In April of 2018, I was diagnosed with a rare migraine condition known as New Daily Persistent Headache, or NDPH. The details are vague and, from what I can gather, not fully ironed out. The basics of my condition are as followed: two days before my seventeenth birthday, I was recovering from the common cold and developed a splitting headache that reduced me to a noise-sensitive puddle curled in a dark room, and it has remained this way for fourteen months now. “The brain’s job,” the pediatric neurologists explained to me, circling my brainstem on a diagram, “is to keep on doing what it is already doing. It is quite good at this, it’s what keeps us alive.” With NDPH, the brain recognizes the amount of pain chemicals it is releasing as normal, and thus registers that pain level as the homeostasis it is meant to maintain. This level of pain is referred to amongst NDPH patients as a “baseline.” In my family and amongst those who know of my medical condition, it has become common practice for me to respond with “how are you” with a number. In the beginning, my baseline was a near-constant seven. I spent most of the latter portion of my junior year lying behind a screen in my Marine Biology class, head a fog of migraine medication: naproxen, sumatriptan, naratriptan, prochlorperazine and diphenhydramine. I would register that my body was floating down the halls to my Pre-Calculus course, but I was unable to feel any of my limbs. The only feeling present was the pain. For several months, I was rated by the doctors as having “moderate to severe disability.” And I was angry, God I was so angry. This wasn’t supposed to be my life! I loved poetry and museums, spending nights out late with my friends and getting into trouble, going on long walks around the city. My grades had slipped tremendously, but I was too tired and embarrassed of my condition to tell any of my teachers why; I was too afraid of being seen as faking it for attention. One of my clearest memories of this time is lying on the floor of my bedroom, staring through the dark to the ceiling and thinking “something has got to give.” I could feel the itch to live again in my blood, like static, like the electric impulses in my brain telling itself that it’s fine, it’s okay, everything is happening as it should be. These days are gone now. I’ve learned to be what nurses call “high-functioning” while they pump dihydroergotamine into my veins. Treatment hurts, of course it does, but it’s not as painful as watching your life pass you by, drowning under all that could be if it just had been different. I’m not sure how I identify these days. My disability numbers are still high, but not as high as they were, and my family panics whenever I mention it. I’m in school, I have good grades, I am attending the University of California, Santa Cruz in the fall. I have a part-time job, friends I love, and I learned how to drive at a baseline of five. Life is out there, and I’m very likely to be able to experience it despite my barriers. I’m not sure what the take away of this is for you, if you are reading this. I encourage you to live your life to the fullest. I wish you health, and fulfillment.

Charlotte Pocock, class of 2019

The morning of my first in a series of near-chronic migraines, someone had taken to an add for discounted Clipper Cards outside the Rockridge BART Station with a sharpie. Black marker blurred over the black type on bold yellow paper with a question, simple in its phrasing but complex in its meaning: WHAT DO YOU WANT? It was underlined twice, the lines crossing sloppily towards the end. You could tell it was written in a hurry. Beyond the throbbing in my temples and the twisting of my empty stomach, I thought of what it was that I truly wanted. I was to take the SAT in a month– a clinical symptom of my college diagnosis– and I had already visited two college campuses, so it isn’t as if my future has not been called into question. It’s all been more about expectation than want, however. Necessity.

I cannot picture a life in college, or how I would be making a living after, but it is without a doubt the path that my life is going to go down. I have modest expectations. But since the discovery of this rushed my transit existentialism, I have begun scribbling my desires down where I can: candle wrappers, cafe receipts, lipstick price tags, the corners of my library copy of In Cold Blood, teal-stained post it notes. Here is a list of what I have comprised so far, but in this process I have discovered is that what I want most of all is to grow up satisfied with what I have. 

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

• I want small and tiled kitchens and the ability to sustain plants.

• I want coffee boiling on my stove and fresh nectarines on my table.

• I want the sun on my collarbones and I want the wind in my hair.

• I want the orcas outside my window and the museums preserved.

• I want the Venus di Milo to never go out of style

• I want my grandchildren to know the ocean as I have.

• I want mud in my boots.

• I want to have enough regrets to not wreck me.

• I want gilded frames and Milan and neon lights and Tokyo.

• I want my mother to stop worrying and I want my brother to be happy.

• I want malt milkshakes and French cinema, rainwater and tapioca.

• I want a thousand lives, each one with more time than the last.

• I want more than I deserve.

Charlotte Pocock, class of 2019