Listening to Migraine

In September, the cicadas and tree frogs give their full-throated warning: the year is ending. Too late, too late. Their announcement is impossible to escape. Shut up, cicadas. We know. Inside the house, rogue crickets hide behind the furniture and scream.

Today’s my birthday. I was born on a Saturday, like today, in a year when Labor Day fell on the first of the month, as it did this year. Sometimes my birthday falls on Labor Day, which makes for fun and puns, and a holiday for all. Even so, for decades, I’ve dreaded September 6th because I saw this day as the touchstone for my failures.

The night before I turned thirty, I waited up alone till dawn, swaying on the porch swing, weeping. My life was half over, and I had accomplished so little. (In fact, I had published a book, was teaching at a university, and raising a toddler.) In those days, my life felt linear, like a game board, and I was just a pitiful button, advancing through bright squares at the whim of the dice.

Now I am more than twice thirty. Each September, I travel back towards my young, despairing self. I had no idea then that I was still a child, that I will always be a child. So many corners I couldn’t see around then (and now), so many interstices, and unexpected shocks of light. I have learned bits here and there, but mostly what I’ve learned is that the future’s unimaginable.

I don’t envy the ones who say they know what is going to happen. You know who I’m talking about. Or at least, after it happens, they say, of course, of course, they saw The Terrible Thing coming all along. They remind me that they told me so, and I wouldn’t listen. It’s true, I have no desire to know my fate. This way, I’m never bored. My life keeps undulating into something new. It’s always breaking news.

I am always a little bit behind, a clumsy fraction of a beat behind the metronome of time. While everyone else is playing basketball or string quartets or Lindy Hopping in the middle of the floor, I’m on the sidelines, definitely wearing the wrong shoes, scrambling for a pen so I can write it all down.

Okay, found my pen: The scene freezes, and only I can move around. I examine the motionless dancers politely (in case they remember later.) I bend and unbend an elbow and caress the hem of a skirt. I lift a pair of glasses from a nose and wipe away the fingerprints. Then I put the glasses on my own face. The world grows small and sharp. Is this how other people see things? I don’t put the glasses back right away. There is no hurry.

Writing is a temporal art that exists outside of time. I find rhythm with the tiny jeweler’s hammer of prose, and I take my time to do it. It is a higher-level superpower, I think, than always-being-right because writing gives you license to insert ideas inside other people’s heads. How cool is that? I write, horse, and when you read it, a horse is suddenly inside your head. Try and see if you can make it leave; you can’t. The horse is pooping now, on your carpet. The carpet in your head. Last summer, someone I trusted wrote smugly that it didn’t matter how hard we worked, there was nothing we could do; Trump was going to win again. I had no idea why they thought they knew what was going to happen. To me, it seemed a justification for not trying. But then they were right. They reminded me they told me so. That poop still takes up space inside my head.

Early this summer, I stopped writing. Publicly, at least—I filled volumes of unpublishable notebooks. I stopped because I was falling apart in every way. I didn’t see The Bad Thing coming, I never do, though some who know me better than I know myself have said, of course.

And one day, without warning, I had vertigo, vestibular migraines: ten unbroken weeks of nausea, left-side dizziness, blurry vision, and a listless, useless brain. There was a constant vibration throughout my body; sometimes the shimmery feeling amplified to venomous spikes. I’d never had migraine before, and now migraines were stealing my life. Some days, my face burned scarlet for no reason my doctors could discern. I was radiating heat, like a furnace was emanating inside my head. The next day, my skin would peel, as if I’d been sunburned. I lowered the shades and stayed inside. One night, I woke to indescribable pain in my upper left jaw: an abscess in the space above tooth #14, where I’d had root canal three years earlier. The infection had been going on noiselessly for months, close to the trigeminal nerve. Now it rose to the surface, along with the many so carefully papered-over terrors of my past. My marriage, did I mention, was at a flashpoint; becoming unexpectedly debilitated made it worse.

Whatever awkward life-rhythm I possessed, I’d lost. I was a collapsing pile of wet clay, spinning askew, and I couldn’t work out how to make the wheel stop. The metaphor felt apt in the moment because years ago, I’d abandoned ceramics, unable to learn how to center a decent pot. I tried so hard, but I didn’t have the gift, the rhythm. I could not.

So maybe now I’d turned another corner in my ever-undulating life. The sky was menacing in this new neighborhood. Breaking news: everything breaks. Tree limbs, human limbs, Congress, and universities with marble hallways crumble like sugar in the rain. I needed to escape. That was the logic of the moment. In my life, I have abandoned many things. I would abandon my life.

Reader, I did not. The story is longer, but to skip ahead:

A week or so ago, as the storm of my summer’s mind began to settle, my therapist asked me, “How is having these migraines serving you?” Maybe you have heard this before. Maybe it’s a typical question therapists learn in therapist school, but for me, it was brilliant and fresh.

I was wearing headphones, an EMDR paddle in each hand. Beep. Beep. I waited for an answer from the metronome of time. Beep. Beep. There was no reply. So, being myself, I concentrated on her syntax. She had not asked, “How are these migraines serving you?” but rather How is having them serving you?

Migraines are not a bodily insult from the outside world, like a wound or viral infection. They blossom from the brain, which itself cannot feel pain. They are as mysterious as your life. No doctor or researcher understands them. You can treat them with abstinence or drugs, but the side effects are terrible (believe me.) Spend an hour or two on Migraine Reddit and you’ll understand the futility of trying.

Migraines are a message, a strategy from the brain. I would almost say, much as I hate and fear them, they are a gift. (Writing that, I risk a different kind of headache, from brickbats.) My brain has always been my greatest teacher. A frustrating teacher, sometimes.

Abstruse, recondite, enigmatic. The brain loves a puzzle; straightforwardness is never interesting. The brain withholds and makes you work, but in the end, it will reward you with more than you asked for. If I could center a pot or nail a handstand or finish a poem on the tenth or twentieth try, what would be the point of that?

It’s late afternoon. Now the sky blackens. All day long, the prescient people have told me it will storm at seven. Trees will fall, roads will flood, and the power will go out, as it always does. I knew they were probably going to be right, as usual, but I refused to believe. This day has been brilliant. An hour ago, I picked figs from our tree in the sunshine.

The night returns each night. We count on that rhythm, even people like me, who are always a half step behind. Mosquitoes alight and pierce us; moths eat our clothes; winter is always coming, and the city lights will go dark at the moment you need them the most. Here in the living room of my mind, somebody tosses the dice. They land, snake-eyes, or so somebody says. But now they’ve toppled to the carpet, perhaps beneath the sofa, and no one can find them. For the moment, we are stuck. Our pitiful buttons cannot advance. What will come after? Will there be light at the next corner?

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