New Altitude

As I descended into Minneapolis my head suddenly seized with intense stabbing pain. "Must be the altitude" I thought.
Sprinting through the airport to catch my connection my head beat with the rhythm of my flip-flopped feet and all I wanted was to stab my brain out with a spoon. Surely that couldn't have hurt worse.
Jetting out of Minneapolis between a clear blue sky and one so dark the lights on planes shone like dozens of brilliant suns my eyes involuntarily shut as the pain throbbed on.
Restlessly hurdling through the air I anticipate landing, surely the ache will be gone when I descend to a more agreeable altitude.
But the ache goes on and one through the night into the morning and the next three days.

I begin to wonder if my brain isn't on the verge of exploding. I take any and all medicine I can think of to stave off the spasms happening behind my eyes. I try to remember what Bret Micheals said about his aneurysm and if maybe that's what I have too.
I push through. What if I never feel better? I don't want to miss Portland if this will last the whole week and into forever.
What if this is my new normal?

Slowly but surely the ache dulls and sometimes goes away completely. But it seems that as soon as I notice it has lessened or gone completely for a moment it comes back with a vengeance. It is only now that I feel confidant enough to say out loud that I feel better. Yet even now as I write it a sharp stab of pain passes over my left eye.
As I think about this I realize, I am like this in almost every aspect of life.

I don't know how to live without their voices telling me I'm a nasty selfish girl. I don't know how to be a girl that wears small clothes. Because to do so would be to stand naked without pounds and pounds of reasons for your rejection outside of my own ability to be desirable in your eyes.
To finish a degree would be to acknowledge I know what I want to do with my life and hold myself accountable to doing more than what I've stumbled into and what comes mind-numbingly easy to me. It would be to risk your disappointment in my chosen vocation more so than in my accidentally on purpose vocation.

So I don't mention it. I bury it beneath layers of skin I can't shed and witty retorts to your questions of how I am.
I adjust to a normal I don't know how to be without.