California Dreams (and headaches)
Why isn't this vacation working?
I am looking at my bubble bath nails, homegrown, their smooth surfaces like milk glass in the sun streaming through the car windows.
Why isn’t this working? I think.
It never works, I remind myself, sitting back in my chair, my mind beginning to whir like the fan in an overheated laptop.
That was last Christmas, on a trip out to the coast. We stayed in a house by the sea. There was a hot tub, we could hear the ocean from the porch. We drove into town and wondered around sleepy little thrift stores. The sun was out, the dogs were galloping across the beach.
And I was looking at my nails, which I had painted before we left, because I knew that I was prone to feeling inadequate. Prone to wishing I was more put together, more expertly styled, more effortlessly at ease with myself and my oversized sweaters and my perfect, understated manicure.
But it wasn’t working. Everything was, ostensibly, perfect and yet I still felt disembodied, still felt like the experience wasn’t rich enough, real enough to pull me back into myself.
That’s the problem, really. I don’t live in my body, I live in my head. My mind, which is always checking the time, always asking things like, am I having fun? Are we having fun?
This is why, when we set off a few weeks ago to drive down the coast to California, I was not surprised to find myself looking down at my nails in the car, running a finger over each smooth surface, trying to jog myself back into my body.
Maybe I could have done it—settled into myself like marmalade in a jar, pressed into all of my edges—if it wasn’t for the headache.
It started on the first evening, blooming at the back of my skull, creeping up around my eyes. Every morning, for eight days, it would start up again within an hour of waking up. I could press it back a bit with ibuprofen, an excedrin. But I could feel it hovering at the margins, ready to come back if I moved my head a little too fast, if the sunlight bouncing off the cars on the highway was a little too bright, if I thought too long about a second glass of wine at dinner.
“That’s a nice name, Ms. Fox,” the young, male receptionist said to me.
I was at an urgent care in Palm Springs, because I had had a headache for eight days.
Is this man hitting on me? At an urgent care?
But I still checked my reflection in the bathroom mirror a minute later. Sunscreen sheening on my cheeks, smudged around the neck of my black top. I was wearing the one pair of jeans I’d brought on the trip. They needed washed.
In short, I looked like I’d had a headache for eight days. But I guess in Palm Springs, anyone under the age of 65 is very, very eligible.
I sat down in a chair in the waiting room, wondered what mental disease I had that made me need to be attractive to the male receptionist at an urgent care.
The headache didn’t really go away until we were home. Even after ibuprofen, excedrin, naproxen, an injection of toradal, and an imitrex prescription.
A few weeks before the trip, I’d seen a video about a women living with intractable migraine, which is a migraine that never goes away (NEVER. GOES. AWAY.).
Every few hours a voice in my mind would whisper, iNtRaCtAbLe MiGrAiNe.
I would close my eyes, press cold fingertips against my temples, that’s not helping.
The trip was beautiful! The photos prove that. And we had a great time in spite of the headache, and my anxiety about the headache, and the anxiety-to-worsening-headache pipeline.
But it reminded me of how hard it is for me to actually experience the moments I’m in, headache or no headache. It’s easier for me to process things when they are in the past.
Look at these photos, see how pretty it was!
Or pretend process (i.e. obsess) about things that might be the future. I mean, who doesn’t love to create a whole scenario in their mind and then get their feelings hurt over something that hasn’t even happened?
I hear meditation can help with this. Maybe I will try that.
Maybe some day I will be on a plane or in a car, staring at my nails, tipping them up and down to watch the light reflect across their pearl-smooth surfaces, rubbing an expensive hand cream into my cuticles, and I will think,
maybe this is working.
Hi. Meditation, I do think is worth exploring. I’m not great at it - but I use it just enough to help me find my way back to center when I find myself wondering away. I felt compelled to comment because I see your focus on your nails as a great entry point to use your nails to focus you back into the present.
Reminder, no expert here, but meditation uses repetitive focus and movements like breathing to remove all the noise in your head. Use your focus on your nails in the same way. Find a repetitive message to say as you use your finger on one hand to trace the fingernails in the other hand. Maybe, “My nails help remind me to stay present”.
Do that on both hands and use it as a way to forgive your thoughts and come back to your intention to be present.
Good luck.