Inspiration strikes you at the funniest of times, don’t you think? I always find it strange that I can sit and look at a page for hours, probably days sometimes, without ever being able to string a single, sensible sentence together, and then sometimes words just want to tumble out – in no particular order – as if they’ve been waiting for a bus that’s hours late and they can’t be bothered to queue anymore.
I find that migraines often result in the most magnificent of creative bursts. And this is a strange phenomenon considering your head is so full of soundless, bright strobe lighting moving in time to the silent thumping of a thousand footsteps at a noisy rave. Migraines wake me up. I don’t suffer from lots of headaches, and they don’t make me feel sick, but I do wear the occasional migraine like a tight fitting cap that seems to want to squash my brain until it’s ready to explode.
And often, when this happens – which isn’t that often I’m glad to say – words always ricochet out of me, like they’re desperate to escape from a burning building, like little lemmings racing to the edge of the cliff, throwing themselves out of my head to escape from the burning inflamed nonsense of a tired and restless brain starved of life. Migraines for me are just word overload. A time when it just gets too much and they need to get out, leaving space for more words to fester and grow so that the cycle can continue.
I woke up at 2.00 am last night, head throbbing, and found that my words were charging themselves into a series of random poems that just kept popping up, jostling for release, desperate for an outlet. And every time I laid back down to close my eyes, another one appeared, inviting insomnia to stay for the night while they found their rightful place in a place that wasn’t my head.
I don’t blame them. My head is no place for organised rhyme and reason! But when the words began to dry up, my head stopped pounding quite so much and I felt the blessed relief of some peace and quiet. My head? It stopped hurting. And the words? They were free.
Mags Winthrop Blog 