There are many things I love being about being a freelancer. I work in my sweats. I can run an errand or two in the midlde of the day in needed. No long boring annual retreats. But there are worries to being a freelancer: the lack of steady pay, the need to find self-insured insurance, no safety net.
I am a member of a group called Freelance Success (FLX) which allows freelancers to support one another through a productive, engaging forum. Often the support given is work-related, this time, we’re working on something that gets down to the very essence of life. Lori Hall Steele is a freelancer whose feet stopped working last September. Then the paralysis spread to her hands and legs. She is a single mom, raising a seven year old boy whose understanding of death she poignantly wrote about just after his fourth birthday. She sold that essay to the Washington Post and, ironically, it just came out this summer. Knowing what we know now, the essay is haunting. Today, Lori Hall Steele is an ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) patient. She is paralyzed and on a ventilator. Her insurance company is bailing on her medical bills (don’t get me started. Some of you have heard my healthcare reform rant and subsequent plan to reform healthcare. This just reinforces it for me.) Her savings have run out, and she will soon lose her house because she cannot pay her mortgage. So, we’re rallying because that what communities do- even virtual communities that only know each other through our type strokes. Today, all of us at FLX who have blogs are blogging about Lori’s plight and asking anyone who can to donate any small amount (the challenge at FLX is for each of us to donate $25) to the Save Lori’s House effort.
In her essay, Lori wrote:
” I tell him I’ll always be here for him, one way or another. Always always always. Just like my mother is here for me. Just like I was there when he was 3. It is an impossible promise, a gamble with his trust. I secretly pray I don’t let him down, not on this.”
Today, we’re all trying to help Lori in her mission to not let him down.
Thanks for reading!
