#3 not published in a row. Great. 

It is now three weeks into the school year. With the return of school has come a bunch of headaches of a completely new and worse-than-ever sort. 

I'm increasingly convinced that 99% of my various types of headaches are actually my subconscious mind mishandling stress. My subconscious does a variety of things that I'm not sure it's actually supposed to. Although some of those are good--- such as my modified gag reflex that often makes me spit out food if I get full halfway through eating something--- others are just weird, or entirely unhelpful. 

On the weird side (although I think this is something people's bodies are known to do sometimes, so I'm not sure it counts)-- probably the second biggest injury I've had is the gash I got in my leg a bit over a year ago at the airport. I managed to trip over my own suitcase and fall down on an escalator, which left this bleeding gouge in my leg. It hurt a lot the first few minutes, but by the time I was in the car on the way to the hospital to get it looked at, I wasn't feeling it at all. That numbness--- that's what I'm pretty sure is normal. But is it supposed to trade the pain for a mild headache? 

On the unhelpful side--- I'm pretty sure my subconscious handles all my stress and most of my nervousness. I'll talk too fast or slow or loud or quiet, I'll stutter sometimes, but I won't feel nervous or stressed. Now, you could argue that's a good thing--- but you see, I don't tend to notice if I'm, say, talking too fast; and there's already often weird pauses in the middle of words (that I don't hear), and pauses between words as I try to figure out what to say next to get my point across (which I do hear), and how am I supposed to notice the difference between that and an actual stutter? So I have little to no idea of when I'm nervous/stressed, and therefore no way of figuring out how to become less nervous or less stressed. 

And now my subconscious, having been handling those things for years, seems to be getting overloaded. So I'm getting headaches that I'm pretty sure are it desperately trying to keep doing it, and it isn't working, and the stress and nervousness are starting to leak through to me, my conscious mind, and I don't know any way to deal with it because I've never had to before, and the fact that the headaches are making me be physically in pain at the same time are just making it worse. 

I started suspecting it during the periods last school year when my headaches were worse than they had ever been before in both strength and frequency, but I took the doctor's advice to drink more water and get more sleep, and I discovered that I needed glasses again (which, when I had needed them before, had led to headaches until I started wearing them) and then the headaches got better and I thought it had to have been one or all of those three things rather than my subconscious. 

But now I'm pretty sure it was more to do with the calmer days towards the end of the school year (final exams, but tests have never actually been something I cared much about, or grades either really, and I think that's true, not just all the stress being hidden by my subconscious) and then it being summer. 

And now that school has started again my headaches are back. And I'm nearly sure now. 

I'm going to have to convince myself to tell one of my parents about my headaches and my theory. 

Not my dad. But my mom is asleep and I don't want to wake her and I need sleep myself. ... 

It is now Christmas break of that same year, and due to continuing headaches I will be in an online program when school starts again. (I have been invited to continue coming to choir at my old school despite no longer being enrolled, though, which is cool and probably something I will do. I definitely want to continue being part of a choir, and one I already have friends in and where the choir director understands I may not always be there because headaches... that's definitely superior to attempting to find an outside-of-school choir that would work for me.)