The Colors Behind Closed Eyes

I grew up believing a migraine was something you survived in silence.
In India, when the pain came, I went into a dark room and waited. That was the treatment: remove yourself from the light, the sound, the world, and ride it out. We did not call it anything complicated then. It was a headache. A bad one, maybe, but still a headache. In my family, I was not the only one who had them. My mother had them. Several cousins had them. In a joint family, everyone knew what it meant when someone disappeared into a room and shut the door.

But knowing it existed was not the same as understanding it.
No one talked about diet, weather, posture, exercise, triggers, medication, or prevention. No one explained that the vomiting, the sensitivity to light and sound, the one-sided pain, the need to withdraw from everything, had a name. I only knew that when it came, I had to leave whatever was happening and wait for my body to return to me. In India, that was not always easy. The world was noisy and chaotic. Quiet was not always available. So I learned early that pain could make you alone, even when people were nearby.

It was only after I came to the United States, in my twenties, that I began to understand what I had been living with. These were migraines. There were medicines. There were doctors who could say, “You don’t just have to suffer through this.” For the first time, I realized that maybe pain was not something I had to simply endure until it was finished with me. Maybe there were ways to interrupt it, soften it, live differently with it.
Over the years, I tried many treatments. Some helped. Some brought side effects. Some worked for a while and then did not. For decades, migraine shaped the boundaries of my life. At its worst, I could have migraines almost every day of the month—not always at the same intensity, but enough that life became smaller. I had to give up pieces of myself: career plans, social life, ordinary spontaneity, the simple ability to say yes without calculating what pain might do later. And yet, alongside the pain, there was always imagery.

At first, I thought everyone with migraines saw things the way I did. Colors. Shapes. Patterns. A private world blooming behind closed eyes. It did not occur to me that this was unusual. I thought that was simply what it meant for a migraine to arrive: the body hurt, the senses sharpened, the world narrowed, and somewhere inside, images appeared.
I did not know yet that these images would become my language.
The turning point came while I was doing my doctoral work at Ohio State University. I was commuting from Cincinnati several times a week, teaching, taking classes, coming home, caring for my family. It was too much on my plate, and my migraines became worse. I began over-medicating because I had so much to get through, and with that came rebound headaches and more side effects. Eventually, after finishing my coursework, I took a year’s leave of absence. The plan was to return and finish my dissertation.

I never did.
But during that year at home, something else began.
One migraine was especially colorful. I had always drawn and painted, and I had art supplies nearby. For reasons I still cannot fully explain, I looked at what was happening inside my mind and thought: This looks interesting. I need to put it down somewhere.

So I painted it.
Not during the most severe phase, when the pain was too much, but as I was beginning to feel better. And as I painted, something changed. My body felt different. The chaos quieted. The clenched, overwhelmed feeling inside me softened into calm. For once, the migraine was not only something happening to me. It became something I could meet, something I could translate, something I could place outside my body and onto a canvas.

Painting did not cure my migraines. But it changed my relationship to them.
Before, I fought them. I felt sorry for myself. I became angry, frustrated, trapped inside the unfairness of it all. Through painting, I began to accept their presence in my life. I could say: this is part of me. It will come. I will deal with it. And then I will move on. That shift in attitude changed something profound in the way I lived with pain.

At first, the paintings were simply mine. Then there were many of them. A friend invited me to show my work, and I did. Then came more shows, more responses, more conversations. Slowly, I realized that what I was doing was not only personal. It was a way of making an invisible illness visible.
At art fairs, people react in different ways. Some are drawn in immediately. Others become uncomfortable. Many people say they get migraines, but not everyone understands the difference between a headache and a migraine. Some do not want to hear the story behind the paintings. Some worry that looking at the art might give them a migraine. I understand that reaction. Pain can be hard to look at, especially when it is rendered in color.

But others come closer.
They tell me they have followed my work. They tell me my story meant something to them. They tell me that seeing pain transformed into art helped them feel less alone. And each time that happens, I think: This is what I need to do.
My message is not that everyone needs to paint like I do. In fact, that is not the point at all. Creativity is not about making something worthy of a gallery wall. It is not about producing a finished product. It is about finding something you can do, something your body can tolerate, something that lets you breathe inside the moment. Paint if you paint. Bake if you bake. Garden if you garden. Cook, write, draw, make something with your hands. Let yourself get lost in it, even briefly. Let it remind you that you are still here.

Pain is lonely. Even with family, friends, support, and love, the person in pain is the one who has to live inside it. In those moments, you can feel lost, isolated, even desperate. If my work helps someone live better, feel less alone, or find one small way back to themselves, then that is success to me.
Recently, my life has changed again. A new migraine medication has dramatically reduced the number of migraines I experience. Things I once could not imagine doing—gardening outside, exercising, making plans, being in the sun—have become possible. After years of living around pain, I have felt the world widen again.
Still, I know what migraine has taken. I know what it means to sit in a doctor’s office and mention only the most dominant symptoms because you do not want to seem dramatic, or strange, or like too much. I know what it means to seek care while carrying parts of the experience you do not fully say out loud.
That is what I wish medicine understood better.
Behind the label of “chronic migraine” is not a condition walking through the door. There is a person. A person with a life, history, feelings, fears, responsibilities, and dreams. A person whose migraines may not look like anyone else’s. Even in my own body, every migraine can be different. To treat migraine well, you have to listen well. You have to see the individual behind the diagnosis.

That is what I hope my paintings do.
They say: this is pain, but it is not only pain.
This is color. This is survival. This is the body speaking in a language I had to learn.
For much of my life, migraines forced me into darkness. But somewhere in that darkness, there was color waiting. And when I finally painted what I saw, I realized I was not only documenting pain.
I was giving it somewhere to go.


Find out more! https://priyarama.com/
Background painting is "Dance of the Dragon"