About The Migraine Diaries
I did not choose to become a migraine “expert”. Migraines chose me.
I have had them for over ten years. Not the occasional bad headache that a dark room and two Advil can fix. Chronic migraines. The kind that show up uninvited 15 or more days a month, take over your entire body, and leave you functioning at about 40% on a good day. The kind that turns you into a person who owns blackout curtains in every room and can tell you exactly which grocery store aisle has the least brutal lighting.
On the worst ones, I call them my vampire days. Light burns. Sound hurts. The only acceptable activity is lying completely still and hoping the cats stay quiet.
-
When I first started having migraines (after of course, going through years of just assuming these were headaches) regularly, every resource I found was medical. Medication options. Clinical definitions. Lists of triggers written like they were pulled from a textbook. Honestly, I felt like I had stepped into a Harry Potter novel… except the Latin phrases were meant to be describing what I was feeling, not help me lift a feather.
What I could not find was someone talking about the actual experience of it. What it feels like to sit in a work meeting with a migraine pressing behind your eye, nodding along and praying nobody asks you a direct question. What it is like to cancel plans again and feel the familiar wave of guilt that somehow hurts almost as much as the migraine itself. What it is like to wake up at 3am in pain with nobody there to help you, just you and the ceiling and the knowledge that tomorrow is going to be a write-off.
I live alone. There is no one to bring me water or turn off the TV or check in. There is no partner who has learned my warning signs. When a bad one hits, I manage it myself, and for a long time I thought that was just a personal failing. Surely everyone else had this more figured out than I did.
They did not. I just was not finding the people who were honest about it.
-
Looking back, I spent a long time having my experience minimised. First, by myself, assuming that what I was experiencing was just a bad headache, then by my family, thinking I was just being introverted and wanted to avoid gatherings. Then colleagues who could not understand why I needed to work from home on certain days or if I needed to be in the office why the blinds needed to be closed. By people who meant well but said things like "have you tried drinking more water?" as though I had not already overhauled my entire life around this condition.
When I finally spoke to my doctor about it, the conversation mainly focused on medications and tracking triggers… because there is no cure.
Getting a handle on my migraines has taken years of trial, error, dead ends, and eventually learning to trust my own experience above anyone else's opinion of it, and even now, there are good days and bad days. I am not a doctor. I am not a neurologist. What I am is someone who has spent a decade figuring out how to build a full life around a condition that does not care about your plans.
That experience is worth something. This blog is where I share it in hopes that it can help even one person who is in a similar situation.
-
Lucy came first. She is a bit of a drama queen on her own terms, very much a mind-her-own-business cat, but on my bad days, she knows. She will appear out of nowhere and tuck herself against me for hours. No fuss, no noise. Just there.
Jerri is my daily joy. Where Lucy is the nurse, Jerri is the reason I get off the couch. She wants to play, she wants attention, she makes me laugh when I genuinely did not think I had a laugh left in me. Both of them are waiting at the door every single time I come home from work, which, on the days when work was held together with sheer stubbornness and a prayer, means more than I can adequately explain.
They did not fix my migraines. But they make the hard days feel less like something I’m going through alone.
-
I started noticing more migraine content appearing in my Instagram feed. Which was good, in theory. But most of it was clinical. Medical explainers, supplement recommendations, trigger lists. Useful, yes. But it was not speaking to the reality of living with chronic migraines when you do not have a support system at home. When you are managing your condition at work and hoping nobody notices. When you are exhausted, not just from the migraine itself but from the mental load of managing it day after day without anyone to share that weight with.
I built The Migraine Diaries for the people in that gap. The ones who are already across the medical basics and just want someone to be honest with them about the rest of it.
You will find research I’ve found helpful, practical tools, and things that have genuinely helped me. You will also find the unfiltered version of what actually living with migraines looks like, including the dark humour that gets me through the vampire days.
You are not alone in this. Even if it feels like it at 3am.