Once I finally started to acquiesce to the needs of my inner child, my headaches lessened. As you may have noticed, kids don’t know or really care about what adults have on their schedules. They aren’t interested in how much money you make or how late you’re running for a meeting. They have not yet subscribed to our rat-race, hamster-wheel culture of self-abandonment. They don’t yet know that needy is a pejorative word, so when kids have to pee, they say they have to pee; when they’re hungry, they say they’re hungry. They have not yet learned to suppress their needs to impress people or pretend they’re fine because they’ve been brainwashed to believe that being needless is a sign of strength. They don’t walk on eggshells to be liked, so connecting with my inner child helped me redevelop the muscle of anticipating and addressing my own needs instead of worrying about someone else’s. This may all seem pretty obvious, but before inner-child work, I literally used to hold pee in for hours or skip eating if I felt either would inconvenience someone or slow down my work. Now that I have connected with my inner child, I don’t constantly feel like I’m in labor about to birth one.
Child Whitney has become my compass, and my headaches have become the strict parents I needed but never had. When I’ve overcommitted myself, date a guy who causes me anxiety, or pound Chinese food made almost entirely of chemicals and MSG, my headaches appear to scold me and steer me in another direction. It’s as if Google Maps had a feature where your phone electrocuted you whenever you got off on the wrong exit.
Maybe you don’t get headaches, but maybe your body talks to you in other ways. Maybe you get back pain, cold sores, anxiety. Something you think is idiopathic may actually be your inner child tugging on your shirt asking you to investigate or to slow down and make a different choice. Maybe your stomach hurts; maybe you’re sad and don’t know why; maybe you yell at people; maybe you can’t stop masturbating; maybe you dabble in Scientology. Whatever shape your pain takes, I hope you can see it as your body trying to communicate with you, perhaps to the point of rendering you immobile to force you to take it seriously.
Although at first I viewed my headaches as preventing me from living a full life, I now truly think my headaches protected me from far worse ramifications of my bad ideas. A lot of the time migraines kept me from engaging in unhealthy behavior. They made me go home and sleep when my instinct was to work until three A.M.; they guided me into a dark room instead of letting me hang out with a dark person. Because hangovers yielded migraines, my headaches also steered me away from alcohol, which is truly a gift given how addictive my personality is. Without migraines God knows what I’d be doing, what weirdo I would have married in Vegas, what unlucky kids I’d be badly parenting. Without headaches I’d probably be a full-blown hot mess, instead of the half-blown one I am now.
The search for a migraine cure taught me a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise. I learned about the workings of our brain, neurochemicals, and allergies. My migraines led me to do a lot of things that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred to me. Without trying to fix my brain, I never would have gotten my vision checked, for example. And thank God I did get contacts, because without them I’d still be oblivious to my unibrow and wearing foundation countless shades darker than my actual skin tone.
In order to heal my headaches, I had to stop thinking in terms of what I had to do; instead I had to start thinking in terms of what I had to stop doing. I was so programmed to do more, to try harder, to force solutions, and to go to the pharmacy for solutions that I didn’t even think of what I could eliminate instead of what I could add. Doing this made my life way more boring, but my headaches abated and so did the number of pill bottles that fell out of my purse on first dates.
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My headaches also taught me a valuable lesson about my reaction to pain. It gives me chills now to think that my response to pain was to toughen up, then normalize it. I was so used to hearing “calm down,” “relax,” and “everything is fine” that I ended up believing it and doubting my own reality. I internalized my parents’ and their parents’ white-knuckle philosophy of ignoring pain. I’m not qualified to psychoanalyze what exactly happened to make me feel shame for suffering, but my reaction to having pain was embarrassment. I also didn’t want to feed the stereotype of women not being as tough as men, so I never wanted to show distress, and as an adult I wanted so badly to be low-maintenance, easy, and cool. But there’s nothing cool about being five thousand dollars in debt to an emergency room or puking out of a car on the freeway.
I shudder when I think about how quickly and easily I normalize pain, both physical and emotional. My headaches ended up becoming akin to what happens when you need to beat a lie detector test: Lying is stressful to the body, and the polygraph machine picks up on that by measuring your racing pulse, sweaty palms, dry mouth. Basically everything happening in your body when you take your hair extensions out to reveal your actual hair, or lack thereof, to a guy. The trick to beating the lie detector machine is not to become a better liar, but to become worse at telling the truth. That’s what it means to normalize an unacceptable situation. Also, criminals, you’re welcome for the hot tip.
Normalizing is how to beat a lie detector test, but not how to win at life, although these days going numb and martyring ourselves seems to have become the norm.
I’m not sure when having a high tolerance for pain became impressive or cool, but it’s neither. Pain is important information, and I can’t imagine there’s any pain that’s by accident. I’m not talking about the pain people are born with or the horrible diseases that make people needlessly suffer. And the fact that I need to qualify that is another example of normalizing pain! So often my inner monologue tells me to “stop complaining. It’s not like you have leukemia. Some people have real problems, you dummy ingrate!” Yes, there are people in way more pain than some of us, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore our own.
This trend of minimizing and even glorifying pain—emotional or physical—has got to stop. Nefarious adages we throw around like “no pain, no gain” are so deeply imbedded into our psyches that sometimes it doesn’t even occur to us that pain is your body’s form of giving you a warning. It’s our body telling us to “stop doing that and get out of there, ya goof.” And yes, I realize pain may yield results with exercising, but anything past sore muscles is not okay to ignore.
I think it’s time we all reject the glamorization of tolerating pain. High heels, waist trainers, CrossFit, staying in painful relationships—these are all very masochistic. Yes, I know relationships technically take work, but I have a job, and unless a relationship is putting money into my 401(k), I can’t make working on it my main priority.