The Faithfully and Chronically brand was created to inspire and advocate.
Brand Summary
Being a girl in your twenties is not always easy, especially when you are chronically ill.
Our founder, Baileigh Picou, created Faithfully and Chronically to raise awareness and normalize the experiences that young women with chronic illnesses and disabilities face.
During her freshman year of college, Baileigh was diagnosed with multiple chronic illnesses, many of which she had never heard of before. She joined support groups and followed people who had her same diagnosis, but she did not feel as if being a passive member of these groups was enough.
After competing in a Miss America local with her first service dog and having an overwhelming amount of people say that they felt inspired for the first time since their diagnosis, Baileigh set out to share her life experiences in the hope that she would not only be able to educate others on chronic illnesses as a whole but also ideally inspire someone who was in a similar situation.
From posting Get Ready with Me videos where she recounts stories about the day-to-day of being a chronically ill young adult to sharing videos of an entire day filled with doctor appointments, work, and school and even posting cute infographics about her different chronic illnesses, Baileigh is constantly exploring new ways to educate and motivate.
Whether you are looking for inspiration, Christian content, or someone who just gets it Faithfully and Chronically is the place for you. Our content is all about having authentic conversations about topics such as faith, dating, doctor's appointments, and other things you go through as a chronically ill woman in your twenties. Our goal is that you can always find something to relate to in one of our posts or podcast episodes. Even if you aren’t chronically ill, you can still find ways to relate to our content or even educate yourself to be a better ally for those around you.
Brand Backstory
I was 19 years old when my life changed forever. One day, I was a relatively healthy 19-year-old and the next, I caught two viral infections back to back that took my chronic illnesses from only presenting as mild symptoms to being full-fledged. Now, two years later, I have been diagnosed with Dysautonomia, Fibromyalgia, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Gastroparesis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Vulvodynia, and chronic migraines. Day-to-day for me consists of a high heart rate and low blood pressure, constant dizziness, always being tired, food intolerances, a constant headache, and joint and muscle pain, among other fun symptoms.
I remember constantly asking why me, what did I do to deserve this, and while I didn’t know it at the time, I was grieving the life I had been living and thought I was always going to live. I was no longer a normal college student who could go out with her friends and do whatever she pleased. I am now a chronically ill college student who has to plan out her days by how many spoons she thinks it’ll take (to learn more about what spoons are, read this article on the spoon theory). I lost all of my independence, and it wasn’t until I got my service dog a year after I got sick that I finally got some of it back.
My faith was shattered as I started believing that God no longer cared for me like He did everyone else. However, that couldn’t have been further from the truth because God never stopped working in my life. Even though I couldn’t see it at the time God’s plan for me was always in motion. God continued to show me that His plan was based on perfect timing as He placed my cardiac alert service dog in my life during one of the lowest states I had been in mentally since becoming chronically ill. Then, the time I was unemployed for two months after graduation, became a time during which I re-evaluated my life and found myself turning back to God. When doctors and society kept telling me that no, God didn’t just give me the strength to turn each no into a yes, but He also gave me a platform to be able to reach out to others.
More often than not when someone becomes chronically ill, they are given a bunch of no’s which can be very discouraging, especially if you don’t know anyone who has turned those same no’s into a yes. It was going through that process myself that led me to develop Living Chronically, a podcast where I would share how I tried to live my life despite my chronic illnesses. This has since evolved into the Faithfully and Chronically brand (podcast and social media pages), where I can share how I live chronically and how my faith ties into it.
It wasn’t until recently that Living Chronically was rebranded into Faithfully and Chronically because it wasn’t until recently that I felt I had repaired the foundation of my relationship with God enough to speak on it. The Faithfully and Chronically brand gained inspiration from my desire to raise awareness for chronic illnesses and to create a community where others feel safe to share theirs. I wanted to create a community that understood the complexity of navigating being chronically ill and still having faith that God would redeem it because it was that community that I needed when I became chronically ill.
While I am still growing in my relationship with God each day, and by no means have I figured out the best way to live with chronic illnesses, I hope that in sharing my discoveries, stumbles, and triumphs as I navigate the journey of being a Christian woman with multiple chronic illnesses, that I can educate, inspire or help someone else along their journey.
