My name is Alyssa, I am a 25-year-old disabled, chronically ill young adult. Throughout my life, I have dealt with various chronic health conditions. There were times throughout my childhood that I was in hospital, or too sick to go to school and I often felt lonely and isolated. It was always a bit hard for me to connect with people my own age, but it wasn’t impossible. Prior to the pandemic, I was living independently. Though I was sick, I was still independent and enjoyed a life of my own. I was in university full time, I was taking care of myself, my apartment and my service dog, and while there were adjustments I had to make to keep my symptoms manageable, I lived a relatively happy life. As the pandemic started, my underlying auto inflammatory and autoimmune diseases progressed and I could no longer live independently.  While my peers went on to graduate, travel, get married and for some, have children, I moved home with my parents so they could help me. My health continued to decline and I spent time in and out of hospital.  Over time, I lost more and more of myself. The relationships that I’d struggled to maintain only drifted further apart. I had less and less in common with my peers and found it hard to relate. Our lives were just so different – they didn’t understand mine and I didn’t understand theirs. I felt more and more isolated from everyone in my “pre-sick” life, and I didn’t really know how to find people who understood what I was dealing with.

I started Creative Connections after speaking to countless other disabled and chronically ill people who told me that they too felt isolated from friends and family because they didn’t understand what it was like to be sick. We also all felt like most available resources were geared towards either older people or young children.  But for those between 18-35,  many said they had trouble finding things that were geared to them.  Essentially, they had fallen through the cracks. As I was feeling less connected to the outside world, I saw a huge need for a group of people my own age who would understood what I was going through. So one afternoon, I opened up facebook and created a page called “chronically ill and disabled pen pals.” I shared the group on my instagram feed and told a few people on TikTok about it and within 2 days we had over 140 members. After two successful rounds of matches, I just knew.  There were other people like me and they wanted a connection as much as I did.  My mom mentioned it to a group of twelve girlfriends, some of whom she has known for 50 years, and everyone understood the potential. As a result of that conversation,  I have a small group of amazing volunteers who are helping me.

Because we’re aiming to connect young people who are disabled and/or who have chronic illnesses who often have mobility issues, we want to make being part of this as easy as possible. Rather than having to go get stamps, we provide them. If they are on disability and don’t have enough resources to buy things to make writing to a pen pal fun (e.g. funky paper, nice pens, stickers to jazz up the letter) we’ll provide it.  The key is to remove as many barriers as possible so all our pen pals have to do is focus on making connections.

Every pen pal will receive a welcome box that will include things like:  envelopes for all their pen pal letters, stamps, colourful pens and paper, stickers, other crafty things, and note cards.  We estimate the cost of the box to be about $75 dollars – that includes all the stamps and material they will need for one year.  We also need to pay for postage to get the boxes to our pen pals.

We are going to run a one-year pilot and are aiming to make 35 connections – that’s 70 people. We’ll send each pen pal a welcome package, keep matching people through the year so at the end our pen pals will have multiple new connections, and we’ll evaluate the impact of the program as much as we can.  Our fundraising goal of $5,000 will pay for the welcome packages, a simple inexpensive website, logo, a few small gift cards to give our pen pals so they can recognize something special in a pen pal’s life or help them buy something small to personalize the pen pal experience.  We have no staff.  This is almost all volunteer based, except for buying the domain name for the website, giving an honorarium to a disabled or chronically ill designer to help us with a logo, and other things like that we just don’t know how to do on our own.  We’ll try always if we provide an honorarium for small bits of work to find people who are themselves chronically ill or disabled.  100% of your donation will go directly into the program.  Our long term goal at the end of the pilot is to apply for some stable funding.

Any donation is welcome.  If you want to help sponsor the pilot or know someone who does, email me at creativeconnections22@gmail.com.

Thank you for donating.  I can’t tell you how much I appreciate and how much good it will do.