Thank you.

Sometimes as I'm writing my blog every night, I wonder who is actually reading it. I look at my stats, I see how many views I have, but I still wonder who the faces are that go along with those numbers. Because, as much as I appreciate the numbers, what I appreciate even more is knowing that those numbers are people. People who I know. People who I don't know. People who have Lyme. People who didn't even know what Lyme was before they started reading my blog. Every single time my blog views go up, my heart gets a little bigger. (You know, like how The Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day?) 

But, what really made me realize for the first time that my messages are getting across was a message I received the other day. It was from a girl I was friends with in highschool--a girl I was friends with before I even knew about Lyme. She told me that she had been reading my blog and that she was really glad I was writing it. And that in itself was enough to make my heart happy. But, when she told me about her mom's battle with Lyme, it nearly stopped me in my tracks. She told me that she has watched her mom go through a lot of the same things that I have, and she thanked me for writing about the hard stuff that most people don't recognize. It was the first time I heard someone who wasn't one of my Lyme friends tell me that they appreciated me telling our story. She doesn't have Lyme, but she is living a very similar story. She is looking at it from a different viewpoint--she isn't the one with Lyme--but she is living it. And, my blog spoke to her the way her message spoke to me; we both realized we weren't alone. We both gained another hand to hold in this journey. 

I told her thank you. And now I'm telling every one of you thank you, as well. Thank you for reading this and doing your part to become Lyme aware. Thank you for helping to make a difference. I may be the one writing these posts in an attempt to get some awareness out there, but you are reading them; you are just as responsible for getting the message out there. I'm writing the words, but every time you read them, they are spreading. And I just needed to thank you for that. 

Thanks for working with me. Thanks for helping my heart grow, thanks for helping my story grow, and thanks for helping awareness grow.