Hello there!

Summon the leeches — The Unpleasantness has returned. Short one this month, as my skull is cracking open like an egg. If you’re new, welcome. If you’ve been here before, yay.

Let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other … so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. — Virginia Woolf

Last week, while curled like a question mark on my bathroom floor, shivering and shunning the mirror, I learned the Ancient Greek word hēmikrania: half a skull, perfect! The reflection I’d been avoiding showed half my face stuck in a Billy-Idol-ish sort of snarl. It had been like that for three hours, and the rest was migraine. Hēmikrania. My half-skull was being witnessed, albeit by some very long-dead Greeks. It’s Meanwhile: May megrim edition. 🧠

Meanwhile in editing

The Greeks started it all off with hēmikrania, which became the Latin hemigranea. Say that in your best French accent, and you’ll get something like ‘emigraine’, which (French wearing smooth like any other language) soon dropped the shrug of ‘eh’ and became simply migraine. But for a while there, Middle English had another word for migraine. I propose we resurrect: megrim.

megrim /ˈmigrəm/ n.

Morbidly low spirits in humans and blind staggers (sudden blindness and falling) in horses. Vertigo, dizziness, fancies or whims, headaches, nausea, capriciousness and gloom. Dullness, stupidity and ‘vehement pain’.

How’s that for a word! Medical terms (migraine et al.) seem dead set on flattening suffering into something neat and — impossible! — impersonal. Megrim chucks it all in and says, ‘Imagine being this person! Medically terrible vibes.’

In his v readable 1905 article, George M Gould, MD, wrote of doctors that:

…these opposers and ridiculers [of mental and neurological conditions] are most anxious to find that the sufferers from migraine, epilepsy, neurasthenia, hysteria, melancholia, indigestion and headache are, thank God, incurable.

If you’ve recently visited a neurologist, this might be a bit too relatable (soz). Gould actually disliked words like megrim, hemicrania and migraine because they overemphasise the ‘half-head pain’ part of a complex condition. But I’m less fussed by the name than the dessicated definitions.

Bring back complex definitions that cover the breadth of an experience! Bring 👏 back 👏 megrim 👏.

Meanwhile in reading

Yesterday, I told someone I love very dearly that among the best cures for isolation is finding yourself in writing.

Poetry

The migraineurs of literature include my always-adored Virginia Woolf (whose essay, On Being Ill, is quoted in the intro to this newsletter), Jane Austin and Emily Dickinson. The latter wrote about the extreme solitude of migraine in I felt a Funeral, in my Brain:

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -

…

And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -

Some strange, wrecked, solitary race, indeed, and I’m crying as I write this, because I am always crying now. But crying while reading, in communion with others of my race — that, at least, is a consolation. (But really, a tiny little hole drilled in my skull couldn’t hurt.)

Meanwhile online

While trying to find a link, I was confronted by an AI overview of Meanwhile that was so confidently wrong it tickled me. I’ll grudgingly concede the ‘meanwhile is an adverb’ portion, but God help us all if this newsletter is secretly helping brands refine their voice through seasonal reflections of all the nauseating concepts. I’d like to state, for the record, that I have absolutely no such ambitions. And isn’t that a relief!

Meanwhile in art

This month’s adverbial coda is chaotically, illustrated by the wonderful Emma Charteris of Emma Makes Creative. In her words, ‘I couldn't pass up the opportunity to draw a cat (a true agent of chaos).’ 🐈

I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time. — Jack Finney

That’s all for May

Thanks for reading Meanwhile in May! If you were sent this and fancy subscribing or reading past editions, you can do so below — feel free to share it far and wide or keep it squirrelled away just for you. I’ll see you in June. 🫶