“When did you break your nose?” he asked.
I thought long and hard, unable to recall a pivotal moment in my life. Had I broken my nose while on sleeping pills and completely forgotten about it? I started brainstorming out loud things that could have broken it: basketball, laying facedown in tanning beds, a couple blackout drunk nights in my early twenties? He looked disgusted and bored while I recounted a litany of terrible choices.
I finally realized he was giving me surreptitious permission to get a nose job. He pointed out that my nostrils are uneven and that my nose was very crooked. If you took into consideration my cripplingly low self-worth, you might think that this would be a slam dunk for rhinoplasty, but my nose was actually one of the only things I didn’t mind about myself. It worked, it had character, it was sturdy. I had never even had a nosebleed. I pierced my nose when I was twelve, and when I took the nose ring out three months later, the skin healed up like a champ, whereas most noses would have had an unsightly hole in them forever. My nose was resilient, and I appreciated that.
My tour of doctors continued. I started collecting more information about my triggers, such as that certain perfumes and too much light at certain angles cause migraines. So if you see me in public wearing sunglasses and looking at the floor, I’m not avoiding you, I’m avoiding a migraine. And if I hug you, then immediately run away from you, it’s because you’re wearing Charlie Girl or some perfume that could knock me out for three days.
Straining your eyes can be a headache trigger, so I got my vision checked. Sure enough, I needed glasses for distance. I also started wearing a mouth guard at night because grinding my teeth in my sleep was causing tension in my jaw muscles, which releases lactic acid, which can throw off your neurochemistry. All of these were solutions and valid triggers, but even though I was controlling the amount of light I saw and the amount of dust and perfume I inhaled, and fixed my vision, sleep, hormones, and sinus swelling, I was still getting headaches.
Eventually, I threw up a Hail Mary and decided to meet with one more doctor at UCLA who has a great reputation for helping migraine sufferers. This doctor explained to me how migraines actually work in a way that finally made sense to me. To paraphrase, she explained gently, “the migraine brains are simply more sensitive to outside stimuli than other people’s brains are. They don’t like any kind of chemical change, and they need routine and consistency. Wake up the same time every day, drink coffee the same time every day, eat consistently at the same time, go to bed the same time every night.” Finally, an excuse to be a robot.
She talked about the brain as if it were a toddler that had to be nurtured, not a villain that had to be slayed. It made me wonder why we treat our bodies like something outside ourselves when it’s actually what we inhabit. It’s not attacking us, it’s where we live. I fought my pain with synthetic chemicals, never bothering to understand how everything worked or what it actually needed. I was trying to Windex shards of glass instead of protecting the window from being broken in the first place.
Meeting this UCLA doctor was the beginning of my journey to educating myself about neurochemicals, what triggers them to be released and what they do to our brains. I’m pretty horrified that we’re taught so little about how our body’s engine works. Why did I spend a year doing stoichiometry in chemistry class, which I’ve never used in my life, but I didn’t know what cortisol does? When we stress out, our body releases cortisol, which sabotages our sleep, suppresses the immune system, and ages us. It ages us, you guys. If someone told me fifteen years ago that stress would make me look older, I would have taken a very different approach to life. I certainly wouldn’t have been stuck in the tragic irony of stressing out to pay for facials that were supposed to make me look younger.
I learned that what triggered migraines was actually the stress I experienced while trying to cure them. I’m so conditioned to do more, to try harder, to overwork, that my brain would never stop hurting unless I rewired it and changed my approach altogether. The obsession with work was passed down from generation to generation in my family: My grandfather juggled owning a candy store and a coal mine, and refused to stop working until the day he died. My father inherited that work ethic. I remember waking up at two A.M. and going into the kitchen for a snack and seeing my dad wide awake, working at the kitchen table. He always carried around a yellow legal pad no matter where we went so he could work anytime, anywhere. We all of course have to work for money and meaning in our lives, but seeing a blueprint that glorified constant hustle, I confused work with my worth.
Looking back at all the headaches I had endured, I actually feel like they weren’t trying to hurt me; I feel like they were actually trying to help me. My brain stem was trying to tell me something, whether it was to slow down, take a nap, stop taking a pill, cancel my plans, break up with someone, not eat something, eat something, stop trying so hard to impress someone, drink water, get off my phone, do literally anything but what I was doing. Because my instinct was always to do more, in order to solve this problem, I basically had to stop trying so hard to solve this problem.
Since I had no synapses dedicated to this skill of doing less, what ultimately helped me overcome migraines was the inner child work I’ve told you about. And if you missed the eating disorder chapter, don’t worry, inner child work isn’t in violation of any child labor laws, it’s essentially connecting with your inner child.