The Mindful Migraine

She was an architectural student of mine, decades ago. I can’t remember her name, only her PhD research topic. Raised on horror movies, she wanted to find the common thread that ran through the stories that scared her the most. And she wanted to present her investigation in the form of a haunted house, a labyrinthine assemblage of chapter-rooms which could be read in any order, like a children’s ‘choose your own adventure book’.

I admired her commitment to her theme, but we often argued about her approach. To say it was ‘unconventional’ was an understatement, and although universities were becoming more flexible in their assessment criteria, I worried that the examiners might not approve the final product and all her hard work would be for naught.

“Ah Madame,” she would laugh, “you must trust the process.”

The earliest chapters she submitted were astonishing. She perfectly captured the way our homes simultaneously hold golden moments and memories, whilst being cloaked in darkness, overshadowed by a herd of knee-knocking furniture, plagues of dust bunnies, and the fog of secrets, fear and regret.

She also managed to illuminate the strange inversions that take place as we age; how all those spaces that we ran to, to hide from the monsters that chased us as children, soon became the very spaces that contained the worst of them.

Each chapter resurrected anxieties that fed the ones that followed. Her tunnel-vision way of researching and writing sucked me in and created an uncanny sensation of infinite regress… where did her exploration end and my experiences begin… or, perhaps more accurately; how did my life become her words…

After reading the pages she sent me, I would often lay awake at night, troubled by the creation she had constructed. I worried that there was a “House of Usher” like crack running through her work from research-foundation into every buttressed-argument, that would continue to tremble and shift all the way to the crowning-pinnacle of her aimed-for achievement. Whilst I could not put my finger on what that flaw was, I suspected that one well delivered blow by an adversary would send her words tumbling into an academic abyss, revealing them to be nothing but a gimmicky jumble of junk.

When I woke the next morning, exhausted and still plagued by nightmare images of rooms wrapped in plastic and walls smeared with bloody cries for help, I would fire off an email and ask her to reconsider.

She declined and wrote on.

Her writing began to move into the margins. Basements and attics became her focus, and the chapters became even more unnerving. Buried skeletons and wild women abounded. The clanking chains of colonial imprisonment started to weigh her work down. Furnaces and boilers began to take on a mind of their own and generated an unbearable pressure that threatened to blow the whole project sky high.

Next, she moved me into even more confined areas. Cupboards. Closets. Claustrophobic spaces designed to conceal the detritus of our lives. Somewhere to orderly contain our disorder. The tiniest of hidey-holes, behind the door, inside the wall… liminal places that are (a)part of the main areas of the living.

Then came in-depth discussions of architectural elements; cobwebby staircases that ascended into a pale glow or descended into gloom… doorknobs that shook violently, the crack beneath the door that highlighted sinister shadows, broken balustrades, impossibly long corridors, trapdoors and dumb-waiters, lights that flickered and went out in the moment of greatest need…

My student-author began to appear as a femme fatale in my mind, an unprepared innocent who was trapped in the underbelly of the world, trying to find her way out, for herself and for all of us… midwife to our sanity. Everything that I was reading mixed and merged: motherhood, melodrama, murder, martyrdom, misogyny, mistrust, madness, and melancholy… her imagined moods became my own, and I was startled at that time to discover I was pregnant.

Her baby and mine became inextricably linked in my mind and belly.

And I was terrified.

Because I could not deter her from her writing, I delayed my readings. I turned to the newspapers instead. But they too were filled with conflict, death, torture, betrayal, slavery, injustice. Over and over, the most vulnerable people were revealed to be cowering in the shadow of their oppressors.

A completely rational person, I nonetheless felt the other version of myself growing in my womb to be, somehow, another version of the author… implanted, or transplanted, from her page to my pelvis. When I voiced my concerns to my partner, his silence spoke volumes. Moving forward, I kept my ideas to myself, but daily, felt more and more unsheltered in my own home.

Her chapters were piling up in my email inbox. Without opening them, I wrote to the student to tell her to stop. She had gone over the regulated word count – it was too much – she had gone too far.

The chapters kept coming. My partner opened a couple and skim-read them. He was impressed by the strength of her writing skills, but like me, sensed there was something inadmissible about the work… he called it a spider’s web of words, and emphasized the gossamer fragility of it all.

I wrote to my boss at the university and complained, admitting with great embarrassment that I had lost control of my student, she had gone rogue, and I didn’t know how to handle her anymore; I was done.

The reply that I received left me cold… and ignited a scandal that scorched my career.

The student was not in fact a student at the university. There was no approval for her PhD admission, let alone her research topic. Nor was there any record that confirmed I had been assigned to be her supervisor. Nothing at all was on file that could prove she ever existed.

And still the chapter emails arrived.

My computer’s desktop was covered with her files. The backdrop image of a green meadow was now littered with dozens of icons that represented folders, pages, envelopes… each one an accusation of my carelessness, a reminder of how disempowered I had become… they formed a mosaic, a tiled floor, a barrier to everything else that I was doing and thinking…

Tentatively, I raised the idea of an exorcism with my partner. Understandably, he was confused. He ignored my suggestion, muttering instead a litany of grievances about alienation and unpaid debts. But I confronted him again. And again. Eventually he sat me down and asked what, or who, I was trying to evict from my usurped house, computer, soul…

As I tried to articulate the ways in which my childhood was co-joined with the future of our child, and how our house was still home to the ghostly traces of all who had inhabited it before us, and why their energies, both good and evil, were stored in the walls and furniture all around us, now and always, his concern shifted from something kind and patient, to something… else.

His remoteness reminded me of the emblematic haunted house; a foreboding edifice, set apart from neighbors, barely glimpsed through an overgrown garden beyond rusty wrought iron gates set on creaky hinges… I felt his eyes cloud over, as curtains dropped in place… his gaping-door-mouth slammed shut, and without a word, I sensed a key turn in a lock…

But that was many, many years ago.

Now, I just enjoy the sunshine on my shoulders when my daughter visits, albeit less and less often. She wheels me into the yard, out of the dark room that is my home in this troubled place.

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Sending light and laughter your way after that heavy tale.

Take care taking care lovely people,

Linda xox

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PS – there’s plenty more short stories like this on my blog, over here, on my GOTHIC page.

PPS – shoutout that tomorrow is Rare Disease Awareness Day – read more here: Rare Disease Day 2026 (it includes an events page that will let you know more details about local support groups) xox