do you have any more epileptic will headcanons?
Oh absolutely - I think about this a lot!! I believe that Will would really struggle with internalised ableism - he canonically hates being treated as fragile and I think he'd experience a lot of frustration that he made it through fighting literal interdimensional creatures but was then knocked down by a neurological disorder of all things.
I think being diagnosed with epilepsy would also heighten his sense of being a burden and a mistake tenfold. He already feels so indebted to his mum, Jonathan, and the party for always being there throughout all of the Upside Down stuff, and he would hate having to be reliant on them for help again. For example, I still haven't gotten my driver's licence at 23 because I wasn't cleared to be able to go for my licence until I was seizure-free for a period of time. Will would hate not being able to drive himself places and have that sense of independence.
I think this would all manifest in him being very resistant to talking about his experience with seizures, but this feeds into my favourite headcanon that I've already posted about: I think Will would make paintings of the auras he experiences before a seizure. I can totally see Will not wanting to talk about his auras and seizures, but various members of the party sitting down and just tracing their fingers over his paintings and asking him to describe them, and therefore getting an understanding of what he's going through via his art.
Some fun ones:
-I feel like Mike would be incredibly attuned to the little signs that Will is about to have a seizure to the extent that the rest of the party would joke about him having a literal spidey sense for it. I always think about that scene in S2 where Mike notices that Will's been quiet even though Dustin and Lucas didn't pick up on it, and I think it'd be the same with Will's seizures (and I think Lucas would be next best after Mike because he's very quietly perceptive, like how he picked up on Max's depressive behaviour in S4).
-You know how people sometimes use terms like 'happy pills' to describe antidepressants? I feel like the party would call Will's anticonvulsants his 'potion of not seizing' (like the 'potion of healing' in DND) to make it seem like less of a big deal. They're such nerds I love them.
-When you're first diagnosed with epilepsy, you have to keep a seizure diary and record stuff when you have seizures, what you were doing/feeling/etc. before the seizure came on, etc. to try to establish patterns and triggers. Dustin, being the most math-y of the group, would absolutely have turned this info into graphs that he would draw out on a whiteboard to analyse and find patterns to help Will out.
This post got long but THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS ASK! I love talking about epileptic Will <3
