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ChatGPT: what do you know about me?
ChatGPT is often accused of being ‘derivative’ – everything it writes comes from other people’s texts. Weirdly though, humans are not that different. We often write about what other people say, or about other people’s stories and successes and so on. Today’s blog, for instance is inspired by something someone…
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Vincent van Gogh’s pain
There are rumors going around the internet that several ‘alternative’ artists from the past, suffered from migraines with visual-auras. We’ll never know for sure, but I’m skeptical that an artist could have migraines on a regular basis, and no one would record them as being ‘poorly’ in their biographical notes.…
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Migraines, by the book
I recently borrowed a book from the library called “Migraines” by Mary E. Williams (2011). It started with a spot-on quote from Andrew Levy’s migraine-memoir, ‘A Brain Wider than the Sky’ (2009): “There is no line between migraine and worrying about migraine…” In the opening section of the book I…
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Fridge poetry for pain
Chances are you know someone who has Fridge Poetry; those little magnetic words that you can arrange and rearrange to make poems on your fridge. I used to have an irrational jealousy of people who owned them. Why I never went out and bought my own set, I don’t know……
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Ghosting, coasting, or boasting: chronic-pain-friends (PART 3)
Over the last couple of weeks, I have written about how chronic pain can affect friendships. First, I addressed the not-so-fun issue of ‘ghosting’ and then I wrote about those cruisy ‘coasting’ friends, with a reminder that you have to keep up your end of the friendship-bargain so they don’t…
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#shadesformigraine
I know I said I wasn’t going to ‘show my face’ here again for a while, but I forgot about the initiative that is always run on the 21st of June by migraine advocates around the world. They pick this date because it is the summer solstice; the longest, sunniest,…
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Make a healing mandala
When I first started my holistic healing journey just over a year ago, I woke up and decided I was sick of being sick, and it was time to take things into my own hands so I could get better. The first thing I did was to write a program…
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Ghosting, coasting, or boasting: chronic-pain-friends (PART 2)
Last week I wrote about friends ‘ghosting’ people with chronic pain, and how much it hurts. Today I want to talk about a different friendship arrangement; ‘coasting’. For me, I would suggest that most of my friendships fall into this category. My friends are ‘cruisy’. They’re low-maintenance. We don’t make…
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Gaining awareness: intentionality versus randomness
It’s Migraine Awareness Month, as previously mentioned, and I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘awareness’ versus ‘information overload’. When I first started trying to understand my diagnosis of chronic migraine, I went looking in multiple places to try to find as much information as I could. I was particularly open…
The Mindful Migraine 