I got really angry at this week’s content and stopped participating for five months. I didn’t mean to stop for so long. I just didn’t feel motivated to try again. This also coincided with some massive external pressures and events. Now I’m trying to remember what made me so angry… I have descended into full-fledged panic attacks and clinical depression, so I guess this week’s content was pushing some buttons as I fell. Plus my epilepsy is caused by a brain tumour that can’t be fully removed and will eventually kill me (rather horribly from everything I’ve been able to discover), so my epilepsy and all the fears around that are bound up in some other horrible stuff. I don’t see my situation reflected in any of the content so far, and I think that was making me feel dismissed, overlooked, unimportant… I’m not sure. I’m not saying that’s anyone else’s fault – my reactions belong to me and aren’t the fault of this excellent initiative. And if, as I desperately hope for everyone else’s sake, my situation is rare when it comes to the general population of people affected by epilepsy, then I wouldn’t expect this course to have an example for every tiny sub-section of the population – or to scare people that they might have deadly tumours in their heads. But we’re invited to write our honest feelings, and here are mine. I’ve started getting help for the panic and depression (though I had to stop the first set of meds after only 2 days because they were making me throw up my AEDs!) and used the last few lessons from this week to go through other ways of getting help. I hope that if anyone else feels angry or upset by anything they encounter here, they can feel less alone, and know that there’s surely a perfectly good reason underlying it all. Getting to that reason will make you feel better, even if it takes a few months of going farther down the rabbit-hole before you can see it. I am now back in the saddle and looking forward to accomplishing a much smaller goal this week as I see what week six has to offer.
