#98: April is the sludgiest month
My brain - the cause of, and solution to, all of my life’s problems.
Thanks for reading - I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here!
Here’s April’s round-up.
This month’s round-up will be, out of necessity, a short one. Those of you who’ve read my work for any length of time either in this newsletter or at Brussels Beer City will know that I am a migraine sufferer. And in recent weeks I really have been suffering. In fact, I didn’t make it through a week without an attack through the whole of April, and this article was barely cobbled together through snatches of lucidity across the weekend just gone.
On Friday I woke up with a heavy head, and though I hadn’t experienced the telltale crenulated hallucinations that presage an imminent attack, I felt sludgey in a way that only a migraine makes me feel sludgey. What do I mean by “sludgey”? That my head weighs two or three times heavier, and that every movement - a cough, a laugh, bending over - can prompt a searing pain behind my forehead.
I type and my hands feel divorced from my body, as if I am typing through butter. In fact, I often feel a full-on dissociative episode, the worst, most boring kind of out-of-body experience where I am both in the room and not in the room. It is very frustrating, I’m sure, for the people I live with. My focus is gone and I grasp for words I can’t remember. I can’t read for more than a couple of minutes and can barely write much of any use. My bowels misfire (thank you, gut-brain nexus). There is a headache too, but less than I used to experience; these days, a migraine leaves me drained, guilty, angry, useless, and despairing. I feel like I’m wading through sludge, and I don’t know when the sludge will ebb. A migraine is not just a headache, it is days-long, total bodily stupor.
This was how I was feeling Friday morning, but I managed to pull myself together and put down a draft zero of what you’re reading now. A first draft proper followed on Saturday, and by Sunday it did feel as if I were emerging from my neurological stupor. Only a third draft never materialised because, before I could sit down to breakfast on Sunday morning I saw in the corner of my left eye, the looping, fuzzy castellations of my migraine aura, and I knew the day was done. I abandoned all ambition to write, ate my breakfast, informed the family, took my emergency pill, and withdrew to the upstairs room to doze and watch one and a half Jurassic Park films.
I’m telling you all this because it is a pattern that has repeated itself throughout April, migraine following closely on migraine. It is not a state of affairs that is conducive to a productive creative practice - which partly explains why there is no actual newsletter this week and just a brief round-up. I simply do not have the cognitive energy for more, and worry that if I were to push myself I would just spark another cascade of misfiring neurons and overheat my brain.
This is all the more galling because at the end of 2024 I decided to junk the beta blockers I’d been taking to little ameliorative effect through the previous year and it seemed to work - for the first two months of 2025 I was migraine free, and creatively fecund. I was also oblivious about how tenuous my neurological wellbeing was, and how easily it was about to disintegrate. I even did an editorial schedule for the newsletter and for Brussels Beer City all the way through to June. For obvious reasons, I have not stuck to it, and I hope the foregoing explains why there have been more frequent dives into the BBC archives and more newsletters than I would like landing in your inboxes on Friday lunchtimes rather than Wednesday mornings.
In truth, on Sunday morning I was close to convincing myself to knock the newsletter on the head, to take a step back and try to work to some kind of baseline neurological equilibrium. If I’m honest with myself, the stress of putting out a weekly newsletter - the stress I put myself under - is a not insignificant contributor some weeks. No one is, after all, forcing me to do this, just me. As my old therapist used to remind me, I don’t actually have to do anything. I could just be like Joan Didion and withdraw from the world altogether for days on end waiting for the sludge to recede. But I have, I’m aware enough at this stage to admit, a compulsion. The itchiness I get under my skin when I don’t write is worse than the sludge of a migraine - and is itself probably also a trigger (the more you learn about your migraines, the more you realise everything is a trigger). Or at least I’ve convinced myself it is, for the moment.
I am trying to be better, to limit as much as I can the other triggers capable of prompting an attack - lack of routine, too much sleep, too little sleep, dehydration, salty food, missed meals. But it’s hard, and I am not always successful. Sometimes, even, it’s not even my fault. Sometimes I’m good and my brain just decides, not today.
There were many such days in April, and I hope there will be fewer in May. But if there isn’t, and you experience a disruption to regular service, you will I hope understand why. It is what it is; I’m trying to be more accepting of this occasionally-crippling “neurodivergence” of mine, but it’s not easy. Be patient with me as I learn to be patient with myself.
One day I’ll do a Didion and write more cogently and forcefully about my migraine travails, but for now I’ll leave you with this and the hopeful promise of more - and more coherent - work to come. Scroll down to the end for a special announcement, and while my brain may be imploding, at least the weather out there is nice.
Writing - Brussels Notes
The Slow Euthanisation of Brussels - maybe my fragile neurological state has made me more susceptible to the city’s failings. Or maybe Brussels is just failing.
Illicit Foraging - I almost broke the law for some wild garlic
The Infinite Possibilities of the Foodmet - installment two of my short series on Brussels food courts. Part three is coming, but please don’t make me repeat myself as to why it’s delayed.
Drinking/Eating/Watching
My good friends Brad and Jonny over at the Craft Beer Channel were in Brussels in March, and came home with this excellent video with and about Brasserie de la Senne. The beers are really as good as they look, and Yvan as nice as he sounds.
Finally got myself to Yangguofu Malatang, the Chinese hotpot restaurant at St. Boniface. It was excellent. And extremely busy. I went for the vegetarian - and not very spicy - tomato broth. Maybe I’ll tell you sometime about my Beijing hotpot story.
I had to go back and read some reviews of The Last Showgirl to check if I had missed something. I clearly must have, because it seemed I saw a different film to the one lauded by critics. Not for me, Clive.
Dekkera has recently become our new pre-game pub of choice for Union matches. I wrote about it when it opened, and even if you’re not into football, it’s worth a visit for the lighting installation and the bar - both reclaimed from a since-demolished Brussels bank.
Oh, about that announcement.
I’ll just leave this here for now. More details to come…
