Migraines, Gym Class, and the Butterfly Effect

When I was a child, I suffered from migraine headaches.  Here's the story, as far as anyone else knows:

When I was about thirteen or fourteen years old, I started getting migraine headaches all the time.  I'd had them on and off for years, but this time they just wouldn't go away.  I missed a lot of school because of it.  My parents took me to all kinds of doctors and did all sorts of tests.  For the latter half of seventh grade I was given permission to take a study hall instead of PE class.  My headaches got a bit better over summer vacation.

In eighth grade, I changed schools.  This was a much more academically-focused school, and my migraines gradually returned.  After a few months, I had to transfer schools again.  Once at this third school, my chronic migraines faded away for good.  I still get them occasionally, but months apart and only for a few hours at a time.

We always concluded that the chronic migraines were brought on by stress.  A lot was going on around that time.  My grandmother died.  PE class was brutal that year.  My dad got in a car wreck.  My parents started arguing a lot, and eventually divorced.  That second school had a big workload.  When I finally found the school that was right for me, life was less stressful, and some of the other problems were gone by then as well.

But the truth is, I faked it.

Not intentionally, and not in a nefarious way.  I really did get a lot of headaches, but in retrospect I believe the real culprit was clinical depression.  It wasn't a term I'd ever heard at the time, but migraines were something I understood, something I could latch on to.

Every time I used migraines as an excuse to avoid something, I really, seriously could not have brought myself to do that something.  It would have been physically impossible to do what needed to be done - and I did try - so I would tell them it was migraines to get them off my back.  If I stayed home from school, I didn't sit there playing Nintendo all day.  I was fully committed to the excuse.  I stayed in bed, even if nobody else was home to check up on me.

It all started with gym class.

I’ve always hated phys ed.  I do see the benefit of having P.E. in schools – it helps you develop healthy exercise habits, you learn teamwork and communication skills,  and so on.  But I’ve rarely seen a gym class that was done right.  For starters, they always assume that everyone knows how to play every sport.  Those teamwork skills I mentioned?  Nah, most games ended up with the nerds being assigned positions where they could stay out of the way and do the least damage, while the jocks carried the team.  Healthy exercise habits?  Nope, they never taught us calisthenics or yoga or other exercise techniques I might use later in life.  They usually just had us play various sports.   

Most of my worst memories in high school involved gym class.  Several times I let the team down because I didn’t understand the rules, or I simply couldn’t throw the ball far enough to complete a play.  I was bullied a little, though not physically, thank goodness.  Still, every bully-related memory I have happened in gym.  To me, gym class is nothing but a big pile of psychological scars.  

 

Most gym classes were also sexist.  The girls got to sit in the bleachers and treat it as study hall, while the boys played basketball.  God, I envied them.  Occasionally I was in a gym class where the girls did exercises like jumping jacks, but I don’t think I ever saw girls required play an actual sport in high school gym class.  My high school did have cheerleaders and a girls’ basketball team, but that was done separately from the standard gym class I’m talking about. 

 

Honestly, if schools can’t do gym class correctly, I wish they would do away with them.  In my experience, the entire class is set up just to torture non-athletic students.  I suppose the actual athletes might see it as their only respite in the day, and for some students it’s the only class they don’t dread.  But for me, gym class has always reminded me of prison somehow.  I think gym class could be fixed with a little effort.  But gym class as I experienced it should be banned.  At best it’s a waste of time, at worst it scars you for life.

 

Anyway, seventh grade gym was particularly bad.  The coach was like a drill instructor.  Every day, he would have us line up, and walk down the line punching each of us in the stomach.  Not hard enough to hurt – I’m not saying this guy belongs in prison or anything – but just hard enough to see if we’d been toughening up our muscles.  If your stomach gave way or it knocked the wind out of you, he had you do some push-ups.  Even though it wasn’t painful, it was still humiliating, and I’m amazed that it was legal.  (I’m pretty sure the girls were spared this treatment as well.)  It made me afraid of going to gym class every day.  I seriously DREADED it. 

 

The incident that tipped off my migraines was pretty innocuous.  Had it not come after months and months of embarrassing gym incidents, this one would hardly have registered.  I had missed a couple of days because of a cold, during which time they had started on volleyball.  I like volleyball, and I was actually kind of looking forward to it.  After all my disastrous attempts at basketball, I was hoping volleyball would be more my speed.  Unfortunately, the rest of the class got to spend a few days learning the basics while I was out sick, so I was just thrown right in with no instruction. 

 

It didn’t turn out to be much better than basketball.  Volleyball mostly involved standing in place and hoping the ball was never hit in my direction.  My depth perception has never been great, but pre-LASIK it was horrendous.  I would swing my arms too early, or too late, or swing at balls that were nowhere near my zone.  But serving was the worst.  I tried to get the gist of it by watching other people, but when it was my turn, I hit it too hard and sent it across the gym.  I couldn’t take it.  I could feel my face getting hot, and tears wouldn’t be far behind.  My sinuses were still stuffy from being sick, and the result was that I started to choke on my own phlegm.  The other students saw my face turning purple, and in the end I got sent to the school nurse.

 

They gave me a note letting me out of gym class for a few days.  But I was so stressed out by then, I started getting migraines.  These headaches were so bad I could barely see.  With a little finagling, my parents managed to arrange it so I didn’t have to go back to gym for the rest of the year, and I went to a study hall instead.  I was a little less stressed out after that. 

After my grandmother died, my Mom came to me and said, “I spoke with the rest of the family.  We’ve decided that the reason you’ve been having headaches is because all this time when she was sick, she wasn’t in much pain.  We think that you were bearing all the pain for her.  And we thank you.  But now that she’s gone, you don’t have to have these headaches any longer.”  It was a beautiful sentiment, and I wish it had been true.

I changed schools.  My brother graduated that year, so we weren’t as tied to that school, and I was happy never to have to see that PE teacher again.  The new school was more academically-focused.  It was okay at first, but I very quickly got bogged down.  It was a bit like skipping three grades, and I wasn’t up to the challenge.  Now, understand that the previous school was not a bad school, academically speaking.  But with all the other stresses going on in my life, it was not the best time to challenge myself. 

It's a pity.  I really liked some of the classes.  They had a PE class I actually looked forward to, one that actually taught us rules and techniques for the sports we were playing.  It also had a wonderful art class.  I didn’t make a lot of friends there, though.  I was too busy trying to keep up with the classes.  I felt like Bart Simpson in that one early episode where he fakes being gifted.  I started dreading several of the normal classes the same way I’d dreaded PE at the previous school.

Soon I found myself with headaches again.  I saw the school nurse more than some of the teachers.  They called my parents a lot.  Apparently I was spending a lot of the classes with my head down on my desk.  My parents tried everything.  We went to all sorts of doctors, had all kinds of tests done.  I remember having a CT scan, wearing a rubber guard to keep me from grinding my teeth at night, going to a chiropractor, seeing a psychiatrist, and so on.  I missed a lot of school.

I also felt guilty about all the money they were spending on tests.  I remember when we got the results back from the CT scan, telling Dad, “I’m sorry it cost so much and didn’t show anything.”  But he’d been afraid I might have a brain tumor or something, and he replied, “Best money I ever spent.”  Still, I felt like their lives might be better if I wasn't around to be such a burden.

One night I tried to kill myself.  It wasn't a method that would have actually worked, but give me a break, I was a kid.  Basically I tried taking lots of pills.  I went into every medicine cabinet in the house, opened every bottle, and took about half the pills from each.  I didn't want to actually empty any bottles, because if I wasn't successful I didn't want anyone noticing I'd taken them.  But all in all, I probably took about 40 random pills.

My first thought the next morning was, "Damn.  I'm alive."  But I didn't have to go to school.   My parents told me I'd been sleepwalking all night, and they were taking me to the doctor.  The doctor gave me a drug test, which came back negative, so my half-assed suicide attempt stayed a secret.  I never told them.  

One later morning I had a really hard time getting moving.  I really couldn’t miss any more days.  My parents were like, “If you’re going to be sick anyway, be sick there.”  But I couldn’t make myself go.  I just couldn’t.  The school was like this giant block of black dread and I couldn’t in my wildest dreams envision myself willingly walking into it that morning.

In the back of the car, I was like a caged animal looking for ways to escape.  At every red light I considered hopping out of the car and just running.  I was already thinking about just hiding in the bushes instead of going inside once they dropped me off.  But I realized that wasn’t a long term plan, and missing one more day wasn’t going to make me survive the school year.  This had gone far enough.  I told my Dad, “Okay, I hate this school.”

He was immediately understanding.  We talked about it a lot about the pressure while he drove me home.  He considered taking me straight to the local public school, but then he remembered that an old friend of mine went to a different private school.  At this third and final school, things were a lot better all around.  The first school had been sports focused, so of course I didn’t fit in.  The second school was college focused, and I might have made it there if I’d started earlier.  The third school put more emphasis on religion.  It was a good fit for me, at least at the time.  In retrospect, the school had some deep flaws, and if I had kids today, I definitely wouldn’t send them there.  It’s the same school that was in the news a couple of years ago for rejecting a potential student for having gay parents.

But that was the end of the headaches.  My Dad asked me a few years later, “Did we ever figure out what was causing those headaches you used to have?”  I said it was probably just stress, and that was that.

I still feel very guilty about all the money they spent on various doctors, when it was really "just depression".  It probably caused some of the debt they had to dig out of later, and the stress I caused them may have even been a factor in their eventual divorce.

It's one of the most defining events of my childhood, and it's yet one more thing I think would have turned out differently if I'd been born female.  Yeah, I know, "I make everything about gender dysphoria.  Of course I'm going to retcon my headaches to be about it."  But a lot of trans people report similar periods of depression in their teens.

In my case, everything started with gym class, at a school that was overly focused on sports.  Without all that initial pressure to be better at masculine things, I think I would have ended up graduating at that school.

I often think about what my life would be like in that alternate timeline.  If I'd graduated that first school, I would have had an entirely different circle of friends.  I never would have met the guy who introduced me to my wife, so I wouldn't even be friends with her now.  I can almost guarantee I would have gone to a different college, which would have changed a lot of things.  As a girl, I would have had a different set of peer pressures I haven't even considered.  I might still have had migraines and/or depression because of stresses I will never know. 

There's so many possibilities there.  Would I still be a geek?  Would I still be attracted to women?  Would I still have eventually become an atheist?  My mother was so into keeping us up with fashion, I really think she would have loved to have a girl.  It would have changed a lot about my family dynamic, so I might have a completely different personality. 

One question that really haunts me is, "Would I still be transgender?"  What if "female" isn't actually a core aspect of my personality, but "non gender conforming" is?  What if "girl me" was just as stubborn about fitting in with others of my sex?  What if she gradually came to the realization that her birth sex just wasn't for her?  Is there an alternate universe where I'm an FTM?

Believe it or not, these are the things that keep me up at night.