February 2026 - Vol. 23, Issue 1

No one really knows when my seizures began. I was in foster care, then I lived with my maternal grandmother, and then I lived with my biological mother. When I was about eight years old and my parents got back together, they started doing things like taking me to the doctor.

I was diagnosed with absence seizures. I was having about 100 a day, according to the EEG results. My mom had a hard time accepting it. She kept saying “but that doesn’t run in our family.” I don’t really remember what my dad said about it. I remember he apologized at one point for punishing me for “not paying attention” and that was about it.

My epilepsy was always kind of a secret. My parents never told the school nurse. I never had to take my medication at school. They did have to tell the nurse when I went to camp, but I generally hid my condition.

My parents didn’t “have anything”, they insisted. But everyone was reluctant to go to the doctor in my household. There was also this idea that if we went to doctors, they would “find something.” I was warned against being “different” and singled out. I was encouraged to try to fit in. My parents both use humor to fit in, and I followed.

There were things my parents did that other parents didn’t do. My father always had business ideas—He would stay up all night for days creating a restaurant, a soap business, T-shirts with panda paintings on them. All of his ideas were great, and he would go all-in. My mom was more organized, but she needed a lot of time alone. Time to decompress, time in the dark, time where she could hide.

My dad’s projects collected in the garage until only one car fit in there. My mom’s anxiety and need for darkness grew until she could no longer drive. So her car stayed in the garage next to the boxes of T-shirts and restaurant equipment.

I was in charge of taking my medicine. First, it came in a liquid form. It dried and formed a disgusting crust around the lip of the bottle. Finally, I could take a pill—four a day. Two in the morning, one when I got home from school and had a snack, and then one after dinner. The two in the morning was the worst…it was so bad that I scheduled time in the morning to simply sit and hold my stomach.

As a teenager, there was a time when my friends thought my seizure medication must do something cool. They would read through the list of side effects. Hiccups. Night terrors. Nausea. No, nothing in there was interesting. Nothing would make them high. Still, every so often, someone wondered if I didn’t have seizures at all…if I just had secret, special powers.

I hated hearing that. I hated hearing that because part of me feared that my seizures were the most interesting thing about me. Without them and their corresponding hallucinations, I was boring.

Or, alternatively, if I stopped taking my meds, I could have a violent seizure that would change my life forever, and then I would be a person duped into hurting myself. Duped by people who didn’t know anything about anything. And all those people who said my seizures made me special would disappear.

When I was about 17 years old, my younger cousin was evaluated. My aunt said, “He doesn’t have autism, but I think you do.” I looked up some information online. It seemed to make sense. Epilepsy and autism were linked.

I remembered hiding my pills, hiding my diagnosis, and how lonely I felt when my friends flipped through the list of side effects. I used humor to make friends, but I didn’t know how to connect with them beyond that.

The garage of half-completed ideas; my mom in the dark in the afternoon. I wondered for just a second why I had never been evaluated, but realized my parents told me all along—

We didn’t go to doctors, because then they’d find something.