I want to give you an honest accounting rather than a tidy story. This isn’t a triumphant “I’m healed” post, and it isn’t a discouraging “nothing’s changed” one either. The real picture holds both real improvement and ongoing difficulty at the same time, and I think that honest coexistence is more useful to you than either simpler version would be.
In This Article
Where Things Stand With Seizures
Seizures are still a daily part of my life. That hasn’t changed, and I want to be direct about it rather than let a hopeful update imply otherwise. What has changed is the severity: the larger, tonic-clonic seizures have improved significantly, and symptom management more broadly has gotten meaningfully better across the board.
What hasn’t resolved, and what I don’t think I can honestly promise will ever fully resolve, are the cognitive effects — real, ongoing difficulties that trace back to years of seizures, a traumatic brain injury, and multiple concussions. I’m not going to pretend I know whether that fully heals someday. I don’t know. What I can tell you is where things actually stand right now, without dressing it up in either direction.
What’s Genuinely Improved
Some things really have gotten better, and I want to name them clearly rather than bury good news under caution. The headaches are essentially gone. I don’t get migraines anymore, which was not a small thing for years of my life. Energy, mood, day-to-day function, and mental clarity have all improved in ways that are real and noticeable, not imagined or minor.
Real improvement and real, persistent difficulty aren’t contradictory. They’re just what an honest account of a complicated recovery actually looks like.
I want that to sit honestly next to what I just described about ongoing cognitive difficulty, without resolving the tension between them. Both are true at once.
What Remains Hard
Some emotional challenges and physical limitations are still part of daily life. Chronic pain is present, though it’s considerably better managed since inflammation came under control — and that particular connection turned out to matter more than I expected.
Getting one thing under control didn’t just fix that one thing. It rippled outward into improvement across several other areas that I hadn’t expected to be connected to it at all. That’s worth naming explicitly, because if you’re managing several overlapping chronic issues yourself, it’s worth asking whether one of them might be quietly driving several of the others, rather than assuming each problem needs its own completely separate fix.
This Isn’t a Finished Project
None of what I’ve described above is a plateau I arrived at and now simply maintain. Food, symptom tracking, and day-to-day management are an active, ongoing process — not a calibration I found once and then locked into place. What worked six months ago doesn’t automatically keep working now. Something shifts, and the whole picture has to be reevaluated and retuned again, sometimes more than once in a season.
That reevaluation is real work, and it’s easy to leave it out of an update like this — to describe where things currently stand as though “currently” were the same as “permanently.” It isn’t. The improvement I’ve described holds because I keep actively tending to it, not because I found the right combination once and it settled into place on its own. There’s no finish line where the adjusting stops and the maintaining simply begins on autopilot. It’s ongoing, indefinitely, and I’ve had to make peace with that being the actual shape of this — not a sign that something is still unsolved, but simply what managing a genuinely chronic condition actually requires.
What I Understand Now That I Didn’t Before
For a long stretch of this journey, I operated as though I needed to fully understand what was happening in my body before I was allowed to act on anything. Clarity had to arrive first. Courage came second, if it came at all. That’s not actually how any of this worked, and unlearning that expectation took longer than I wish it had.
Somewhere along the way, healing also stopped meaning what I originally assumed it meant — a full return to the life I had before, with no seizures, no pain, no limitations. It became something closer to a way of living instead: choosing alignment over pressure, presence over performance, showing up on the genuinely hard days without waiting to feel sufficiently “healed” by some external measure before that showing-up counted as real. Some things about my body and this whole process still don’t make sense to me. The real difference now isn’t that they finally do. It’s that I stopped waiting for them to make sense before I kept going.
The Peace That Passes Understanding — Faith in the Middle of It
Healing the body turned out to be only part of the story. There was a deeper layer of work — around identity, and around my relationship with God — that genuinely didn’t begin until the physical protocols alone hit a wall they couldn’t get past on their own.
That deeper work has looked less like resolution and more like surrender, in the specific sense of laying something down rather than giving up on it. Stillness became sacred to me in that process, not just physical rest but a genuine quieting that made room to actually be met rather than simply endured. What I’ve found there isn’t a peace that depends on the outcomes resolving in my favor. It’s rooted instead in something steadier: the quiet knowing that God never left, including in the parts of this that still, honestly, don’t make sense to me. Scripture puts it plainly: “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28, NASB). That rest was never contingent on the seizures stopping first.
Where This Leaves You
This is an honest accounting, not a resolution — because there isn’t one, not in the tidy sense most updates like this promise. It’s an ongoing walk, with real ground gained and real ground still being walked. I’ve written more generally about what that non-linear coexistence of progress and persistence actually looks like in Why Healing Isn’t Linear — And Why That’s Not a Failure, and if you’re curious what I’d say to an earlier version of myself who was still in the middle of this, I wrote about that exercise directly in What Would You Tell Your Younger Self?
Read the Full Story
For the fuller account of this journey, start with “Healing Against the Odds.” For the years that led up to it, “Still Walking” picks up the story.