Those who know me personally know this all too well, but for those who don’t: I have suffered from chronic migraines since around the age of 7. They have varied in how they affect me at different points of my life but generally they consist of a similar base of symptoms and are non-responsive to treatment or preventative measures.
First, I get a slight flicker in my vision. I would compare it to what happens when you look in a very bright light and then look away and still have an artefact over the top of your vision for a moment. It starts subtle and then usually over the course of a few minutes gradually fills my vision with squiggly lines, blurry shapes, pulsating patterns etc.
These migraines can happen at any time and for a variety of reasons. They can even happen when I feel like I’ve ticked all the boxes when it comes to avoiding them, because annoyingly enough it seems I am extremely sensitive to them being triggered and I’ve found over the years it’s kind of pointless to even try to pinpoint why one might have happened and I may as well just try to be as healthy as I can anyway.
So far the only thing I’ve ever found to help at all is cannabis, but that has the issue of being illegal in England (although you can now get small amounts legally.. but you need to pay very high prices and it’s not a lot) and quite expensive. Ideally a medicine option I had would be prescribed for free to me via the NHS in the exact amount needed to curb the issue, right?
Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in! I mention this about myself as I want to talk a bit about how I’m feeling when it comes to perhaps in future being able to work full-time and whether I’m going to need to pivot in a slightly different direction or not and how I’m going to navigate that considering the migraines and me having no formal qualifications.
The main thing that forced me out of a “normal job” all those years ago was my migraines being unpredictable. There was always a chance I could get one at any moment, and that’s definitely still true but I now get them in higher frequency than before if I don’t (allegedly) smoke at all, but sometimes the aura fills about half my vision randomly with a big blurry blotch and it takes only a few seconds to go from clear vision to this, unlike the 5 minutes or so for a “normal” migraine for lack of a better term.
Currently I’m still someone that can’t work in that environment, but some health crisis thing happened a little while ago and everyone seems to be going mad about the idea of remote work.
While it still may be difficult to find a company that’s willing to hire me remotely, knowing that I suffer in this way, if I’m at home it’s definitely possible under the right circumstances. That realisation has reignited interest for things I’ve dabbled in before like programming and cyber security and even esports to some extent.
Over the coming years I think the best thing for me is to try to suffer as little as possible with the migraines and slowly build up skills and work out exactly where in the world I can fit even if I don’t have an easy fix for the migraines.
As I mentioned a few times prior, I’ve been interested in the fields of Cyber Security and Game Development. As a kid, I had brief stints in both, but they never became as much of an obsession as design and FPS have been at different times. I used to get really mad when trying to learn programming and I’m not gonna lie, I feel like that’s mostly because the resources back then just weren’t for me.
In particular, I’ve found myself pivoting into learning fundamentals again, even if I think I know them, and making absolutely sure that I double back if I don’t get something. In the past I’ve dabbled in C, C#, C++ to extremely varying degrees, but also I recall getting really annoyed in two out of three of those at a certain point because of certain things not being included by default in the language. Something that apparently doesn’t have that problem is the very cool Odin created by “Ginger Bob”!
While watching some videos of C++ developers trying it out I actually realised during them that I knew a lot more about C/C++ style than I thought. I’m not saying I fully understand things or that I’d even have the gall to call myself a proper programmer as of yet, but it’s wild to find out sometimes when my mind goes blank that doesn’t mean the memory is completely gone! Good to know.
Either way, I want to get as comfortable with programming as I am with designing and I know the only way to do that is to keep the interest going.
Thanks for reading! Connor ‘konr’ Baron