I had a migraine for seven years. It started the year I stopped speaking to my sister and it lifted six months into a therapy I had not wanted to start. I am writing this not to suggest that all migraines are emotional, because they are not, and I went through six neurologists and an MRI and a sleep study before I started therapy. The medical workup women get for chronic pain is real medicine and I am grateful for it. I am writing this because somewhere in the seventh year a therapist asked me a question that nobody else had asked, and the answer dismantled something I had been holding in my head for two thousand days.
The question was: 'What is your sister doing right now that you cannot bear to think about.' I had said, in passing, that we had not spoken in eight years. I had not said why. I had told everyone, including myself, that it was a misunderstanding that had calcified, the way old family misunderstandings do. The therapist did not buy this. She asked the question again. I sat with it for what she later told me was forty seconds. Then I told her what my sister had done in 2017 and what I had not been able to say about it since. The migraine, that week, was a six on a ten scale. The next week it was a four. Six months later it was gone.
I am being careful here because I do not want to write a piece that tells women their pain is in their head. Women's pain is dismissed as psychological for a documented and damaging reason, and that dismissal is a feature of medicine I will fight against until I die. The migraine was real. The MRI was real. The medication helped, sometimes. What I am saying is that for me, in this specific case, there was a parallel thing going on, and the parallel thing was that I had decided, the year I stopped speaking to my sister, not to be angry at her in any direction that would have allowed me to say it out loud. Anger I cannot say goes somewhere. In my body, it went to a particular vein behind my right eye, and it stayed there for seven years.
I spoke to my sister again last spring. We did not resolve anything. I told her I had been angry and that I had not been able to say so for a long time. She told me she had not known. She told me she had been waiting for me to call. We are not exactly friends again but we are sisters again, which is a different and lower bar. The migraine has not returned. I keep waiting for it. It has not returned. I do not think it is going to. I have moved the thing it was carrying into a different room, and the room I moved it into has a door and a window and language.