Aura Farming (Migraine Edition)
I'm writing this at 5am, a couple of hours after waking up from a migraine-induced sleep.
I don't mean to portray my relationship with migraines as particularly bad, just to frame the mood and position I'm in. I get maybe 3 or 4 migraines a year and when I do I lose at most a couple of days of high-functioning to them. I can pretty much always look back and figure out roughly what set it off - usually stress or exhaustion, and yesterday I was operating on less sleep than I'd like. Usually I can sense it coming on, a mild queasiness and difficulty reading, and I just go to a dark room and wait it out. I don't have any meds for it because my last batch expired before I needed any of it, if that helps give a sense of how not-terrible my position is.
All that being said, aura is fucked up.
If you don't know, aura is all the non-pain sensory shit that can accompany the actual headache portion, and it's not universal. It's highly personal, variable, and at times subtle. While aura isn't a necessary part of migraine - statistically, most migraines are without aura - pairing visual disturbances with headaches was what allowed my doctor to put the word "migraine" on my file, and let me research how to deal with them better.
Generally I just get some blind spots and visual sparkling in the half hour before the pain, but a couple of months ago I got a much weirder disturbance. I was dming a friend about F1 and was having to focus pretty hard to read the text, until he wrote one slightly awkwardly worded sentence and I just couldn't wrap my brain around it. I sat for 10 minutes trying to understand, to break it down, or even speak it out loud - I couldn't get my mouth around the words.
In reply to me saying Red Bull might view doing another driver swap Hadjar<->Tsunoda as a no-loss scenario.
I mean, the loss is that they don't give Hadjar the time and the tools, so they end up ruining his career too, whereas if they give him this year to develop, stick him in that car next year for testing etc, he could really do the job for them
I thought I was having a stroke or something. Jumped on a voice call with him for a bit, made sure I was speaking clearly for an hour or so, played some Rocket League (hit some bangers, ofc) then the headache started rolling in and I knew what was up.
There's something about that break in my literacy that really shook me. Reading has always come extremely naturally to me, having it just drop out from under me over the course of a couple of sentences kind of hit an existential note. It's a little advanced warning of the kind of cognitive decline I'll need to look out for in my dotage, and that shit already terrifies me.
I joke a lot about how "x really makes me understand that I'm just a machine made of meat" but aura is this acute demonstration of how fucking complicated the machine is. The most complex computational device in the known universe is driving the robot that can damage itself by biting the inside of its own mouth.