A Head Is a Territory of Light
October 11, 2024 at 05:44AMPain isn’t weakness leaving the body, as so many gung-ho influencers love to tell you. It’s just pain. And sometimes, that pain has no seeming precursor, no dependable provenance for us to excise at the root. But we still look and we still hope, just as Tan Tuck Ming has his entire life in his search to conquer his all-consuming migraines.
Once a migraine trigger is identified, you can start to build your life around it—your abstinence from it, its absence. In this bid for a painless life, I stop drinking coffee, hydrate diligently, start sleeping early, discard a threadbare Snoopy T-shirt, take deep breaths, close my eyes when something is shining, avoid static, quit watching TikToks, and try, in general, to feel a little less forcefully. I try to find spaces and shapes that are habitable, to make myself a discrete, contained self. I wonder if this is why the aunt we don’t speak to avoids direct sun, why my grandmother preferred Minnie Mouse on her T-shirts. Did we share the same triggers? Did their pain feel like my own? Perhaps they had learned, over the years, to design their lives in a certain way. If we could speak, could they tell me how to better inhabit this body?
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/10/a-head-is-a-territory-of-light/
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