A World Too Bright

How much of our suffering comes from the event itself, and how much comes from our fight against the fact that it doesn’t match what we expected? This book is more intimate than the others in this collection — less about the thought patterns around migraine, more about the raw, strange experience of visual aura itself: the shimmer, the missing pieces of a familiar room, the sense that your own perception has briefly become unreliable. There’s grief in that strangeness, and there’s also something close to wonder, if you’re willing to look at it that way.

There’s a particular strangeness to visual aura that’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t lived it: the room is still there, mostly, except for the piece of it your eyes have quietly stopped delivering. A shimmering gap, moving slowly, taking a familiar space and making it briefly, unmistakably foreign. The first instinct, especially early on, is a kind of quiet alarm about the self: something is wrong with me, my body is failing.

That thought treats the aura as a verdict on your whole body, rather than as a specific, temporary, well-understood neurological event. A shimmer in your vision is not a verdict on your whole body. It’s a temporary, specific event your brain knows how to end on its own.

Fear is common here, and understandable — your own perception, the thing you trust most to tell you what’s real, has briefly become unreliable. The reaction often includes closing your eyes, freezing in place, or a wave of panic completely out of proportion to how briefly the episode actually lasts. Experience: a shimmering gap appears in your vision.

↓ Automatic thought: ‘something is wrong with me.’ ↓ Emotion: fear, disorientation, a sense of unreliable perception. ↓ Reaction: freezing, panicking, or fighting the sensation. ↓ Observation: ‘this is strange. It is not the same thing as broken.’ ↓ Possibility: greeting the strangeness calmly, the way you’d greet weather passing through.

The word I would use to describe my aura, if I set fear aside for a moment… Is there any part of the visual strangeness that, honestly, holds a kind of beauty alongside the fear? Strange and broken feel like the same word in the middle of an episode. They are not.

Your visual system is doing something unusual, temporarily, and well within a pattern your brain already knows how to complete and end on its own. Letting go here looks like greeting the shimmer instead of fighting it — closing your eyes if that helps, breathing slowly, and trusting that this particular strangeness, like every one before it, will finish on its own. The world isn’t actually too bright.

Your perception of it is simply passing through weather of its own, for a little while. The world didn’t actually change. Your perception of it took a brief, strange detour. Both things can be true, and neither one means you’re broken. The aura is strange, genuinely strange, every single time.

Strange was never the same word as broken, even on the days it felt that way. How much of our suffering comes from the event itself, and how much comes from our fight against the fact that it doesn’t match what we expected? Next in the series: The Sadness of Losing What You Imagined — on the grief that so often hides underneath anger.

to explain another symptom, but to sit with the feelings that so often ride alongside one: anger that things aren’t as they should be, and grief for the versions of days, people, and himself that pain quietly rewrote. One question runs underneath every book here: how much of our suffering comes from the event itself, and how much comes from our fight against the fact that the event doesn’t match what we expected? He doesn’t have a tidy answer.

He has ten honest attempts at sitting with the question anyway. Want the whole journey? Times — the full story, with every practice, every episode, and every lesson in one place. The Identity Series — on reclaiming yourself from the condition: Person on the Horizon Movement & Parenting — by Sarah J.S.: Hormones & Migraine — also by Sarah J.S.: Caregiving & the Sandwich Generation — by Steven Albert K.S.: Your Aging Parent About Their Migraine Healing & Lightness — by Jake R.: Grateful Body Visual Health Anxiety — by Amanda Q.