Once in a blue moon, you meet a person who rocks your socks off. I hadn’t come to BlogHer anticipating meeting this someone. I wasn’t expecting it at all. PatientBloggers - You Are Not Your Disease, You Just Blog About It Every Day was a seminar I had been planning on attending since I first eyed the BlogHer agenda. I had no idea who anyone on the panel was, nor did I bother researching them. If I had, I would have been suitably impressed. I wanted to attend more because I blog a lot about Autism, and I constantly struggle with balancing being a mom to an Autistic child and being “me”. Some days I write about the battle against Autism, and how pissed off I am at the system. Some days I live blog about reality TV. Other days I write about things I should probably keep to myself, and every once in a while, I ‘fess up on how much I weigh. Is that okay? Is that what people want to read? Do I care? Should I care?
The seminar was excellent. Each of the panelists brought a unique perspective to the subject matter, and the bloghers in the audience, they were in inspirational bunch as well. Top discussion points included “how to have sex while wearing an insulin pump” and a brave blogher who described her husband’s reaction to her blog post about how she felt about losing all of her hair to Alopecia. The person who stood out the most to me, was a woman by the name of Loolwa Khazzoom, a journalist based out of California and the founder of Dancing With Pain. Loolwa struck a chord with me because she didn’t start out as chronic pain expert. She started out as a self-described “über athletic chick: an avid cyclist, swimmer, and jogger, a women’s self-defense instructor, and most importantly, a dance fiend”. She wrote the book Consequence which chronicled her decision to respond to sexual harassment physically and aggressively. That’s a far cry from where she ended up. How did she get here? Did her readers come with her as she morphed from cool punk rock chick to a pioneer in the chronic pain management field? And does she care? Should she care? When the seminar wrapped up, I was left a bit overwhelmed. While I wanted to write about it immediately, I felt like I needed to process my thoughts for a few days.
The next day, as I headed back to my room to rest up for one last night of partying, I saw out of the corner of my eye the one and only Loolwa. I wanted to say thank you to her, to tell her how she had inspired me to want to write more honestly, more raw, and to not worry about what other people thought, to just be true to my story, whatever that is. I figured it would be a quick “omg you’re so awesome!” moment. But it was so much more. Loolwa asked me to sit down and chat with her. She was touched to know how much hearing her speak had meant to me. She wanted to hear my story, and Max’s story. And not for one moment did I feel like she was waiting to talk, waiting for me to shut up. She was sincere, and real, and empathetic. We talked about how much music has helped Max, and how music affects her differently on any given day. We talked about how vibrations can heal, and that there is so much more out there than what old school medicine would have us believe. She confided in me that the very editors who had turned down her pitches two years earlier because her ideas were “too out there” were now coming back to the table and embracing these very same concepts as cutting edge and relevant to their readership.
