Unknown Speaker 0:00
We must acknowledge that Diversity Equity belonging is also about living with chronic illness is about disability and disability is often invisible.
Michelle 0:14
Welcome back to the pyjama interviews the podcast for every woman living with chronic illness. This week, I am so thrilled we're speaking with Salesforce executive party, Kat blue. And we are talking about her long career, as well as her experience of chronic illness. Stay tuned at the end of this week's exciting announcement. And now let's dive in. It I'm so excited that we're going to talk.
Unknown Speaker 0:45
I'm so excited to be here. And it's so nice to have a face to face conversation with you again, it's been too long.
Michelle 0:51
Yeah. So the first thing that I wanted to ask you was about your diagnosis and your process to diagnosis if you're willing to share with us.
Unknown Speaker 1:05
Yeah, sure. It's, it's very distant for me because it was when I was about nine. So I have Hashimotos, which is a thyroid disorder. It is autoimmune. And and my mother, who also suffers from Hashimoto diagnosed me when I was about nine years old, because she felt that my thyroid was enlarged. And I remember she took me to the paediatrician and they sort of poo pooed her and you're, you know, you're being hypochondriac. There's nothing wrong. And she insisted, because she's my mom. And they tested me. And indeed, I was lacking significant amounts of thyroid hormone. And so I've been on on hormone replacement and hormone therapy for my thyroid since since before puberty, really? That, so it feels very, very distant to me the diagnosis itself. And, yeah,
Michelle 2:20
it's just amazing about your mother and her. Like, that's a big thing to insist as well. And I'm very fascinated by her being such a big advocate at the very beginning of your experience of chronic illness like right at the beginning, beginning, because most people don't have that level of advocacy at that beginning spot.
Unknown Speaker 2:44
Yeah, that's exactly right. Um, I think my mom, frankly, is a better advocate for me. And then she's been for herself, it's easier to advocate for others, you know, she, I suffered migraines very. And those were also genetic. My dad suffered migraine. And, and so she, I think was very acutely aware of what was going on with my body, trying to help minimise his, my migraines, and all of the things that you would want to do as a mom. And so I think she was just really aware of all of the things that were going on. And so literally, she she felt that my thyroid was was just swollen. And that was it. That was enough for her to insist.
Michelle 3:35
Fascinating. And then, as you say, what happened next fatty from your whole experience then?
Unknown Speaker 3:45
So Michelle, it's really funny, because as long as I was living at home, and my mom was responsible for my care, it didn't affect me. I mean, not to the extent that I, I would I think about it today, right? Because she handed me the pill every morning, and she was she was responsible for the care. It wasn't until I hit my mid teens when I sort of took on the responsibility myself. And concurrently began to experience my first about of clinical depression. And those two things kind of going hand in hand, I think was the first time that I realised Oh, like, my body doesn't quite my body and my mind don't quite function the same way that other people that I go to school with. And that was a period wherein I would say two things happened. The first is, it was also my first backlash. It was my first sort of cuz like, I don't want this crutch, right? Like, I just, I want to be normal, I don't want to have to take this pill every day. And so it kind of wouldn't there would be days and weeks when I wouldn't take my medication. And of course, that compounded the depression significantly, but also through puberty, the need for adjustments to to thyroid medication and thyroid hormone changes. And so I had this like convergence of, I'm being a teenager, and I want to be normal. And I don't want to take these medications anymore. I'm compounding with really deep clinical depression, and and made worse by the fact that I wasn't taking the medication, and I was on the wrong doses of medication. And nobody could get a good read of my thyroid levels. Because I would take like the week leading up to a thyroid test, I would double up my doses go and blood worked on, things would look okay. And that was it, I wouldn't take him for another three to six months.
Michelle 6:08
Wow. And so this is I mean, it's just beautiful in telling the real truth, like we're right in the grid. And we all know, no matter how old we are, we all know the times we didn't take the medication. And I think that's such a normal response to being medicated, and to having your body requiring for some more functionality than it would otherwise have medication. But it's also that the history of medicating women is not a great history either. And so it's complex. It's not just our side, it's also very cultural. So I'm curious, then fatty as you moved into, you know, young adulthood and started to move into work and study. What did that look like for you on the chronic illness journey?
Unknown Speaker 7:04
Yeah. Throughout college, I continued to be very resistant to medication. And I look back now and I wonder what kind of damage I actually did to myself during that probably four or five year period of time when I was really, really non compliant. My bigger problem, as I went through college and entered the workforce, to be honest with you was migraine, I had a very poor grasp of what my triggers were what was causing it for me. And I, I knew only that I would almost inevitably have a migraine crash, after a period of elevated energy and elevated work and elevated excitement. And like the things that get are really exciting when you're first working, you know, you're working on a project, and it's really great. And you've got all of the endorphins and the adrenaline running through and then you deliver the project or you deliver the paper, and boom. It probably took me three years to figure out that pattern particularly well. And it it probably defined the first five or six years of my work life coming out of school.
Michelle 8:42
Yeah, that's, that's a lot. I mean, I had migraines severely too. I don't remember having them as much as my 20s. I definitely had them. But I remember the last five or six years of me working in a corporate job, I had them three times a week and I would go home, I would make it to the end of the day, I would go home, get in the darkroom, take whatever I could crash, get up and eat after sleeping, maybe at 1030 Go back to sleep wake up still with the tension. But by that stage, I had negotiated working part time because I was working on other creative projects. And I just had this if I make it through by Wednesday, I can just rest my body Thursday, Friday, and then I can do what I want. But I'm pretty sure you're talking about working full time. And under pressure as well. I'm wondering if you can just describe for us what work looked like for you at that time. And sort of what the trajectory you want it to be on as well. That sort of unsure as part of the story.
Unknown Speaker 9:54
Yeah. It's a great question. I was a marketing coordinator. are a catalogue company. And so we released catalogues four times a year, six times a year, I can't quite remember. But I was responsible for like, literally getting the the final files and the final proofs out the door, like driving to the Federal Express office at five o'clock, and being there and delivering this thing at the very last minute into their hands, that would then go to a printing press the next day. And, and so like really high energy, really high pressure high state. And I love I love that. Now, what's really interesting is I got to a point where I could navigate it and say, and my boss knew, after something is out the door, fast, he's gone for two days, because she's going to be doped up with heavy, intense medication, trying to get through the next 18 hours. And mostly, like, once we figured it out, I was really fortunate to have a very caring boss and employer. And, and I consider them both mentors. And then they navigate it with me, you know, they were they were open to that. How do we make this work for everyone? There have been other situations where it hasn't been so great. So after I kind of left that job, I was there for five or six years, I learned probably everything I could. That was in Southern California, and I moved to San Francisco, and this is sort of 1999. And I entered the agency world, like the creative agency world, which is a very different story and very demanding. When your client says jump, you say how high right, and that's sort of like the environment of creative agencies, you know, for time immemorial, that was harder, because my customers, my clients were my bosses effectively. And there's only so much air cover that the agency managers and the agency bosses can provide, like if a customer has a need, if a client has a need, you've got to show up. And that was hard, because I think like you, I found for me, there is no way to work through the day. My work was on computer screens, like if I if I had aura, and it was starting and a migraine was starting. Like, at that point, I was gauging whether or not I had enough time to get home. Like that's how bad it would be. So that was that really kind of carried through I would say my late 20s. I think it was 27 or 28, when they finally started to abate. And it was hard. Now, interestingly, at that same period of time, and that same sort of five or six year window when I was at the agency, the thyroid also was flaring back up. Yeah. And if I'm being honest with myself, that's when I really started to take it seriously. That's when I started to notice my body failing me when I didn't take medication. Yeah, so early findings.
Michelle 13:41
So you start at nine by the time you're actually 20 years now of living with chronic illness by this point. And what I'm hearing you you is that since it's almost accountability, it's the difference between responsibility and accountability. You're actually like, Okay, I'm driving the ship. This isn't going to change. I need to work this out for myself. And I'm curious what that looks like, once you that kicked in for you like how, how were you treated? Or how did you see the world the working world now? Once that accountability became the next step in the journey for you?
Unknown Speaker 14:26
I mean, frankly, a big part of it, is that I was able to show up better. i i My mind was sharper. I felt more creative. My body cooperated. I didn't have bouts of exhaustion so intense that I I just didn't know how I was gonna get out of bed. And it took, you know, being in my early 20s and Feeling like an old woman sometimes feeling like, the fatigue I was experiencing at the age of 25. There's something wrong. And, and I remember, you know, this is this predates like Dr. Google and WebMD. And all of those things, right? Like the information wasn't so readily accessible to us then. And I remember finally making an appointment with an endocrinologist. And sitting me down and explaining why not treating my thyroid with the respect that it deserves, would would break my body would eventually, and she couldn't have known I mean, I this, I don't know that we would get into this otherwise, but I've never wanted kids. But when you're 25, nobody believes that there's no doctor in the world that actually will believe you, if you say I don't want to, I never want to have kids. And so, you know, this endocrinologist was very, like, you're going to have fertility problems, and you're going to have an increased risk of osteoporosis, and you're going to have other autoimmune things. And you're gonna have a hard time losing weight, and it's your metabolism is going to break and when your metabolism breaks, that's for ever. And she really kind of, yeah, forced me to respect this tiny little gland in my body that I had just thought of is like an annoyance in the past. And now realise, hey, this thing is actually really calibrating a lot of the functions in your body, and you really have to pay attention to it.
Michelle 16:46
It's so interesting that we hear like, we all have experiences with clinicians, but she was the right one at the right time, to communicate to you, for you to hear it in a way that worked for you. And by this stage, like there's thyroid, there's migraine, and there's depression, as well. So what I'm curious about Fadi is I'm sure as we know, your career moves on. And I'd love to, you know, explore what that looks like. What I'm deeply curious about is, are you telling people if you're haven't recognised at all the importance, what's your relationship with everybody else? And also, as I know, so many of us with chronic illness, push harder, push further, you know, really work at the best possible level of capacity we have, because we know there's a crash in the hood. So what what did it look like to everybody else in relationship to you and work?
Unknown Speaker 17:55
I was pretty open about migraine, because you can't really hide it. And I think you just got to be open about that. I'm trying to think if I ever talked to anybody about the thyroid, and I don't, I don't think I ever brought it up. But I remember very distinctly a woman that I was friends with, I guess I would have been early 30s, by now was having all kinds of units, her hair was falling out. And she's having like all kinds of problems. And I think that was probably the first time I said to somebody, have you had your thyroid tested. It's really under diagnosed in women our age. And she subsequently went and got her thyroid tested. And she did in fact have Hashimoto. And, and this is a woman who was also trying to conceive at the time, and was having a really hard time conceiving. And like, it sort of changed the narrative for her so much. That I became more open about talking about it, and it no longer felt like I think that was also a period if, if I'm thinking back, like we started to understand a little bit more about autoimmune disorders. We heard more about lupus. We heard more about Epstein Barr we heard in the US, certainly, you know, people getting Lyme disease and having to live with the consequences of that for years. And so I think it became more acceptable to talk about an auto immune disorder, that mental health I did not talk about, not for years, not for years longer. And yeah, in the workplace, like you just don't talk about depression and anxiety disorders like not not until fairly recently. And and as you know, I am now an open book. I refuse to care. keep it hidden. I talk about it on my very public Twitter. I talk about it on LinkedIn. I think it's incredibly important to normalise this stuff, and to D stigmatise it. But I didn't get to that place until three years ago, four years ago.
Michelle 20:19
And this is my curiosity, because I feel like, we're right. I just had this we're in the sensitivity of three or four years ago, you had also reached such an incredible point in your career as well. And I'm wondering if you could talk about what your career looks like at that point. And then what yeah, what that space of having potentially the privilege of being respected and speaking as well, rather than building what that looks like for you by that time?
Unknown Speaker 20:53
Yeah, so I'll give you a tiny bit of background, which I think is important to contextualise this. So after I left the marketing world, I went to work for a company called Forrester Research. And I was writing about marketing ethics and privacy and, and data protection and, you know, digital identity in the context of like, there's all of these giant companies, kind of arbitraging our identities on the basis of like, the things we click on, and the things we look at, and the, you know, the friends that we have online. And it became really clear to me that through my entire career, and through my personal interests, the thing that really drives me, and the thing that I'm always working on, is rooted in identity. And do you and I have sort of had this conversation before, because I'm a first generation immigrant, who left the country of her birth under really awful circumstances, it was when the revolution happened in Iran, and there was a hostage crisis. And there's like, all this stuff going on. And unlike there was never any expectation that my family would stay in America. People thought the revolution will blow over, we'll all be able to go home. And so I have always been an in between kid, I'm not quite American enough. I'm not quite Iranian enough. I'm first generation, I'm the eldest daughter, the eldest child, my relationship to my identity is really deep. And the way that I have had the privilege of a being white passing until you see my name means that I've been able to curate my identity really well, both for family and for work, and for school, and in all contexts. Likewise, as a person who suffers mental illness, as a person who suffers chronic illness, I've been able to manage those identities. And so my interest lies in our relationship to our identities and our right to our identity. So, four years ago, I had reached a fairly kind of APEX in a sense of writing research about this writing and speaking to audiences about the importance of of agency and autonomy in the digital world, because it's not fair that because I do a Google search for anxiety disorders, or side effects of a new medication that I'm on that suddenly that becomes part of some digital identity and some digital breadcrumb trail that I'm leaving behind, right, like that doesn't feel just or fair. And so that's what I was working on. And, and I also had a mental health crisis, I, I had a very bad mental health crisis. I was in hospital. And when I came out, I decided I was done hiding that as someone with this is such a, like, weird thing to say, but as someone with an audience, as someone with the right to speak to people who, who listen, who respect the research that I've written, and spoken about, like I have a moral responsibility, really, to not support the stigmatisation of these things by not talking about it.
Michelle 24:54
It's interesting because what you're also talking about when we talk about an audience for for you is you're not talking about an Instagram audience or a social influencer audience. You're talking about actual credibility that you have built through things you have done. And I'm wondering if you could describe for us like, what did your day look like in terms of for nobody who's ever seen you or heard you? What does it mean to have an audience? Like, who are you talking to? We're talking and who's in that audience? Fatty? Yeah, so
Unknown Speaker 25:32
this is before I joined Salesforce last fall, when I was in my sort of public speaking public writing world. On any given week, I might be publishing research about privacy, or ethics, or diversity, equity and inclusion in marketing. I might be writing some blog posts, I might be syndicated. In Forbes, a blog post I wrote might be syndicated in Forbes, or in Harvard Business Review, I might be on the radio, or I might be talking to the New York Times about my research and what that looks like. And then I would be speaking on stages, that could be you know, 2000 people, 3000 people audiences, I could be sitting in a boardroom, with the executives of a company, who is worried about who are worried about whether there's enough representation in their marketing, whether they are using customer data ethically, whether they're using their platforms to build trust with consumers and employees. And so it was a very varied set of, of kind of tasks or jobs and interactions that I had. But I started to use Twitter a lot more. And I don't have a huge Twitter following. I think I've got five or 6000 followers. It's not huge, but it isn't, it is people who are interested in the stuff that I talk about. And so it became increasingly important, and I'll tell you this, the sort of moment and the the event where I realised I need to be way more out there. It was right before the before the pandemic started. And I had been asked to moderate a panel by a very large company called Live RAM technology company. And I'd been asked to moderate a panel about the convergence. And this is some research that I'd written the convergence of diversity, equity and inclusion, and privacy and privacy ethics. And, and the importance of those things. And I was sitting there in this room, and it was a breakout session with some unbelievably brilliant people. If you've never followed either Aubrey Blanche, an incredible dei person, or Belinda Smith. They're both incredible women. And I was moderating this panel with the two of them, the president of live ramp and another gentleman. And there were like 20 people in the breakout. And the conference in the event itself was probably 3000 2000. And I was like, I'm not I'm not talking loud enough. Like, I'm not talking about this stuff outside of other contexts, nearly enough. And so that became the sort of tipping point for me of, we must talk about these things in the corporate environment, we must acknowledge that diversity, equity belonging isn't just about race, or gender or ethnicity. It's also about neurodiversity. It is also about living with chronic illness. It is about disability and disability is often invisible. And like we have to include these things in the conversations that were happening about Dei.
Michelle 29:16
And this really links to something the work that I'm fascinated and in as well is now how do we take this conversation to expand so the chronic illness is in DNI and one of the things about that is, firstly, when we look at the statistics of people living with chronic illness in America, it's 133 million people. And in Australia, it's 47% of Australians. But here's the trick. A lot of this conversation about chronic illness is in the burden of disease conversation. And a lot of stats are actually in the burden of disease. Some of the stats that private corporates like Deloitte or PwC, whoever's doing some of this work around the burden of disease stats for government are also talking, then about 70% of these people are working part time and full time. Okay. But what we don't have is the drill down in that data to the person who's actually trying to navigate the experience. So that information on that data is something my colleague and I are working on literally at the moment, we're drilling down into the data. And one of the reasons for that is that in the conversations I'm having with companies that take for example, neurodiversity is getting some traction. At the moment, it's starting to be seen as we have a lot of talent, who isn't able to advance because they're not vocal enough, or they're not seem to be in the right form. However, what we aren't having a conversation about is all of the women, including you, you know, in this whole career process, who have navigated chronic illness while working, and what that actually looks like for their experience for us, because we don't talk about it, because there's not the data, you know, actually translated over to talent management, and what that looks like, we don't have the right support, we don't have the right conversation, we don't have the inclusion. And what that means from our research is that managers, the person with the chronic illness is often telling their manager, they're not telling HR, they're telling their manager. That means that the manager and them are trying to work out how to navigate their corporate career, under the radar with chronic illness. And what that looks like is almost where you started this conversation party. We know if Jennifer has chronic illness, and she works on this thing, that she only can work five hours, or she's going to have a crash or she's hospitalised. So we're not going to count that sick leave. We're going to do that at the other end of the project and backdate it, or the manager is struggling, who has such empathy but is struggling about how to actually get the work done. And nobody is having the conversation about what's the conversation to have with the person having chronic illness? What's the conversation the chronic illness person is having with the organisation? How do we navigate this experience? How do we do that in a functional way? And how do we do that in an inclusive way. And that's the conversation that we're in the open moment for. And I'm so grateful as a woman living with chronic illness for all of the diversity, equality and inclusion spaces that have been, you know, created and been addressed. And this one is now time because this the problem with illness when we use the words chronic illness. The problem is that if you have an illness you're supposed to get well. And so that conversation is all about getting you back to wellness, and your chronic illness, you're not going to get well. So the support actually needs to be for the lifetime of your employee rather than a health and wellness intervention. Because it's not in the domain of health and wellness, which is how we think of illness. It's actually exactly what you're talking about its identity, its awareness, acceptance, and advancement. And that's the conversation I think we're in and I'm so curious about to hear your response in the time that we have to this conversation. We're now I mean, it's,
Unknown Speaker 33:57
it's so important, and it's so timely. And I think there's two things that that as you were talking, I kind of wanted to touch on and pick up on. Aubrey Blanche, who as I mentioned is brilliant. has said to me, Can I curse? Can I swear on the pod? She has often said suck diversity and fuck inclusion. It's about belonging. And when we create spaces at work, where people feel that they belong, that is when our work is done. About right she's I love it really
Michelle 34:39
the belonging finding a space to belong while you're living with chronic illness that has been almost impossible. And it's only just moving. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 34:48
It's it profoundly changed the way that I think about all of this work because it's not enough to say, you know, to have the statistics and the numbers that say Oh, We support our, you know, our wellness and health and whatever programmes it's about, like do I feel safe coming to work and showing up as myself and saying, I'm just having a really rough day, I need to cancel all my all my calls, or I need to have all of my meetings without video because I cannot bring myself to to look presentable. Or I just need to take a nap today, you know that, that is when you feel when you feel that you can say those things is when you feel belonging, I have to say, I feel really fortunate to be in a place where I can do that Salesforce is a magical place from that perspective. The other thing that I wanted to touch on is that I think that there is there are geographical and cultural differences here. Even though we both live in democratic English speaking countries, you and I, the degree to which insurance and your ability to not go broke, is tied to your employer in this country in the US means that, like, you're gonna do whatever you have to do to keep the job, especially if you're a low wage worker, especially if you're early in your career, especially if you have pre existing conditions and can't afford to lose your job, you are going to do whatever it takes and work through illness and work yourself to the breaking point. Because if you lose your job, you will not be able to afford insurance, and you will go broke in this country. And so the ability to even start the conversation with your manager or start the conversation with HR depends on a lot of privilege that of those 100 and 30 million people that you quoted, I would guess 70% don't have.
Michelle 37:10
Yep. And this is the open moment why talking about it now is so important if you have that capacity. And one of the things I'm curious about in the time we've got left 40 is okay, so you've moved from foresters to Salesforce? What is it about that company? Or what is it in that space? Tell Tell me about that for you now, and who you are, in this combination of your experience, including depression Hashimotos migraine? Yeah. Yeah, so
Unknown Speaker 37:50
listen, I, I love Forrester, I, I will love my 11 years there. It's an amazing company. And the people are amazing. And I felt incredibly well supported there. But I now get to work in sales forces office of ethical and humane use of technology, which is a dream job, these positions didn't exist three years ago. And my job is to lead ethics by design for our software and services. So I literally get to embed ethics in the design in the development and the deployment of our products and services. It's a dirty job. The reality of Salesforce is it it's an incredibly strong culture. And it is it has these five values. The first of which is trust. And it is it really does do like walk the talk and it is a now 75,000 person company nearly. And the the fact that it's been able to maintain that culture and maintain those values and really, really take a human centric approach to work is is incredible. So taking that from a sort of Salesforce cultural perspective and then bring that in and narrow that lens and narrow that focus to this office of ethical and humane use, which includes product accessibility and inclusive design, which includes ethics by design, which includes ethical and responsible responsible development of AI, which includes policy ethical policymaking. Like I am I'm in the nexus point of people who are who are bringing their authentic selves to work every day, honestly, unabashedly vulnerably. And I am grateful I So much gratitude to be alongside those people, because I've been very vulnerable and transparent with everybody, we we have this thing that is it is a team agreement, a team operating manual, and everyone on the team has filled out. This is what it looks like when I show up with energy at work. This is what it looks like when I feel overwhelmed. This is what it looks like when, and this is how you can help when I feel overwhelmed. This is how I want to get feedback. And this is how I like to give feedback. I mean, everybody on the team is willing to share that information in a document. And so when we sit down to have hard conversations, we refer to that operating manual. And I know how I need to deliver feedback, I know how to show up for somebody, if they're having a rough day. It's incredible. Like I want I want this for the whole world.
Michelle 40:59
What's interesting about that is you're actually talking about the emotional labour of going to the office, the unseen, hidden emotional labour that often women have carried. And when you live with chronic illness, that Labour goes to a couple of trusted colleagues, and it comes to the very point I was making is that Labour can be dispersed, and it doesn't have to be labour, it's about connection. And I love this conversation about belonging. Because if you have Crohn's disease, and you're working in a corporation, and you have an incident or process on the way to work that you have to change for or whatever, then is a very hidden thing that nobody wants to talk about. I don't have Crohn's disease. But what I know from all of the work that I've done, other women who have said to me, thank God, you are talking about this, because I can go to work with a sense of pride, I can go to work and stop feeling ashamed because I know, I am an extraordinary woman. And I'm a very creative woman. Because if you are a woman living with chronic illness, you are an extraordinary woman, and you are a very creative one. You've had to be creative about how to get from bed, to the shower on any given day. And this is not about inspiration. This is not about you know the courage or what it takes you didn't ask for it. It is your lived experience. And you have had to work it out. And there is no great way to work this out. And that's what I'd really like to close with. Bharti is, you know, where do you see us at at the moment? Because there's a lot of work to be done. And the No way I feel i You saying I've worked this out?
Unknown Speaker 42:51
Yeah. Listen, my my goal and objective for the next decade of my career is to open doors behind me for other young women who are suffering, who are in the situation. Because as we're talking here, you and I, I suspect that we've had both experienced either an amazing mentor or an amazing opportunity to open a door for us. And I think of the 1000s of women, as you were talking about Crohn's, I have a very good friend who just never tried, who just said, I'm never going to be able to go and sit in a client meeting or do a one hour presentation with confidence that I'm going to be okay. And I can't afford to take that risk. And so I'm just going to stay here in my middle management position, that feel safe to me. I never want anyone, woman or man, I never want anyone with chronic illness to feel that they can't do that. Because there's not somebody there supporting them. And so the next decade of my life is committed to mostly women in tech, mostly neurodivergent women in tech, women with chronic illness and tech, helping open doors, because I've got the privilege to do it. And that's that's what I hope my legacy can be.
Michelle 44:24
And it's interesting because that's my decade. That's That's my decade to, I'm here for us to firstly transform the public conversation about it. But that's just the way like, that's just the smallest piece of the work. The work is actually helping women navigate career, helping them navigate our relationships in our whole area that you and I haven't touched on. I feel like Oh, there's another whole podcast conversation he fit with you talking about that. But this conversation is not visible and even you and I having Conversation. This is the first time we've had it at this level. And this conversation is not done between us. And it's not done between all the women that we know, personally who are in the room with us. So I really want to thank you for being here in this moment, fatty because we're in a moment. And every woman listening to this, I want you to know that we're here. We're working with you, we're present with you. There are ways to follow us, there are ways to connect with us. There is nobody excluded from this conversation, no matter what your experience is, if you are bed bound, and career is not even like it's just over from your perspective, I want to say to you, firstly, I work with women who are bed bound, and this conversation can be had, and your dreams are still in your heart for a reason. And it may look very different, it may not be going to the office at all. But that doesn't mean that your creativity and your talent doesn't have a place in this world. And the other women that I'm speaking with in this process, you know, there's Danica Kim, who's an amazing artists lives with endometriosis, there's a place for everybody in this room, and this community and connection. So we'll have all of these connections in the show notes, you'll be able to follow her on Twitter, and see the conversation that she's having. But also know that we're working towards creating more public space and corporate conversation together to have this theory open, and also have navigated because it hasn't been done. And so not every nobody's going to get it right at this point in time. This is my pioneering work at this point in time. And it's so amazing that you and I 30 This is our next decade individually. And I also feel we're in the hood together. This is our next decade together because every woman listening to us, and in this conversation, this is all of our next decade together. You don't have to be the advocate. We're gonna carry that with you. But we're all in the hood together.
Unknown Speaker 47:17
I absolutely love that.
Michelle 47:19
Well, thank you so much for sharing with us today. So openly. I know this is the first time that you've publicly spoken about all of this journey and the vulnerability of that journey. And it's a big thing to come out and talk about it. And I super appreciate it.
Unknown Speaker 47:37
Well, thanks for inviting me. I'm really excited to catch up and and yeah, start having this conversation and more publicly.
Michelle 47:49
Thanks so much for joining us. If you want to explore connecting and working with me Michelle, you can chat to me at Michelle irving.com.au/chat. And we can book on a time to connect. And stay tuned for next week's episode where we have another gorgeous, magnificent woman sharing with us about how to navigate chronic illness in an empowered way.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
