From the outside, the television industry looks glamorous. The lights. The studios. The names you recognize walking the halls. People see it and think — what a life.
From the inside, it looks very different.
It is relentless. It is demanding. It will consume every hour you are willing to give it and then ask for more. I gave it everything I had. I walked those halls with purpose, moved between studios with urgency, and showed up every single day ready to do whatever the next production needed.
I loved it. I was good at it. And I believed — with everything in me — that I was building toward something.
I was walking through Rockefeller Center on an ordinary day, moving from one studio to the next, when I felt it.
The tingling sensation.
Anyone who lives with epilepsy knows this feeling. It is your body’s only warning. A few seconds of knowing what is coming without any ability to stop it.
I looked around quickly, hoping to find somewhere — anywhere — I could go without drawing attention to myself. I was not the type to make a scene. My seizures were usually brief, and I had learned over the years to manage them as quietly as possible.
But there is no managing the ground.
Within seconds, my arms and legs gave out completely. I went straight down. No warning. No way to catch myself. Just the floor of a busy hallway in one of the most famous buildings in New York City rising up to meet me.
I opened my eyes.
People were everywhere. Moving fast. Everyone had somewhere to be.
And then an executive walked by with his crew.
He looked down.
He stepped over me and kept walking.
I was conscious. I could see him. I just could not speak yet — those first moments after a seizure, the body comes back before the voice does. I lay there on that floor, completely aware of what had just happened, unable to do anything but watch him go.
I kept thinking — how do you see a person on the floor and step over them? Even if you did not see them fall. Even if you do not know what happened. There is a human being lying on the ground in front of you, and you step over them like they are something in your way.
That thought has stayed with me for decades.
Thirty minutes later, one of his assistants — a young woman who looked like she did not want to be delivering this message — came to find me.
I am sorry, she said. But we are going to have to let you go.
I remember looking at her. I remember the stunned silence that followed. After everything I had given. After every early morning and late night and extra hour. After showing up through medications that made me foggy and seizures that terrified me and a condition I had never asked for and could not control.
He could not even deliver the news himself. He sent someone else to do it.
I do not remember what I said. I do not think I said much. I gathered myself, walked back down that hallway one final time, and out the door.
I walked out with my head up.
I want to be honest about what followed, though. Because the triumphant exit is only part of the story.
I was devastated.
Not just hurt. Devastated. The kind of devastation that takes years to fully surface because you are too busy surviving to feel it all at once. I built new things — a freelance company, a new chapter, a marriage, a life — but underneath all of it the wound was there.
Epilepsy had done it again.
Every time I walked three steps forward, this disorder knocked me two steps back. I knew what I was capable of. I could feel the potential inside me like something banging against a wall trying to get out. And every time I got close to something that mattered a seizure would arrive uninvited and change everything.
It is a particular kind of grief — the grief of knowing what you could do if your own body would simply cooperate.
I carried that grief quietly for a long time.
And then someone from the Epilepsy Foundation called.
He was a director who worked with people living with epilepsy across New Jersey, and he invited me to do something I had never imagined doing.
Come to Washington, he said. Speak before Congress.
I remember standing in that hearing room. I remember the faces of the people listening. I remember Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey — our congressman — sitting across from me as I spoke. And I remember the moment he reached into his pocket, took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes.
Afterward he shook my hand.
My sister had epilepsy, he said. You brought back a lot of memories for me.
In the months that followed, additional protections were added to the Americans with Disabilities Act — strengthening the rights of people with disabilities in the workplace. Making it harder for an employer to do what was done to me on that hallway floor.
I think about the executive who stepped over me sometimes.
I wonder if he ever thinks about it.
I wonder if he knows that the woman he stepped over went on to build a podcast reaching 1.3 million listeners. To write twenty books. To stand before Congress and change the law.
I do not tell you this to be triumphant.
I tell you this because I spent years believing that what happened in that hallway defined the ceiling of what was possible for me.
It did not.
The floor of Rockefeller Center was not my ending.
It was the beginning of everything I was actually meant to build.
If you have ever been stepped over — literally or figuratively — by someone who should have stopped and did not, I want you to know something.
The people who step over you reveal everything about themselves and nothing about your worth.
Get up.
Keep walking.
Your head stays up.
Read the complete From Seizures to Success series
Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3 million listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host. She testified before the United States Congress on disability rights and job discrimination.