2026 03 17 / A Prologue Added One Month Later
In this photo from a few years back, tree branches reach out to almost meet against a stormy sky. They remind me of neurons and hold promise that even the ones stripped bare might blossom back to life.
For a time, the title image in this post was a photo of a collage I made to give expression to the chronic pain I’ve been living with for years. It was an emergency signal that made sense at the time. It served its temporary purpose well, but now I have removed it from such unavoidable view. Now the reader may effortlessly opt out of scrolling down all the way to the artwork. So why wouldn’t you look? The image in question is blatantly personal, evocative of excruciating pain, and possibly hard to unsee. Those who live with unexplained illness or know the suffering of headache may be most inclined to keep reading, but they might also already have enough of their own weight to carry. As for everyone else, I’m not sure if my severe metaphorics have universal appeal. Anyway, you’ve been warned.
2026 02 16 / The Original Post
Migraneur turns out to be what you call a person who gets migraines. And a migraine is not “a really bad headache” but a multi-level nervous system collapse that in not limited to head pain (or, as many would insist, to “head nausea”).
I have been learning many things this winter about the intricacies of this affliction, which I share exclusively with other people cursed (and blessed?) with ultra-keen senses and hyper-reactive nervous systems. It’s pretty clear, too, that I’ve had variations on migraine since childhood. And that my dad most likely did, too.
Maybe one day I’ll write about everything I know—from all I’ve experienced as one living with this condition to all I’ve discovered in the course of seeking relief from it. But today I just want to show a collage I didn’t know I had in me, which presented itself during an early evening of collage-making among friends (one I couldn’t confirm I’d attend until the day of owing to all those recent migraines).
My collage is a near-square of cut and torn stuff hastily glued on to black heavy paper torn at the top. The clippings are from some vintage National Geographics and from a program for a theatrical production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The title is from an ad for a keyboard, and now I am aware of how the word migrena doesn’t have any repeating letters. This was a first collage in decades and it’s an abrupt lesson in the permanence of the form, something I’m not used to, since in writing and photography edits are reversible. If I could apply edits now, I’d try to do much less. And that, I suppose, is also the lesson of every migraine.