When Karen Thomas was diagnosed with a chronic illness 5 years ago, she never thought she\u2019d find her life\u2019s purpose: empowering others through her online support community and craft website Conscious Crafties.<\/p>\n
It started in 2011 when Thomas was in a car accident. After awhile, she would get sick and faint when she tried to stand up. She felt queasy just sitting on her couch. It took a year to find a diagnosis — Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), a rare condition affecting the blood vessels and heart rate. It took a while longer to discover that her POTS was caused by Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a connective tissue disorder affecting the skin, cartilage, ligaments, and blood vessels of the body.<\/p>\n
Her symptoms appeared suddenly, but Thomas says that\u2019s how it works for many people.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people get sick after trauma to their body, whether it is physical trauma like a car crash or emotional trauma,\u201d Thomas tells Guideposts.org. \u201cIt\u2019s almost as though it lies dormant and then something happens and you get sick practically overnight.\u201d<\/p>\n
She started going online, looking for support groups where she could connect with people managing illness the same way she was. She thought it might make her feel better, but as she began chatting with others facing similar chronic diseases and disabilities, she realized they all had something else in common.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody just felt as though their life had been stripped away,\u201d Thomas says. \u201cThey didn\u2019t feel that they had any purpose. It really upset me. I was lucky in that I was able to work around my sickness but so many people weren\u2019t able to do something that was from home. And, there weren\u2019t many sympathetic employers that would let them work around their sickness.\u201d<\/p>\n
That general, overwhelming feeling of uselessness spurred Thomas to act.<\/p>\n
A lover of crafts from a young age, she realized many of the people she chatted with online shared her creative hobby.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Crafting] was something that really helped me because it was quite meditative; I think it is for a lot of people,\u201d Thomas explains. \u201cIt takes you away from the stresses and strains of life for a bit. When you\u2019re creating, making something beautiful that you know other people will appreciate, it just makes you happy. You feel useful.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was so much talent in her online community but many of the people with chronic illnesses that she spoke to didn\u2019t know how to effectively sell their products online. They found sites like Etsy were too confusing and selling things on Facebook was a slow process.<\/p>\n
Thomas decided to take her experience creating and managing retail websites, her love for crafts, and her newfound commitment to helping others and put it all to good use.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was almost as though everything in my life up until that point had prepared me to do something that was going to help lots of people,\u201d Thomas says.<\/p>\n
She bought the domain name ConsciousCrafties.com in 2011 but wasn\u2019t able to create the website until four years later because of her illness. In the meantime, Thomas reconnected with her love of crafting, selling some of her own products online.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was able to escape judgment from people who couldn\u2019t understand my illness, from worries about work, worries about money, my pain,\u201d Thomas says. \u201cI was focusing on something else and it was giving me a sense of achievement again.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was able to get Conscious Crafties up and running in 2015, building it to be both a business platform \u2013 sellers can contact her to have their shops and products added to the site \u2013 and a support group for people living with or caring for someone living with a chronic illness or disability.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe needed a way to work around our health and we needed a way to showcase our talents,\u201d Thomas says. \u201cOur group isn\u2019t just about how sick we feel today, it\u2019s about positive things that have happened. When we have sales, we share it with the group; we all just share in each other\u2019s happiness. It\u2019s important for us to be successful. We want to feel more than our illnesses.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, the site hosts over 200 crafties and over 7,000 products. They are inviting more people to participate. Thomas has connected with other crafties who help mentor new members. She welcomes each crafter to the site personally and offers her help in selling their goods, giving them advice on everything from how to take great photos to how to market on social media.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s also using her site and the community she\u2019s building to bring attention to problems people managing chronic illness face. After fighting for so long to get diagnosed, Thomas says she still battles misconceptions about her condition.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe hardest thing is trying to help other people understand. They\u2019re not feeling it themselves and [we] look perfectly fine,\u201d she explains. \u201cYou can have good and bad days and also good and bad hours. I might be able to walk my dog one minute and the next minute, I\u2019m consciously deciding if I have enough energy to go to the bathroom. It\u2019s so variable. When people see me on the rare occasion when I leave the house, that would be a very good day. They don\u2019t see what really goes on with my health.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, Thomas feels lucky to have found something meaningful in her struggle.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was a workaholic before, but nothing that I was doing was of value to anybody,\u201d Thomas says. \u201cIt was all meaningless to me. As much as I loved my job, it didn\u2019t light my heart up like this does. There\u2019s a tiny part of me that\u2019s quite glad that I got sick because it means that I\u2019ve been able to do something that\u2019s actually worthwhile.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Karen Thomas was diagnosed with a chronic illness 5 years ago, she never thought she\u2019d find her life\u2019s purpose: empowering others through her online support community and craft website Conscious Crafties. It started in 2011 when Thomas was in a car accident. After awhile, she would get sick and faint when she tried to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":29537,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[360,377,341],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[470],"class_list":["post-21774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-coping-with-illness","category-emotional-and-mental-health","category-living-longer-living-better"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n