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.
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1 response so far ↓
1 Leigh // Apr 13, 2012 at 3:17 pm
Claire,
I know nothing about you except for your comments on Joan Didion’s migraine problem. The message that you convey to me is that if Joan Didion were to follow your example, leave her husband? Or something like that, abandon whatever ostensibly entraps her, that she would no longer have migraines. Did you mean to imply as much? Isn’t such suggestion just a bit presumptuous?
First, permit me to suggest that you go back and read her writing again, and this time, pay particular attention to the point she makes about the genetic component of the migraine phenomenon. Then also do please note her remarks about how she has found others quick to make negative judgments about her character on account of the headaches. I think you may have unwittingly fallen into this trap.
You know: I used to believe, like you seem to, that human existence could be explained in a rather mathematical way, for example, “a+b=c” or “If A and B then C,” or some other simple and understandable construction. Then I was dismayed when someone older and wiser pointed out that, over time, I may realize that I just can’t explain everything that happens in such a perfect fashion. Worse, I do others a real injustice when I arrogantly presume to know why they, for instance, have developed cancer. Since the 1960s or 70s we Americans have been cultivating a reductionist New Age philosophy, tainted by an over-simplification of Freudian ideas, that asserts, for example, that the appearance of the disease of cancer results from unresolved rage at one’s family of origin. But think of how many astounding people, e.g., Mother Theresa, if I recall correctly, have died of cancer! And you know, here’s the crux of the matter: Who cares?
Who cares if Joan Didion gets migraines because she feels trapped in her life–or at least she did back in 1968 when she wrote the essay. Who knows what her experience is today, nearly 45 years later? Migraines or not, look at what Joan Didion has contributed to the canon of American literature! My God! I wish *my* migraines could do for humanity even a smidgen of what hers have done!
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