From Seizures to Success — The Story Nobody Has Heard Yet
I want to tell you about a sidewalk.
Not a famous one. Not a sidewalk anyone would have reason to remember except me. Just an ordinary stretch of pavement outside a building in Midtown Manhattan — the kind you walk past a hundred times without noticing.
I noticed it.
Because the day I stood on that sidewalk with nothing — no job, no dignity, no roadmap for what came next — was the day I made myself a promise that changed the rest of my life.
This is the story I have never fully told.
The Morning Everything Changed
I had epilepsy since the age of five.
You can read the full story of how it began in the earlier parts of this series — the ear infection that became encephalitis, the coma, the teardrop my father witnessed rolling down my face as he prayed, the moment I woke up when the doctors had not been sure I would.
What I want to tell you about today happened years later.
I was working in New York City for one of the most recognized names in television. The kind of job that felt like proof — proof that epilepsy had not won, that the years of seizures and a lost license and quiet desperation had not defined the ceiling of what I could build.
Every morning I walked through those doors, I felt something I had been chasing for years.
Normal. Capable. Seen.
And then one ordinary afternoon — without warning, without mercy, without any regard for where I was or who was watching — my body did what it sometimes did.
I collapsed on the office floor.
I was conscious. Fully aware of everything around me. But frozen — completely unable to move, unable to speak, unable to do anything except lie there on that floor while the world went on around me.
And in that moment of complete helplessness, a colleague walked past.
Looked down at me.
Stepped over my body like I was an obstacle in the aisle.
And kept walking.
Not long after that, I was let go.
What That Moment Cost Me
I have spent years thinking about how to write this part honestly without making it smaller than it was or larger than it needs to be.
The truth is that being stepped over cost me something that took a long time to name.
It was not just the job — though losing the job was devastating in its own right. It was what the silence of that moment said about how the world saw people like me.
What made it particularly devastating was that I was conscious for every single second of it.
I saw everything.
I saw him look down.
I saw the moment he made his decision.
And I could not say a word.
That is the part that hollowed me out. Not the seizure. Not even the job loss. But lying there — fully present, fully aware — while someone chose to step over me as though I were not a person worth stopping for.
In that silence I heard every fear I had ever quietly carried about myself confirmed out loud.
That I could be stepped over.
That my presence was an inconvenience rather than a human emergency.
That epilepsy had finally made me invisible in the most literal and public way possible.
Thirty minutes later I was released from my position, and I walked out of that building and stood on the sidewalk outside.
And I stood there for a long time.
The Promise
I do not know exactly how long I stood there.
I know the city kept moving around me the way cities do — indifferent and relentless and completely unaware that something had just shifted in one woman standing still on an ordinary sidewalk.
And somewhere in that stillness I made myself a promise.
Not a loud one. Not a dramatic declaration I announced to anyone. Just a quiet, fierce, completely private commitment that formed in the deepest part of who I was.
I am going to make a difference in this world.
Not out of anger — though the anger was real. Not out of a desire to prove something to the person who had stepped over me.
But out of the sudden and unshakeable understanding that what had just happened to me was happening to people everywhere. People who were losing jobs and opportunities and their sense of worth not because of anything they had done wrong — but because of a medical condition they had never chosen and could not control.
Someone needed to say something about that.
I decided it would be me.
Washington
The Epilepsy Foundation heard what had happened.
They asked me to come to Washington D.C.
And so I did.
I stood in a room I had never imagined standing in — and I told the truth about what it feels like to live with epilepsy in a world that does not always make room for it. I talked about the job I had lost. About the colleague who had stepped over me while I lay there on that floor — conscious, frozen, unable to move — as though I were furniture rather than a human being.
I told them that the fear of speaking was exactly what had kept this problem invisible for so long.
And I asked them to do something about it.
In the front row sat Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey.
I watched him reach into his pocket and take out a handkerchief.
And I watched him wipe the tears from his eyes.
When it was over he came to find me. He shook my hand and told me that his own sister had lived with epilepsy. That he understood more than I knew. That what I had said mattered.
Not long after that testimony stronger protections became law — so that no one could be pushed out of a job simply for having a disability.
What That Day Taught Me About the Power of One Voice
I have told this story to myself many times over the years. In the quiet moments when the work felt impossible. In the years when it felt like no one was listening. In the moments when the easier path would have been silence.
And every time I come back to the same understanding.
One voice — telling one true story, in the right room, at the right moment — can reach all the way from a sidewalk in Manhattan to the floor of Congress.
Not a perfect voice.
Not a polished voice.
Not the voice of someone with power or platform or any particular reason to be heard.
Just an honest one.
That is all it took.
And that is all it ever takes.
The Reason I Have Never Stopped
I built a podcast that now reaches more than 1.3 million listeners. I have written twenty bestselling books. I have appeared on national television and been recognized by my industry for the work I do.
But none of those things are the reason I have never stopped.
The reason I have never stopped is because I know what it costs a person to stay silent about something that is hurting them.
I know what it feels like to be stepped over.
I know what it feels like to be fully conscious — fully present — while the world decides you are not worth stopping for.
And I know what becomes possible when someone — anyone — decides that the silence has gone on long enough and chooses to speak instead.
That choice, made on an ordinary sidewalk outside a building in Midtown Manhattan, is the reason everything I have built exists.
And it is the reason I believe — with the full conviction of someone who has lived this — that your voice matters more than you know.
Whatever you have been through.
Whatever you have been afraid to say.
Whatever story you have been waiting until you are ready enough, credentialed enough, healed enough to tell.
The world does not need a perfect version of your story.
It needs the true one.
By Stacey Chillemi
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, The Advisor with Stacey Chillemi, reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.