“No one is you, and that is your power.”
What does this little snippet of wisdom invoke for you? Do you find it inspiring and powerful? Or perhaps cliché and boring? Still, so many of us like to plaster our walls with them. Do you?
I know I do.
Another favorite of mine is:
“Believe you can, and you are halfway there.”
And that’s what brings me here today, to kick off my blog, and to share my story with you.
If you are reading this, you’ve probably dealt with, or are dealing with, a health challenge. For me, it was epilepsy. It has been a journey of defeat and victory, alternating in continuous cycles. But what I learned through the years is that even in adversity, gifts are to be found. And you have more control than you may initially think. With this blog, I want to share everything I’ve learned, from experiences to research reviews and interventions I’ve used to work my way up from misery to good health. I want to empower you to take control over your health too.
Allow me to tell you my story.
When I was a kid, I didn’t need cards on my wall to feel unstoppable. I did well in school, my teachers liked me. My family totally encouraged this. They were of one mind: become a professor, a millionaire… or a family disgrace. That attitude became highly apparent one evening. I came home with a piece of math homework that only got 5 out of 10. I had misunderstood something. My grandmother exploded.
“What were you being stupid for?”
I exploded back. “I wasn’t being stupid!”
Quite frankly, I’m surprised the entire house didn’t explode that night. But all in all, I was on a roll!
Until that one, hot day after PE class. A sensation of warmth stole over me. You know that hot feeling you get when you get caught doing something you’re REALLY not supposed to be doing? That. I saw images of my surroundings, but they were disconnected. They invoked panic. I could only blubber. My brain had put the word “What” on repeat.
It initiated a venture into the medical world, from neurologists to psychiatrists and back. Finally, after seeing the umpteenth neurologist, the culprit came to light.
“We have a mild form of epilepsy here.”
I had no idea what epilepsy was. But the neurologist was kind, he put me on medication, and the seizures became a thing of the past. Another thing that became a thing of the past, though, were my good grades. My cognitive performance, the thing my family valued above all else, was slipping through my fingers, like water seeping through tightly cupped hands. I scraped through high school.
Then, when it was time to start university, my neurologist decided that I had been seizure free long enough to reduce the medications. It felt like a miracle, like a veil being lifted from every fibre of my being. I was on a roll again!
But epilepsy is a ruthless master. After a year of bliss, it again reared its ugly head. I had to face the truth. It was not childhood epilepsy, as my neurologist had initially thought. It was here to stay.
I was in anguish. I had just been offered a PhD position. How on earth was I supposed to do it wearing the veil of medication? But my health was deteriorating fast. I could not spend more than 2 hours in our poorly ventilated office without suffering a seizure. Gone were my concentration and clarity of mind.
My supervisor said to me: “What became of the Ilona I knew?”
That phrase really ripped my heart apart. I knew that the real me was still in there somewhere, waiting to be released, but being yet unable to find the key to unlock the chain. And my biggest fear was that they would write me off before I could find the key. That I would become the family disgrace after all. I could almost hear my grandmother again.
“What were you being stupid for?”
This time, though, I didn’t explode back. Slowly, reluctantly, the voice of self-reflection began to trump the voice of pride. Maybe I WAS being stupid. Surely medicine could not be the only way to save my health. What gems of knowledge were out there to be mined that were not to be found in the doctor’s office?
A fire had been lit inside me. I was being trained as a scientist, I had access to the medical literature. It was as though I had started a second PhD. But this one was entirely my own. Only my boyfriend and his family supported me. My parents were afraid. They believed in conventional medicine.
It was slow progress. But the performance mindset had been hammered in hard enough, and this time, it was saving me. About 5 years ago, I finally struck… perhaps not gold, but definitely silver, in my health quest. My hours of plowing through literature and self-experimentation were starting to pay off. My productivity and clarity of mind came back.
October 8th, 2020. After 11 years, I became Dr. Ilona. Without the white coat, though.
Today, I still find it tough to uphold my confidence. I have my moments of relapse into uncertainty, into believing that I am inferior. Thankfully, I have always been able to work in a supportive environment, but academia remains a tough world. Taking 11 years to complete a PhD does not look good when facing competition from star candidates all over the world with perfect, polished profiles and with high-impact publications and awards galore.
But do you know what I hear from everyone who hears my story?
“Wow. You completed it. That’s amazing, and that’s what truly matters.”
If my epilepsy, my ruthless master, taught me anything, it is perseverance. Wherever you want to go, whatever you want to achieve, don’t let it slip through your fingers. Your path will differ from others’paths, and you may have to search for years to find it. The road is rough, the canyon is deep, but there is a way out. It will take strength and determination, but then, are we not here to cultivate our best possible selves?
Which brings me back to my cards.
“Believe you can, and you are halfway there”.
And if you need more reminding, go on! Plaster your wall. Clichés give hope and comfort. Let’s undertake this journey together.
“No one is you, and that is your power.”