The Watchtower

Every watchtower is built with good intentions. Mine was built out of floaters, flickers, and a reasonable fear of being caught off guard by an aura. Over time, though, I noticed I had stopped living in the town below and had simply moved into the tower — scanning the horizon so constantly that I forgot there was anywhere else to be.

This book is about that tower: how it gets built, what it actually costs, and how to climb back down without leaving yourself undefended. I noticed every visual anomaly, tracked every floater’s vigilance of someone watching vital signs. This heightened awareness created an unusual relationship with my own vision — one where I was less a person who saw the world and more a person who audited his own eyes for signs of betrayal.

The tower is seductive because it feels like competence. Watching closely feels like responsibility, like diligence, like the opposite of denial. And in small doses, it is exactly that. The trouble starts when the watching never stops — when there is no longer an off duty, only different intensities of on.

“You seem to think about your vision constantly,” a friend told me. She was right, and the comment made me wonder something uncomfortable: could thinking about it less actually help me see better? Or at least, help me live better with how I see? Sometimes I wonder if the hyperawareness itself became part of the problem — a self-reinforcing cycle where attention amplifies perception.

The more I scanned for disturbances, the more disturbances I found. The more I found, the more urgently I scanned. Vigilance had stopped being a response to the condition and had become a second condition, running in parallel, feeding on itself. The mental energy spent on internal monitoring pulled me out of the present moment, transforming ordinary days into anxious ones.

This is the question the tower doesn’t want you to ask, because the honest answer dismantles its entire purpose. Vigilance promises safety and delivers exhaustion. It cannot prevent an episode — I never once scanned a migraine out of existence by watching hard enough — but it reliably prevents presence.

Every hour spent auditing my visual field was an hour subtracted from the conversation, the meal, the person in front of me. The condition took its minutes when an episode actually arrived. The vigilance took my days, every day, whether an episode arrived or not.

That trade is the tower’s real cost, and it is far higher than most of us ever add up. Minutes an actual episode costs you, on average… Minutes spent each day scanning, checking, and bracing for one that hasn’t happened… What that difference, multiplied by a year, actually costs you…

Looking back at my time with cluster headaches, I can see how vulnerable and lost I was. I hadn’t yet learned to identify my triggers, and the fear of another attack was absolutely excruciating. Without realizing it, I was creating a version of myself — a persona built around worry and over-worry for things that might never happen.

This anxious identity was slowly becoming who I was, because that’s where all my attention went. My mind was constantly scanning for visual auras, anticipating the next migraine, living in a state of hypervigilance that was exhausting me. The breakthrough came when I recognized I had to actively break this cycle — and that the worry itself was never protective.

It was just depleting. “Is worrying about this actually preventing it? What am I gaining by staying in this state of fear?” The answer was always nothing. The thing I scan for most often that has never once been prevented by my scanning… One hour this week when I could try being “off duty”

on purpose… Instead of constantly monitoring my vision for signs of an aura, I learned to redirect my focus to the present moment. When I caught myself scanning for symptoms, I would deliberately shift my attention to something concrete: the feeling of my feet on the ground, the sound of my breathing, an object in my immediate environment.

I began replacing the worry habit with creative expression. Instead of feeding the anxious persona I’d created, I started writing songs and poems — not as distraction, but as active rewiring. The creative process demanded presence and focus, pulling me out of the future-focused anxiety spiral.

Each song was a small victory over the worry habit; each poem, a step toward reclaiming who I was beyond the fear. Redirect the scan — a menu Grounding: name five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear — ordinary things, not symptoms. Create: write, sketch, hum, cook — anything that demands your attention be somewhere other than your own vigilance.

Name it out loud: “I’m scanning again” is often enough to loosen its grip, the same way naming a whisper does. Ask the question: “Is this watching preventing anything, right now?” Let the honest answer end the scan. None of this means abandoning real vigilance. I still pack sunglasses.

I still honor real limits. The tower isn’t the problem — living in it full-time is. Climbing down means keeping a lookout post you visit on purpose, rather than a residence you never leave. The most important realization from that season was simple and enormous: I had unconsciously created an identity around worry, and I had the power to uncreate it.

By recognizing where my attention was going and deliberately redirecting it, I broke free from the exhausting cycle of anticipating every visual aura and migraine. The tower feels like safety because vigilance always does, right up until you count what it costs. You can keep every real precaution and still climb down from the constant scanning — the two are not the same building.

We can inadvertently become our coping mechanisms.