I.

Migraines are caused by an excess of electricity in the brain, which has no outlet, and so it hurts me.

When I say electricity, I want you to read it as power. When I say power, I want you to read it as electricity. Medical diagnosis is one kind of narrative, but now I'm telling you mine.

I started getting near-daily complex migraines at 36. I felt stroke-like symptoms—buzzing in my left arm and leg, strange disturbances in my field of vision—the day after I received the vaccine booster. They receded, then recurred a few weeks later, mid-Omicron season, sending me to the ER, where they ruled out a stroke, and then to a neurologist.

The neurologist, a humorless man in a sterile midtown office, asked for my health history. His eyes grew alert when I told him I had been diagnosed with anxiety at 19. I saw the gears of a great machine turning inside his mind, closing his ears to what I would spend the next four months saying: I am still sick, I am getting worse, I need help.

He frowned when I told him about the timing of the onset of illness and told me I had migraines, that the cause of those migraines was anxiety. I also frowned. Doctor, I wanted to say, I've had anxiety for seventeen years with no migraines.

The timing felt absurd. After spending my late twenties and early thirties depressed and trapped, I left my dead-end relationship and began to write again. Or—I tried to develop a sense of my own power only to find my body beset by electrical problems, like some kind of cosmic joke.

II.

When you're struck by lightning, it leaves a trail of branching scars across the interior of the body. I read this in a book by my former writing teacher, Kati, who told me I wasn't done writing about men who hurt me.

The MRI my neurologist ordered revealed another kind of markings: white matter in the frontal cortex that may reflect the sequelae of migraines. I googled "sequelae"—damage, wound, residue, trauma. I did not realize the flashes of migraine left marks, ghostly traces on the MRI, until I read his notes in the MyChart app. They were not intended for me to see.  Something was hurting me. The neurologist believed that something was me.

My migraines are not usually painful. Instead, a buzzing current courses down my left arm and leg. The sensation spreads to my face—my lips, my tongue. In his notes in my health chart: I have reassured the patient that her symptoms are entirely normal. He wanted me to stay calm and quiet as my mouth went numb, nerves sparking, waiting until the electricity was gone so I could speak.

III.

When I was a girl, I propped my little body half off the top bunk of my bed, my torso stretched dangerously forward towards the nightlight, an open book in my hands. Once, trying to unplug it, I stuck my finger in the socket and felt a full second of hot agony I never forgot.

At nineteen, when I wanted to die, I took a writing class instead, following an instinct that if I could make a narrative out of my life, I'd figure out how to survive it. I made friends with a woman in her sixties who wrote about electroshock therapy, though I worried she was my future, wearing her treatment-resistant depression like a shroud. Still, the words cascaded out of her, a shower of sparks.

She quoted Viktor Frankl: What is to give light must endure burning. I loved this line; it made our shared pain noble. Lately, though, I wonder how much burning one ought to endure, how much that light is worth.

Before she had rheumatoid arthritis, the writer Caren Beilin says, I never made a connection when I saw someone limping, dragging, or bent, that pain is attached to shape, to form. I did not know that form is pain.

When I think of the form of depression, I imagine a void—formless black. Migraine is what you're reading: zaps. Air cleaved by lightning. Flash! And gone again.

It hurts too much to write paragraphs about illness, about men. It hurts to think about the neurologist, dim shadow of a male authority figure, telling me a new version of the same story I've heard all my life. I try sentences instead, sentences for the narrative that fails to appear. Sentences for the life sentence.

IV.

The neurologist dismissed me with a prescription to relax and take a magnesium supplement. I watched my own private lightshow on the subway home, flares and starbursts dancing across the walls and ceiling, aura migraine projections of my mind.

Changing trains, I peered into the tunnel and saw the blue signal light with its ten-foot-tall tail. How strange it was to see the unreal so clearly. If knowing my perceptions are false is a sign of sanity, why do I feel so crazy? At home, the pain returned, and I lost the energy to keep wondering.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a sharp gnaw in my pelvis and repeated the words my neurologist taught me each time I reported a new symptom: This is perfectly normal. His notes in the MyChart app said, The patient is anxious and tearful at times. I wanted the doctor I respected to respect me. I wanted to be a good patient. So I ignored the pain, just like the good doctor taught me.

V.

I spent the years from 19 to 33 going numb. The first man I loved lied to me and used me, which is to say he disempowered me. What electricity I still generated I spent too freely on the men who came after. Dense, wooden, I did not conduct.

I refer to that period as the time I was dead. It was almost half my life. A half-life half alive.

VI.

Sometimes in that long winter of illness, a headache rattled my skull like a thunderclap. Then I needed absolute darkness, a black vacuum around me to absorb the pain. Every light was a starburst, a star of Bethlehem, a trailing incandescence, leading not westward but straight to the center of my mind. On the worst days, constant flashing lights, an optical illusion. I looked out my window to see who was having a photo shoot, found the street empty.

I lay in pigeon pose on my yoga mat, my head resting on my hands. It's okay, brain, I told my brain. Or: It's okay, brain, one part of my brain told another. I see you. You can stop flashing. Even with my eyes closed, my brain sent up bright flares. Flash! Flash!

The flash essay is a short-form essay. The sentences I wrote on migraine days were shorter still, but they were as long as I could manage.  On a single page in my notebook from the sickest month: When I stop getting migraines five days a week, it's over for you bitches. The rest of the page is blank.

VII.

Whitman sings the body electric, yet while men build houses and fight fires, women are but the recipients of limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous… quivering jelly of love. In nine months, they become the mothers of men. I grew up with this poem; it's no wonder I didn't feel particularly empowered as a woman, as a writer.

Not to knock Whitman. At 33, I thought of a noiseless patient spider when I stepped into the void that led away from my old life.

But on the subject of electric bodies, there's a poem I like better, by Matthea Harvey: That's me in the hum of your fan, me in the crackle of your TV, me lighting up every last lightbulb. The speaker is covered in a rash of sockets, between the eyes and behind the knees. I don't remember who first used me. I don't either.

At night I can see the red switches of the piles of power-strips blinking and imagine the city running on whatever strange surge (not quite sugar, not quite caffeine) flows through my veins. I cried when I read those lines, knowing they were true. It hurts to be a woman with power. It hurts both to hold it and to give it away.

VIII.

The acupuncturist I began seeing pricked the soft web between my first and second toes. You will feel a little zap.

I saw her secretly, driven by desperation. She placed a needle in my left bicep, another at the top of my shoulder. Clamped to each, plastic-coated wires, which entered an electrode resting on the padded table by my head. She flipped a switch and my shoulder twitched.

My neurologist said the herniated discs and frozen shoulder that appeared six months before the migraines did were unrelated. The acupuncturist saw a narrative thread: a herniated disc, then inflammatory response to the vaccine or to Covid, then migraine. I clung to the logic of her story, the one she told me was written in my body.

Hearing about the herniated discs, the unnatural stiffness of my shoulder, my friend told me, The body keeps the score. The consequences of my complicated relationship with female power: the upper third of my left arm cannot conduct, my brain conducts too much.

IX.

The nervous system requires electricity to send signals to the brain and body, which is how we move, think, and feel. To be alive is to be electric. That's not something I used to think about, back when my relation to power was medically normal.

Pain signals move through neurons at a rate of only 1.3 miles per hour. Which means I could outrun my pain if I could excise it, though I only run an 11-minute mile. Too bad I have to carry it with me!

Want to hear my favorite joke? Every day is leg day when you're running from your problems! Ha ha ha!

Pain is the emotional experience associated with an electrical signal traveling from a nerve to the brain, not the electrical signal itself. I learned this fun fact from neurologist Vernon Williams, MD, author of Pain: Is It All In Your Head? The title is a joke. You need a brain to feel pain. Get it? Ha ha ha! Neurologists, man. They're funny.

X.

After three months of worsening symptoms, I begged my neurologist, tearful and anxious, for more help. He offered the choice between Effexor, an SSRI that may cause weight gain, and Lamictal, an anti-epileptic drug that causes brain fog. In my journal, I wrote, Why am I always being made to choose between being fat and being stupid? I chose fat.

I took the first pill, slept fitfully, and woke up unsure I was still me: something was blocking the ruminating movement of my brain. I was powerless to conduct a coherent thought, suddenly afraid of death, madness, suicide. All I managed to say in a desperate email to my neurologist: Please help something is very wrong I don't think I like Effexor very much.

After two hours of terror, I felt a swift change in my skull as my brain flooded with skittering electricity. Something had been turned on inside my head. My friend R. told me these were brain zaps, a common side effect of antidepressants. All these years on other SSRIs and I'd never had it before. It felt delightful, my brain lit up. I was giddy with it. The flashes got worse, but I didn't care—I was happy!

Then I was sure I was going to be a great writer, but the part of my brain with a grasp on reality feared this self-assuredness signaled drug-induced delusion. I asked my neurologist, who told me my serotonin levels would stabilize, that I would return to normal. And I did, that familiar self-doubt creeping in.

XI.

Studying myself in the mirror the next week, I noticed fireworks of burst capillaries circling my armpits and said, This is perfectly normal. Two hours later, following a coughing fit in class, I looked down at my forearms and found them covered with fireworks, too. I held my arm out to my professor, saying nothing. She said, Go, now, to the doctor.

A general practitioner asked me to pee in a cup. The urine was as cloudy as the sky before a summer storm. Did you know you have an advanced bladder infection? Did you know a severe infection can worsen migraines? She prescribed strong antibiotics and referred me to a female neurologist who told me, You have endured a medical trauma. Funny—on her exam table, I couldn't stop crying.

XII.

The men I date seem to have a sixth sense about my electric body. I don't think they like it.

A year before the migraines started, I stood under the Williamsburg Bridge while a man with a Flock of Seagulls haircut slipped his tongue in my mouth, his palm pressed across my clavicle like a volt. Nobody had touched me in months. I pushed his hand under the hem of my dress; he pulled away. I want our first time to be special, he said. I never saw him again—I scared him, my body too reactive to his touch.

Once I found myself lying in bed with R., my hand on his cheek, pulling his face toward mine. I gasped when he pressed himself against me and felt my body dissolve in pleasure. After, we discussed whether this dalliance would hurt our friendship—of course it did; I felt used, useless. I mention it because of how he described that night, which makes me think he could feel it, that it's not just in my head, this electricity thing. R. is a writer; he chooses his words carefully. Our dynamic, he said, felt very charged.

I'm not giving him the last word, so: man, you bet it did.

XIII.

With Effexor and antibiotics, the auras stopped. Six months later, working on a photo shoot, I sat tense as a real flash went off and photos of cocktails and liquor bottles appeared on the camera screen. It's not a migraine, my brain said to my brain, You're okay.

I did this work to buy time to write. And to pay my medical bills, thousands of dollars for specialists out of network, endless currents of currency flowing away from me.

XIV.

I spent the summer of my 35th year at the beach. Staring down my looming middle age, I decided to take charge of the course of my life. A year and a half later, I started getting migraines. I'm not saying these two events are related. I'm not saying they're not, either. I'm saying I find it difficult to be a woman with an unstable relationship to her own power.

To live within a great system that is often hostile to it.

To feel the aftershocks of that struggle in the body.

To work my way backwards looking for the true onset of symptoms, unraveling a knotted cord of pain as I go, and still find it nowhere.

But on the gray day that summer when I decided I'd seize that power back, I saw storm clouds roll in across the Cape and raced down the hill to the shore. From the edge of the dock, I watched lighting dance over the water and welcomed it toward me.

Feeling low below the vaulted sky, salt wind plastering static hair to my face, I stretched out my arms and knew the same electricity coursed through me, flowing from my fingers heavenward, and laughed.

__

After I recovered from the illness I write about here, I tried to write a more straightforward essay about medical gaslighting but kept finding myself bogged down in litigating every detail of my interactions with my former neurologist, which felt unhealthy and not interesting to anyone other than me. Still, I felt like I had to wring something out of the experience, perhaps to get back a measure of control over my body that I'd lost entering the medical industrial complex--this is not NOT a revenge essay (haha)--so I took inspiration from Bhanu Kapil's Ban en Banlieue, this idea of sentences towards a failed project, and of failure as a generative force. I was also thinking about "Free Electricity," the Matthea Harvey poem I quote from here, which seemed to gesture towards a more complicated relationship between ideas of power and the female body than I'm used to seeing. The obviousness of the power/empowerment pun led to the element of humor in the piece; that tension is what helps the disparate elements hang together, but the humor is less truly funny and more a thin veil for my rage. I'm trying to make as much space as possible for anger in my work so it doesn't eat me alive in my regular life.