It’s Migraine and Headache Awareness Month, And Here Are 3 Things We’re Done Apologizing For

We’ve gotten really good at the apology text. Typed from a dark room, phone dimmed as far as it goes, cold towel across our forehead, calibrating exactly how much explanation is reasonable, and how much is too much. “So sorry!!!” A promise to make it up to them. Because making it anyone else’s problem still feels like more than we’re willing to ask.

It’s Migraine and Headache Awareness Month, which usually arrives with a handful of well-meaning mentions of “invisible illness” and moves on. It feels like a good moment to give ourselves a little more grace. To stop apologizing for canceling. To stop apologizing for the lights-off, sounds-off retreat. To stop apologizing for a neurological disease that’s been called “just a headache” our entire lives.

Migraine is a complex neurological disorder involving abnormal sensory processing, inflammation around pain-sensitive structures, and changes in how the brain regulates pain, says Dr. Eric Dunn, a neurologist with the Cleveland Clinic. “It is more than ‘just a bad headache,’” he says, noting that it’s one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, particularly among younger adults. A 2024 analysis in Cephalalgia drawing on the Global Burden of Disease study agrees: Migraine is the most disabling neurological disease among children and adolescents, and ranks second among adults under 60. Women are hit hardest, with roughly three times more women than men living with the disease, in large part due to hormonal fluctuations.

So, no, we aren’t overreacting. We’re being clinically affected. And as such, here’s what we’re no longer apologizing for.

Not Sorry For... Canceling Plans.

The apology text is its own genre by now: the over-explanation, the self-flagellation, the promise to reschedule before the migraine has even begun to subside. Then we lie in the dark, absorbing the secondary anxiety of having let someone down.

For Kelly H., that spiral often hit harder than the migraine itself. Apologizing profusely spiked her anxiety, which in turn made the migraine worse. The turning point, she says, was realizing she “wasn’t doing anything wrong”; she was responding to a medical condition she couldn’t control. Claire B. hit a similar inflection point through two quieter realizations: She “wasn’t actually missing out on anything major,” and her health was allowed to come first.

Dunn notes that migraine is “frequently minimized despite the fact it can be profoundly disabling,” in part because patients often lead normal lives between attacks. That in-between functionality is part of what makes the cancellation feel like it needs defending in the first place — but it doesn’t. We’re people with a neurological disease responding to a neurological event.

Not Sorry For... Going Dark (Literally)

The recovery ritual is non-negotiable: shades drawn, sound off, phone face down, the room as cold and quiet as we can make it. Claire stopped apologizing for it the day she accepted that absolute silence and a dark room were the only things that worked.

For Kayla P., the version of this guilt that lands hardest is the one her kids have already absorbed. Her two young boys can clock a migraine before she even names it. They lower the TV volume on their own, leave the lights off, and adjust to her without being asked. “‘Mama, do you have a headache again?’ is a question I get asked far too often,” she says, “and it breaks my heart each time.”

The instinct to dim the world isn’t a preference. According to Dunn, many patients experience heightened sensitivity to light, sound, smell, touch, and movement because the brain enters a hyperexcitable state during an attack. The lights aren’t off because we’re being dramatic — they’re off because they have to be.

Not Sorry For... Refusing To “Push Through.”

There’s a version of femininity that runs on quiet endurance, and a lot of us were raised inside it. Get up anyway. Show up anyway. Smile through it.

Stephanie S. stopped pushing through after reading about neuroplastic pain (research suggesting that pushing through pain can actually reinforce it). “It was nice to hear a clinical rationale for why not to push through something,” she says. Kelly remembers what years of toughing it out cost her: A constant low-grade anxiety about when the next migraine would arrive, which often summoned it.

The push-through narrative leans on a stubborn myth that if we just managed our stress better, this would resolve. Dr. Seemant Chaturvedi, a neurologist with the University of Maryland Medical System and professor of neurology at their School of Medicine, dismantles it directly. “Migraines are not caused by personal factors, and they are not psychological in origin,” he says, describing migraine as a recurrent neurological disorder with biological and environmental components that both need addressing.

Underneath all three is the same shift: We are done internalizing that any of this is our fault. Kelly puts it best. “I do everything I can to manage them, and I wouldn’t look at someone who broke their leg and think they should just push through it.”

This Migraine and Headache Awareness Month, we’re not asking for permission to take care of ourselves — we’re just doing it.

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