Migraine Series

This was actually done on August 13th. I'd had a massage and it brought up a lot of tension. I got a terrible migraine and lay in bed most of the day. One good thing was, I managed not to hate myself for having a migraine -- I finally figured out that if I was going to feel horrible anyway, I might as well be kind to myself while it was happening. Because that part I have some control over, even though I can't control the pain.

The other good thing was, I did this series. This is a variation on blind contour. Instead of looking at something and drawing it without looking at the page, I close my eyes and feel how my body feels and trace it from inside. In the first one, you can kind of see it's an "icepick" headache, with a fierce spot over the eye and then another at the back of the head, with the pain also coming from the shoulder. I draw it from myself, so it's kind of a mirror image, in that the pain was on the right. In this one, #8 in the series, it looks like things were only getting worse.

I kinda like this one (# 10). All in all there were 22. The eyes are there because you can feel them from inside and the nose and mouth, you know they are there too. In this one the pain has gotten over to the left as well.

I don't know that I felt any better after doing this, but at least I have a record of where I was. It's like my friend Lee said a long time ago -- when you're sick you can't imagine being anything else, and when you're well, you can't remember what it is like to be sick. (Or, as Virginia Woolf said, "we cannot quote Shakespeare to describe a headache.) When I look at these I do think I've described that headache a bit.