Migraine-land, Part 2

There’s a useful semi-consciousness that comes into play when you’re in migraine-land. Your body becomes sort of like a car; it gets you places but you’re not “in tune” with it. You don’t think too hard about how it works, because it’s broken down on you a few times and you’ve been wrong every single time you’ve tried to identify the trigger. You’re a poor mechanic, and doctors aren’t much better.

People around you suggest meditation and yoga. And they’re right, and it’s good, but you can’t concentrate on stuff like breath. (All the meditators and yogis want you to focus on breath. “Feel it go in and out,” they say, breathing loudly, luxuriantly. You can tell they’ve never been afraid of pollen or dust or carpet chemicals, all of which have, at some point or another, given you asthma attacks. You breathe thinly, thinking of yourself as the opposite of the great hoovering aspirators the people around you become.)

If you did things differently—noticed your body, paid attention to how it moved—you would realize that it’s almost always hurting somewhere, and none of it is interesting pain. Your sinuses are just there, gummed up like overused playground furniture, pulsing behind your eyes. The muscles of your neck and shoulders burn as if they’d been weight-lifting. It’s not the kind of pain that really sends you screaming to your mom. It’s the kind of pain you imagine a cow feels when it’s been injured. It’s dumb pain.

You once said this to your mom, when you were little. “Everyone’s always a little bit in pain,” you said, and you wondered aloud what it would be like if things were different. Your mother was horrified. “What?” she said, scandalized. “What do you mean?” And you remembered how she always spoke about your aunt with kidney failure, and how she never complained, but instead made hilarious jokes, and you stiffened up and never-minded, realizing that what you’d said was wrong wrong wrong. Your mother may have meant that you were factually wrong; but you interpreted your mistake as ethical.

Later, you got into the habit of thinking of your body as a sort of ultra-green machine: you gave it minimal air by breathing shallowly, tried to make one restaurant meal last until the next day’s lunch and dinner, tried to minimize your garbage. You slept four hours a night. You didn’t drink water on hikes (trying to imitate your grandfather, a hardcore outdoorsman who almost rejected treatment for his prostate cancer because of how much his surgery would cost taxpayers.) All of this was obliquely reactive—a way to perform a type of ruggedness, and to keep the world from forcing itself into your head and lungs. Superstition: if your demands are small enough, maybe the world with its irritants will forget about you.

Migraine-land, though, turned out to pretty unimpressed by the power of your will. In fact, it double-taxes you: on top of the baseline discomfort, any effort at thinking doubles the (uninteresting, plodding, spike-in-the-brain) pain. But you get used to that—so much so that you’re surprised, one day, when you wake up with nothing hurting. Something seems amiss. There’s no thick membrane of discomfort to fight through to get to your morning, no sluggishness as you try to think of what your day will look like. You feel … glad. Happy. Normal.

It’s only on days like that that you realize what the other days are like. They’re a mixed blessing, the good days. Rewatching old episodes of Looney Tunes, you realize that the good days just might be roadrunners, and you—if you actually decided to concentrate on your body and your breathing and all that—might be in real danger of living a life as Wile E. Coyote.