Your headaches may define you, but you may also define your headaches.

Know me, know my headaches. 

No me, no my headaches.

If the gurus you seek to fix your pain are on a difficult to get to mountaintop, find new gurus. The good gurus are on the ground.

Have you been to the headache convention? We all stay in and get room service. We open the curtains only at night, as the city sparkles. We’ll put the TV on quietly.

Maybe our hat is too tight.

Our inner hat.

It can be hard to know whether to blame your actions on your headaches, or your headaches on your actions.

I had a headache.

Or did a headache have me?

Headaches supposedly lessen, like many things, with age.

Headache treatments are like romantic relationships. 

Some seem to fix everything for a little while. Some have a great, dramatic effect just once. Some make everything worse, and some do nothing. The one that works most of the time should be kept near, loved, and never abused. And kept in a cool, dry place.

Don’t blame yourself for your headaches. 

Don’t blame your headaches for yourself.

It’s important not to read too much into these things. But you should read something into them.

If you have to ask if a medicine or lifestyle change is working, it is probably not working.

People will recommend their favorite cure no matter what the problem is.

What about when your headache diary reads identically to your regular diary?

Headaches will tell you to go to yoga, but you never go, do you?



Perhaps not doing yoga is a kind of meditation...

We talk of headache management.

It is a set of management skills that does not translate to the marketplace.

A headache cure is out of the question. We look to manage.

The migraine is invisible to medical tests. We know what it is from what it is not.

Likewise, we know who we are by ruling out who we aren't. [NOTE: Check if this is true!]

Migraine medicines are usually scrounged from other places. They were meant to deal with some other issue--depression, anxiety, wrinkles, seizures...

This is another reason why the headache-haver can feel like an afterthought.

Headaches are some of my oldest companions. We have been through a lot. Like with some old friends, at times I think we get together merely to honor the past.

Migraines will neither kill you nor make you stronger.

What would you do if your defining nemesis left?

We hate our bullies, but we would also miss some of them. 

Hot weather is a friend to headaches. 

But do headaches not deserve friends, too?

(Maybe they don't!)

I have a friend who has claimed he has stopped getting bad headaches completely.

I feel strangely sorry for him.

Conventional and unconventional medicine can co-exist, like two science-fiction moons.

Like dreams, or a cat, sometimes headaches are trying to tell you things. 

Not all the things are rational or useful. 

The problem is not that the boss might not believe you when you call in sick with a headache.

The problem is that you might not believe you.

A migraineur will try almost anything for a headache cure.

And abandon almost anything.

Is it sympathy you want? It's always more fun to say you don't want any sympathy.

The list of potential headache triggers is so long as to be useless.

(chocolate, wine, cheese, bread, citrus, too much sleep, not enough sleep, stress, work, weekends (not enough stress), vacations, sex, sun, too much exercise, not enough exercise, perfume, dust, headache medicine...)

The word "migraineur", meaning one who gets migraine headaches, is too French to generate much sympathy. Perhaps we migraineurs like it that way. 

To be cured of headaches is to be cured of life!

Everybody gets headaches, but not everybody gets headaches.