How To Be an Ally |LGBT | Love| Relationships

Learning to be an ally, no matter what your beliefs are, is a great way to avoid destroying your family when someone comes out.

And avoiding the destruction of your family is why you’re reading this, right?

Great! Here are 5 great tips to help you become a loving ally, regardless of your personal beliefs, and 5 action steps to get you started.

5 Tips To Being A Loving LGBT Ally

In this column, you’re going to learn 5 loving tips that will guide you to being an ally, even if your own beliefs are different.

Tip #1

Love them unconditionally. Please take a moment and think of the very…

or 7 things you should never say to a transgender person

The world is starting to get vocal about different genders and sexualities. That’s good news. The not so great news is that most cisgender people are entirely in the dark when it comes to transgender people. Right? You want to try- this is your person, your brother, your daughter. You want to be supportive, but you don’t know what to do. (cisgender means your insides and your outside are in harmony. And no one has EVER questioned you about it.)

I was just like you, only a few years…

LGBT | Transgender | Allyship | Lifestyles

How to show your transgender loved one they matter

So, you’re loved one has just dropped the ultimate coming out bomb. Transgender. Your first thought is “God, no! Not THAT!” quickly followed by “How on earth do I do this?”

Am I close? If your experience is anything like mine was, I bet I nailed it.

How do I do this? Let’s begin with one simple premise: the answer is love. No matter what the question, the answer is love. …

Fibromyalgia | Chronic Pain | Lifestyles

We have been working through the acronym FIBRO to talk about some symptoms of this painful syndrome. First, we talked about fatigue right here:

When you have a condition with a lot of invisible pain, a whole lot of people think invisible means nonexistent. Not true.

Fibromyalgia has different types of pain that are quite unlike typical arthritis or any other it is. Hear me- those can result in excruciating pain. That’s not what I mean.

Fibro is full of weird pain. Unexpected pain. Disconnected Pain. Continual Pain. Acute Pain. Chronic Pain. And none of it makes sense.

Here’s an…

Fibromyalgia | Chronic Pain | Health

If one more person tells me how freaking normal I look, I am going to . . . nevermind. I promised my editor I wouldn’t use those words. * bald-faced lie to get a chuckle. And to use the phrase “my editor.”* I am seriously tired of hearing this type of comment when I mention fibromyalgia. I kind of get it After all, only about 8% of people get fibromyalgia and most of them are women So, don’t feel alone if you don't understand this diagnosis. Not sure anyone does, completely. Even those who live with it.

We’ve been discussing…

Chronic Pain | Fibromyalgia | Health

Think about the last time you felt absolutely exhausted. What did you do? My bet is you went to sleep, either for a nap or until morning, and you woke up, felt great, and carried on. Makes sense. We’ve all done that more than a few times over the years. Particularly when there were fewer years to count, if you know what I mean.

This is not that.

This is the fatigue that is one of the overwhelming symptoms in our acronym FIBRO.

We’re talking about the fatigue that 90% of the people with fibromyalgia experience daily. Fibro fatigue is…

LGBT | TRANSGENDER | ALLYSHIP

We’ve been talking about how you can become an ally to the LGBTQ person in your life, how you can be an ally to ALL LGBTQ people. We started with the acronym ALLY and talked about coming Alongside someone, about Loving someone, about Learning their language. Today we will wrap it up talking about YOU.

I saw your eyes light up a little when I said this would be about you. Even though you read the title, you still got a little excited thinking I was finally ready to talk about what a struggle your loved one’s coming out has…

LGBTQ | Transgender | Love

It is a genuinely surreal moment when you go with your female-bodied grandchild to have an elective double mastectomy. And you're excited for it to happen. No cancer or tumors led to this removal of body parts. That would have made perfect sense. This reason, however, was equally fatal.

My grandchild is an FTM (female-to-male) transgender human being. He is an incredibly loving and kind young adult (22) male. I am a born-again Christian with a house full of Bibles. I am a caring and kind Grandma who had no idea how to absorb the news of his true identity…