What My Migraines Taught Me
Poems and Thoughts from the Anxious Poet
What My Migraines Taught Me
They always start
with a pinking sheared
flash across my vision.
Then a numbness
in the fingers and the feet.
My speech is next,
as if my words
are jigsaw pieces and
none of them will fit.
I have to lay down,
the last to go
are my thoughts;
nothing makes sense.
But that is the
startling thing: there
is still a me, beyond sense,
beyond mood,
beyond scrutiny.
Like Aragorn sitting
in the corner of a
crowded inn or the
sound of Gandalf’s staff on
the round green door
of my interrupted life.
At first I was scared
that my migraines
would trap me unawares
in the middle of the
traffic of my life.
But now I know
they introduced
me to the stranger
that is my soul,
and he is there
with his travel
stained boots,
guiding me.
Waiting for me
to ask him
where to now?
I wrote this poem1 at a time when I was having regular migraines and they were pretty fierce. I had my first during a Maths exam when I was sixteen years old. They scared the life out of me before I knew what they were. At college I had them after playing soccer. I had a brain scan and was told they were called ‘footballer’s migraines’. In extreme attacks I would lose the power of speech and have to lie in a darkened room, not thinking or moving, just being still with my eyes closed.
As I got older, more often I had them because of stress. I tried to submit to the process and I began to realise that even though I couldn’t speak, move, or think, I was still there. A presence underneath all the chaos of life quietly waiting.
I also found that the more I found a rhythm of life that didn’t overwhelm my system the less frequent they became. That and a homeopath who gave me a remedy that caused me three days of headaches and nosebleeds. However, since then I rarely have migraines. I don’t know what I think of Homeopathy but that seemed to work.
I have been having a mini-sabbatical during February. Refraining from One-to- One work thus opening more time reading, walking and thinking. One of the books I have returned to, as I do nearly every year, is the Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. I first read it when I was thirteen after my Father died and in a strange way it saved me. It gave me a world to escape into. Only later in life in I discover Tolkien’s notion of the Eucatastrophe.
In his writing on Fairy Stories he says this:
"But the 'consolation' of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite — I will call it Eucatastrophe.
The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality."
This is what happened to me. I somehow glimpsed in the chasm of grief and loss that there was what I called in one of my later poems ‘the impudent sprouting of a new life’.2 And as I wrote in another piece:
‘Death drove a wedge to part us; that wedge now props the door open, which seemed shut and bolted darkness.’3
I cannot explain it, or rationalise it, or make much sense of it beyond that I have said here, but the encounter with loss, grief, illness and limitation as I allowed them room to breathe, revealed that they were not the last word. They introduced to the stranger that is my soul and that soul is an animating force that is deep inside me and around me and I can trust it to lead me on. It is waiting for me to ask - where to now?
In The Call of the Unwritten (available at www.adriangrscott.com )
This poem is called Falling and is From Arriving Magic - also available on my website.
From The Medals Of My Father in The Call Of the Unwritten.
Adrian,
I felt appreciation on reading your ‘making sense of and finding value’ in your migraines. It is a valuable demonstration for a way to approach any chronic malady, especially one that knocks you flat. I am fascinated by Tolkien’s writing on the purpose of fairy-stories— thank you for providing this. I haven’t read TLOTR for several years. Hmmm…….
Holding space in a loving and tolerant way, I can relate, telling stories is a way of teaching and a living territory. Thank you, Geraldine