Or any suffering that can’t be turned into influence, profit, or proximity to power.

I have fibromyalgia. And one of the hardest parts of living with it has been realizing how quickly people stop caring when your suffering becomes inconvenient, repetitive, or difficult to monetize.

That sounds harsh. But I think a lot of people living with chronic illness, especially regular working people, understand exactly what I mean.

People care about what touches them directly. Their body. Their family. Their money. Their comfort. Their routine.

Everything else becomes background noise.

That’s part of why awareness around fibromyalgia still feels so thin despite millions of people living with it every day. There are no telethons. No celebrity-packed galas. No billion-dollar campaigns with soft lighting and orchestras swelling in the background. Most people with fibromyalgia are just trying to survive Tuesday.

And survival doesn’t photograph well.

Especially when you’re not famous.

Tupac said something years ago that stayed with me. He questioned why humanitarian awards are always handed to millionaires and billionaires while poverty, homelessness, hunger, and suffering still sit right outside the ballroom doors. Why do we celebrate people for giving crumbs while sitting on mountains?

That question never left me.

Because the truth is, people at the bottom are often expected to save each other while barely surviving themselves.

That’s the part nobody romanticizes.

A Black woman with chronic pain trying to build a small business while fighting her own body is not considered inspiring in the way America likes inspiration. There’s no Netflix deal waiting at the end of this sentence. No blue check. No PR team carefully shaping my pain into something marketable.

There’s just me. Trying.

Trying to build something honest. Trying to keep my lights on. Trying to create products and collections that say: “I see you. I know life hurts sometimes. You still deserve beauty anyway.”

And despite everything, I still want to help people.

That’s the strange part.

Even standing this close to exhaustion, failure, burnout, and uncertainty, I still cannot convince myself to stop caring about other people. I still think about food insecurity. About women dealing with illnesses nobody takes seriously. About families one emergency away from collapse. About people quietly drowning while the algorithm debates luxury handbags and celebrity gossip.

I know I cannot save the world.

But I also know the world gets colder every time somebody decides compassion is no longer worth the effort.

So I keep going.

Not because I’m fearless. Not because I’m healed. Not because I’ve “figured it out.”

I keep going because people matter. And because I refuse to become the kind of person who only cares when suffering becomes profitable, famous, or personal.

Maybe that makes me naive.

Or maybe it’s the last human thing left worth protecting.

And because I believe that, I do not want this to end with me.

Yes, I am raising money for my own treatment because I need help staying here. That is the plain truth of it. But through The Truth, Made Visible Collection, I am also committing 15% of profits to fibromyalgia research, because no one living with this condition should have to spend years being doubted, dismissed, under-treated, or left to piece together a life around pain medicine still does not fully understand.

If the people with the money, the platforms, and the awards are not going to care enough to move this forward, then I will do what I can from where I am. Even if that means selling the shirts, writing the essays, raising the funds, and, if necessary, going back to school and helping figure the damn thing out myself.

Because this was never only about me.

It is about every person living in a body that hurts and still having to prove it. Every woman who has been told to manage what should have been studied. Every patient waiting for better answers than “we do not know.”

I want to survive this. Of course I do.

But I also want my survival to leave something useful behind for the people coming after me.