Once Upon a Time in My Oceania

  By Kara Blocker I’m 17, singing a solo in church. I hit a high note, hold it, close my mouth and a hammer begins pounding on my head. I thought I was dying. “Don’t disturb the service, the show must go on,” drilled in my brain since childhood leads me to run down the aisle out the front door and begin puking on the sidewalk. Alone and scared, I didn’t want to bother anyone so I just run home to the parsonage and collapse into bed. I wasn’t dying. And now, thousands and thousands of excruciating migraines later I know that I won’t die from them, I’ll just wish I could. I felt punished. What did I do wrong? What did I eat? Did I sing too high? Was I breathing improperly? Was I afraid of my uncle/monster in the audience? What did I DO, so I can fix it and NEVER DO IT AGAIN. As every migraineur knows, I obsessed over triggers. I’ve now spent nearly half of my life in migraine pain. Approximately 40% of every hour, every week, every year for 33 years. It has interrupted most of my...

Living life with chronic illness comes with its own struggles to overcome, along with the added reality that your new "normal" may look entirely different. Of all the many things a person faces when confronted with an unexpected health condition, the questions of Why me? Why this? What did I do to deserve my health failing? can often be visited in the mind of a chronically ill patient. I grew up in an environment that always knew the answer to these questions: God made you sick.  Witnessing a manner of all illness afflict many an individual during my time in the Christian Fundamentalist movement, I don't have to traverse long down a path in my mind to recall the reasons why God would allow sickness in a follower's life. It was always one of two reasons: A trial for a believer to overcome and bring God the glory once they were healed, or the direct result of an unrepentant sin committed.  The latter reasoning tended to be the most widely accepted opinion in-group. It s...