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Poppy's Story
The Story Behind the Lane
A gentle note before you begin: this page touches on grief and illness. Read it when you have a quiet minute, or not at all. The Lane will be here either way.
Poppy Lane was not built out of a business plan. It was built out of a life.
It started when I was very small
Picture a good childhood. A loving family, a house full of noise, sports in the yard, the station wagon in the driveway. That was mine, and I don't take a day of it for granted. I just happened to be the kid whose body didn't work the way it was supposed to.
I was eighteen months old when the doctors first said the words autoimmune disease. Even then, nobody was completely sure what was wrong with me. We found out slowly, the way families do, one specialist at a time, some near home and some a long way from it. Some of those places treated me like a lab rat for their medical students, and I hated it. To this day I can still remember the way the doctor smelled. I can still picture the students and the doctors, all of them looking at me like I was a case and not a child. That left a scar on me that is still there in adulthood. Nobody really knew anything about what was wrong with me; it was all still so new. So I was treated as a disease, and not as a little child who was absolutely terrified, with parents who were terrified too. I spent part of my childhood with my legs in full casts. Then it was braces. For a while they thought it might be cancer. When the diagnosis finally settled, the treatment was strong medicine, the kind that helps you and makes you sick in the same breath, and I was sick a lot.
I knew pain young. My knees were swollen more often than they weren't. Every hour meant eye drops, and the drops hurt, every single time. Needles went into every joint I had, and fluid was drawn out of them. I had injections in my eyes too, starting when I was small, and they went on for years. Migraines came. Food made me ill in ways nobody had language for yet. I had been going to eye doctors since I was a toddler; I was there more often than I wasn't. I played field hockey all through high school, and at one point, when my body was struggling, my coach told me there wasn't room on his team for me and my disease.
My eyes had been in trouble for as long as I could remember, but the real failure began when I was eleven. I had seen the freckles on my own face when I was small. Somewhere along the way, I stopped being able to.
The illness in my family
Underneath that happy childhood ran something else, quieter and heavier. My family carries a rare illness. There is no treatment for it, and no cure, and it has taken a great many people I love. One of them was my parent.
It's a strange thing to be fighting your own body while someone you love is fading in the next room. But that's what those years were. I helped care for my parent, and I stayed, all the way to the end of their life.
Near the end, they hadn't spoken in a long time. We were losing them a little more each day. And then, out of nowhere, there was a clear moment. They found their voice, and they said to me, "You're going to help a lot of people." I can still hear it. It has never once been lost on me.
That wasn't the only grief waiting for me, either. There came a season when I nearly lost my spouse, more than once, when the phone calls were the kind nobody wants and the edge was very close. Other family members are gone now too. Death and grief and medical trauma aren't strangers in my life. They've shown up in more forms, more times, than I will ever set down here. I don't need to list them all for them to be real. They're part of my journey, and part of how I became the woman I am today.
And here's the thing I only understood later: I already knew. I knew when I was seven, writing in my little journal. I knew all through my teens. My purpose here was to help children. Even that young, I could see life wasn't fair. Some kids got everything. Some kids got so little, through no fault of their own, and it bothered me then the same way it bothers me now. I wanted to close that gap somehow. I wanted people to get to feel happy. Real joy, the ordinary kind: seeing the freckles on your own face. Being able to run with your friends. Being included. Being more than a diagnosis, and more than somebody's child. Being yourself, existing just for yourself, exactly who you are. Most of all, I wanted every child, and honestly every person, to know love and gentleness and empathy, and to know in their bones that they are okay exactly as they are.
The years that nearly took me with them
Grief doesn't do its work all at once. Neither did the hard years. Mine came with severe depression, and with seasons when I wasn't sure I could stay. And then there was the illness itself. There were years my body was too sick and inflamed to move. Years I couldn't work, couldn't get out of bed on my own, couldn't hold an empty bottle. My eyes kept failing until I was legally blind. Hold your fingers an inch from my face in those years, and I couldn't have told you how many there were. I learned people by their voices, and by the shape of how they moved. Someone had to cut my food and space it out on the plate so I could eat it properly. It was hard on me mentally in ways I still don't have good words for.
I won't dress any of that up. It was hard. Parts of it were lonely in a way that's almost impossible to explain to somebody whose body has always just cooperated.
What healing looked like
Healing didn't arrive in one big moment. It came in small ones, stacked up on ordinary days. I started eating food that healed instead of food that hurt. By then I had spent years researching health and wellness on my own, holistic practices for body, mind, and soul, teaching myself to cook from scratch, figuring out what my body actually needed. Little by little, my body came back to me. A hundred pounds came off. The noise in my health quieted down.
For a long time my body was never well enough for the surgery my eyes needed. The doctors said it was too risky. Then, finally, it wasn't. I have implants in my eyes now, and I can see. I don't think I'll ever get tired of that sentence. I can see the children in front of me. I can see the page. I can see the faces I love.
Why the Lane exists
These days my work is in education, with children whose bodies and brains work differently. Kids who feel everything at full volume. Kids still finding their words. Kids having the biggest feelings in the room. I know what it is to be the different one, the struggling one, the one the world doesn't always make room for first. And if my life has taught me anything, it's this: gentleness is not weakness. It's the whole method.
They are a part of my journey and how I became the woman I am today, and I am grateful for them, even the darkness, because the darkness is what brought me the light I am now. I learned from all of it.
I'm here to help heal the children and the adults, and to be a source of gentleness, empathy, and friendship.
That's what the Lane is for. Every book, every page, every small soft thing here was made by someone who knows what it is to be different, and struggling, and still here. You belong here. So do your children.
The full story is longer than one page, and I'm writing it now as my memoir. When it's ready, it will live here on the Lane. Until then, this is the short version, and the work itself is the rest of my answer.
You are loved, exactly as you are.
Poppy
If you are in a season like the ones on this page and you need help now, in the United States you can call or text 988, any time, day or night.
