The very first time I ever had a migraine, I was about ten years old. I was taking lessons at a little music store less than a mile from our home. It was one of two tiny clusters of businesses in our small town: the cluster that included the post office ("downtown") and this cluster, which included a bank, a bakery, a butcher shop, a laundromat, a deli, a convenience store (eventually), and (inexplicably) this music shop, which eventually burned down and never reopened.

The deli was the defining landmark in my childhood; it changed ownership many times, but it was always referred to, regardless of what the sign outside said, as "Brit's." I was never sure if it was once called Brit's, or if someone named Brit (or of British descent) once owned it. One used to refer to things in that vicinity as being "near Brit's" and would arrange to meet friends "at Brit's." It was a dark place, with worn, grey wood floors, and we used to walk there and buy Italian ices in the summer. The music shop was up the hill from Brit's and the fellow who worked there gave lessons in a back room with a window that faced the gravel driveway of the laundromat.

One day I was playing a piece of music in that room and couldn't read the sheet music anymore; it slowly began to go all shimmery, like sunlight was reflecting off water onto the page. I was upset and disconcerted by the fact that I couldn't see, which threw off my playing, and the instructor chided me for not practicing. By the time the lesson ended, my vision was back to normal. When I told my mother about it as we walked home together, she didn't seem very concerned about my weird visual disturbance, but that may have been because I was so much more upset at having played poorly and having appeared not to have practiced when I truly had. As I walked, the pressure in my head grew, until I arrived home with a blinding headache, and shut myself up in my room and sank down onto the bed. The sunlight through my window seemed achingly bright, and I tried to block it out with a pillow. I assumed that trying to read music through the shimmer had given me a headache; it never occurred to me that the shimmer was part of the headache.

The shimmering and the headaches got more frequent in college, and I always assumed that trying to read through the shimmering (because I was always reading something and never wanted to stop, even when I couldn't see) caused the headaches. I almost always notice a migraine coming on (or test to see if a migraine is coming on) by reading. I will try to read something and find that I can't see the word that is directly in front of me. The words before and behind will be clear, but whatever I am trying to focus on will be blotted out, a tiny visual eclipse. I will only notice it when I'm reading at first, because the disturbance is so tiny, just enough to blot out a few letters on the page or screen. And I often push on through the shimmering now, knowing the pain is coming; I try to cram everything in that I want to get done, knowing that soon I will have to lie down and wait for the pain to be over.

I remember writing in my journal in college as my vision shimmered, lying on my bed in my room sophomore year, writing that I couldn't see. I went to see an optometrist, who told me I had perfect vision, but gave me reading glasses to help with what he assumed was occasional blurry vision from eye strain. I loved the reading glasses; they made me look very intellectual. I still got headaches. But at some point in college my brother started getting these things called "migraines," which, for him, started with tunnel vision, which would resolve to be followed by intense headaches. Oddly enough, that sounded just like what had been happening to me for the last ten years: visual disturbance followed by a splitting pain. So, I diagnosed myself with migraines in my twenties.

After my son was born, I was feverish and exhausted when my vision started shimmering in that familiar way. Yet I remember thinking I was dying, that the pushing during labor had caused me to burst a blood vessel in my brain and now I would never see my brand new son grow up. I terrified my husband with the desperation with which I told him I couldn't see and that a migraine was coming. He desperately told the nurses, who, surly and annoyed at the troublesome new parents, eventually left a paper cup on my bedside table with some ibuprophen in it.

The migraines got worse with the postpartum hormonal changes: there was vomiting, which was new, there was a new kind of foggy vision that could go on for days, unaccompanied by pain, and numbness down the left side of my face and arm, which sent me to a neurologist. So, after MRIs and ultrasounds and blood tests to rule out anything truly nasty, I was finally, in my thirties, formally diagnosed with migraines. And some of the fringe benefit symptoms I gained with my children -- the nausea, the numbness, the foggy vision -- have decided to remain part of my migraine symptoms even today: one of the many ways my body remembers that it carried my children, that it gave a part of itself up to them...

After I have a migraine, after the pain has disappeared, I spend some time in what I think of as a migraine hangover. I'm tired, and I feel disconnected and far from the world, like I'm wrapped in cotton. My vision is a little foggy; I can see, but I have to concentrate quite hard to focus, and it helps to wear sunglasses. That's where I've been today: not in pain, but tired, disconnected, foggy, seeking darkness. But I think I am almost back to the world, almost ready to face life without sunglasses again.