Note: I don’t necessarily have tidy takeaways here. I wrote this to name the season I’ve been in—and to remind myself (and maybe someone else) that being stuck doesn’t mean being lost. The invisible illness of migraines has made me grapple with my sense of self.
The Shame Beneath the Symptoms
I do my best to be someone who shows up. I take pride in being reliable—at work, in friendships, in the small rituals of discipline that tether me to my goals. I don’t chase perfection, but I’ve long held myself to a quiet standard: that my word is good, that I deliver, that I don’t flake.
And then came the migraines.
They didn’t just knock me off my feet—they disrupted my entire sense of self. It has been two months of negotiating pain and obligation. First came the dizziness, the visual sensitivity, the nausea. But underneath that, a slower—in some ways more painful—ache bloomed: shame.
I began missing meetings. Rescheduling plans with friends. Canceling guitar lessons I looked forward to all week. The version of myself I’d carefully built—competent, consistent, dependable—started to feel like a memory I was failing to live up to.
I didn’t expect the guilt to be the worst part.
There’s a cruel math that starts to take root in moments like these:
If I miss one guitar lesson, it’s understandable.
If I miss three, I’m flaky.
If I miss a work deadline due to a migraine, it’s health.
But if I start altering how I work, what I commit to, or who can count on me—am I still the same person?
I didn’t want to be treated like someone who couldn’t be trusted.
And worse—I didn’t want to believe it about myself.
When something I’d committed to at work moved forward without me, it felt like confirmation of what I feared most: that I was a failure.
When my guitar lessons moved me to the cancellation list after too many missed sessions, undisciplined echoed in my chest.
When I couldn’t make it to a friend’s birthday because of a migraine, my conscience hissed: flaky.
All of it became evidence for a story I was afraid might be true:
That I’m failing.
That I’m not enough.
That even though the cause is out of my control, the consequences are mine to carry—and that they define me.
I’ve poured so much time and energy into trying to fix this invisible illness. Even now, when people ask if I’m feeling better, I hedge. Yes, I’m “better”—but only in the sense that I’ve learned how to mask better. The migraines still come. The dizziness still hits. I’ve learned to work around them—until I can’t.
Trying to get proper care has felt like shouting into a void. Booking a neurologist appointment was hard enough. But the real gauntlet came after: follow-up questions about prescriptions that didn’t help, routed through a receptionist like a cruel game of telephone. I’ve been made to feel like I’m doing something wrong just by advocating for myself.
I wish I could snap my fingers and erase the last two months. I wish this wasn’t part of my story. But it is. And I’m still here—sorting through the guilt, the fear, the shame, the pain—and trying to find a version of myself I can still believe in.
Right now, I’m just trying to keep going—even if I don’t know what “better” will look like. Even if all I can do is name the ache and let it be seen.
What Audiobooks Gave Back to Me
Even when I was trapped in my apartment—blinds drawn, head pounding, the world tilting beneath me—I could still be transported.
The migraines knocked me out of rhythm, and out of recognition. I couldn’t trust my energy. I canceled plans. Missed things I cared about. I watched that version of myself I had always depended on—the reliable one, the capable one—start to fade.
So I did what I’ve always done when I feel unmoored: I reached for a book – or rather, audiobook. I’ve been a proud listener of Audible since 2015.
Now, when screens and pages could cause searing pain down the sides of my head, audiobooks were my lifeline. I started listening to Les Misérables, Femina, Race After Technology, How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England, and Character, letting them play while I lay motionless in bed or shuffled to the kitchen to reheat chicken congee I made in bulk. I even listened to HCI papers through Speechify, letting their clunky syntax become oddly comforting.
Sometimes the topics were way too heavy for my sensitive mind. That’s when I turned to the books every woman reads but doesn’t always name publicly—the quiet comforts passed friend to friend without pretense. I could distract myself from the dizziness and nausea for a few hours at a time with some regency romance or litrpg.
And so listening became a lifeline. Not a hobby. Not a virtue. Not some aesthetic return to self-care. When I couldn’t move my body, these stories moved something in my mind. They reminded me that I still had curiosity. That I could still lose myself in ideas. That I could still feel joy, or fury, or awe—even when I couldn’t do much else.
This wasn’t the first time reading saved me. Two years ago, during concussion recovery, I got through an impressive (for me) number of classics while I was similarly trapped: Don Quixote, The Brothers Karamazov, Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, North and South, and Moby Dick. Of course, I balanced those with an equal (or greater) number of “embarrassing” reads. Each book reminded me that my brain was still mine, even if it wasn’t working quite right. That the light was still on, even if flickering.
Reading certainly didn’t fix my migraines. But it is giving me a way back to myself. Whether through Hugo’s moral universe, feminist theory, speculative critiques of tech, or soft romance tropes I’ll never publicly admit to loving, every book cracked open something in me.
They gave me back pieces of myself.
I am grateful to reading for that.