My name is Jasmine Ivanna Espey, and I'm the founder and CEO of a nonprofit organization, helping people living with HS and inflammatory diseases reclaim their lives. and so I was diagnosed with it when I was in high school, but I developed it when I was thirteen. so if you can imagine, just from the description of HS, I had stage three, so it was very severe, and it progressed rapidly. So any semblance of a childhood was, extracted from me because of this disease. I was in and out of the doctor's office. I was poked and prodded, you know, that was my life. and even before that, I was still chronically ill.

but, it really impacted a lot of my, social relationships, my relationship with my own body. I just, was talking to my therapist about the grief that I've had to experience dealing with a chronic illness like HS. I think anybody with a chronic illness can relate to that. So there's just so many stages of grief that I've experienced, and that I've had to work through, as an adult, because as a kid, I didn't have the language of what I was dealing with. I didn't know how to articulate it to my parents, put them through so much, you know. but it's been a tumultuous journey getting to this point and being able to, like, even sit here, even being able to start a nonprofit, being able to talk, you know, publicly because there's so much shame and isolation that is experienced.

And for me personally, I felt like if I came out and said I had this debilitating condition that disfigured my body, that I would ostracize myself from or be ostracized from my community.

But so many of my friends, whether they're in the community like Amani or whether, you know, my friends back at home who don't have any relationship to the disease beyond me, you know, they have been a great support system, and I honestly wouldn't trade, you know, not speaking about my condition for the world. You know, I'm really grateful that I was able to talk and be at this point because advocacy, this work really saved my life, to be truthfully honest.