There's a lot of talk (and sometimes from me) about whether things are weak or strong. But... it's subjective. Is it weak or strong to go through migraines? It's both. It's a defect. It's something wrong with me. If I could change my DNA (or reverse the damage if it came from hitting my head sometime as a toddler - for example, who knows, maybe the time I rode my tricycle down a flight of stairs and fell on my head - or maybe the time I ran out of the bathtub, slipped, hit my head on the sharp corner of the sink counter, bled all over the place, and had to get stitches) so that I didn't get them, I would. Sure, it could be unhealthy to walk around everywhere thinking "I'm defective. There's something wrong with me." There's something wrong with all of us, though. Evolution is a process of one defect after another. We're all massive conglomerations of typos, some of which are essential.

The things that make us weak can also make us strong, and the other way around. It isn't strictly one or the other. In fact it may be a mild/naive form of gaslighting to insist "This *is not* weak. It is *strong*." I mean, without metrics, these are opinion words. When you give an opinion, you should be aware it's an opinion and someone else will have another, and that isn't evil, it's just natural.

I'm sure - there's no question in my mind - that some of my greatest and most useful qualities are seen as weak, defective, annoying, stupid, or wrong by others. But when it's useful over and over, it is also a strength.

Migraines have taught me many things, not only about pain and suffering and perception, but also about brain chemistry and communication.

It isn't badass - I think - to suck it up and take the pain when the pain comes from a self-reinforcing inflammatory cascade - a feedback loop. A migraine is almost exactly like feedback from a mic on a PA. It's this needle-sharp, hot, almost (with the migraine, it literally is) nauseating crack down the calcium-phosphate crystal of your skull and your soul. That's kind of how it feels. Like a needle through your eyebrow, behind your eye, into your brain. Just left there, radiating. The pain leaks into the bridge of your nose, across the top of your head, into your neck at the atlas vertebra, sometimes your jaw and teeth. It doesn't have to be that bad to drive you slightly crazy. Nauseating pain that persists mercilessly is much worse than the same pain for a moment. It's more what it does to the pit of your stomach and your sense of the decency of the world than what it does to your actual pain receptors, somehow, though when the pain subsides, there's often relief to the point of euphoria.

So it's a thing I learned that just because pain isn't obviously physically damaging anything, it is actually not good, and trying to push through it with willpower can weaken rather than strengthen you. Pain has psychological effects, and when you let that inflammatory feedback run - like the mic feedback - without interrupting it, it grows and grows until it reaches some saturation point (you hope - but you really don't want to find out how high that point can be, because when you think you know, it can go higher). The longer you let a migraine run this time, the more easily you'll get the next one. And the more it'll affect your mental clarity, too, and probably your cardiovascular health. That isn't badass, really. That's something to avoid.