I started getting migraines in college.  The first one came out of nowhere and was a huge trauma, sending me to the emergency room wishing I could die.  After a while I started to learn the signs as well as the factors that can act as triggers, so I rarely get a full-blown episode anymore.  But a few days ago I had one of the worst ones ever, and it reminded me of that first time.  It also reminded me that there’s something positive to be said about the experience.

Now, I understand that most people don’t see anything positive in complete, soul-sucking, debilitating pain.  Add in vomiting every 10-20 minutes and stretch the whole thing over 12 hours or more and it seems pretty hellish – which, of course, it is.  And some people have it worse than I do, with headaches that don’t respond to any treatment and can last for days.  Mine are quite manageable by comparison.

But even with the strongest ones (or, at least, the strongest ones I’ve had) there’s always a powerful, I might even say mystical, sense of clarity that comes with the experience.  When you’re lying in a dark and silent room, still as a rock, trying not to think about the pain but unable to think about anything else, you eventually realize that you can’t fight.  Nothing you can do will change what’s happening at that moment.  You are completely powerless.

You can’t worry about the work you should be doing or the money you don’t have in the bank.  You can’t plan what you’re going to do tomorrow, or tonight, or even one minute from now.  You can’t obsess about the size of your gut or what someone thinks of you or  what you should have said in that argument if you hadn’t been so damn emotional.  You can’t create and you can’t destroy.  You can’t get right with God and you can’t tempt the devil. You can’t do anything but be there in the middle of your misery. 

The amazing thing, the thing that I probably can’t really get across to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, is that you can’t even think about the fact that you can’t think.  All those millions of routine thoughts that are normally flying through our heads from moment to moment simply don’t exist.  There is nothing in the entire universe but the pain.

Sounds pretty horrible, but the fact is that this is the kind of mental state that lots of people try to achieve through any number of other means.  Meditation, religion, drugs, self-abuse, physical and emotional addictions of all sorts...these are all, at their root, ways of quieting the noise and focusing on the one thing that seems ultimately important. Or, perhaps, the one thing that seems ultimately real.  And in the middle of a migraine there is only one reality.

I wouldn’t wish this experience on anybody, and I certainly don’t want to keep going through it again and again if I don’t have to.  But, having been through it, I don’t think I would trade it either. 

We all know the relief of getting through a trauma and the feeling of renewal that comes after a sickness or a crisis is over.  But the migraine experience, at least for me, is more than that.  I know how it feels to lose myself completely, to actually have no self.  And while the method is far from fun, the result is, honestly, rather beautiful.