I remember it like it was yesterday.
I was going into my third year of college. I was dating the man who would become my husband — Michael, whom I had met in English class. We were driving back to his house through a quiet stretch of farmland, everything open and spacious the way the world feels when you are young and in love and do not yet know what is coming.
I felt the aura.
That tingling sensation. That specific feeling of funniness that was my body’s only warning. I turned to Michael in the passenger seat and said it clearly.
Michael. I am going to have a seizure.
I started pulling to the side of the road.
The clock ran out before I got there.
My body stiffened. My foot pressed down on the gas pedal. My arms locked to the wheel. Michael grabbed it — his foot all the way down on the brake, my foot all the way down on the gas — the car heading straight toward a telephone pole.
With everything he had, he pulled us away from it.
He told me later that I had the strength of a male bouncer in that moment. That if he had not been in the car with me, I would likely have been dead.
Death flashed before my eyes again. And I was not even conscious to see it.
What I Hoped Would Be Temporary
Shortly after that afternoon, I made an appointment with my doctor. He asked me to stop driving until my seizures could be fully controlled.
I thought it would be a few months. Maybe a year.
Fifteen years of trying new medications. Of being weaned off one and started on another. Of my father driving up to my college campus to get me. Of the close friend who lived off campus who took me to the grocery store and anywhere else I needed to go. Of family members rearranging their schedules. Of accepting help I did not want to need from people I did not want to burden.
It was fifteen years.
I was an independent woman. I had always been. I wanted to do everything on my own. I wanted to learn from my mistakes and grow. I wanted to reach the highest levels of success without asking anyone to carry any part of my weight.
And here I was — needing a ride to buy milk.
The Dream I Could Not Chase
Working in the city was manageable at first — trains and buses made it possible. But when the seizures intensified and I stopped working in the city, when I married Michael and built a life around what was available to me, the walls started to close in.
I felt like my dreams had been smashed.
I had wanted to be a news reporter. A journalist. Someone in television. I had dreamed of growing into something extraordinary in the media industry. But you cannot chase those dreams from the passenger seat of someone else’s car.
I settled. Because I had no choice.
And then we had children.
That was when the walls became a prison.
I could not take my kids to the toy store on an impulse. I could not pick them up from school without coordination. I could not do the small spontaneous things other mothers did without thinking. I felt depressed. I felt like an underachieved woman with everything on hold because of a condition I had never asked for and could not control.
I felt helpless.
What I Built Instead
But I did not stop.
I started writing.
When my seizures were at their worst, and the world outside felt inaccessible, I turned inward and poured everything onto the page. I wrote an article about epilepsy and sent it to the Epilepsy Foundation. They published it. Three to four hundred letters came back from strangers across the United States and Canada.
I took those letters and wrote Epilepsy You Are Not Alone.
I built a blog. A writing career. A platform. People came to me. I found that writing was not just my output — it was my therapy.
And then one day an email arrived.
Someone had found my book at a Barnes and Noble. They wanted me to know it had saved their life.
In that moment something shifted in me. Quietly and permanently. Maybe this life — the one I had built inside the walls of my limitations — was not the lesser version of the life I had planned.
Maybe it was exactly what I was supposed to build.
The Day the Prison Doors Opened
It took fifteen years. It took changing everything.
I changed how I handled stress. I changed what I ate. I incorporated integrative medicine — detox protocols, supplements, exercise, yoga. I rebuilt my sleep. I went to therapy. I worked on my confidence. I learned to accept that epilepsy was part of my life — and that acceptance was not defeat. It was the beginning of every real change I would ever make.
With my doctor — a true epilepsy specialist who refused to give up — we finally found the right combination. My seizures rapidly decreased.
And then they stopped.
When I finally got my license back after fifteen years, it felt like walking out of a prison through garden doors into open air with no one stopping me and the whole world ahead.
The first thing I did was take my kids to the toy store.
Just because I could.
What the Prison Taught Me
I used to think about what might have been. The news career. The journalism. The television industry. All the versions of myself that I would never get to be.
I understand now that everything I built inside those limitations was not the consolation prize.
The book that saved a life was built inside those walls.
The blog that became a platform was built inside those walls.
The platform that became a podcast reaching 1.3 million listeners worldwide was built inside those walls.
The twenty books. The Congress testimony. All of it — built from inside a prison nobody else could see.
The prison taught me that when the life you planned becomes unavailable, you do not stop building.
You build differently.
You work with what you have.
And sometimes — not always, but sometimes — what you build inside the walls is more extraordinary than anything you could have built outside them.