Catalina Florescu illustrates and explores the pain of her migraines in poetic form.
In manipulating these moments in time and making them co-exist, I wanted to finally reach out to the girl who did not have the language to say how she felt. I chose to pay respect to how a body feels inside when it’s broken by a chronic, debilitating pain.
Visualization (Migraines for Beginners)
It’s not an album.
It’s embodied.
It’s not a story about you narrated by another.
It’s a first, felt memory:
of you,
broken.
*
Unde te doare? the mother asks.
Aici, the 5-year-old points to her head.
Cum te doare?
The little girl has no idea how
to verbalize agony,
so, she gestures:
Two fists put together and banged against each other.
Try that.
They make sound,
you make sound,
but it’s outside of you.
*
This is what the little girl feels:
the sound inside her head,
that loud beast!
She wants to listen
to fairytales on their vintage record player.
*
A 49-year-old woman confesses:
All of a sudden, my head grows exponentially big,
But not in size, in weight.
Invisible to the other’s eyes
But gnawing inside my head
and yet multiplying uncontrollably.
*
It’s hard to put into words.
But you must see what I feel.
*
It’s like I carry two bags,
I know their weight,
I feel comfortable holding them,
when, unbeknownst to me,
heavy loads are added.
*
My body, exploited, reacts as it descends into hell.
I lower myself.
I bend under pressure.
I drop the bags.
I stand still:
*
My head has metamorphosed into cemented bricks.
I can’t even gently move my head up or down
without feeling intense pain.
*
My own tears feel sorry for me.
They look at me,
refusing to come out fully.
*
I exist in the expanding land of pain.
But you see me whole.
Projected, we follow directions
and read together the woman’s note:
It is I who must tell you how I feel
using a subject and a verb:
I suffer.
It is you who must listen.
*
Whenever I come back from a migraine episode
I dance like a lunatic,
I feel unstoppable.
*
I see the 5-year-old girl still terrified.
I take her tiny hands in mine.
Give yourself permission to be afraid:
Sunt aici.
***
Sometimes, when a migraine visits me again, I want to make sure I have enough strength to remember the pain. I rely on the fragile moment to immortalise that embodied feeling despite being in agony. Sometimes, I cannot find too many words. In this case, retroactively, I am amazed at how I was able to come up with a haiku – an otherwise beautiful, old, succinct Japanese artform.
Haiku
Debilitating
migraine wipes out everything:
voracious monster
***
A friend invited me to be part of a month-long marathon of poem writing. I was again in pain when I started to write this. I was trying to imagine having a conversation with my doctor, and they were asking me to describe how I felt. I employed analogies to create insight into how I was feeling. Sometimes, I do this when I am with my spouse and son. I want to tell them that while they see my head/face, in reality, it feels like something else; in this instance, a vise. Being a multilingual scholar, while writing this, I also realised that in my mother tongue, vise means something quite life affirming. I liked the ironic encounter and scaffolded the poem accordingly.
Vise: Vise
The purpose of a vise is
to hold metal when cutting
*
But in a doctor’s office, you ask:
do you know what’s a vise?
*
He looks at you worried,
amused & back to being worried.
*
You tell him, the pain
I feel inside my head
*
Is like a vise, that’s all.
Vise is Romanian for dreams,
There I almost never hurt –
somehow, I am back in time
*
The linguistics professor teaches us
how one grapheme can change
*
The meaning of a word in a second
tare is different than mare & sare,
*
I look at the chalk how it invades the board
Playfully, knowing it will be erased,
*
Agreeing to dwindle; doctor,
why is there a vise inside my head?
“Vise: Vise” is a poem based on my experience with migraine. The image is titled “My Neighbors’ Vise” by Ken Powers (Source: Art America). The poem like the voice are mine. The goal is to expose this hidden disability so that other people could feel empowered to share and the general public may be more educated that not all pain is tangible and visible.
***
I grew up in Romania in the mid-70s and 1980s, under the dictatorship of general secretary of the Romanian Community Party, Nicolae Ceauşescu. While I was raised in a loving family, when it came to talking about pain and suffering, we did not know how. A diagnosis was considered something that had to do with one’s bad life choices and people in pain were stripped of their voices. While cancer was a diagnosis people knew about, disability- both visible and/or invisible- was practically erased from any discourse. In Ceauşescu’s Romania, people could not have mysterious conditions.
When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990 and two years after the diagnosis she died, we, as a family, fell deeply into the isolation of silence. By then, Romania was Ceauşescu-free, but no one could become fluent in talking about their feelings. When someone lives under dictatorship, they are constantly silenced. So, an immediate and impactful way to communicate emotions is an arduous journey – to say the least.
Only after I came to the United States to study (originally) Comparative Literature in 1998 at Purdue University, I realised the importance of knowing how to talk about personal experiences. Still, it would take me years to create space to talk about my own embodied pain. It would take me decades because, at first, I would spend a lot of time researching about becoming a patient, health rights as human rights, and so on. In other words, I would focus on writing and defending a PhD dissertation about cancer, AIDS, and the medical community. This would give me a chance to honour my mother’s encounter with the disease of cancer and allow me the opportunity to reflect, though not first hand, on the liminal condition of being a patient (Florescu, 2011).
Only in recent years, would I finally write about my migraines, inspired by them being catalogued as an invisible disability. The National Headache Foundation and the American Migraine Foundation advocate for a more nuanced understanding of disabilities so that some conditions, such as migraines, are catalogued as hidden; that is, a patient/person may look perfectly fine on the outside, when in actuality they may be in terrible pain (Novak, 2025).
The introduction of certain drugs in the 1990s created a different space to address migraines as more than just headaches. Dr. Patrick P.A. Humphrey and his team at the pharmaceutical company Glaxo started to work on the drug triptans, with Humphrey being interested in whether serotonin receptors had a role in migraines (Humphrey, 2021). Still, triptans are not advertised as a cure for migraines; their function designed to alleviate the symptoms. The etiology of migraines is not known and patients suffering from it go through various discomforts, some quite debilitating. This baffles the medical community while it frustrates those who experience migraines.
At Pace University where I teach, our leadership has recently addressed the gap that exists when we craft discourses on visible disabilities, all the while ignoring invisible conditions. To ensure that there is inclusivity, Pace University is one of the few universities in the United States that has joined the fight to acknowledge all disabilities (both visible and invisible), so that students, faculty, and the staff alike feel seen, heard, and respected. A few years ago, Pace joined the Hidden Disability Snowflower, a network that tries to raise awareness about lesser-known disabilities. The idea started at an airport in Gatwick in 2016, and ever since it has been gaining global recognition worldwide (A Symbol, 2025). It also helps to note that while a person’s medical condition should be private, the American HR Departments at universities list migraines as a disability. As discussions continue on invisible disabilities, I’d be remiss not to mention the fact that in order to educate, all sectors of private and professional life must participate in this layered dialogue.
On a personal level, I started to write poems and create visuals because I noticed how therapeutic the process is. Not only for me, the person in pain, but also for my students, peers, family, and friends. In my case, I waited a long time to talk about my beautiful, broken body, and thus to add my voice to this extraordinary body of confessional work; think of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, (Lorde, 1987), or Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, (Grealy, 2016), or Joan Didion’s The Year of the Magical Thinking, (Didion, 2018).
Writing is therapeutic. It lets me say what I really want to say without caring for being politically correct – after all, if I suffer, if I am in pain, I need to access and share those words that could match how I feel rather than sanitise or censor my emotions. In return, those who read my poems may want to reciprocate. In other words, every single voice or personal perspective on a condition matters, so much so that the field of medicine manages to discover layers within layers of disease as illness.
About the author
Catalina Florina Florescu is a Romanian born American scholar, author, and activist. She holds a PhD in Comp Lit/Medical Humanities from Purdue University. She teaches at Pace University. Her books focus on immigration, health rights, and motherhood. She is currently working on a book under contract with Routledge on cancer, theatre, and social prescribing meant to spark conversations among students and faculty in Medicine, the Humanities, the public, and the private sector. http://www.catalinaflorescu.com/
References
A symbol for non-visible disabilities. Available at: https://hdsunflower.com/us/ (Accessed: 28 July 2025).
Didion, Joan. 2018. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Florescu, Catalina Florina. 2011. Transacting sites of the liminal bodily spaces. Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
Grealy, Lucy. 2016. Autobiography of a Face. Boston: Mariner Books.
Humphrey, Patrick. International Headache Society. Available at: https://ihs- headache.org/people/patrick-p-a-humphrey/ (Accessed: 28 July 2025).
Audre Lorde. 1987. The Cancer journals. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute.
Lorie Novak. 2025. Migraine Register – Lorie Novak, LORIE NOVAK –. Available at: https://lorienovak.com/projects-page/migraineregister/ (Accessed: 28 July 2025).
