Who Was I Before?

Of all the questions this condition ever handed me, this is the one that changed the most. Not “how do I stop the auras,” which I never fully answered — but a quieter one, asked on an ordinary afternoon: who was I before all this vigilance? What did I think about when I wasn’t analyzing every flicker in my vision?

This book is the heart of the series, because it isn’t really about migraine at all. It’s about the person who was standing underneath the diagnosis the entire time, waiting to be noticed again. “Who was I before all this vigilance?” I wondered. What did I think about when I wasn’t analyzing every flicker in my vision?

It’s a disorienting question to sit with honestly, because for many of us the answer takes a long time to arrive. The condition moved in gradually enough that we never marked the day the old tenant moved out. But the question itself is generous, not accusatory. It doesn’t ask you to prove the old self still exists.

It only asks you to go looking — and looking, it turns out, is usually enough to find him. I still catch glimpses of my pre-migraine self sometimes — moments when I’m so absorbed in a conversation or an activity that I forget to monitor my visual field entirely. These brief holidays from hypervigilance feel like visiting an old friend.

The glimpses rarely announce themselves in advance. They arrive in the middle of a good conversation, halfway through a task that demands your full hands and your full attention, in the particular kind of laughter that leaves no spare processing power for symptom-checking. You don’t decide to have a glimpse.

You simply notice, afterward, that you had one. Hunting your own glimpses — a week-long log □ Today, the moment I forgot to monitor anything was… □ What was I doing? Who was I with? □ How did I feel in the minute right after I noticed I’d forgotten?

□ Do this daily for a week, then look for the pattern — it will point directly at your way back. Oh, there you are, I think, whenever one of these glimpses surfaces. That small, warm recognition matters more than it seems. It is proof, collected firsthand rather than argued for, that the pre-condition self was never destroyed.

He was only crowded out by the noise of constant monitoring — and noise, unlike a person, can be turned down. The self who forgets to check is not gone. He is exactly as present as he ever was — he simply needs the monitoring to quiet down before he can be heard.

This reframes the entire project. The goal was never to become someone new, someone braver or more resilient than you used to be — though those things may come. The goal is retrieval. You are not building a person from scratch. You are finding one who has been waiting, patiently, in every unmonitored minute you’ve had.

I’ve always worked on computers — writing, creating websites, living in that digital world. It was the one thing I had learned to perfection, my craft, my expertise. With my eyes growing more sensitive, I watched the very skill I had mastered become something I could barely use.

There is a particular grief in watching a condition reach for your craft, the thing you built your competence and your pride around. But the pre-condition self who built that craft is the same self hunting glimpses in this book — and craft, like identity, can be adapted without being surrendered. Screen breaks, voice tools, shorter focused sessions: none of these are defeats.

They are the terms under which the old expertise keeps living inside the new body. Something I used to love doing, that I quietly stopped because of my condition… One small way I could return to it this month, on the condition’s terms rather than its old terms… Sometimes I wonder who I might have become without this condition.

Would I be more carefree? More adventurous? Less introspective? It’s impossible to know. The condition and I have co-evolved, our boundaries blurring until it’s hard to determine where it ends and I begin. This is not a defeat to admit. Every long-carried condition reshapes the person carrying it — that is simply what long carrying does.

The task isn’t to somehow separate the two perfectly clean, as if peeling a label off glass. The task is to make sure the reshaping happens on purpose, with your values doing the shaping, rather than by accident, with fear doing it instead. Here is the practice this whole book has been building toward: treat every glimpse as a trailhead, not a curiosity.

When you notice you forgot to monitor for an hour, don’t just smile at the memory — go back and do more of whatever produced it. This week’s most reliable glimpse-producer was… I will schedule more of exactly that, on purpose, this week. I will notice, without judgment, how much monitoring returns when it ends — and treat that return as information, not failure.

Do this consistently and something quiet happens: the glimpses lengthen. An hour becomes an afternoon. The old friend visits longer each time, until one day you notice he’s simply living there again, alongside the condition rather than beneath it. You were never gone.

You were only quiet, waiting under the noise of constant watching for the moments when the watching finally stopped. Every glimpse you’ve ever had is proof he’s still home. The path toward becoming this person again seems to lie not in eliminating the condition — a goal that has proven elusive for most of us — but in changing our relationship to it, glimpse by glimpse, until the glimpses are simply called Tuesday.

Next in the Identity Series: Taking Off the Heavy Coat — the break point, and the four questions that make the coat come off.