Buzzing Notifications
Do you have a cell phone with notifications to remind you of when things will happen? Has it become second nature to you to sense when a notification will be coming but you don't completely know when and where it may happen? What if that buzz from your phone was a buzz from your body and it meant that you had to protect yourself from injury while whatever you had carefully planned out will fail completion? Imagine going to class eager to learn and having forgotten to turn off your cell phone. In the middle of the most informative part of the lesson, your notification goes off and you must put yourself as close to the ground as possible. What if expecting that notification meant preparing for disruption?
I ask these questions because that is what living with epilepsy was like for me, except that I didn’t have a cell phone at the time. My notifications, the auras that warned me of a seizure, were small buzzes of sensations that I felt in my body that would intuitively tell me that I had to get close to the ground. Imagine walking down a hallway to your next engagement and suddenly knowing that you must crouch down close to a wall and try to calm yourself as people hurry past you. How would you feel having to concentrate while thinking that you should be ahead of them to not be late? How would you prioritize the safety of your body over the safety of your reputation? How is one to decide these issues in a matter of seconds? When the choice boils down to live or die, there isn’t room for pickiness in decision making. It’s make a choice, know why you did it and ride the wave to the next moment.
When an aura was a sure sign that all plans must be dropped and choices must be made on how to continue after the attack, all preconceptions were dropped until I reawakened in a new situation. Life was about accepting whatever changes came my way and adapting to what I had to work with.
It was my experience with multiple seizures a day that taught me not to attach myself to preconceptions, find meaning in every situation and recognize that life continuously changes. There is limited control over what happens in life, but we have control over our feelings. Life became easier to respect when I admitted that I was part of something more and I was grateful for the notifications that helped to protect me.
