Hope

I posted this link on Facebook the yesterday and mentioned that I think #4 is only partly correct:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ilana-jacqueline/personal-health-_b_5482294.html

A friend who also suffers from a chronic condition shared it as well, and he agreed with my analysis. (I say condition because neither of them are an illness. We aren't "ill" in any way, we have a condition.) He added his own title comment, and I commented on his post and said: "It's a fight that you can never stop fighting, and if you lose the consequences are dire."

After a post that I just made this morning, I thought back to this article. The fight is not always physical, and I think this article (linked above) suggests that it is. In fact, 90% of the time the fight is not physical. More often the fight is mental and/or emotional. People are often asking me "how are you so calm about this!?" Others are freaking out about my seizures and I'm all like "meh." Because I have to be calm about it, and just accept it, in order to win the fight. I have to always think that I can go longer without a seizure. I have to do what needs to be done in order to live on to be a better person every day.

Today I posted that I have been 12 days seizure free and that I go to camp in 40 days. At the end I said that I hope to be 52 days seizure free when I get to camp. This is the thought process that I must have. I can't say "I hope to be at least 12 days seizure free when I get there!" Because that is not my hope. My hope is that I never have a seizure again. Is it a realistic possibility? No. But I can always hope.

I am not a religious person, so I don't believe in "faith" that most people talk about and believe in. Faith is a blind belief in something that cannot be proven or disproven. It is trust in something that you have been told even though you have no reason to trust it. Faith is something that people use to force themselves to believe something that they wouldn't otherwise believe.
I do, however, believe in hope. Hope is a state of mind. Hope is something empowering, hope is positive thinking, and positive thinking can have both mental and physical benefits. For some people faith leads to hope, and I therefore I cannot fault people who have faith. If your faith leads to hope then keep having faith, because when you lose hope you lose everything.

Just as I am not religious, I am also not an optimist, or a pessimist; I am a realist. I look at things as how they are, not how I want them to be. The glass isn't half full or half empty, the glass has water in it. This is why I say that it is not realistic to think that I will never have another seizure. It is an unrealistic thought, because I have had epilepsy all of the almost 30 years that I have been alive. But while I am realistic about the matter, it is absolutely necessary to hope that I won't have any more seizures.