My fingers glide over the electrical coils attached to the back of the cap. This is one of the first prototypes, and it looks rather unremarkable at first sight, maybe even a bit run down with time. A bit nervous to try it since it sends out electromagnetic waves that are pulsed right onto my head I set it to the lowest setting. A continuous clicking sound emerges, passing from ear to ear.
My personal metronome.
A long cable goes down from the hat, around my neck, attached to a small battery. I try to wrap the cable around and through the arm sleeve of my shirt, which leaves the small battery attached to it dangling awkwardly against my collarbone. The little yellow light indicates the rhythm of the pulses. They should have made it green. Yellow, I think, is a warning color.
Do I feel different? Hard to tell. So many factors are at play, my body is loud and chaotic, and it feels difficult to filter through all of its signals.
I was given the hat to treat my very persistent migraines that hit me out of nowhere. I remember when they started, like an uncomfortable brain massage, stretching the muscles from inside my skull backwards. Accompanied by nausea, it sometimes lasts for weeks. No treatment works, and in a way, I accepted is as a part of me.
Pain is an invisible wave. I up the electrical field stimulation and the clicking sound now turns into a whirring sensation. It’s almost meditative to be able to sense a frequency. In a way, my pain is also a frequency, that surfaces.
Curiosity always gets the best of me, so for an hour a day, I put on the hat while I sit on the computer.