The Mindful Migraine

I grew up in a haunted house. It was a 100-year-old bungalow that was apparently built by a whaling captain.  It never occurred to me to be scared, because my parents never showed any concern and kept smiling.  My mother laughed about the presence of Old George, whilst my father seemed to deliberately ignore it… or be oblivious to his presence… there’s a difference, of course.  He was an architect who had previously ‘flipped’ houses back before it was popular.  He’d buy a run-down house with other architect-friends, team-renovate them, then sell them for a profit.  This (haunted) house was also to be renovated, but not to be flipped, it was our family home.  For the nearly 20 years that I lived there, I took it for granted that House was haunted. It creaked and banged in the night, and there were footsteps in empty corridors, and doors that opened and closed on windless days, and once, just once, the dark shape of a man who appeared at the end of my bed and disappeared when I sat up.  Beyond the shadow of a doubt, I grew up in a haunted house.

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Growing up, there were many father-characters on TV who were architects.  The owner of Mr Ed (the talking horse) was an architect who used to work on his big, flat, plan-table in the stable.  Mr Brady from the Brady Bunch was an architect who always seemed to be carrying around rolls of plans or a model home.  There was also an Australian show called “Hey Dad” that included an architect working from home.  It was the pre-computer days, so it was always big tables, hand-drawn paperwork, models on shelves.  Always the fathers working from home… such a strange thing back then… so unlike other father-figures who went off to work each morning and returned for dinner each night… these architect-fathers seemed to belong to the house as much as the house belonged to them… these architects seem to haunt their own homes.

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In Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” (1959) a group of adventure seekers and scientists set out to prove whether a house is as haunted as the suspicious locals believe.  The more scientifically minded team members discover a normal house with ancient floorboards that mumble, and unfelt, but surely present, drafts that were opening and closing doors.  The more ‘sensitive souls’, on the other hand, seemed to recognize the house was infused with an ‘otherness’.  Whether it was ghosts or the house itself that creates the disturbances is not entirely clear, although House seems to be the main culprit… it seems to be sinister and sentient… something more than mere bricks and mortar and stone statues. Over time, the novel cleverly blurs reality with imagination, shared hallucinations with gaslighting.  It becomes increasingly unclear whether it is House or humanity that is the bad influence.  Does a person see bad things and go mad, or are they already mad and thus, see bad things.  Is the house haunted – or are we?

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On my good days, when I am working hard, I take time off to watch a bit of pay TV while I eat lunch.  I recently finished the contemporary adaptation of the Haunting of Hill House.  I found little synergy between book and screen, other than the core theme that a house can have ‘bad bones’ as it were… I watched the show across several hours and many, many, sittings, and whilst I can’t say I loved it, I did enjoy some of the ways that it tweaked old narratives.  Here was a family of flippers, with a parent who was an architect.  Only this time, the architect was the wife-mother.  She had the big table and the cardboard models.  She walked through gothic-styled rooms clutching a roll of plans.  She became increasingly disturbed by House and the potential presence of ghostly forces seen and unseen.  She too seemed to compound sensitivity, with anxiety, and madness. 

This time however, there was one additional layer to mess with my mind.  This key character suffered from migraines.  When they first arrive at House, they are episodic (occasional), but over time they become chronic (constant).  In several scenes she might be talking one moment, then squeezing the bridge of her nose the next, rubbing her eyebrow, or pushing against her temples… all migraine postures.  Now, we have to wonder (at least for the first half of the series), is the house making her anxious and giving her migraines, or, are her migraines distorting her version of reality and making her “see things”.  It was very hard to watch her struggle through her pain, trying to re-find herself… literally, figuratively and existentially. Where, after all, does chronic pain end and madness begin?

[Image sources: screen shots of my TV]

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One last thread to be followed into the labyrinth that is haunted House… after watching this architect-migraineur lose the plot and become all wild-haired and wild-eyed, I thought of Charlotte Bronte’s Bertha.  In Bronte’s gothic novel “Jane Eyre” (1847), Bertha is ‘the mad lady in the attic’.  She is a narrative necessity, a knot that Jane must untangle before she can get to her love, Mr Rochester.  Bertha is portrayed as an inconvenience, an embarrassment.  But I see her slightly differently now.  She was unlucky enough to be sick all the time, from an inherited illness, that caused her to swoon and behave poorly…  What if poor Bertha was a migraineur?  Once locked in the attic, she would wail and moan, wonder the hallways at night, haunting the house in a manner not unlike myself on my worst days… feeling like a burden, staying out of the light, sticking to the shadows.  What if Bertha was not mad-insane, but mad-frustrated… so bored of her room that she lashed out.  Certainly, I have not torn at people’s faces, or set fire to other people’s bedrooms… but then… I have only been stuck in my bedroom for a year or two, not ten… or twenty…

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What if migraineurs are ghosts that haunt their own homes…

What if our head is our home – and the migraine is the ghost that haunts us.

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Take care… Linda… x

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[PS – don’t stress… I’m fine… just experimenting with a different type of writing style that blurs my memories with my curiosity… xx]