Jillian Leslie - Immortal Warrior
Those of you who’ve been with us since at least 2001 have read articles about and by our dear friend and mentor Jillian Leslie. Jillian’s website, Everyday Warriors, was one of the most informative, professional and heartwarming medical sites most of us will ever encounter. Truly one of a kind, Jillian confronted her own devastating illness by offering support and solutions to others. With her long background as a respected author and editor, Jillian sought out and published writers she believed in, giving them an audience of well over 250,000 regular readers. Friends of Lupus NewsLog including Rose Harris, Royce Sharp and me, were regular columnists or frequent contributors to Everyday Warriors. At Lupus NewsLog Thrivers, we honor and carry on that intimacy of true life, hard won and shared with hearts wide open.
When our Butterfly NewsBytes home site froze due to too many (4500+) members joining too soon, Jillian published our newsletter issues at Everyday Warriors. My short stories of life as a country mouse and a bay city kitty won her praise. The books she cradled for me like their own godmother are making progress, one on lupie life, with the recent discovery of once lost member contributions and another book with a darkly mysterious but true to life premise. She constantly urged me to write weblogs too, not just Lupus NewsLog but more personally and far more opinionated. She respected my backstage personality but never stopped shining a spotlight in my direction. That site she wanted so much for me to create will be online soon, largely due to her faithful encouragement.
Jillian and I were so close and so reflective of each other’s personalities that we exchanged countless emails and she sent me frequent effervescent voicemails which I treasure now as a vital inheritance. Those of us with incurable disease often live with internal time bombs, silently ticking, reminding us to savor every moment and every experience, teaching us to turn tragedy inside out, to offer others the acceptance we all deserve and shape our lives with creative expression.
With Jillian’s sharp intelligence, fluent artistry and surpassing compassion, she didn’t just help lift us up the ladder of life, she built it for us rung by rung in Everyday Warriors. Eventually her own pain and struggle became to much for her, making the heavy duty of a first-class, hugely popular website too exhausting to continue. Although she carried the copyright, owned the domain and never sought to earn a cent from it, an imposter has taken the name and is using it to make a buck off one of the finest, purest non-profits the world-wide web will ever weave.
Because Everyday Warrior’s name is being ill-used in this way, I’m removing every link to this famous site. Please ignore them in their last days at LNL. I won’t shill for any shyster and I won’t help anyone to cheapen Jillian’s considerable contributions. Jillian brought energy, humor and enthusiasm to everything she did and she will always be vibrantly alive in the memories of those she’s shared so much with and done so much for. Ti amo, dear sister, you are truly an Immortal Warrior!