Happy Purple Day 2021!

 

Hello again and Happy Purple Day! Today is Epilepsy Awareness Day around the world (in Canada it’s even a national Holiday!) I always love Purple Day as it is a time to celebrate the people living with epilepsy daily and raise awareness for the condition that I’ve been living with for so long.  I’ve never known life without epilepsy but it’s so unknown, and yet it’s the fourth most common neurological condition, affecting between 50-60 million people globally. Because not many people know much about it, and it affects so many people, I like to use Purple Day to try and make some noise!

 The past year has been a bit of a bonkers one for me, not because my epilepsy has changed all that much, but because of the way I have seen how much my epilepsy impacts everyday life. I started this blog this year focussing on my experiences living with epilepsy and it has forced me to sit down and reflect on things I’ve never really thought about before. Writing about my journey has been a cathartic experience for me and I can only hope that what I have written about has been of some use to others as well. I think over this year, I’ve noticed more and more, how many different aspects of life epilepsy can filter into. (I wouldn’t have written so many blogs if this were not the case!) But epilepsy can impact so much of your life in the same way that your life impacts your epilepsy. Epilepsy is so much more than just seizures.

 All the reflection and introspection of this past year, and the lessons I’ve found myself learning from past experiences, has made me even more passionate to raise as much awareness as I can about this condition I live with. A few things in my life recently have really brought home to me just how much more there is to epilepsy than just my experience, and it impacts so many more people than we realise in so many ways. It is far more diverse than I could have ever imagined as a child. I have been blessed to find a charity in my area that has allowed me to meet more people with different experiences to me, which is something I lacked growing up. But different people experience seizures differently, recover differently (and at different rates), and find different ways of navigating and coping with different areas of life. And while epilepsy can mean such a complicated variety of things, it seems to me that everyone who lives with it daily is just finding ways to get through it, cope with it, and if possible, try to thrive through it.