The Unfiltered · Monday · No. 12
Sitting here tonight with one of the mild ones. Not the bad kind. I want to say that up front, because if you’ve never had one you probably think there’s just “headache” and I need you to understand there’s a whole scale, and I live somewhere on it every single day, and tonight is just the low end of a scale that never actually hits zero.
Little over a year since the stroke. Two weeks, back then, where I literally could not talk. Words I’d known my whole life just weren’t there when I reached for them. That part came back. I got lucky, and I know it, and I don’t take it for granted for one single day.
The migraines didn’t come back. They never left. They’re not a symptom anymore. They’re just Tuesday.
Here’s what nobody tells you about living with something like this every day: it’s not the pain that gets you in the end. You adapt to pain. I’ve adapted to pain the way you adapt to a shitty mattress — you stop noticing it’s shitty, you just notice when it’s worse than usual. What actually gets you is what the pain does to your bandwidth. How much less room is left over for anything else.
Tonight, mild version, and even so — a butterfly went past the window earlier and something in me wanted to scream at it. A fucking butterfly. Doing nothing. Existing in the most harmless way a living thing is capable of existing. And some raw nerve in me still flared up like it had personally come to fuck with me.
That’s not the migraine being dramatic. That’s just what’s left of my patience on a day like this. It’s already spent somewhere else, on staying upright, on being a person who functions, and there’s nothing held in reserve for a butterfly.
I know the whole dichotomy of control thing. I’ve written about it. I believe it. The butterfly isn’t doing anything to me — my judgment about the butterfly is doing something to me, and the judgment is mine to manage, blah blah, I know the whole architecture of it, I could recite it in my sleep.
Knowing it and having access to it in the actual moment are two completely different things, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. On a bad day, the philosophy is sitting right there, fully intact, and I simply cannot reach it, the way you can see your phone on the other side of the room and still not have it in your hand. I know exactly what I’m supposed to do with the irritation. Knowing doesn’t move my arm.
The part that actually breaks me a little, more than the pain itself, is what happens when people need things from me while I’m like this. Not big things. Nobody’s asking me to move a couch. It’s small stuff — a question, a favor, five minutes of my attention — the kind of thing that on a normal day I’d do without even registering it as a cost. On a day like today, each one lands like a full invoice. One person needs something, fine. Second person, right behind them, needs something else. Third person. None of them did anything wrong. None of them know what today costs me just to be sitting here typing this out. And I can feel myself getting closer to the edge of snapping at someone who did nothing but ask me a completely reasonable question at a completely reasonable time.
What I actually want, in those exact moments, is something almost embarrassingly small: quiet. A room with nobody in it. Nobody needing anything from me for twenty consecutive minutes. That’s it. That’s the whole ask. And it’s the one thing that never seems to be available exactly when I need it most.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, though, and it’s the only honest thing I’ve got tonight: you don’t need a stroke for this. You don’t need migraines. Every single person reading this has had the version of today where a coworker’s completely normal question felt like an assault, where your kid asking for a snack felt unbearable for half a second before you caught yourself, where something as dumb as a slow checkout line made you want to put your fist through the car window. That’s not a medical condition. That’s just being a person with a finite tank, some days more finite than others.
I don’t get a different feeling than everyone else gets. I just get it on a schedule I can’t opt out of, and I get to watch, up close, exactly how thin the line is between fine and not fine, because I’m standing on it basically every day instead of once a month.
I don’t have some clean ending where I tell you I made peace with the butterfly. I didn’t. I sat there wanting to be irrationally furious at a harmless insect, knew the whole time that it was absurd, and stayed irritated anyway for about four minutes before it passed on its own, the way it always eventually does.
That’s the actual practice, on days like this. Not transcending it. Just outlasting it, four minutes at a time, until the tank refills enough to be a person again.
The Unfiltered runs every Monday — no lessons, no answers. Just what’s true.
