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Thanks for visiting my diary. I've been journaling since 1984 and have chosen to share some of my entries online. They are not all positive thoughts, but I hope that reading them might be a blessing to someone who needs encouragement.
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Migraines seem to greatly intensify whatever negative emotions I have lurking in the shadows. I know this, of course, but knowing it and experiencing it are two very different things. Experiencing it is like being in hell. Knowing it helps me to get out of hell and do my best to pick up the pieces from what I've done while I was in hell. I've said all this before, but sometimes the experience is so deep and so enduring that I lose sight of the fact that there is a physiological cause. This dizziness and the changes in heart rate when I go from resting to standing are some kind of new thing, and I haven't yet figured out the relationship of those to the pain phase of the migraine yet except that I'm starting to suspect that they point to a real humdinger! That's what seems to have happened this time.
I've been in bed for three days straight with the exception of dinner on Thursday night, and the emotions went wild. Part of that was the impact of the migraine on my brain. That's not something I can observe, and I'm having a very hard time giving credence to things that can't be observed physically. I've been accused one too many times of being lazy or "stressed." I either need to just get a grip or go to counseling, and everything will be fine. But it isn't fine, and part of the negative emotions has to do with acknowledging that I'm not fine and may never be fine. That sounds so gloomy and pessimistic. But it isn't pessimism any more than saying that I'm a good writer is arrogant. It's an acknowledgement of reality, and this particular reality is something I don't have any interest in facing. If it was possible, I would just go on and live normally in spite of it, like I live normally in spite of blindness. I just find ways to do the same things differently. But this is something that tears apart normalcy. I can't find any ways to do the same things differently that are reasonably safe. It doesn't seem wise to put myself in physical positions that keep my pulse over 120 for long periods of time. That's why I didn't sit up and go to church. I probably could have managed with a whole lot of effort to tolerate the dizziness, but that's four hours of my heart working as if I'm doing aerobics. I had thought of things like putting a chair at the kitchen counter so I could fix myself something to eat without standing because I needed my hands to hold on to things and keep from falling. But that's still an upright position and brings the pulse up.
So all of this set me thinking about what my future is going to be like because my symptoms are becoming more severe and more frequent, and that set off negative emotions that got very magnified. I couldn't see it because they were also somewhat legitimate. How will this additional disability affect my relationships with friends and family, ability to support myself, etc?
What really threw me for a loop, though, was my attitude last night about my spiritual life compared with my post-migraine attitude. I may as well have been a different person. Last night I couldn't grasp the reality of God or any sense of His love at all. I had to take it on faith, and faith is a weak area of my spiritual life right now. I tried to put music on, and besides the fact that it was physically painful for me to hear anything, it all just seemed abstract and fake to me. In contrast, tonight when the pain phase was finally over, I had music on and was very intensely thoughtful and "connected" with the spiritual part of myself.
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