Following my post on rebuilding confidence after having a seizure in public, I wanted to make a post about rebuilding confidence following diagnosis. Because being diagnosed with a potentially chronic condition can change how you feel about yourself. Your capabilities, your independence, your ambitions, the list goes on. We evolve over time, confidence isn’t static. Epilepsy can also be so unpredictable, but owning the label and focusing on what I can control has helped me fe

Like many people, I struggled with denial after being diagnosed with a long-term/chronic condition. For years, I was told: “you need to learn to accept epilepsy”. So I focused on destroying denial. I thought if I could just stop pretending everything was okay, stop wishing epilepsy would disappear, stop pretending that I’d never have a seizure again... Then maybe I’d finally have accepted it. But the more I pushed it away, the less achievable acceptance became. It’s only rece

For years, I believed that if I did everything "right", I'd stop having seizures. That’s what the doctors told me. That’s what my family thought too. Sleep well. Eat well. Exercise. Take my medication. Avoid alcohol. When I still had seizures, it felt like I'd failed. I felt like I’d maybe not complied with that equation. What I eventually realised was that I'd been measuring success by the wrong outcome. Those habits didn't guarantee seizure freedom, but they changed how I f

Seizures and epilepsy are one of the longest documented conditions. I’m talking all the way back to 2500bc!! In 400bc, hippocrates noted in his “on the sacred disease” that epilepsy is not caused by angry gods, and he even accused healers who gave epilepsy this “sacred” status were fraudulent. The text stated that the brain was the source of the disease. And while the understanding of what epilepsy is and how it is perceived has changed over time, somehow some myths and consp

When asked "how do you tell your partner/someone you're dating about epilepsy?" I now feel like the question should be "what do you tell them?". After 15 years and now sharing it on the internet, I feel like I can tell anyone that I have epilepsy. But telling a partner how this truly impacts me wasn't something I'd even thought about until recently. And it's not just about me now. It's a partnership. Epilepsy deeply impacts me and therefore is bound to impact him. It requires