The identity issue

The Generation Next staff comprises diverse high school students, all with different life experiences. Here, they explore the meaning of identity. A couple of them discuss how they’ve embraced the fusion of American culture and that of their immigrant families; one Santa Fe Indian School student talks about the struggles she’s had in rediscovering her Native culture while living in a modern, non-Native world; one expresses fears of leaving behind Nuevo Mexico for an out-of-state college; and another explores how living with epilepsy has affected his approach to life.

"Living with epilepsy is very much a peculiar identity. It isn’t something I have experienced throughout my entire life (at least, I haven’t always been the epileptic one in the family), but it is a challenging part of who I am, and it is something I continually have to learn how to deal with.

I have always hadepilepsy at the back of my mind — well, according to my electroencephalogram,the seizures are actually throughout my entire brain, but I digress. My firstseizure wasn’t until I was 12, but my father is epileptic and my grandmotherworks in medicine, so neurology has always been a common topic of discussion.This also meant that I grew up watching someone else deal with epilepsy beforeI had to. It was by watching my dad persist through his seizures that I reallystarted to understand just what it meant to always get back up. When my turncame to have seizures, albeit of a kind totally different than his, I wasalready in a position of support and understanding.

I spent three years ofmy life having nonstop seizures, and it is because of those that I cannotremember much of middle school. For all intents and purposes, I was very muchdisabled; I could barely attend school, and the thought of getting a driver’slicense seemed more like a dream than a reality. Yet here I am, four yearslater, writing about a time when I could barely remember anything, after a dayof driving my brothers around town.

I may not have had aseizure in quite some time, but that does not detract from my being epileptic.I cannot stay up late often or do anything with a strobe light (I still havenot seen Incredibles 2). The traditions I developed earlier in mylife still hold true: anticonvulsant medicine at 7:15 a.m., trips to myneurologist twice a year, etc. The point here is that I will always be me, andepilepsy, regardless of whether or not I am actively seizing, will always be apart of who that is.

I continue to prepare for the risks that epilepsy brings, and with college on the horizon, newfound independence is going to present a plethora of opportunities for error if I am not careful. Epilepsy hasn’t just made me cautious and wary, however; it’s also given me my die-hard work ethic. The fact that I passed middle school, even without remembering most of it, is because I was able to finish everything I missed outside of class. As my dad taught me, being epileptic is about learning how to keep getting back up, even if you cannot remember falling down."

By Harvey McGuinness a senior at Santa Fe High School.

SOURCE: Taken in part from an article by www.santafenewmexican.com