Soporific Seizing: How I think Epileptic Awareness Should be Spread

Not on my Watch

I take so few occasions to discuss this matter privately, let alone publicly. 

Often, I find it only fitting to contemn and deride people's efforts to express their grievances in response to a condition or disease with which they are afflicted, simply because it is always saturated with pathos. I have lived with my disorder for nigh 20 years, and I would find it contemptible to go out of my way to try to elicit emotional responses of sympathy and pity. I mention this not to slander those who have had the courage to share their stories with others, but because I often feel as though their demonstrations are counter-productive; invariably evoking the very cheap compassion and compathy they claim to dislike and spurn.

Recently, I watched a TED lecture on the subject of epilepsy and the experiences of a young woman who was so burdened. I won't disclose her name or personal history, but I will say (as someone who is probably more qualified to judge it) that her presentation was not only uninformative and tiresome, but down-right nauseating. I am not a prolific student of the art of rhetoric, (despite my Aristotelian efforts to do so) and I readily acknowledge the distinction between the tone, delivery and communicative style of speech versus print. Nonetheless, I felt as though she squandered her time on the main stage. Attempting to slowly and laboriously convey her story, she made a fellow sufferer's eyes glaze over. As I assumed, at one point, she inevitably broke down into tears before a vast and captive audience. While that does in a subtle way infuriate me, I do my best to empathize with the overwhelmingly potent influence of emotion. My criticism and distaste is derived from the ensuing events - and her meretricious sobbing. Once she gathered herself and re-established some semblance of stability, her performance's quality declined. Not inconceivable, but to my taste, a waste of her own time and the audience's. 

I found it to be a crying shame that such a person spent nearly twenty minutes on an issue rarely broached or discussed, and other than garnering temporary and tawdry sympathy, achieved so little. I can honestly recognize the unpopularity of my perspective, but as someone who shares her disability and who also has a penchant for the art of dialectic and conversation, I feel vindicated in expressing my disdain. Needless to say, I am doubly aggrieved. I think it is an outright exposition of duplicity and hypocrisy when people say they evade any opportunity to speak about their malady due to the uncomfortable sorrow with which it is met, only to deliver their story in such a maudlin way once they do.

I don't know about my fellow epileptics, but I wouldn't want the few chances I have to increase awareness about our condition besmirched by a whimpering explanation; appropriately followed by simpering remarks. I am already fed up with the plaintive and petulant culture that is fulminating in our society - I won't have our case for attention and scientific focus expounded with querulous infancy. One cannot control the emotional response of their audience upon reception, but they can tune the key of their own song. 

I may be alone in this campaign, but I feel as though our cause would be much better met and respected if it were explained with sobriety and rationality. Axiomatically I am biased by professional interests and propensities, so I don't take any objections in this vein too seriously. 

As Thomas Paine said in his Age of Reason, John Milton said in his Areopagitica, and John Stuart Mill in his essays On Liberty, free expression and inquiry are essential for the polity not only because of their right to profess their own thoughts, but not to be deprived of the ability to hear everyone else's; especially those in a small dissident minority. For, as we all can intuit, it must have taken any defector from an overwhelming consensus quite some time to muster their opinion. On those grounds, I beseech you to not only consider my own, but to value and perhaps prefer logos to pathos. Much more truth, comprehension, and progression are sure to follow if we do.

Thanks, a garrulous gadfly