal productive?

Sidestepping questions about the controversial status of fibromyalgia in the public imagination as a legitimate health condition, I can tell you this: it hurts.

Even admitting all of this is fraught, as the publishing industry is not exactly welcoming to people with disabilities. Someone who reads this may wonder, Well, if they want to write for a living, can they physically handle deadlines? (Speaking from experience: yes, but sometimes with an extension!) A book tour? Publicity or interviews?

For those last two, here’s the thing: I don’t know.

The standard end goal of improving one’s own productivity—to really make the best of the 24 hours in each day–is to make oneself a better worker. For those of us who have bodies that do not, or cannot, conform to the expected 40-hour work week: what then?

I sometimes wonder whether I am too unproductive to be a “real” writer. Am I still a writer if I don’t write every weekday? What if I write stuff that is just good sometimes, instead of great?

There are also times when the words just don’t come—again, usually when I’m in pain—and I spend way too much time staring at a blank page in Microsoft Word, and then start to feel weird about it, and then feel discouraged. Part of me feels that I should be writing a certain number of words every day, even if the quality of said writing on some days is below average.

A lot of us know someone who has their fingers in a ton of different pies—they have several writing gigs and a podcast and a YouTube channel and are considering streaming stuff on Twitch. On one hand, that is how being a content creator works now: you need to do multiple things to feed the algorithmic monster. I don’t often admit this because it sucks, but I feel envious of people who can do multiple things at once and have a career, instead of whatever it is that I am trying to accomplish.

I often feel like I should be one of those people with a podcast and a blog and a column for some website and a bunch of other projects, because then I could be successful, right? But, no—my pain restricts me to the point where I can only work on two or three things at a time, and certainly not for 40 hours a week. If I work over my allotted number of projects, I start to feel overextended and (more) exhausted which can increase my pain level. Currently, I am able to write one unpaid feature per month for my newsletter, take on one or two freelance projects per month (a crapshoot, given the state of the media industry), and make short comedy reels for my Instagram. I’d love to occasionally go to comedy open mic nights to try performing stand-up, but it’s been hard to add that to my schedule—even irregularly—because my pain/fatigue can get worse with absolutely no warning.

Time is a weird thing when you are chronically ill or disabled. It is hard for me to estimate how many good pain days I experience, particularly in comparison to the bad ones. My good days sometimes feel eclipsed by the bad ones and that’s mostly because the bad days tend to be mind-bogglingly awful.

On my good (low pain/fatigue) days, I can write anywhere from 1000-1,500 words in a few hours and this material will usually be pretty solid—maybe not great, but good. That is to say, it’s not shit. If I have a deadline, “good enough” is fine. It has to be, especially when I have other things on the neverending to-do list to complete. On good days, I can write sitting up for at least a couple of hours. If I’m having a great day, I can write most of an essay draft in one sitting. Those days are rarer, and they pass by quickly.

Bad pain and/or fatigue days are something else entirely. Time on these days tends to stretch and blop and curl up like the world’s shittiest lava lamp. I can sleep for ten hours and it will feel like 30 minutes; that, or the pain will keep me restless all day, or awake all night. When I finally rouse myself from bed, it will feel like I’ve been awake for a week. Or I’ll have a bout of insomnia, stay up most of the night, and then be able to function somewhat the next day (albeit with assistance from caffeinated tea).

I have lost entire months to pain. Remembering these months, or even a handful of my bad pain days—especially when they come in a row—is difficult. The memories are fuzzy, almost like there’s Vaseline on the lens of my brain; what did I do on those days? How bad was my pain level on those days? Did I sleep through them? What did I actually do for the eight-plus hours that I was awake? Was I productive?

And the question that haunts me: why didn’t I just do something, anything? Create something—write something, draw something–on those days, as a distraction, as a fuck-you to the pain and fatigue? That’s what a successful, productive creative person would do, right?

It’s an easy-sounding solution that is not possible on my bad pain or fatigue days. This should not make me feel as self-conscious as it does. But when you get headaches that make you feel like someone’s glued a 50-pound boulder to your head and unleashed a hive of wasps inside your neck, or have leg pain so severe that you have to be horizontal for many hours of the day, or have pain everywhere that is just as severe, doing “something productive” as a middle finger to the pain becomes—and feels–impossible. My 24 hours might be spent in bed, or in pain.

In a perceptive 2022 piece for Cosmopolitan, writer Alice Snape contends that the oversimplified “we all have the same 24 hours” pearl of wisdom likely started with a meme about Beyonce. I love Beyonce’s music too, but she and I do not have the “same 24 hours” in a day. Beyonce does not have a day every 2-3 weeks where she needs to sleep 15 hours due to a chronic fatigue flare. Beyonce probably does not take the nine medications that I have to take—yes, daily–just to be functional at a bare minimum level. She and Jay-Z are both able to work to support their family. I am going to make an educated guess that Beyonce has a personal chef to cook meals for her and her family. I’ve had countless meals consisting of a bowl of cereal plus a piece of fruit, raw veggies and hummus, or frozen vegan taquitos when I’ve been in too much pain to cook. Girl dinner? Try nonbinary chronic illness dinner: sometimes, preparing a bowl of yogurt with a few toppings is all I can handle without sinking into fatigue or pain further.

The expectation that people of all abilities should strive to be more productive and make the most of those same 24 hours “that we all have” is, at its core, capitalist nonsense. It is yet another manifestation of unreachable self-improvement in the guise of motivation. After all, why focus on the systemic issues that make those “same 24 hours” unmanageable for certain people—lower income people, disabled and chronically ill people, parents, caregivers, those who have multiple jobs, and people who (for whatever reason) cannot get ahead no matter how hard they work at improving their “productivity”—when you can keep trying to hustle your way out of your circumstances? Just keep working. Don’t question the notion of productivity, or its inherent goodness; what are you, lazy? You just need to manage your time better. Look at [celebrity] and how well they manage their time! If they can do it, you can also be a multihyphenate triple threat!

A dark question skips around my brain on occasion: Why not just give up? Stop trying to write or be creative at all when it feels impossible to keep pace with everyone else?

My body sometimes fails me. It’s not because I don’t exercise enough or eat too much processed food or because I don’t love it enough —it is because I am disabled by an illness that is still poorly understood by medical science. The pain meds help a lot, and in the last eight years, I’ve been improving slowly. When it comes to having more good or okay days than bad, I still have days where my productivity is, to put it crudely, fucking shit.

Writing, however, does not fail me, even when I can’t do it for a day (or more). I still love writing no matter what it does to me. Even if I’m not productive enough in the eyes of someone who thinks that Kim Kardashian’s extremely ironic “get your fucking ass up and work” snipe from 2022 makes a lot of sense, I keep going because I have to. Because I want to. There is a strong possibility that I will never ever be productive enough for the LinkedIn bros, the hustle culture success stories, the motivational content creators who go viral and gain millions of followers by telling people that they increased their own productivity to become more successful—and you can too, by using those same 24 hours that we all have more effectively! And by the way, you can learn the secrets of their success by buying their exclusive online course.

Admitting that I might not be able to “make the most” of my days when pain gets in the way sounds depressing. But it is realistic.

ABOUT

Photo of Anna, a white nonbinary person with dark blond hair and glasses, smiling while sitting on a couch. They wear a black v-neck t-shirt and a floral print button down shirt.

Anna Hamilton (they/them) is a writer and comedian based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their work has appeared in the Conversationalist, Welcome to Hell World, and many other places around the internet. You can follow them on Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram, or subscribe to their newsletter.

No, we don’t all have the same 24 hours in a day: On chronic pain and freelancing in an unreliable body