Relationships

Hi everyone. Three days ago I went into hospital and had all my upper teeth removed and dental implants put in their place. This is a decision I have been putting off for a few years but the deterioration of my teeth left me without many options.

Practically this means only soft foods for the next 4-6 months. As you can see from the photo I look like a teddy bear at the moment. Since that photo black eyes and black cheeks have emerged. I am trying to focus on the end results. The swelling will retreat and the black eyes will heal. It’s the yucky in between season I hate. I am sure you can relate.

Volume 1: The Migraine Teacher Brain

Dr. ChatGPT and I spent a couple days in intense conversations creating this visual of the Migraine Teacher Brain from my new memoir, How I Became a Cowgirl: One Woman's Journey with Rare Migraine Disease.

Yes, I know.

It is a lot to look at.

It is a lot to take in.

And it is a lot to process.

Well, that has been the reality of my life for almost 20 years as I live with—and teach with—this rare migraine disease.

My new memoir does not simply tell you about this disease. In 44 pages, you get to live inside my migraine brain. You get to experience the organized chaos of a migraine teacher brain because it is written in the second person. In that way, you, the reader, are also on the frontline in the battle with migraine. I write this memoir in broken English, not only to honor my Jamaican heritage, but also to give you the raw and realistic experience of how my migraine teacher brain works.

The truth is teaching with such a rare migraine disease has been both fulfilling and disheartening at the same time. As I reflect at the end of 25 years, I feel proud of what I have accomplished, even as my brain was in constant war with migraine.

I am grateful for the lives I touched, even if I don't remember all the names. Those yearbooks and self-made rosters have allowed my brain to navigate and maintain relationships on days when migraine takes over the brain and my memory is at its mercy.

Yet in those moments, migraines could not take away the wealth of knowledge I have gathered with each passing year. Somehow, my brain is able to build an impenetrable defense to safely secure what I need to teach.

As I reflect in my memoir:

But you still teach. It always confuse you that you forget everything but you don't forget the wealth of knowledge you possess.

Now everything has to be in its place. If it is not, then I become confused. I stutter sometimes while I teach, or I forget a word or two, and sometimes I get stuck on constant repeat. I am grateful for students' patience as I ask the same questions too many times.

I write everything down, and I have a daily to-do list. I spend a lot of time in constant conversation with myself—yes, I ask and answer—as I plan and revise lessons.

I have an old composition book and endless sticky notes with a variety of different colored pens to plan my lessons. Sometimes I talk through the lessons with Jean Luc, my medical alert dog. Over the past seven years, he has been my evaluator and silent critic.

There are days when this migraine does not give me a break.

There is no ceasefire. In the memoir I speak of when:

you write an email to say you working with a migraine but you teaching you life out same way for they don't know your high tolerance for pain ….or the seven months straight you teach with a migraine.

And sometimes, just for a split second, I wonder if someone thinks I am lying. But my brain stops me in my tracks. For one positive that this migraine brain has given me is "don't care."

I don't care what anyone thinks about me, simply because, as you can see, there is just no space left in my brain to do so.

Professional Development days are the most challenging. My migraine teacher brain is used to a daily schedule of teaching, and when that schedule changes to a full or half day of professional development, it creates a serious conflict that always ends in some form of migraine drama.

Over the years, I had to learn strategies to manage this migraine brain. I keep my grandmother's bush tea remedy close. It never fails to calm the brain when I need it most.

I am still learning to manage the stress that comes with disrespect, for I have no tolerance for that.

Thanks to my little brother, Andre, I learned to manage the stress that comes with my passion for student success and their choices:

"The choices are yours, the consequences are not."

That is the motto of my classroom.

Those green stickers are everywhere.

That is the redirect line.

I choose my battles because there is one that is constantly being fought in my brain.

When I did my first interview with Peter from P Literature, he asked me where I get the strength to show up every day.

I told him that is what I am expected to do.

I come from a family of educators.

Teaching is my bloodline.

I am also a Jamaican woman raised by strong Jamaican women. My grandmother was my first teacher, and she always showed up and showed out no matter what.

So that is what I do.

That is what this migraine teacher brain is trained to do.

Show up.

The connection between people-pleasing and depression is a common pattern I see in my practice. When you spend your life prioritizing others people's needs over your own, something inside becomes lost. You might not realize it’s happening at first. The exhaustion might feel normal or barely noticeable, and the resentment seems manageable. The emptiness is something you live with and tolerate. But below the surface, despair can slowly start to show up and eventually take over. Seeing how this dynamic shows up in people-pleasing can help you recognize how the strategies you've possibly been using to try to stay safe and connected can actually leave you feeling disconnected, isolated, and depleted.

The Hidden Cost of Constant Accommodation

People-pleasing isn’t simply about being kind or considerate. It’s a survival strategy that develops when you learn that your own needs or preferences are somehow problematic, leading you to chronically set aside your own emotional needs when with others. Maybe expressing disagreement felt dangerous in your family. Perhaps you learned that love was conditional, something you had to earn through perfect behavior or selfless giving, or that you'd be hurt by an abusive parent, or bullied or abandoned by friends if you didn't hide parts of yourself. Maybe you felt like your needs burdened the people closest to you. Chronic pleasing internalizes the harmful idea that you aren’t safe or good enough unless you’re adapting to others.

This constant accommodation requires you to suppress yourself. You silence your needs and quietly hold your disappointments. At first, this might feel like a small sacrifice. But when you spend years dismissing your internal experience, you lose touch with what you actually feel and need. You become a stranger to yourself. This disconnection is where depression starts to grow.

What People-Pleasing Can Feel Like

Seeing how you experience these patterns is an important step toward reclaiming your own sense of self and relieving depression and anxiety, and even things such as phobias. When you recognize how your people-pleasing tendencies can backfire, you can start to separate your identity from your old survival strategies.

Inability to say “no”: Feeling obligated to agree even when you are physically or emotionally overwhelmed.

Emotional Caretaking: Constantly apologizing and feeling responsible for the moods or reactions of others.

Hypervigilance: Feeling a sense of panic or deep anxiety if someone appears slightly displeased or upset with you.

Loss of Identity: Struggling to know your own needs or preferences because you have prioritized others for so long.

Conflict Avoidance (Fawning): Automatically smoothing over tension or “performing” to keep the peace at any personal cost.

Anger towards yourself for having feelings: People-pleasers often reach a sort-of "limit." This is the point where the symptoms begin to outweigh the benefits of people-pleasing. The depression, loneliness, anxiety, fears, and panic increase and you can't just stop them by pleasing anymore. The mechanism that used to protect you no longer can. People-pleasers often become angry with themselves when they can't please enough to feel safe anymore. It feels like a failure, and a scary one—that your mind and body is insisting on room for your own needs to exist, and be addressed.

Along with the disconnection from your own needs and feelings, this chronic state of vigilance can leave you in permanent “survival mode,” depleting your emotional energy and setting the stage for things like depression, anxiety, panic, and phobias. When you disconnect from your emotional needs, the needs continue to grow until they start to overtake you by showing up in places in your life you may not expect to see them. For example, I've seen people who start experiencing lack of sex drive, stronger anxiety and panic, migraines and headaches, fear of flying, or finding themselves more anxious when around other people than usual and wanting to isolate.

When Self-Sacrifice Becomes Self-Erasure

The relationship between people-pleasing and depression deepens when self-sacrifice crosses into a sense of erasing yourself. You’re not just being generous with your time and energy, your identity is disappearing. Your relationships become one-directional. You’re always the listener, the helper, the one who adjusts. Meanwhile, your own struggles remain unspoken because you’ve learned that they are burdensome or unimportant.

This can create profound loneliness. You’re surrounded by people, yet no one truly knows you. The connections you’ve worked so hard to maintain feel hollow because they’re built on a version of you that is, in many ways, detached. Depression often starts with this fundamental disconnection of self from others, which starts from disconnection with yourself. You feel empty because you’ve spent so long denying your own needs.

Finding Your Way Back to Yourself

Understanding your own people-pleaser tendencies is significant when trying to overcome depression, as well as various other mental health issues that can impact you. The process involves rebuilding a connected relationship with yourself and your internal experience; learning to notice what you feel, want, and need without immediately dismissing them. By enduring the discomfort of someone’s disappointment, or simply not being the one to keep others regulated—which may have been a crucial survival mechanism when growing up if you were bullied by peers, or had a parent that could be emotionally unpredictable—you learn that healthy relationships can actually withstand your needs.

#Depression #Anxiety #Relationships #peoplepleasing #phobias #Migraine #PanicAttacks