Tag Archives: #spoonielife

Pain like a vise on my head…

A cartoon of a white woman with a headache. The headache is visualized by the presence of a vise on her head.

I am starting to despise the lovely, cool, pre-rainy days of my life. While they were once a cue for a day spent reading on a couch with my cat or wandering into the wilderness with my dog they are now CRUSHING my brain with the intensity of their barometric pressure.

Not only am I in a fairly intense and uncomfortable level of pain, non-stop until it actually does rain, I am also sitting here – or more accurately lying here – watching all the have-to’s and want-to’s pile up around me like last week’s laundry. (Which happens to actually be one of the have-to’s.)

It’s not as though I can just get up and do all these things feeling this way. Have you ever managed to go about your daily life with a rhinoceros on your head?

You can carry the weight of intense pain for a little while. Maybe you can make it through your morning commute, or school drop off, maybe you can do one meeting, but this heavy beast is just pressing down on you, making each step reverberate through your skull like the base of a bad EDM song. You are going to miss important things, like stop signs and questions, and time.

Eventually the weight becomes too much and you have to lie down. Close the curtains, turn out the lights, and give in to the pain. For me, these days are endless, difficult trials that I have to get through in order to -hopefully- have brighter ones tomorrow.

However, I have a chronic, deteriorating, poorly understood disease. So, tomorrow isn’t as bright as it could be. I roll the dice every time I go to sleep.

Will sleeping on my ridiculously sensitive scalp cause another high level migraine?

Will there be another impending doom storm system resting against the Rocky Mountains?

Or will it be sunny and I will have the ability to move, to clean, to create?

Whatever I roll, I usually get a relatively balanced mix of good days and bad but this summer is different. This summer is hard. The storms are angrier, more pressured, and they just hang around bullying me for days. My to-do’s are piling up, my want-to’s are looking like distant dreams, and I am beginning to feel a bit like an incompetent version of the Roadrunner.

Everywhere I turn, fire.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed…

It just feels as though every day I am surrounded by red hot pokers.

People I love are struggling. Thinking about the reasons for the their struggles makes me scramble back to distraction or anything else because otherwise I want to cry because someone is sick or because their choices are making them sick or because their mental health is really bad and there isn’t anything I can do to help.

People I love are hating. They are choosing to be mean and hateful and go out of their way to hurt people they don’t even know for reasons I can’t understand.

My country is fading. The heroic Captain America U.S. I grew up with is looking more and more like something Indiana Jones would fight against. Something the Avengers would defeat. Something we used to stand against.

Everywhere I turn there are burning, searing, painful places screaming for me to deal with them. All I can do is cower in the center of the flames.