Guilt by Paula Apodaca

Paula has elequently penned another great post concerning the guilt many of those with epilepsy feel with regards to how their condition affects those around them. I tried to select a favoite part, but the whole post was super awesome. Here are the first two paragraphs to whet your appetite...

Guilt connects deep inside of us at that vague junction between an action taken and an action withheld. A core understanding of E. is the recognition that as persons with it, we cannot control the actions of our seizures with certainty. Epileptics and their families learn how to keep silent about the condition, preferring not to speak too loudly about it because to do so might engender more problems than support. In that silence we quietly learn to devalue ourselves. We learn to be guilty.

There is little social history we can lean on to make us feel more comfortable. We can become fixed on our own relationship to epilepsy and can spend huge amounts of time and energy on it. Rarely have any of us seen ourselves seize, but many of us have experienced the aftermath of a seizure’s power and the residual effect it can have on those around us.

Heros and Self Loathers

Paula Apodaca wrote an excellent post on her blog E. is for Epilepsy about her personal reflections about famous people affected by seizure disorders. Here is a snippet, but read the whole thing...

For my own part, I can't say I feel better about myself knowing there have been famous or historical persons with E., but I do find reading about them as interesting as their works.

Of the ancients, Julius Caesar and Socrates are presented most frequently. Napoleon Bonaparte is often pointed out, but unfortunately, the only lesson I took away from Napoleon's story was that his E. betrayed him in the end, at Waterloo.
I liked writers with E. much better. Fyodor Dostoevsky filled my adolescent hours with great drama; Edgar Allen Poe, entertained me with horror stories; Count Leo Tolstoy made me cry.