10th Aug, 2026
Learning to Walk Again
Widowhood, Disability, and Other Unexpected Ways to Lose The Plot
I’m on my gap year. I haven’t been anywhere yet.
I haven’t worked in six months, a fact which makes me DEEPLY uncomfortable. You see, I’m the archetype of Eldest Daughter™. My brilliant parents divorced before I can remember and I was strictly 50/50 custody. I was a ‘pleasure to have in class’, a ‘very well behaved child’, and other similar metrics which at age 34 I am still trying to measure up to.
Born just in time to be lucky enough to go to university when it was only £3k per year, worked non-stop since age 14 doing this and that, jumped just high enough to get on the career ladder at something I am moderately good at doing and climbed it, quickly. I was lucky enough and spent enough time skint to buy a house in my hometown when I was 25.
Productivity was a drug; for a solid decade I woke up at 5am everyday to walk 6 miles and go to the gym, be at the office by 8am, food shop on my lunch break, shower after evening yoga class (save on the bills) and prepare all my food for the following day in time for bed at 10pm. Plans every weekend, Thursday night beers, rugby matches most Saturdays.
Looking back, I’m not entirely sure when I planned on being a person.
Then my wonderful, brave husband died of cancer in 2020. It wasn’t sudden, we navigated it for three years, but adding full-time-carer-in-a-pandemic-where-noone-knows-their-arse-from-their-elbow to the above was a chapter quite literally no one could have predicted. It’s overwhelmingly disconcerting to be widowed at age 28 when seemingly everyone else was getting engaged, buying a flat, and not allowed to leave their houses due to a virus.
I have an incredible universe of family and friends who kept me somewhat upright and didn’t really know what they were doing either. I was, however, also very resilient by sheer virtue of a want to succeed, a knowledge that others have it much worse, and not wanting to be a bother. I will go to incredible lengths to not borrow money or ask for help, due to misplaced ego, pride and a strange, nonsensical notion that I can do it all.
I’m FINE.
I’m good at being skint. I could pay my mortgage alone, make stars align so the water bill didn’t come in at the same time as needing to buy my travelcard, batch cook pretty decent meals to take to work. I can do workouts at home instead of the gym and walk around my local park instead of a treadmill.
It turns out that I was very good at anything that didn’t involve sitting still with my own thoughts.
Widowhood had taught me that if I kept moving, there was always something to do. Someone to look after. A bill to pay. A problem to solve. A reason to get out of bed.
Illness took all of that away.
4 years later in July 2024, I had a massive seizure at a work conference (v. embarassing, cheers brain) and was diagnosed with Epilepsy and Functional Neurological Disease. Illnesses which quite literally are your brain’s way of saying ‘Absolutely The Fuck Not’ and putting you on the ground immediately, followed by an undetermined amount of time in bed with mystery injuries and absolutely no memory of the seizure, what I was doing before, what I did after, and what the fuck is happening.
In a pretty short space of time I completely lost myself.
No longer able to drive, no longer able to walk miles and miles every day, no longer able to go to the gym, no longer able to go to big Tesco, no longer able to drive you to the airport at 4am, no longer able to be spontaneous. I am much less social, I feel like a worse friend, sister, cousin, things which truly haunt me but I wasn’t brave enough to admit.
I tried to work, holy shit I tried. I’d pulled myself up after being widowed, I’m not dying for Christ’s sake, loads of people have this condition, how hard can it be?
I didn’t like the answer to that question.
I am very proud of my career. It’s challenging, I like people, I like stretching my brain, I like leaving something better than I found it. It took multiple attempts of going back to work full time, going into the office, trying to be like it was before until one of my doctors sat me down and in no uncertain terms told me this has to stop.
I was making myself worse, seizures became more frequent and more severe. Anti-seizure medications are like speed dating loads of incredibly strong drugs at the same time. Physically I couldn’t do much at all. Mentally I was having a hard time getting my head around it all. Neurologically I’m absolutely buggered mate.
Epilepsy doesn’t discriminate, it gets you if it gets you. You might be able to identify triggers, but truthfully your brain will just light up like a Christmas tree struck by lightning and bang, down you go. Functional Neurological Disease is a whole other beast. It is still a seizure disorder, and without being a Neurologist you’d be hard pushed to differentiate one from another. FND, however, is effectively a subconscious trauma response. It goes around your memories and thoughts in your subconscious and when it finds something that’s just too painful to deal with, apparently the solution is to pull the emergency brake on the entire nervous system. Bang, down you go.
There’s no cure for either, and there’s no strong mind pills for FND. The only treatment is therapy to address PTSD and reducing physical and mental stresses which is very much easier said than done when being alive is expensive and the world is burning down. I grew up understanding that the world doesn’t owe you a living and you needed to find a way to carry on.
For the first time in 20 years, I stopped working. I had spent a long time in denial, exhausted, making it from one hour to the next riddled with anxiety that I’d have a seizure at the top of the train station stairs and confronting my own mortality with invasive thoughts in the shower that if it happened right now, that would be it.
It is too much of a mindfuck.
I’d always applied tenuous mental gymnastics to make sense of difficult situations and problem solve on my feet while keeping plates spinning. This time I couldn’t. I had to accept that I simply couldn’t carry on. I owe so much to Dan, the incredible man I met when I was 30, armed with enough patience, empathy and love for the both of us. Marrying him felt like home, it still does. I have been the carer. I know what it is to organise someone else’s life around keeping them alive, and how helpless you can feel when you can’t fix the thing that’s hurting them. I will never have the words to express my gratitude fully. Being in a position to not be working for some time is an incredibly privileged place to be, and that does not pass me by.
Negotiating with my ego and choking on my pride, I admitted to myself that I had to strip everything back. I accepted that to get better I needed to start from scratch and ultimately live a very different life to what I am used to. I needed to accept help from people for basic tasks Which, for an Eldest Daughter™ who has spent 34 years confusing independence with virtue, was obviously a fucking nightmare. I had to adapt to convenience food and bend my morals with Amazon deliveries, I had to slow down to nearly a complete stop and throw out the comedically extended yardstick I was measuring myself against. Acceptance, I am learning, is not the same thing as liking it.
I won’t sugarcoat it, it’s been hard. Things have been dark at times. Some days and weeks the only goal has really been to survive it. Slowly, very slowly, I have begun to adjust my thoughts and try to understand what this version of my life could be.
How am I going to do that? That question 10 years ago would have winded me. Now, I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I will, sometime, somehow.
So, if you like, please join me on my inadvertent gap year. I’m not sure where I’m going, what I’ll be doing, or when I’ll be doing it. But I’m learning to walk again, in every possible sense of the phrase. This way I’m in my thoughts, but I’m not alone with my thoughts.
J x
Throwing A Fit 