The People Who Show Up

One thing I haven’t talked about enough is how much I appreciate the people who support me. The people that matter the most to me. Family and friends.

I talk a lot about Sickle Cell Disease. The pain. The advocacy. The work. The mission. But behind all of it, there are people. Real people who have quietly, consistently, and sometimes sacrificially shown up for me. And honestly? I don’t say it enough.

Living with SCD means you become very familiar with your own limits. You know what a bad day looks like before anyone else does. You learn to manage not just the physical, but the emotional weight of being someone who sometimes needs more than they can give back. That’s a hard thing to sit with.

But then there are the people who don’t keep score.

My mum.

She has never once made me feel like a burden. Not once. And if you’ve lived with a chronic illness long enough, you know how rare that actually is. Because you do the math, you start reading the room. You catch the exhaustion in someone’s eyes even when they’re trying to hide it. You start apologising for things that aren’t your fault. You shrink yourself because you don’t want to take up too much space in someone else’s life.

She never let me do that.

There’s a difference between someone who loves you and someone who chooses you again and again, even when it costs them something. Mum has always been both. She didn’t look for detours around the hard parts. She stood in them with me. Her strength never looked like sympathy or careful words or the kind of tenderness that keeps you fragile. It looked like action. Like presence. Like showing up even before I knew I needed her to.

It looked like building things. Like taking the pain our family has lived through and refusing to let it just be that, pain. She turned it into purpose. Honestly? I think I learned that from watching her. She is, without question, one of the reasons Raremark exists. Not just because she believed in the mission but because she showed me what it looks like to refuse to look away from suffering, and to actually do something about it.

Calvin and Ashley.

We don’t always have the words but we have the understanding. Especially Ashley, my favorite yapper who knows firsthand what it means to carry this condition in your body every single day and still choose to live fully. Watching her do that gives me something I genuinely can’t name. But I feel it every time things get hard.

My friends, Vern Ta, Steve, Shan and all the ones who checked in during the quiet moments, not just the crisis ones. The ones who sat with me, or gave me space, or somehow always knew which one I needed. You know who you are.

And then there are the people who became part of the mission. Colleagues, board members, partners, donors, the Warriors Club who believed in Raremark before it had much to show for itself. Who gave time, resources, and credibility to something that was still finding its feet.

I’m not writing this to be sentimental. I’m writing it because I think we, especially those of us with chronic illness, spend so much energy being strong that we forget to be grateful out loud. We forget to tell people what they mean to us while they’re still here to hear it.

So this is me saying it.

To everyone who has shown up for me in the big ways and the quiet ones, thank you. You are not background characters in this story. You are a big part of why this story is still being written.