Migraines, Beauty, and the Witch
Estrogen makes my headaches get worse. When I was small, migraines structured my time, eating up days as I lay entombed between pillows. I imagined as their cause a witch casting spells from afar, chanting while she gazed through a cracked crystal ball to make me suffer for reasons I could not understand. Her presence became an obsession - I wept and prayed, changed my diet, habits, and thoughts all in the hopes she would not return.
I learned this, in part, from my mother and her mother too, even before I knew the migraines were genetic. I watched them hoard cushions, make themselves smaller, change all they did while expecting catalysts around every corner. They had given me their curse, put me in the path of the witch they knew first, showed me their pain and their pain-fear.
As I grew and coped, the headaches ebbed from prominence. They came three times a year, not three times a week, yet the pain-fear grew as my body developed. The vomiting and blindness of childhood found themselves replaced by nausea at my shape in the mirror and an ignorance towards my wasting away. The witch’s new spell made my obsession with her, my hatred of her, worse and worse; descending and spiralling, pain-fear becoming dysphoria-dread that invaded sleeping and waking.
One of its cures, intramuscular estrogen injections, was not painless on its own - the bite of the needle and the soreness of the muscle. The sting in my thigh was, however, accompanied by a more familiar hurt. The witch returned: estrogen makes my headaches get worse.
So much of life is structured by pain-fear, loss-fear, dread. Witches of all sorts are birthed from it, formed by its presence and our need to push it away and vanquish it. In a variety of contexts (the European Middle Ages, early American settler colonialism, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s), cultural obsessions with witches and the occult represent many things, one among them a fear of what cannot be controlled, what cannot be easily quelled – a social pain-fear.
Monstrous creatures in ‘Western' stories are mostly for effigy, decorations to be burned along with the anxieties they represent. The monster dies at the end, its ability to threaten us with death and loss and self-knowledge put to rest for a time. But the embers of the witch’s dying linger still, and each new worry or fear of loss resurrects her in the search for something responsible, something to make the pain and pain-fear make sense. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes in ‘Monster Culture,’ “the monster always escapes.”
Transsexuality, and the process of transfeminine becoming, stands as a grand high witch of contemporary America. Cohen writes that “the monster dwells at the gates of difference,” “a harbinger of category crisis,” pointing to the ways in which cultural anxieties over the maintenance of gender, race, class, and nationality produce monstrousness. American national anxiety over witches and the occult, particularly visible during the 80’s round of Satanic Panic, were pointed towards queerness becoming more mainstream, a demonization of public queerness that still holds sway. Discourses of transsexuality in the 2020s have mutated this panic, complete with new images of monstrousness and the body, in a desperate attempt to destroy what they fear in effigy. My choice to stop attempting to burn the witch has made me someone else’s monster, but in a way I already was.
The ritual of exorcism is not without power, like the tomb of pillows I would construct in a pre-migraine haze with shaking hands. Ritual carries us through processes we could not move through alone; situating pain as change and in change the potential for beauty. Yet destruction, the burning of the witch in effigy, will never produce a lasting result: the witch will escape and return. Rituals born from pain-fear, a hope that anxiety will leave forever, are as pointless as effigy. It is only by accepting that the pain will return, that the ritual can only redirect the hurt into change, and that we must continue to hurt and to change can we ritualize beauty and not fear. Only after I loved the comfort of construction did the pillows help; only after I loved who I was becoming did the act of injection become sacred.
‘It does no more occur to a ritual participant to change the meaning of the ritual than it occurs to a dancer to move to a different beat than the one that’s playing.”
- Mariana Colin
- Mariana Colin
Beauty-rituals are seldom comfortable: with piercings, tattoos, hair treatments, makeup, scarification, or surgery, the pain is the point. Rather than to be dreaded, the rhythm of the ritual forces its participant into proximity with pain, its transience and its power to make something new, more beautiful, to make a thing more itself. A woman being tattooed is not startled each time the needle enters her skin because she knows and in that moment accepts that it must hurt to be changed, it must sting to be made anew. Rather than practicing at the belief that the monster can be destroyed, it must be used as fuel for transformation, as proof of growth – it hurts, but by accepting the hurt as part of you, unflinchingly, you can become the witch.
Estrogen allowed me to see a future beyond my reckoning, to gaze back into the crystal ball, and gave me back to the witch of my mother, of her mother, of hers. Migraine, nausea, blindness, all returned in force, but rituals of feminization let me transcend and embrace it rather than produce a witch again. I was once again like my mother, but I learned to love our shared affliction. I could become the witch she ran from, our prayers for release and my dreams of the future could sound the same.
This is the fundamental lesson of the witch, that the (trans)feminine taught to me at last: you cannot run from the pain-fear, cannot banish the witch, but once you know the hurt is part of the spell, you can climb into her cauldron and arise, fresher and more perfect than before.
One final quote from Cohen, whose foundational essay is linked below.
“Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the furthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge… These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place… They ask us why we have created them.”
With love potions and fem queen potions,
Isa Louisa <3
Monster Culture