Migraines and Dependency

Three days into a yoga training in Greece last year, I was hit with one of the worst migraines that I had experienced in years. I scrambled to my bag and it dawned on me that I had forgotten to bring my medicine. In that moment I knew that I was absolutely screwed and I was going to be forced to surrender to this thing like I had done as a child. In the midst of the most incredible pain-fuelled haze, I found myself crying out for my ex partner to come and save me - it was then that I recognised I had a big problem.

My migraines started as a young child and I have worked hard to address them as an adult. At their height during my early 20’s, I had around 20 attacks a month but by that time I had some form of medicine that I could take. As a child, my migraines would come on during times that I was outside the home which meant that socializing and school was a challenge. I have always avoided preventative medicine, convinced that the problem stemmed from emotional or psychological influences.

Whilst in that moment in Greece, I recognised that there were themes of dependency influencing the attacks, it has taken me until over a year later to understand it further. As a child, my mum would come and pick me up and take my home and as an adult it became my partners who would hold me in those moments. Because I had cried out for my partner on that day, I assumed that it must stem from a desire to be held in deep vulnerability and perhaps in part that still remains true.

Over the past month, I have been seeking acceptance of a life that is unattached. Whilst I do desire union with another, I feel that it is important to be meeting a potential relationship from a place of wholeness in myself. I have been in the process of rebuilding my foundations so that I am able to provide for myself for the rest of my life. I am starting to see the experience of being single as a woman as an incredible opportunity and not one that was afforded to the generations passed, nor many women that exist within the world today.

As I start to provide for myself, there has been a resurgence in my migraines but recently they contain strong emotional and somatic content. At work yesterday, I had a particularly nasty one and whilst I laid on the bench upstairs and allowed it to work through my body I encountered this theme of consent. I witnessed the deep layers of unsafety that I have lived with and all the ways in which I have not provided for myself. That I have never known how to hold myself in deep vulnerability and so I sought it elsewhere. I saw that I had stored my ex-partners within my mind and body so that I might escape the belief that I am alone. And within this place of recognition, I also saw the part of me that did not consent to that, that had never wanted their residence within me. That the time was now, that I was finally ready for them to leave.

I can still feel the pangs of dependency rise up when I look out at the rest of my life and question what it will bring. I feel excited by, but insecure of, this life as an autonomous woman. I am aware of my age and that certain doors close with the passing of time, but I also feel the calling of a feral life. I say calling, I am actually not sure I need to venture out and find anything different or that I have been doing anything wrong. I have spent a lifetime collecting together all the jigsaw pieces and now they just need placing.

“A horse will turn feral if it loses its confines, is given enough time away from governing hands, dictated days.

There isn’t a woman I know who doesn’t burn with the same faculty. Like calling to like. Frequency seeking frequency. We understand the gleam in their plum-purple eyes, the twitch in their whiskered lips that says: kick the boards down, jumps the fence, run.” - L.E. Bowman

I think I had just been seeking a permission slip that read “yes you are ready, yes you are allowed this now”. Is that what it had been all along? That I just wanted the green light and had been looking for it outside of the person that could actually give it? I am not sure I ever expected abundance to be characterised by willingness to allow myself to rattle the cage on what this thing called life is. I am starting to see the wealth of time, as if my existence is completely flexible and elastic, that I can stretch at the edges and do whatever I want. How much of any of it was ever compulsory anyway?

In recent weeks, time doesn’t seem to pass me by like it used to. I feel like I was a rusty old machine that just needed some oil and care and now everything can flow like it was always meant to.