The Pain & I

Ever since I started getting migraines, and those migraines became chronic, my life has changed. Life is change, but I have not been enjoying these changes.

I feel useless. I feel worthless at times. I feel trapped, hopeless, sad.

The pain can be consuming. It radiates all around the top half of my skull and throbs. It makes me sick. It makes my vision wobble and sparkles float around the edges.

The pain—or The Pain—locks me in rooms. It traps me in darkness. I keep my eyes closed. I push my face into pillows or into my palms. I remind myself to breathe from my stomach, but I don’t really want to breathe. The Pain has tentacles that reach out to all the lights in the room and turns up their brightness until I want to be sick.

It whispers to me—its words as inviting as silk as each word stabs me—that there is no hope, there is no “getting better” or “being well”. There is no return to normal. This is my new normal. This is me now. The Pain & I.

The migraines make me tired. I’m so far from what I used to be: productive, active, a force, a star. I’m a shell now. Or, at least that is what The Pain says. I am absent from work. I miss school. I get behind. I constantly need people—colleagues, students, family, friends—to be compassionate. I can’t finish in time. I can’t work faster. This is my new reality. And people must accommodate that reality. They must accommodate me more than they probably accommodate others, and it makes me feel even more guilt.

The Pain makes me believe that it would be better for everyone else if I died. Only then would I cease to be a burden. Only then would people be able to stop waiting on me, waiting on my work to be finished, waiting on my emails, waiting on me to call back. Only then could friends find more present, more there friends. Everyone could move on and be happier, freer. I wouldn’t be an anchor, a downer.

It’s hard to fight these thoughts. It’s hard to be unreliable, to be bad at things, to be someone that I imagine people eagerly anticipating the day they can be free of me.

I’m going to fight The Pain. I’m going to try to come up with strategies to be mentally and physically healthy, to live my “best life” even with chronic pain. However, today, today I am sad. I am hurting emotionally. I feel without hope. I feel despair. I feel the pressure of tears wanting to break from my eyes. It is hard today. It has been hard for many days.