Rain

Migraine meets head. The rain pours down on this coastal visit, and my heart feels heavy.  There’s burden to bear but of the how or why, I don’t know. There are tears threatening to pool over my eyes, but instead I let the heavy rain act in place of my emotions. 

It’s been isolating enough to live and breathe chronic migraines.  I thought I was understood for whom I had to become.  But the world shifts in unexpected ways, and I find myself ashamed that I can’t do or be much more than I am now. I believed I was covered in a carte blanche of understanding, only to find that I’m just not the person others would like me to be. Not unless a cure comes down the pike really soon. Or unless this physical therapist I just started seeing can really throw a curve into the stubborn mule train that is migraine. I have hope. I do. It’s just that I’m feeling as if the security blanket I’ve had wrapped around me for so long is being pulled away.

Love in the purest form has been tainted in ways I can’t explain. The world I’ve embraced and taken to my soul is not so solid. The earth moves like gelatin. I fear I might never be able to find solid ground again. It’s like trying to find an opening when you’re trapped under a frozen pond. It’s not where you thought it was. You’re running out of air. You want desperately to breathe again.

I’ll have to work through this, yet the steady showers fail to brighten my heart and lighten my anguish. I’ve lost so much in my life – parents when I was in my teens, my home, my friends. And with these migraines, I’ve lost my power, my ability to live freely and be all I can be. And when there’s not much to strip from a person who’s been held captive by chronic pain, well I’ll tell you, it doesn’t take much to make that person feel even less than who they are.

I will work through this disease and all it brings with it. I must convince myself. I’ll write it on sheets of notebook paper until I believe it. And I’ll hope the wound of pain will heal. It must.