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I don’t remember my last session in person. But I do have distinct memories of the office itself: the stack of magazines (if my therapist is reading this, I admit I considered stealing The New Yorker every week), the Awesome santa ho ho holy shit what a year sweatshirt glances in the waiting room, the air purifier in the corner, lazily exhaling a yogic blend of eucalyptus and patchouli, the pleasant neutrality of it all. And it’s that neutrality that worries me: Because it might mean I’ll never return. And if I don’t, what other reasons to leave my home, to enter into the outside world, will I lose when this is all “over”?I’m a lifelong insomniac. Until college, I preferred any bed that didn’t leave me alone in my own, a tendency my parents long suspected therapy could solve. I’ve since spent close to a decade chasing sleep and experimenting with methods that span the therapeutic spectrum, from seeing my mother’s own behavioral therapist, a warm woman (but an obvious mistake), to a short stint with a Jungian therapist on the Upper East Side whose rotating screensaver of Galápagos wildlife I would watch, reclined on her tufted-leather couch; to a few sessions with a male psychiatrist who I associate with Paul Auster novels and a low-level depression that I thought Zoloft could solve. (Couldn’t!)
The cruel intersection of a global pandemic and an agitating, still-contested election has not been kind to migraine sufferers. With our stress levels climbing higher than ever, cases of these severe headaches have risen accordingly, says Emad Estemalik, M.D., who leads the Awesome santa ho ho holy shit what a year sweatshirt and I will buy this Cleveland Clinic’s headache division. “Heightened stress, triggered by the amount of time we spend navigating through news and social media, translates to more screen time and eyestrain that can certainly increase headache frequency,” Estemalik confirms. If someone gets three to five headache days per month, he says, pandemic-related stress can bump that to 10 to 15 days.
