For 8 years I ignored my 'spells' of blacking out. Turns out I had a brain tumor causing seizures.

• When I was 14, I started having what I called "spells" where I would snap out of consciousness.
• For eight years, I didn't tell anyone until my college roommate told me I needed to see a doctor.

When I was a kid, I used illness to get attention. As the youngest in a family of nine, it was an easy way to stand out. Yet, years later, when a wave of dread and a buzz of electricity surged through my body, I knew it was different.

The wave was followed by a feeling of deja vu. Next, I was frozen, as if I was detached from my mind. It lasted just a few seconds, but when I regained awareness, I felt as if I had been sleeping for hours. My brother had been teaching me to drive and was shaking me, trying to get my attention.

Instead of telling him what had happened, I brushed it off, saying, "I just had the weirdest deja vu."

He was glad to be done with our lessons, so he believed me, and we didn't discuss it again. At first, I assumed it was just a strange version of deja vu, but as the experience repeated itself later that year, and then for years to come, I decided it meant something was really wrong with me and I should ignore these "spells," as I called them.

I hid my condition out of shame

I had read "The Three Faces of Eve" for extra credit in high school. In it, Eve White has blinding headaches, disturbing blackouts, and dissociative identity disorder. In addition to my spells, I had started experiencing daily and sometimes excruciating headaches that I wouldn't learn for years were migraines.

When Eve's other personality took over, "The brooding look in her eyes became almost a stare. This was suddenly erased into utter blackness," the book said.

I couldn't see myself, but I thought I might look like that when the feeling of dread and deja vu overtook me. If I did, it had to mean I had the same diagnosis. I was embarrassed to think I had a mental illness that was highly stigmatized, so I decided to keep it to myself. It is hard to believe, but I kept these spells a secret for eight years, from the time I was about 14 until I was about to graduate college. By then, I was having them a few times a week.

One day, I finally had one of these spells in front of my college roommate. After she shook me back to alertness and asked me what happened, I started to tell her nothing. Then I decided it was time to come clean. I told her everything about how I had been hiding the spells and my theory that I had dissociative identity disorder.

She urged me to tell my parents and go see a doctor.

I had a brain tumor causing seizures

I told them shortly after, and my mom scheduled appointments that eventually led me to find out I had a brain tumor, not a mental illness. I finally had a real name for my spells, which I learned were seizures. A month after graduation, I had brain surgery to remove the tumor, and the seizures stopped.

Today I know how dangerous hiding an illness can be, but I didn't stop doing it right away. After my brain surgery, I again hid severe depression. Later I learned that this depression was a result of my brain surgery. I realized how intertwined our physical and mental health can be.

Now instead of hiding what I went through, I write about it. It still gets me attention, but hopefully in a more positive way than as a child.