When your brain decides to throw a rave without asking first
The day my head went rogue
I thought I’d earned some kind of exemption. Sixty-six years without a migraine, plenty of headaches sure, but nothing apocalyptic. Then yesterday, out of nowhere, my brain decided to host a sensory rave.
It started innocently enough. Late morning, groggy, skipped my usual coffees. Went to see a potential new apartment. Felt fine. Lunch with friends—good food, good conversation, a couple of Heinekens. And then bang.
Out of nowhere, it felt like my skull had been rewired to the city’s electrical grid. Light stabbed, noise screamed, voices turned to needles. Even the polite background café music sounded like someone had jammed tweeters into my temples. I fled, paid the bill like a man escaping a crime scene, and hid in the quietest café I could find. Which, of course, turned out to have a table of people watching YouTube videos at full volume.
Welcome, apparently, to migraine country.
Why now, after all these years?
That’s the question that stuck with me: why would a man who’s never had one suddenly get a full-blown migraine at 66? I’ve drunk more beer than that before without issue. I’ve skipped coffee before. I’ve been under brighter lights, louder noise, worse stress. So what changed?
Maybe the simplest answer is everything, slowly.
Your brain doesn’t file clean reports; it accumulates stress, sensory load, hormonal shifts, vascular changes, and sleep debt over decades. And then one day, it decides to express all of that as one enormous, uninvited neurological fireworks display.
Ageing doesn’t make you immune to new things—it sometimes just delays the invoice.
The contrarian take
Here’s what I think: migraines aren’t “headaches,” they’re boundary enforcement events. They’re your brain calling a staff meeting and saying, “We’re done pretending we can process all this.”
We neurodivergent types—ADHD, autistic, gifted, endlessly curious—are masters of sensory override. We push through noise, lights, exhaustion, caffeine dependence, stress, social demand. The system copes—until it doesn’t.
Then one day, it turns the lights off and makes you lie down. Not as punishment, but as a ceasefire.
One coffee, one bourbon, and one beer… and betrayal
I don’t think my one-and-a-half Heinekens caused anything. Nor did skipping coffee create a migraine out of thin air. They were just the last couple of straws on a very old camel.
Caffeine withdrawal plus alcohol equals a small dip in vascular tone, a little nudge to dopamine balance, a touch of dehydration, and boom—my sensory system, already tired, went on strike.
The irony: I’ve spent a career teaching people to listen to their bodies, and mine just screamed the lesson back at me.
The hangover of all hangovers
Even now, 24 hours later, I’m fogged, heavy-headed, slightly disembodied. The world feels muffled but too bright. That’s the migraine “postdrome” — a sort of neurological hangover where your neurons are still sweeping up after the riot.
Tomorrow, I’ll wake up and pretend to be surprised when coffee suddenly feels like medicine.
The takeaway
Maybe late-life migraines are the nervous system’s way of filing a long-overdue complaint. “You’ve ignored me for decades,” it says. “Now you’ll rest.”
And maybe, just maybe, that’s not a malfunction. It’s a boundary being drawn in bright, blinding, pulsating neon.