Hello everyone,
My name is Matina Alexis, and I’m so grateful to be here.
I live with Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures (PNES), and I’m still in the process of healing. I continue to experience seizures, and through my diagnosis, I uncovered the deeper cause: repressed childhood trauma. I once believed I had already faced and understood my traumas long before everything resurfaced, but PNES revealed a truth that had been living quietly in my body all along. It’s something I never expected to confront, yet it has reshaped my entire life.
Before my diagnosis, I worked with children with special needs, a role that brought me so much purpose and joy. When the seizures began, I had to step away from that chapter, and losing the daily connection with my students was one of the hardest parts of this journey. It felt like I was losing a part of myself I deeply loved.
But while I still heal, I’m learning that healing itself is losing a part of you that was never you to begin with. Like how some animals must shed their skin to grow, PNES has made me so uncomfortable that it’s forced me to shed my old one. The process is raw and painful, but it’s also necessary because sometimes growth demands that you outgrow what was once familiar but not necessarily safe.
PNES has taken a lot from me: my independence, my ability to drive, and many of the simple freedoms I once took for granted. It has forced me to slow down, to rebuild my life from the ground up, and to redefine what strength and survival truly mean. There are days when my body feels like both my home and my battleground.
I started writing when I was very young. At nine years old, I wrote a poem that I later rediscovered as an adult, and it helped me see how much truth had been living in my words even back then. That discovery reconnected me to my younger self and helped me find language for what my body had been expressing for years through seizures. Writing became the bridge between what I couldn’t say, what I needed to heal, and what I am still trying to heal every day.
In the journey of healing, I’ve learned that who you are because of your trauma may not be who you were going to be before it. This is the fragile reality of having to make peace with and mourn every version of yourself that never had the chance to become. But once you understand that truth, you can begin again, setting new foundations brick by brick. You start getting reacquainted with who you are now, and that version of you, just like every version before, is worth knowing and valuing.
That journey became my first poetry collection, The Softest Blade: The Heavy, The Half-Way, and The Healing, releasing November 11th. It’s a deeply personal reflection on trauma, PNES, and the tender place between falling apart and finding yourself. Dr. Lorna Myers, whose work has been a lifeline for so many of us, wrote the foreword with such compassion and understanding.
Soon I’ll be sharing two poems from the book:
🩶 “Pseudo-Seizures”
🤍 “Dear PNES”
There is a place for everyone in this book. My hope is that it reaches those who need it most, because one of the greatest truths I’ve learned through this journey is that trauma and survival look different on everyone, and every story of becoming is worth being told.
With love,
Matina Alexis
Author of The Softest Blade