The Person Behind Words: Why I Write for The Invisible Voice

Finding The Voice That Touches Many…

When Double Triplea first reached out to me, asking if I’d consider telling my story living with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), I didn’t say yes right away. I had spent years sharing only pieces of my story on social media not loudly, not looking for attention, but with intention. My posts were personal, honest, and sometimes raw, written more as a release than a rally cry. They were for people like me people living in bodies that betray them quietly. People who were tired of being invisible. But a speaking about my condition? That was different. That meant putting those private battles into public view. It meant going deeper. It meant being vulnerable on purpose and with a purpose much bigger than before.

Saying yes opened a door I didn’t know I was ready to walk through. And on the other side of that hesitation was something I didn’t expect: a deeper sense of connection to myself, to others in the autoimmune illness community, and to the truth that our stories deserve to be heard, even when they’re uncomfortable. Especially when they’re uncomfortable.

Living with MS, and living Beyond It

I’ve lived with MS for nearly a decade. It’s an autoimmune disease that attacks the central nervous system, disrupting the signals between your brain and body. Some days it’s fatigue that won’t let up. Other days it’s numbness, foggy thinking, or a body that refuses to cooperate no matter how strong your will is. From the outside, I often look fine. But on the inside, MS is always doing its work quietly, persistently, and without warning.

During these years, I’ve balanced a lot: raising a family, serving in the military, building a career in human resources after the Military, and more recently, becoming a cyclist raising money for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society for BikeMS and WalkMS. All while managing a condition that most people can’t see and don’t fully understand or even care. Like many people with invisible illnesses, I’ve dealt with judgment, assumptions, and silence. I’ve had relationships change. I’ve lost people who didn’t know how to support someone whose health doesn’t follow a straight line. That gap between how you look and how you feel between how you re treated and what you’re actually going through is exactly why I started speaking out.

Why This Platform Matters

Double Triplea saw the kind of truth I was trying to share not just about MS, but about what it really means to live in a body that doesn’t cooperate, in a world that often demands performance over authenticity. They didn’t just ask me to write about symptoms or science. Asking me to speak on a platform that shows impact on identity, relationships challenges, health challenges, political downfalls, and most importantly autoimmune lifestyle.

This platform doesn’t exist to sanitize or simplify the experiences of people living with chronic illness, disability and politics. It exists to tell the full story, the messy, political, personal, systemic story in a way that doesn’t flinch. It creates space for real conversations about equity in healthcare, disability rights, breaking political news, and the barriers that too many of us face just trying to survive a system that wasn’t built with us in mind.

The Risk of Speaking Up and Why I Keep Doing It

When I agreed to write, I wondered if I had anything to say that hadn’t already been said. That hesitation is common. Many people with chronic conditions second-guess themselves. We’re often told we’re being dramatic, oversharing, or focusing too much on our health. That kind of messaging makes it easy to stay quiet and incredibly hard to trust that our voices are worth hearing.

But silence never helped me. If anything, it made everything feel heavier. Writing for The Invisible Voice pushed me to say the things I had kept to myself for years. Things about grief, about loss, about the way illness steals things that people don t even realize are at risk friendships, intimacy, momentum, trust. And the more I write, the more I heard from people who saw their own stories in mine. That connection matters. That kind of truth telling matters.

This Is Bigger Than Me

What I write isn’t just my story. It’s a reflection of countless others who live with conditions that don’t show up on scans or get second glances. My columns aren’t about finding silver linings or wrapping pain in a bow. They’re about representation. They’re about showing what life looks like when you’re doing your best in a body that doesn’t always respond the way you want it to and when the world expects you to explain or justify what it can’t see.

Autoimmune disease and invisible illness are too often dismissed, underfunded, and misunderstood. I write because that has to change. I write because we need more visibility, more honesty, and more accountability in how we treat people who live with chronic conditions not just in medicine, but in public policy, workplace protections, relationships, and everyday life.

Why I Keep Saying Yes

I was hesitant. I had doubts. But I said yes. And that yes turned into something powerful. Through The Invisible Voice, I’ve found a way to tell the truth, my truth, and in doing so, help others feel seen. Because even though invisible illness shapes my life, it doesn’t get to define me. And it doesn’t get to silence me.

I didn’t know if it would matter. But I said yes first to a message in my inbox, this platform, then eventually to a room full of students, and a podcast. That yes changed everything. It turned moments of private frustration into something collective. It turned isolation into conversation.

I’ll keep writing for the people who are too tired to explain themselves again. For those who’ve lost support systems after diagnosis. For those who are still figuring out how to live in a body they no longer recognize. And for those who’ve found strength in speaking out, one honest sentence at a time.

Writing for The Invisible Voice has allowed me to put language to experiences I once kept to myself the grief that doesn’t go away, the anger that surfaces when you’re dismissed, the small victories that only someone living with a chronic condition would recognize as wins. It’s given shape to the unseen and permission to be fully honest in a way that most spaces don’t allow. I don’t have to filter what I say here. I can speak from the real place the raw, daily, exhausting, beautiful place where most of us with invisible illnesses actually live.

I keep saying yes because these stories deserve to be told not just by me, but by all of us. Because someone else is sitting with the same hesitation I had, wondering if their voice matters, if their pain is too personal, too messy, too complicated to share. It’s not. And if my voice helps them find theirs, then every uncomfortable truth I’ve put on the page has been worth it.

Invisible illness tries to quiet us. It teaches us to downplay, to smile through it, to not be too much. Writing here is my way of pushing back. Of saying: I’m still here. We’re still here. And we’re not going anywhere.