Covering Your Hair on a Hard Day

The Sprkly Blog · thesprkly.com

Migraine days are rude. They're annoying, they overstay their welcome, and they are rarely just one day long. Today is one of those days, so I'm writing to you from behind my eyeballs, where everything is a little too bright and a little too loud.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about a hard day: life keeps going anyway. The baby still cries. The gan bag still needs packing. Shabbat still arrives on schedule, gloriously indifferent to whether your head is cooperating. I would very much like to be in a dark room feeling sad about it. Instead, I'm getting dressed. Both things are true.

On days like this, I've learned to set the bar low — and to be at peace with that. Low cognition, low expectations, low drama. I'm not going to “win” today. I'm going to get through it, and getting through it counts. If you're having your own version of a hard day, let's set the bar low together. There's room down here.

This is, weirdly, part of why the Sprkly exists. Getting dressed shouldn't be one more thing that hurts. On a migraine day, I don't have the spare capacity to fuss with ties and pins and a covering that pulls. I need to get my hair off my neck, cover my head, and move on with as few inputs as possible. Shape it, go. One less ache. One less decision. That's not a small thing when you don't have much to give.

And somewhere in the middle of the yuck, there's this: I have a head to cover. It's not okay right now, but it will be — not in a fake, fatalistic way, but in a bitachon way. Yihyeh beseder. Thank you, Hashem, for this moment, for this ordinary annoying blessed day, for a life full of important things and even more unimportant things that somehow still matter.

So if today is hard for you too: do your best. Your best today might look like nothing, and that's allowed. Drink your water. Cover your head if you want to. Be gentle with yourself the way you'd be gentle with a friend — or with a good mitpachat. Tomorrow will be better. Probably. And if not tomorrow, then the day after.

You can do it. I can do it. We probably will, even if we don't want to.

Refuah shleimah to all our sore keppies. 🤍

On the good days and the hard ones: The Sprkly is here for it.