Time passes differently when I'm in pain

On limits, routine and mourning the life you once dreamed of

Yesterday, I planned to spend the morning writing before meeting a friend. I wanted to keep working on my manuscript for an hour or two and then write something for Substack; an essay I’ve been planning for a while about moral purity and cancel culture. And then, as a treat for getting work done, I was going to meet a friend I haven’t seen in a while for a glass of wine and an ice cream. Instead, I had a migraine. When I felt the tell-tale signs of the migraine: waves of nausea, a strange stiffness in my face and neck, and of course, the onset of the headache, I knew that I would not be spending the day how I had initially planned. Migraines have a tendency to creep up on me; occasionally I have an hour or so before the vice-like grip of pain descends fully on my senses, but mostly I have around ten minutes. And I try to use that time wisely.

my noble migraine companions

I’ve had to do this hundreds of times; reassess my to-do list to make it smaller and more manageable. Going for a run turns into washing my face and putting my ice roller in the freezer, having a long shower turns into brushing my teeth to rid my mouth of its vomit-y coating, socialising turns into texting to cancel, and getting ice cream turns into putting a glass of water beside for when I wake up. Yesterday, I rushed to do these things and then, I took my medication, drew the curtains and gave into the pain. I try so hard to be grateful for all of the things I have, but my GOD it’s hard to feel gratitude when you’ve got a migraine. Every small slight or gripe is magnified; a stubbed toe is unbearable, a blunt text is catastrophic. I don’t just feel pain in my head (although the headache itself is blinding), I feel it in my entire body. My face hurts, my legs ache, my arms feel numb and tingling. I feel like I’m made of glass and any touch will shatter me.

Sometimes, the pain is so bad that I feel like I become an animal reduced to my most basic senses; blood, bones and hurting, unable to speak or form coherent thoughts. In those moments, I wish more than anything to not exist, to tap out of reality for a few hours until the pain becomes easier to bear.¹ I throw up, I sleep, I stare at the ceiling and just…survive. I know the pain won’t kill me, even though sometimes it feels like it will. Eventually, it dulls to the point where I can listen to a podcast with my eyes closed or read or watch TV, but whatever I had planned on doing for the rest of the day or evening is reduced to sitting on the couch in the dark with the volume turned down.

Time passes differently when I have a migraine; seconds seem to stretch into hours and then half a day blinks by in a single moment. I’m not quite awake but I’m not resting either. Usually, I am someone whose head buzzes incessantly with thoughts, who writes with loud music in the background and literally never stops talking. So, I hate the sensory deprivation chamber I’m forced to create when a migraine descends; when I’m so sensitive to noise and light and smell that I have to blow out candles and move my dogs water bowl into another room. Sometimes, I feel like I’m driven half-mad by the endless days I’ve been forced to pass in silence, waiting for the pain to pass; worrying that it won’t. But it always does, or it ebbs enough for me to open my eyes and sit up, to tentatively wiggle my fingers and stretch my neck from side to side. The day after a migraine, I feel hungover and shaky; like something that has just been born, anxious to get back to life and wary of the possibility of another migraine in the future.

coming back to life post migraine hugging my dog who is only here for the heating pad

This morning, I feel better and I’m trying to pick up the pieces I dropped yesterday. I’m making a new to-do list, one that I can manage without overexerting myself. I’m good at doing this now, but only because I’ve had excessive practice. Living with chronic pain means surrendering any control I once had around my daily schedule because at any moment I could be floored by a migraine or another pain flare up. I write a lot on here about living slowly, and although I do believe that slowing down has a myriad of benefits, living this way has not been a choice for me. I have to consider my body and its limits in every choice I make, and if I forget to do this, I am punished. When I was a teenager, I would get so frustrated by the limits of my body that I would push them on purpose, just for the joy of feeling normal for a day or two. I would work without breaks, schedule job interviews for 9-5’s I knew I couldn’t handle, skip meals, miss my medication, stay up late and sleep in past noon. And then, when I crashed, I would beat myself up for my bodies inability to handle things that other bodies could do with ease. The amount of times I heard older people say things like ‘I wish I could go back and have the energy of my 21 year old self’, and I would look at them and think, I bet I need more sleep than you do. It took me a while to realise that this kind of behaviour is self-harming; wilfully and purposely pushing myself past my limits over and over again with the knowledge that these choices will make me sick, is not the kind of behaviour that I would have engaged in if I cared about myself. I had to accept that the life I had once dreamed of was going to be unattainable for me now. I had to mourn that fact, and then I had to get new dreams. I couldn’t write yesterday, but I will write today, and tomorrow if I can. The ice cream shop is open every weekend and the park I run in isn’t going anywhere. The life I’m living now doesn’t look like the future I imagined for myself when I was able-bodied, but it’s still a life! A good one!

not me searching migraine in my whatsapp chat with my boyfriend to find it has been used 238 times :)

1. When I say this to able-bodied people, they are always shocked and upset, but any chronic illness peers are like yeah same