The benefits of analogue moments are significant
“Don’t touch me,” I mumbled to my friend, who was gently rubbing my back. I lifted my head to vomit into the toilet again, the bitter smell of red wine and bile floating into the air.
My husband came in, shaking his head. “We HAVE to go,” he said. He pulled me up, helped me down the stairs, and walked me to our car, where our three children were waiting. We were at a house party with lots of couples and kids. I had been drinking red wine. The host topped off my glass a couple of times, and I wasn’t sure how much I’d had to drink, but the situation I was in felt infernal-I couldn’t recall feeling this bad since college. And, it was embarrassing. I was a grown woman, a mother.
Two days later, I woke up, got out of bed, and fell over. I wobbled back to the bed, holding my hands out in front of me as if reaching for an invisible wall, dropped onto the bed, and curled up under the sheets. I closed my eyes, and the room began to spin, even under the blackness of my lids.
Then, in January 2020, I was sick with a virus that doctors couldn’t identify. I couldn’t get out of bed for four days. I had a sore throat. I saw spots around bright lights, and sometimes my eyeballs ached. I began to lose peripheral vision. I was in a stressful job at the time, and I thought I had a sensory processing disorder, so I chalked it up to that. I’d always been sensitive to sounds, lights, and busy patterns. But computer work, which I had been doing for 25 years, became difficult. If I scrolled too fast, my eyes flickered, like a computer screen restarting. I also developed severe brain fog. I couldn’t remember names. I couldn’t retain information I had received the same day. I went to the doctor and was given a questionnaire, which ranked me at high risk for anxiety, so I started a low dose of an anti-anxiety medication. With medication, my anxiety subsided. I felt a little better and a bit lighter in my mood, but I still didn’t feel like myself. When I looked at patterns on rugs, they zig-zagged. When I closed my eyes, my eyeballs moved back and forth rapidly. My brain still felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and I had moments where simple words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. I’d search in my head for them, wondering why I suddenly couldn’t remember the name of someone I’d known for a decade. I’d randomly smell an odor similar to coffee and cigarettes. Walking sometimes felt like moving across a bounce house, with the unsteady, wobbly gait of a toddler.
That’s when a nurse practitioner said, “I think you have migraine.” Migraine had never even crossed my mind. Most people, myself included, think of migraine as a pounding, throbbing headache, which requires quiet and a dark room for convalescence. But migraine may not even involve head pain. She scheduled me for an ENT, an audiologist, and a neurologist within several weeks. An MRI confirmed spots in my brain’s white matter, a hallmark of migraine. My other symptoms helped confirm the diagnosis. Three years later, I had a diagnosis: Vestibular migraine.
Our vestibular system is a sensory system in the inner ear that provides the brain with information about motion, head position, and spatial orientation. It is the body’s primary balance mechanism, and it integrates eye movements and the physical body to maintain equilibrium. Vestibular dysfunction can lead to dizziness, vertigo, and instability. The diagnosis was welcome; however, there is no cure, and the course of action required to find what would help me, specifically, was overwhelming. The symptoms associated with vestibular migraine, such as vertigo, can make you feel hopeless. Constant dizziness, nausea, and pain that did not subside over days led me to the darkest thoughts of my life. Despite precautions, I never really knew what would trigger a migraine, making it hard to plan for anything. At times, life did not seem worth living.
Over the next few years, I overhauled my diet multiple times, tried three different medications at varying doses, slept an extra four to five hours a day, gained weight, lost muscle, and missed precious time with my growing children. Gone were the inversion poses I had taught in yoga classes for years. Gone, too, were simple amusement park rides, swing dancing with my husband, turning my head to respond to my name being called (!), rising from a chair without a head rush, and spending more than thirty minutes under the fluorescent lights of a store. The idea that I would advance to an executive level in my career waned day by day. I began to grieve the active life I had before vestibular migraine.
I dug into every resource I could find. I entered a year of vestibular rehab therapy, read books authored by the few vestibular experts that exist, stopped living my life online, likely my most important change. This was exceptionally challenging given that my job requires computer work all day. Computers and smartphones are a major issue for folks with neurological disorders. They trigger a mismatch in the brain between the visual input from the screen and the stationary physical sensation of the body. It is similar to cybersickness, a motion sickness caused by virtual reality headsets. Scrolling, rapid movement, high screen brightness, lack of blinking, and blue light overload the brain’s ability to process where the body is in relation to the environment, causing nausea, vertigo, and dizziness.
I was born in 1975, and though I am not completely nostalgic for that era, growing up in the mechanical age of the 1980s, before the digital world consumed so much of daily life, was grounding in a way that recent generations cannot understand fully. Vestibular migraine pushed me backwards, in a positive way, toward the non-digital age. By integrating more analogue moments into my life, I can now continue to do the things that mean the most to me: travel, spend time with friends, walk beside the ocean, and pursue hobbies that bring genuine joy, because my brain is not as overwhelmed, stimulated, and disordered. Weaving analogue qualities into my days helps me manage my condition and reclaim my life.