Skip to main content

Message received.

The other day I had a migraine.  I have had them before.  However, before Friday, I did not realize that I had.  I have been incapacitated for a day or two here and there by, yes, a headache, but also a range of other symptoms, that all this time, have been preventing me from seeing them for what they were, migraines.  As I slowly climbed out of the hole of weakness and a certain flatness that the migraine had dug for me, I finally started to connect dots that have likely been sitting there for years.

The next day as I stood in the hot shower,  and let the steaming water run down over my body, the realization that this is what had just happened and had happened many times before, made me feel slightly stupid. Relieved, but stupid.

Everyday I allow myself to be inundated by information. On a daily basis, I read pr-ified versions of other people's lives and reviews and memes and essays and news stories and progress reports and information letters and school newsletters and flyers and bills that are both overwhelming and impossible to decipher and relative strangers' updates on my facebook feed and complete strangers' updates on my twitter feed and yet, I did not, could not, read the signs my own body has been persistently trying to tell me.  I have been having them for years, now that I think about it.

The migraines forcing me to lie still for hours on end, grinding my other activities to a halt every few months, had not been sufficient information, for some reason.  There was no twitter alert. No press release. No voice mail or text message.  I simply did not get the message.

I get migraines. Now, I finally know. What else?

Comments

  1. ah... last time i had one i was forced into a whole bunch of realizations m'self. . . so glad it is over for you, and wonder what you'll do with all this awareness and 'space'.

    thanks for answering my fishing expedition over there on wmx... appreciate your thoughtfulness.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am constantly amazed how much I keep from myself. I really hope you continue because your way with words really helps me ask myself new and challenging questions. Please do not stop.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I entered August without you.

 I won't visit you this month.  You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you.   I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still.   We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue.  Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision.  They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped.  Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...

Shake your Bummy

In recent weeks, two things have come to my attention, this article by Mary Beth Williams,  T he real key to good health  and the viral hit created by Dr. Mike Evans,  23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health?  Both coincided with when I was turning my attention to new years resolutions and reflecting on the year that was. Thanks to both,  a reckoning came to be.  Mary Beth Williams' candid advice was to get your heart stronger because you never know when you are going to need it.  She herself has been receiving treatment for lung cancer. Dr Mike Evans' way of putting the exact same thing? "Try to limit your sitting time to 23 1/2 hours a day".   In my day job, I sit a lot. I occasionally rise to retrieve something from the photocopier or to make a coffee, but an awful lot of the time, I'm on my bum.  This is in steep contrast to my night job. At the end of the work day, occasionally in the middle, I h...