Am I Doing Enough as an Online Health Advocate?

I have been sharing online content about eczema since 2012 on Instagram and later Youtube since 2017. Ever since I've begun my online health advocacy journey, I have often wondered if the content that I share online is enough. What I mean by this is despite having a strong vision and dreams of helping other eczema warriors–even just one other one–regardless of how many tips and tricks and stories I've shared I still often wonder if it is enough to really help anyone.

Sometimes as an advocate I have felt very ambitious

I have felt like I'm going to share what I know and hopefully it will transform the healthcare and medical community and more eczema warriors will have more knowledge than I did when I started my healing journey. And hopefully that will make their journeys shorter and help them find treatment plans that work for them faster. But then I'll see statistics on eczema and how there's still millions of us out there suffering no matter how much content and stories are out on the internet.

I've also felt disheartened

I have also found myself disheartened by seeing the change–or extension–in the age range of people who get eczema for the first time. When I first got it in the 1990s, the majority of people that I knew who also had it started having eczema when they were born, or at least when they were young like me, around a toddler age, like the age of 5.

But when I used to be an eco-friendly makeup artist in the 2010s for about 8 years, I met clients who developed eczema later on in life as teenagers and even full grown adults. When I would run into these people, I would share my social media platforms with them and I got a lot of questions about my experience with my sensitive skin, what worked, what didn’t treatment-wise.

I would answer these questions as much as I could to the best of my ability not having a health license or certificate of any sort. Sometimes I would get positive results and sometimes I wouldn't. But I would still get appreciation for trying to help.

I still try to share what I can online and hope it will help someone out there struggling

I do acknowledge and recognize that my own survival from and living with eczema is a great example of being able to cope and surpass eczema for others who are uncertain of what is possible for their rashes.

Over time, I’ve learned that sometimes I need to remind myself that my own existence has an eczema warrior and having gone through multiple severe bouts of it and bouncing back each time is enough. Even if I don't share everything online and even if I'm not able to reach every eczema warrior on the planet, what I do share and who I am able to reach is enough.

And even if I could reach every eczema warrior who exists at this time, not every recommendation or tip I have will help everyone as we are all individuals with our own set of circumstances and factors that impact our skin and our health. I’ve needed to remind myself many times that what I do feel inspired to share is enough, even if it is not always consistent or on a regular schedule.

At least the intention and hopefully the quality of what I share and how I share it is enough to positively impact somebody out there. At the very least my content can inform someone more so about a first-hand experience of what it could be like living with eczema from my perspective and that is good enough.