The Mindful Migraine

The more you search certain subjects on your computer, the more the computer-Universe sends you links to related content. That’s how I came across a reference to an essay published online late last year:

“A Head Is a Territory of Light – Seeking answers about my migraines” by Tan Tuck Ming, on YaleReview.org (here).

The essay is long(ish), but manageable in length and oh so beautifully crafted, so I highly recommend you read it in full at the link above. But, as time is often short, I will summarize it here, with occasional interjections from my own experience.

The essay opens in a seemingly opaque way which reminds me slightly of the philosopher Jacques Derrida (I wrote about his heliotropic flowers here); “A plant does not complain when hurt, does not flee, does not yearn or grieve, does not hunger. A plant appears to accept its immediate conditions.”

Tan Tuck Ming then writes of experiments relating to phototropism where plants turn (seemingly simplistically) towards light sources… but then notes… “Later experiments, however, showed that long after a light source had been removed, certain plants—grass, cress, pea seedlings—continued to bend toward where the light had been. It was as if they had turned back to the memory of it; it was as if they hoped for the light to return.”

The essay then pivots, like a bent plant, towards a memory; he is 17 and seeing his first neurologist, he was told his brain scans are all clear… does he know the doctor’s son through school?

Sway again, this time to an explanation of migraine: “One distinctive feature of migraine as a neurological condition is its unpredictability, its multiformity.”

The author notes that migraine triggers are diverse, with a “kaleidoscopic array of symptoms” from vision impairment, fatigue, vomiting, loss of speech, goosebumps, memory loss, relentless peeing, through to those who “believe they are horses, believe they will shortly die.”

For Tan Tuck Ming, his first trigger is “a small, glittering hook of light. The hook initially appears as a mistake, as if some fragment of an image has caught, left over from a previous glance.” Within 30 minutes, his mind has begun to float away, and “When the light disappears, the pain begins.”

He writes words that are all too familiar, such as the decision to sleep on the bathroom floor to enable him to vomit more efficiently. When my chronic migraine was at its worst, I had a blow-up mattress behind the couch in the living room so that I could drag it out to the bathroom door some nights.

Another pivot, circling back to plants: “…we must take into account that the organism’s body is its own uniquely arranged sensory device. Plants, […] frequently have a sensing part that is separate from a reacting part; in the light, an impulse is transmitted between them. There are territories of dullness, territories of acute feeling. And, of course, the body itself is opaque, so only certain parts of it may be in direct light, while others are set in shade, no matter how we turn.”

When I think of a tree, I recognize he is right; to stop the tree tumbling, it must be structurally balanced and have some parts on the ‘dark side’, as it were, whilst others live in the light… until the sun sets, and then the whole is returned to the wax and wane of moonlight.

His doctor asks him to keep a diary (all doctors do – and you should – which is why I made a Trigger Tracker here). The problem, however, is “a problem of correlation and causation” – is the migraine that appears after reading his computer in bed to do with his posture, the small computer font, or the “depressing lurk of climate change” which he was reading about? Who says, he points out, whether experience is more important than sensation, memory, or “the unknowable.”

As he so beautifully puts it: “Each migraine is a record of its own significance, a moment when a set of circumstances triggered certain phenomena. Over a month, the records make a sequence; over a lifetime, a diagnosis; over generations, a correspondence.”

His plant metaphors tied to his inter-generational references make me think of family trees, and the overlaps of migraine-mundanity and poetic license makes me hum with a form of happiness.

He refers to his migraines as if they come with a version of aura, and as such, light becomes his nemesis (my word not his) but set against the cultural impulse to “see the light” he recognizes a near-universal impulse at odds with his personal pain.

Tan Tuck Mingh then references a poem, a single word by the poet Aram Saroyan:

lighght

[You can read about the “controversial” poem which won $750 in the 1960s here: You Call That Poetry?! | The Poetry Foundation – the article refers to it divinely: “The poem doesn’t describe luminosity—the poem is luminosity.”]

The essay’s author recognizes the luminosity of the word, but notes, that from another angle: “the word is a creature, wormlike, engorged in the middle—too much light stuffed into its body to pass through. This is the closest I can get to describing the sensation of a migraine: being so full that there is no longer an inside or an outside, that it is no longer clear which parts, pains, thoughts, images are yours.”

The author circles around to more experiments with light, and references my friend the physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s simultaneously dead-and-alive cat, who I wrote about recently (here) that resonates so well with migraine.

He then spins again, back to triggers, and describes a world that he tries to make as trigger-free as possible, and his constant pursuit of a “frictionless life”. Who amongst us hasn’t done the same? The risk, however, is always shrinking your world too far, mistaking immobility with being friction-free, ending up all alone in your stillness…

Even on his pain-free nights he lies awake and worries about the next migraine. He lives a life on the edge (just as I have suggested we live a life akin to the ecotone, or out of sync with everyone else).

Tan Tuck Ming draws towards his conclusion with a reminder that “Not all plants bend toward light. […] The young shoots of certain vines will turn away into dimness.” But even this plant touches the sun occasionally and grows taller regardless, creeping towards the boundless canopy of sky beyond.

There is so much to love about this essay (you can read more about the author on his website here: ABOUT).

It makes me strangely proud to be a member of Team Migraine; another shade-loving vine that grows as well as any sunflower might, just in my own way.

The reference to the poem also reminds me that every migraine is a mIgraine – the capital I intentional – because in the same way I often explain that each of us is you-nique, so too are our migraines. The “I” stands firm (or folded) within the moments of pain.

For me, there is no aura to my migraines, but light remains a nemesis regardless. My diagnosis is inter-generational, but MY pain is tethered only to ME. For all of us who are a part of Team Migraine, we still go through each migraine apart.

So then, my vine-friends, know that you are not alone. I see you. I understand.

We might live in dimness, but NEVER believe for one moment that means we have to dim our inner light.

Take care taking care my friends, one and all, in darkness and in light,

Linda x