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CreActiv
Using arts and partnerships to impact social change.
This is what sick looks like...
The Picture of Health or #TPOH is an invisible illness awareness program inspired by CreActiv, LLC founder and COO, Leslie D. Rose's own struggles with chronic pain. It seeks to highlight individuals living with invisible physical, chronic, and mental illnesses through the art of photography, in an effort to normalize illness. The objective is to elicit compassion and use the project as an educational resource to understanding a variety of health issues.
We held our first event in May 2019 in partnership with The Healthcare Gallery and Jones Creek Family Dentistry. The preview exhibit then showed at Southern Cofe through the summer of 2019.
INSPIRATION BEHIND THE PICTURE OF HEALTH
In 2014, Leslie was misdiagnosed with anxiety disorder. A diagnosis she believed as her husband had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. After three years of trying to yoga and meditate the pain and fatigue away, Leslie was hit with a bout of neuropathy. This began a nearly yearlong second opinion process. During which, Leslie began counseling sessions to cope with the unknown chronic pain and other associated symptoms, which was later revealed to be fibromyalgia. All of this has always been met with a huge lack of compassion, because rarely does she “look sick.”
Being so closely touched by a variety of invisible illnesses and having been misdiagnosed, shining light on invisible illnesses of all kinds became a passion project for Leslie. This is why she started an online support group for women of color suffering with chronic pain (now a general support group for the project). But this wouldn’t be enough – she had to find a way to help other people understand invisible illnesses. At the top of September 2017, it was a simple Facebook post that asked people to comment with a selfie if they have invisible illnesses. Some 100 photos later, Leslie knew the project in her head was much bigger than she could imagine.