Claire Conger

Like Joan Didion, I used to get migraines.

For me, it was the kind of migraine when you’re so nauseated that you vomit. It was when I was married, or rather living with my baby’s father.

I felt trapped.

It is the hardest thing I ever did, to leave, but when I left, so did the headaches.

Joan Didion describes something similar in her essay “In Bed” written in 1968.

“Three, four, sometimes five times a month, I spend the day in bed with a migraine headache, insensible to the world around me,” Ms Didion begins.

When does she get them? “Tell me that my house is burned down, my husband has left me, that there is gunfighting in the streets and panic in the banks, and I will not respond by getting a headache. It comes instead when I am fighting not an open but a guerrilla war with my own life, during weeks of small household confusions, lost laundry, unhappy help, canceled appointments, on days when the telephone rings too much and I get no work done and the wind is coming up.”

In other words, Ms Didion gets her migraines when she feels trapped.

What traps Joan Didion? It would be “all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties” that recede with the pain.

It would be those thoughts that the pain purges. Would you have hidden resentments if you didn’t have vain anxieties? Do you need to be ill in order to clear your mind?

You can read “In Bed” along with nineteen other essays in The White Album copyright 1979.