monster, never leave home without it

There is a savage beast living inside me.  Dexter (the serial-killer) has his dark passenger.  I have my migraine monster.

Not many people can see it.  I've learned to hide it so well.  I used to have a good friend in college who could always tell, no matter how well I thought I was hiding.  She said it was something about my eyes.  I think most people don't look that closely.

It's changed me into someone I don't always like or respect.  I used to be intrepid and love adventure.  Crave it, even.  Now, I am more cautious, more fearful of the excruciating torture that I know can arrive at any minute from this invisible, merciless barbarian.

When I did a zipline tour in Costa Rica several years ago, which was 600 hundred feet above the ground, I wasn't scared of dying.  I got stuck along the line because my weight wasn't enough to zip me to the end.  That wasn't scary somehow.

And now?  I'm scared to eat too late or to stay up too late.  I used to travel all over the world, but now I'm resistant to spending an entire day away from home.  Twenty-year-old me wouldn't like current me.  And that has to change.



Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

--Friedrich Nietzsche