A little Andy Warhol

I am a bit bummed that my Color Theory teacher only gav eme 90 out of 100 for my Audrey Hepburn picture. He said I could have used my colors better. ARRRGHH! Well, let's see how I do on this assignment: it is to be a self portrait and used colors that express our emotions. We had to write up what those emotions are, so -- I did an Andy Warhol type collage expressing how I feel/felt about migraines. Meredith read the short description and was bothered by it, and I would liek to say that it was not easy growing up with them -- for me or the people around me. I thank them all greatly, for it had to be as hard on my family as it was for me. I will always love them for all that they endured -- family past and family present (that goes double for Meredith!).

Portrait of a Migraine
Ever since I have been 2 years old, I have suffered from debilitating migraines. Sometimes they start off with wavy spots and lines before my eyes, or a tingling sensation in my extremities. Sometimes there is vomiting involves, and always there is massive pain around the eyes and in the head. The pain intensifies in direct relation to the amount of light that I am exposed to. A lot of times I get very confused and cannot verbally communicate, and this earns me a trip the emergency room, and sometimes a hospital stay. I am now 40, and on average suffer 2-4 migraines a year. This is how I see my migraines.

The first picture in the upper left with the reds, yellows, and blues is a total capture of one of my migraines. The yellow is the bright light that I become acutely sensitive to, causing me massive amounts of pain and suffering. The red is the manifestation of that pain as it permeates my head. The blue is the emotion that I feel, a depression that once again I am going to feel miserable and in great pain.

The second picture represents my hidden thoughts about the way I feel about myself and the migraines that are a part of me. As I went through elementary and high school, a migraine could be triggered by anything, even a bump on the head. Because of this, I was not allowed to play in sports, had to attend a special gym glass, regular camps would not accept me, and it all made me feel like an outcast. It was very depressing because this was a major sign of weakness, and I was the target of many bullies. I feel that I only had one true friend back then who understood what I was going through, but it was not enough to keep me from feeling lonely. The depression was to the point that at times I had considered suicide, but did not have the strength to follow through. The blue is for that depression, with the yellow being my cowardice and shame at the thoughts of suicide.

The third picture with the red and green is how I was made to feel by the rest of the world because of my migraines. There were times when I literally felt like the Joker character from the Batman comics. When I was at school and started to get a migraine, there were times I was told to go lay down in the hallway and wait for my parents to pick me up. As I would lie there, students going to lunch or gym would be paraded past me, all looking and pointing at me, not understanding my plight. To them, I was a freak. The color scheme itself represents me feeling like that freak, but the colors mean other things individually. The green represents the envy that I felt towards the other children who did not suffer the way that I did, that led normal lives. The red is for the anger that I felt, not at them, but at myself for being so different. Even to this day, I still feel a bit of that anger, especially after being in the hospital and wonder “What did I do to deserve this?”

The final picture goes through the steps of a migraine as I perceive it. The squiggles and the lines are what I see when a migraine starts to attack me. The yellows and the whites are the bright lights that will be my antagonist for the next several hours. The red is the intense pain that will pound against my head. Green represents the illness itself, and the orange represents how I feel different from the rest of the world.