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Tag Archive for: Epilepsy Awareness

Why I Built a Platform for 1.3 Million People

Stacey Chillemi award-winning podcast host and founder of Advisor Global Media explaining why she built a platform for 1.3 million listeners

From Seizures to Success: How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher — Part 5 of 5

By Stacey Chillemi | Award-Winning Podcast Host | 20x Bestselling Author | Founder, Advisor Global Media™

This is the final chapter. The full journey begins here: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi

This is the final chapter.

And I have been thinking about how to write it for a long time — because it would be easy to end this series with a list of accomplishments. The awards, the television appearances, the bestselling books, the milestone numbers. It would be satisfying and tidy.

But that is not the truth of why I built this platform.

And after four chapters of telling you the most honest version of my story I can manage — I am not about to stop now.

The Question I Could Not Stop Asking

Let me take you to a moment I have never shared publicly before.

Years after the seizures stopped. Years after the driver’s license came back. Years after the book hit the bestseller list.

I was sitting in my car outside a television studio. I had just finished taping a segment. And I remember looking at my reflection in the rearview mirror and asking myself a question that had been building quietly for years.

Is this enough?

Not out of dissatisfaction or restlessness. But out of something deeper — a genuine reckoning with what all of it was actually for.

I had survived something that should have killed me at age five. I had rebuilt my life after epilepsy took piece after piece of it. I had written the books, given the speeches, stood before Congress, appeared on national television.

And sitting in that car I understood something I had been circling for years without quite landing on.

It was never about me.

It was always about the person on the other side of the story.

The one who needed to hear it.

What Four Hundred Letters Taught Me About Purpose

You already know about the shoebox from Part 3. About the four hundred letters that arrived when I was a college student asking strangers how they coped with epilepsy — and how those letters taught me for the first time that I was not alone.

What I did not tell you is what those letters ultimately taught me about the nature of impact.

Every single one of them said some version of the same thing.

I thought I was the only one.

That is the most isolating belief a human being can carry. And it is the belief that one honest story — shared without armor, without pretense, without the cleaned-up version — can dismantle completely.

That is what I do. That is what I have always done.

The Gap I Could Not Stop Seeing

When I look at the world of experts, coaches, authors, and entrepreneurs I see one thing more clearly than anything else.

A gap.

A gap between the people who have extraordinary things to share and the world that desperately needs to hear them.

I see coaches who have quietly helped hundreds of clients transform their lives — but whose message reaches only the people who already know to look for them.

I see authors whose books could change someone’s entire relationship with their health, their business, or their sense of self — sitting unread while the people who need them most have never heard of them.

I see entrepreneurs who have built something remarkable from nothing — whose story of resilience and reinvention could inspire someone standing at the exact crossroads they once stood at — but who have never been given a platform worthy of their journey.

That gap breaks my heart. Because I know — from forty years of living it — what it costs a person to keep their story silent.

What This Platform Is Really For

The Advisor with Stacey Chillemi is not just a podcast.

It is a bridge.

A bridge between the people who have something extraordinary to share and the 1.3 million people who are waiting to hear it.

Every single guest who sits across from me in a recording session is someone who has been through something. Who has learned something. Who has built something or survived something that the world genuinely needs to know.

And my job — the job I have been preparing for my entire life without quite knowing it — is to ask the right questions. To create the space where the real story can finally emerge.

Would I Change It?

I am asked often whether I would change my story if I could.

Whether I would go back and undo the encephalitis. Skip the seizures. Avoid the colleague who stepped over me on that office floor. Erase the years of isolation and dependence.

My answer — every single time — is no.

Because everything I know about what makes a story worth telling I learned from living through something hard and choosing to turn toward it instead of away from it.

Epilepsy did not happen to me.

It happened for me.

And — I believe — for every person reading this who has been sitting on their own story, wondering whether it is enough, wondering whether the world actually needs to hear it.

What I Want You to Carry From This

We have been on a journey together through these five chapters.

You have sat with me in the hospital room at age five. You have walked through the office where someone stepped over my unconscious body. You have held the shoebox. You have sat in the car in the parking lot on the day everything changed.

And now we are here.

So before I close this series I want to leave you with the thing I most wish someone had given me.

Your story is not finished.

Whatever chapter you are in right now — however hard or confusing or incomplete it feels — you are not at the end.

And whatever you have been through — whatever you have survived, learned, lost, rebuilt, or discovered along the way — there is someone out there who needs to hear exactly that.

Not a polished version. Not a highlight reel.

The real one.

The world is waiting for it.

And so am I.

 

Read the complete series:

Part 1: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi

Part 2: staceychillemi.com/colleague-stepped-over-me-epilepsy-workplace-stacey-chillemi

Part 3: staceychillemi.com/shoebox-full-of-letters-epilepsy-book-stacey-chillemi

Part 4: staceychillemi.com/natural-healing-epilepsy-what-medicine-couldnt-stacey-chillemi

 

If this series has moved you I would love to help you share your own story with the world. Book a Free Strategy Call at calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link and let us talk about what is possible for you.

 

Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.

Explore how we can work together: staceychillemi.com/work-with-me

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How Nature Healed What Medicine Couldn’t — And What It Taught Me About Listening to Your Body

Stacey Chillemi award-winning podcast host sharing her natural healing journey after fifteen years of epilepsy

From Seizures to Success: How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher — Part 4 of 5

By Stacey Chillemi | Award-Winning Podcast Host | 20x Bestselling Author | Founder, Advisor Global Media™

New to this series? Start at the beginning: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi

I want to be careful about how I tell this part of my story.

Because it would be easy to frame it as a dramatic turning away from conventional medicine — a moment where I threw away my prescriptions, embraced ancient wisdom, and was miraculously healed overnight. That would make a satisfying story. But it would not be the true one.

What actually happened was quieter than that. More collaborative. More honest. And ultimately far more powerful than any dramatic gesture could have been.

What happened was that I started listening.

Fifteen Years

I want you to sit with that number for a moment.

Fifteen years.

That is how long I lived with active seizures after my initial diagnosis at age five. Fifteen years of trying medication after medication. Fifteen years of side effects that sometimes felt as debilitating as the condition itself. Fifteen years of adjusting and readjusting and hoping that this new combination, this new dosage, this new specialist would finally be the one that gave me my life back.

The medications helped. They gave me enough stability to go to college, to build a career, to create something resembling a normal life within the constraints epilepsy imposed.

But they never fully solved the problem.

And after fifteen years I had to ask myself an honest question I had been afraid to ask before.

What else might be possible that I have not tried yet?

The Conversation That Changed Everything

That question led me to a conversation with a herbalist — someone who had spent decades studying the relationship between the body and the natural world.

I want to be completely clear about what happened next.

I did not abandon my medical team. I did not stop my medications overnight. I did not decide that conventional medicine had failed me and that nature alone would save me.

What I did was add.

I added knowledge. I added research. I added a deep and curious investigation into everything I had not yet considered — the herbs, the vitamins, the minerals, the foods, the lifestyle practices that generations before us had relied on long before pharmaceutical solutions existed.

I became a student of my own body in a way I had never been before. And I did all of it in full partnership with my doctors, never replacing their guidance but building intentionally on top of it.

Two Years of Research

What followed were two of the most intensive years of my life.

I read everything I could find on the relationship between nutrition and neurological health. I studied which herbs had been used historically to support the nervous system. I looked at the evidence around vitamins and minerals the body needs to function at its best.

I looked at stress. At sleep. At the way chronic illness creates a cycle of anxiety that keeps the nervous system locked in survival mode — and at what it genuinely takes to interrupt that cycle.

And then slowly, carefully, always in conversation with my medical team — I began implementing what I was learning.

What Slowly Changed

This did not happen overnight.

There was no single morning when I woke up healed. No dramatic before and after.

What there was — was a slow, almost imperceptible easing.

A seizure that was less severe than the last one. A week that went by without an episode. Then two weeks. Then a month. A gradual recalibration of a nervous system that had been in survival mode for so long it had forgotten what safety felt like.

And then one day — after fifteen years of living with epilepsy as a constant companion — I realized the seizures had stopped.

Completely.

The Day I Got My License Back

Getting my driver’s license back after fifteen years was something I still find difficult to put fully into words.

Because it was not just a license.

It was proof.

Proof that the body has a capacity for healing we do not always give it credit for. Proof that asking what else might be possible — and doing the painstaking work of finding out — can change everything.

I sat in my car that first day for a long time before I drove anywhere. Just sat with it.

The Book That Came Next

Two years of intensive research had filled pages and pages of notes. A deep and hard-won understanding of how herbs, vitamins, minerals, foods, and lifestyle practices work together to support the body’s natural intelligence.

And I knew — with the same certainty I had felt years earlier when I put four hundred letters in a shoebox — that this knowledge needed to be shared.

So I wrote The Complete Herbal Guide: A Natural Approach to Healing the Body.

Not as a prescription. Not as a promise that what worked for me would work for everyone. But as a resource — a practical, accessible guide for anyone who had ever asked the same question I had asked.

What else might be possible?

What I Want You to Take From This

If you are navigating a chronic condition — whether it is epilepsy or something else entirely — I am not here to tell you what your path looks like. I do not know your body, your history, or what your medical team has advised.

What I do know is this.

Your body is not your enemy.

The symptoms that feel like betrayal are often the body’s most honest attempt to communicate something it does not know how to say any other way.

And the question worth asking — always, at every stage of your journey — is not just how do I make this stop. But what is my body trying to tell me, and am I actually listening?

That question changed my life.

It might change yours too.

To learn more about the natural health research I compiled during those two years visit thecompleteherbalguide.com — the platform I built to make natural health guidance accessible to everyone.

 

This is Part 4 of a 5-part series: From Seizures to Success — How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher.

Part 1: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi

Part 2: staceychillemi.com/colleague-stepped-over-me-epilepsy-workplace-stacey-chillemi

Part 3: staceychillemi.com/shoebox-full-of-letters-epilepsy-book-stacey-chillemi

Part 5: Why I Built a Platform for 1.3 Million People — coming next

 

If this story resonated with you I would love to help you share yours. Book a Free Strategy Call at calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link and let us talk about what is possible for you.

 

Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.

Explore how we can work together: staceychillemi.com/work-with-me

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The Shoebox Full of Letters — And the Email That Changed Everything

Stacey Chillemi award-winning podcast host and bestselling author sharing the story behind her epilepsy book

From Seizures to Success: How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher — Part 3 of 5

By Stacey Chillemi | Award-Winning Podcast Host | 20x Bestselling Author | Founder, Advisor Global Media™

New to this series? Start here: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi

I want to tell you about a shoebox.

Not a special one. Not carefully labeled or neatly organized. Just an ordinary shoebox — the kind you slide under a bed without thinking twice. But inside that box was something that quietly changed the direction of my entire life. Three hundred letters. Maybe four hundred. From strangers across the United States and Canada who had read my words and felt, for perhaps the first time, that someone finally understood what they were carrying.

That shoebox is where my life’s work truly began.

The College Student Who Wrote to Washington

I was in college when I did something that required more courage than I gave myself credit for at the time.

I was struggling. Not just with the pressures of studying and grades but with ongoing seizures triggered by late nights and stress and a body that refused to cooperate with my ambitions. There were no online communities back then. No podcasts. No spaces where people talked openly about what it really felt like to live with a chronic condition. There was silence.

And in that silence, I sat down and wrote a letter to the Epilepsy Foundation in Washington D.C.

I did not write to ask for help. I wrote to ask a question — the same one I had been quietly asking myself for years without finding a satisfying answer.

How do other people cope with this? How do they get through the hard days? What do they do when the fear becomes too much and the world keeps moving without them?

I asked the Foundation to publish my article. In it I invited anyone living with epilepsy to write to me and share their stories — not the clinical version, but the real human version of what it meant to live with this condition every single day.

What Came Back

The letters arrived.

Three hundred of them. Four hundred. From people I had never met — sitting in their own living rooms and hospital waiting areas and college dorms — carrying the same invisible weight I had been carrying, waiting for someone to ask the very question I had asked.

I read every single one. I wept over some. Laughed at others. Recognized myself in almost all of them. And slowly, letter by letter, something shifted inside me that I can only describe as the feeling of no longer being entirely alone in the world.

I put all those letters in a shoebox.

And I made myself a promise.

One day I am going to write a book.

Why That Promise Was Harder Than It Sounds

The resources available to someone living with epilepsy back then were painfully limited. The books that existed were written by doctors in clinical language that went completely over the head of anyone who had not spent years in medical school. Nobody was writing the book that a frightened person needed to find at two in the morning.

So I decided I would.

Not because I had credentials after my name. But because I had three hundred letters in a shoebox that proved I was not the only one asking these questions.

The Man Who Refused to Let Me Make Excuses

Life moved forward the way it does. Jobs in New York City. The beautiful ordinary chaos of building a life. And eventually marriage to the man I had fallen in love with in my very first English class in college — the one who had known me through every version of myself.

One evening he looked at me with the particular expression of a man who has completely run out of patience for someone he loves deeply.

And he said something I have never forgotten.

Would you finish that book already.

I laughed out loud.

And then I sat down and finished it.

The Email That Proved Everything

Epilepsy: You Are Not Alone hit the bestseller list and stayed there for thirty years. I revised it again and again as the community evolved and as new generations needed to find themselves in its pages.

But the moment that mattered most came years later, in the early days of email — when receiving a message from a stranger still felt remarkable.

I opened my inbox one morning and found three sentences that I have carried with me every day since.

A stranger had found my book at a Barnes and Noble. They had been browsing the shelves the way people do when they are not really looking for a book — when they are looking for something harder to name. They pulled my book from the shelf. They read it. And then they wrote to tell me what happened next.

I was on the verge of suicide. Your book saved my life. Thank you.

What Three Sentences Taught Me About Purpose

I have thought about that email thousands of times. I have thought about all the moments between my letter to the Epilepsy Foundation and that email — all the doubt and the delay and the years of starting and stopping — and how any one of those moments could have been the moment I gave up.

And I have come to understand something I now believe with absolute certainty.

Your message does not need to be perfect to be life-changing. It just needs to be true.

The book that saved that person’s life was not written by a doctor. It was written by a young woman who had been through something hard and had the audacity to believe her experience was worth sharing.

That is all it took.

What the Shoebox Taught Me About Business and Life

You are never as alone as you feel in your worst moments.

And neither are the people you are meant to serve.

This is the truth that drives everything I do through Advisor Global Media. Every expert, coach, author, and entrepreneur I work with has their own version of a shoebox — a story, a hard-won piece of wisdom, an experience that shaped them in ways they have not yet fully shared with the world.

And somewhere out there is a person whose life depends on hearing exactly that.

Your message matters. Not because it is perfect. Because it is yours.

 

This is Part 3 of a 5-part series: From Seizures to Success — How Epilepsy Became My Greatest Teacher.

Part 1: staceychillemi.com/teardrop-that-saved-my-life-epilepsy-stacey-chillemi

Part 2: staceychillemi.com/colleague-stepped-over-me-epilepsy-workplace-stacey-chillemi

Part 4: How Nature Healed What Medicine Couldn’t — coming next

Part 5: Why I Built a Platform for 1.3 Million People

 

If this story resonated with you I would love to help you share yours. Book a Free Strategy Call at calendly.com/carecoachingonline/booking-link and let us talk about what is possible for you.

 

Stacey Chillemi is an award-winning podcast host, 20-time bestselling author, epilepsy advocate, and founder of Advisor Global Media. Featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and five times on The Dr. Oz Show. Her podcast reaches 1.3M+ listeners worldwide and won the NYC Podcast Award for Best Host.

Explore how we can work together: staceychillemi.com/work-with-me

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