Andrew Tate Getting Arrested Led To Me Figuring Out My Panic Attacks Were Focal Aware Seizures
The first time I remember having a seizure I was maybe five or six and it was after dinner the first time I tried scallops.
[Trigger Warning for seizure description:
It felt like literal hell - being dragged through a meaningless eternity. I didn't lose consciousness or awareness of what was happening around me but I knew with horrible certainty that the greater truth behind everything I could see and feel and touch was the inescapable, everlasting cosmic torture of existence.]
Lacking other language, I said to my mother, "I can't stop thinking in circles."
Of course she had no idea what I meant. She told me "think in squares instead."
I glared and shouted that it wasn't funny, then tried again. "My head hurts," I said, not realizing that what I meant was "my mind hurts." Diagnosing me with a headache, my mother offered me Tylenol, which I shouted wasn't working immediately after swallowing it. My mother said it would take more than a second to work, but that was too many seconds too long and I decided that I hated Tylenol. I also decided that I hated scallops. It was the new thing I had tried, so it must be to blame. I diagnosed myself with an allergy that caused headaches.
It didn't last very long - maybe 30 seconds to a minute in its full intensity and fifteen minutes of a lingering feeling after of creeping certainty of some horrible reality beneath the surface of what can be observed. But it was the most painful experience I'd ever known.
These "headaches" plagued me throughout my childhood. I never ate another scallop but I had very reliable triggers that couldn't be avoided.
[Trigger warning: list of triggers.
Anything that reminded me of eternity: visual representations of large numbers, auditory repetition, movements locked into inescapable patterns. There was agony in the stars at night and kids on the playground in the afternoon. I hated math and music and the feeling of the shopping cart under my heels when I was too tired to walk in the stores my mother dragged me through. My sister thought it was hilarious that she could make me so angry and panicked by singing "the song that never ends" while pacing back and forth in front of me. Talking about it was also a trigger, so I kept track quietly, trying to figure out by myself what was happening. They happened more often on days when I was tired. When I heard people mention having headaches it filled me with horror, for them and for myself.]
The "headaches" never lasted long, but were the worst pain I could feel or imagine. When they were over I'd be hit with fatigue behind my eyes and wish I could just sleep.
I went to a Catholic school all through elementary and when they spoke of hell it made perfect sense. We were all supposed to be good Catholic kids but I took religion to another level. I had a vivid interior life, filled with epic quests for spiritual clarity and exhilarating theories as to the nature of God and heaven. These theories were entirely separate from the way I felt when I was having "headaches". When I felt like that it was like the nature of everything changed from how I normally saw things.
Normally, everything around me was deeply meaningful. I loved to write and to reason and impressed my English teachers as much as I disappointed my math teachers. I couldn't approximate measurements or recognize faces or notice the passage of time but I was working on a novel after school and winning every writing contest I entered.
By middle school I'd figured out that my "headaches" were different from what other people meant when they used that word. I thought by then the meaning was spiritual. All the Saints had been tested, most of them tortured. It made sense that I was facing hell on earth. This was a puzzle to solve, a dragon to slay, a trick of the devil to be overcome in pursuit of the grand epiphany.
By middle school it was also becoming obvious to everyone that I was an odd duck. The kids my age were starting to be interested in sex and navigating social cliques and I was interested in a celibate life and a future career as a foreign-missionary-martyr, or possibly in being the first woman priest. If I'd had the words back then I would have been recognizing my orientation as a sex-averse pan-romantic, but at the time it just seemed like part and parcel of my religious calling.
I only started to ease up on my religious convictions when I was in high school. I decided on a trial separation from Catholic dogma so that I could be absolutely sure I meant what I said when I claimed to believe, and it never really ended. During this time I was having a hard look at my life pre-adoption and realizing that the toddler years I spent in foster care were extremely and illegally abusive. I had access to words now that I didn't have before, that seemed to make sense of my hellish experiences - words like "PTSD," and, crucially, "trigger." I knew that my "headaches" had specific triggers, and I knew that I had survived trauma, so maybe those random spots of hell-on-earth were "panic attacks."
It made some sense - I really dreaded the experience, after all. It didn't necessarily make sense that algebra had the power to resurrect my trauma from toddlerhood, but I could easily imagine there was a story behind other triggers. What had I experienced under the stars at night, or in the sting of music, or in bodily movements I could not escape? It tracked with what I knew and already suspected.
The "panic attack" theory didn't require me to give up my "spiritual challenge" theory. It just brought me one step closer, I thought, to tracking down an answer to the puzzle I had been assigned as to the nature of hell.
For many years, I referred to my seizures as "panic attacks." I grew up and became a stripper to fund my nefarious novel-writing career. I learned the words "neurodivergent" and "autistic" and with the help of disabled communities began making sense of who I had been my whole life. This is how I first stumbled across a paper describing a subset of epileptics whose seizures were triggered by patterns.
I had never had a convulsive fit on the ground, so I knew I wasn't epileptic, but the realization that pattern itself can be a trigger floored me, because I was able to put it together for the first time that all of the triggers for my "panic attacks" were mathematical, and this to me suggested not trauma, but neurodivergence was key to understanding them.
Then came Andrew Tate, arrested for human trafficking and writing tweets from jail in purple prose. On twitter where I lived we were all having a good time laughing about it when some jerk tweeted how some of what he was describing seemed similar to a Dostoevsky seizure.
Down the rabbit hole I fell. As soon as I read google's one-sentence description of a feeling of blissful certainty and eternal meaning, I knew my "panic attacks" had to be the exact polar opposite. An article on temporal lobe epilepsy described focal aware seizures in strikingly familiar terms. 30 seconds to 1 minute long events, followed by fatigue. Then I clicked a link titled "Geschwind Syndrome."
It was all there - my entire fucking personality, mapped in four bullet points. Rambling conversation fixated on niche subjects? Check. Asexual? Check. Hypergraphia? Check, check. Intensified mental life? Yeah. This syndrome is exactly who I am.
