← Something Positive for Positive People
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Foreign just looked over, saw that I was muted right before I started talking. Welcome to Something Positive for Positive People. I'm Courtney Brain. Something Positive for Positive People is a 501c3 non profit organization supporting people who are navigating herpes stigma. In addition to that, we also provide resources that are useful to healthcare professionals, public health, mental health, and if you are an educator in the field of sexuality specifically. And I am fixing my mic so that ain't no wild stuff happening here. Okay, There we go. Yeah, welcome. Welcome to this episode. So you'll see I'm on camera. If you are watching this on any virtual platform rather than listening to it, this is one that I. I mean, just full transparency. I don't even want to call this a podcast episode because what this is is me talking through a lot of the changes that have come to the website. We now have the website looking more like a website instead of a newspaper. So let me go ahead and share my screen real quick so that you can see a little bit of what to expect. All right, so here's the home page, which you'll see as we got a picture. We got some diverse skin tones on this thing. Look at that. Oh, you know, upgraded Y. The amount of money that I'm. I know I'm gonna have to spend by the end of this process is worth it. So one of the first things you might notice is the shortened main navigation. Now you see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 different navigation links. Some of them have drop down, some don't. But this is a lot shorter than it used to be. Especially for people who might be looking at this on a mobile device, it'll look a lot more clean for you to be able to navigate and find what it is that you're looking for. Now I'm talk in a way that if you're somebody who's new here, you don't know, Courtney, you don't know about something positive for positive people. This is for you. Anyone who's been here for a while, you probably already know what you're looking for. You might come here for the podcast. You might come here to see if any events are going on, or maybe you're going to be curious about the support groups, which I'll get into as well. But this is really just for someone who's brand new to something positive repository people and don't know where to start. All right, so here you'll see the announcement bar. So here's where you really want to see what's happening right now. We're collecting survey responses. So whenever you click on the announcement bar, it'll take you right to whatever it is that's going on or that links to that announcement bar. So here we've got the herpes survey, which also links to other resources. So one of the first things you'll see is that that resources pa. Now, this takes us to the herpes statistics page where you'll see some of the data. You'll be able to scroll down and see some of the images, the graphics, some slides from the presentation. If you want that full presentation, you're able to click there and it'll just open up another tab. That one takes you to our 2024 statistics, where what I presented at the Herpes stigma conference in 2024 is what will be present, presented, and it'll be available for download. So if you are someone who works in the medical field, if you're a clinician, mental health professional, you work with people with herpes, this is for you. And that's why there's a price associated with it as well. This was something that I put a lot into and I'm making it available and accessible for professionals and organizations to be able to access easily. Okay, so it says here who is for healthcare professionals? Therapists, counselors, sex educators and advocates, as well as researchers and public health professionals. It's just a video. And yeah, that's just a descriptive analysis of the data that we collected from our herpes stigma survey. So if you are someone who just wanted to take the survey. Hold on, I gotta hit back because I didn't open a new tab. That's something that I need to fix as well. So I'm glad I'm doing this now. Yeah. So if you are looking for additional resources, you'll be able to click throughout. You'll see how to navigate the pages in that way. So all you'll have to do, if you want to take the survey, hit the disclaimer and then that'll give you an option to just check that you read the disclaimer and then you can start the survey. Every page will have a place for you to join our newsletter. Please be on the newsletter. I'm not doing as much as I have on social media. Social media is honestly no longer worth it for me because of how limited anything that I'm sharing relevant to herpes or the organization, it doesn't get any visibility. It's just not worth it. So I put a lot of time into the website and shout out to Jenny, there's her stuff down here. Yep. It's just Jenny down here at the bottom for challenging me, not only designing the website, making those little changes I asked, but also for challenging me to do my part. One of the things that I want to get to is the support group right away. So you'll see that there's about something positive for positive people. You can scroll through and read that and you'll see a link to me. If you want to learn more about Court, link to the support calls which will take you to and I'll start there actually. So click new tab opens Scheduling a herpes support call now. We can help you with disclosing, we can help you with if you just need to vent, if you need support in knowing how to date, or if you are a loved one of someone who has herpes. This is a really good starting point as well. These calls are donation based and they're 30 minutes. All right, so we do a lot in that 30 minutes, but it can also fly by. I do not recommend you come asking me questions about me. This is your space. There's a podcast of we're almost approaching 400 episodes of interviews with people with herpes about all of their experiences from diagnosis to disclosure, dating, even having maintained relationships and built families afterwards. Okay, so the donation has donation recommended amounts. The value of Courtney's time is 165 an hour. That's what I charge for yoga therapy sessions. That's what I call charge for. That's my rate for if I'm going through the process of doing any type of speaking engagement or presentation. That is what the value of that time is. So if this is a 30 minute call, the recommended donation amount is half that, which would be like $82.50. I'm not going to make everybody pay $82.50. Donate what you can donate whatever you feel the value is of having a conversation about this. It's going to carry you into whatever it is that you need to do. I don't care as long as you donate. Donating just weeds out people who won show up for the call, who are going to waste my time and it makes people be a lot more intentional with the reason that they're there. So that is my ask, my boundary. Because you will not get a donation, not a donation link. You won't get a calendar invite from me if I don't see that a donation had come through. I'll remind you. But yeah, I can't do that anymore. Even right before this, the reason that I had to stop this and get ready for another call was because someone registered. This person didn't donate. I went on and sent the information because of their circumstances and they just wasted my time and didn't show up for the call. I didn't get an email response back. So this is a filter in place to make sure that nobody's time is wasted and that people are serious about being here. So you make the donation and then we'll get a link to the 30 minute call. These calls are 30 minutes. All right. If you need more, you can email me. We can talk about what that looks like. For ongoing support, there's yoga therapy. I will click that here. Oh no, it didn't open a new link. I gotta go through and fix that too so people don't get lost in where they were. The thing with yoga, yoga was very useful for me. It is very useful for me. I've had three outbreaks and throughout the entirety of my diagnosis, my experience at least since I've learned that I have herpes. I had the first outbreak, which was in 2013. I had the second one in 2016 after getting fire from a job, which was really stressful. And then 2021 when I had consumed a ton of sugar in a very short period of time and also learned that I was at the line from becoming pre diabetic. So that was something that having herpes taught me. I made some lifestyle changes and yoga has really been at the center of that. Even if I'm not physically practicing the meditative practices and what I learned and what I've used even in consulting, creating these support groups and having one on one conversations, it all comes from a yoga informed coach. I will be a certified yoga therapist in 2026. I just mapped out the remainder of what I need to do for my training program and yeah, I'm on track to be done by the end of 2026. And I'll be able to offer this not as a yoga therapist in training, but to offer it as a yoga therapist. Which means that yeah, there's going to be more research done, there's going to be more data collection for me and it'll be much more focused because I do believe that that's the best way of navigating herpes is to go to the nervous system directly. We can take the mental health stigma, the physical health outbreak symptoms as a way of guiding us into what the nervous system is really trying to tell us. And that's what yoga therapy is for me, using it towards herpes stigma. So we'll journal, we'll talk some People don't even do yoga. They don't do the breathing. They don't want to meditate. They just want to talk. And so we are. I offer, I hold the space for it. We will do some visualization. That is one thing that I will say. If nothing else, we gonna visualize. All right, the details are all here. $165 per hour. Here's some testimonials. Damn. 20 years. Oh, I know who that was. In transparency, like I'm seeing three people right now. There were five. Two people decided, or three. There were six. Three people decided that they were ready to move on. So what you'll do is just go here, fill out the intake form, you'll fill all of that out. Sharing whatever information. Well, I think most of it is mandatory. And then after that we'll have a one on one call. And then whenever you're making the donation to start, you can do it monthly, weekly, one time, depending on how long you're going to be participating in yoga therapy. All right, I'm gonna go back because I need to make sure. Let me write that down to open new tab. Open tab in links. Okay. All right, cool. So the newsletter, you can sign up for that most places at the bottom of each web page tab you'll see an opportunity to sign up for the newsletter. It is very important to be connected to the newsletter because again, social media is not showing my stuff. It has not been a good use of time and that's it. So we're focusing more on the website. I might post things to social media randomly, but I know that people still will message me or find me in that way. So I'll put prevalent things out there. If there's an event, I'll definitely have to use it and also purchase the ads so that we can have people find out that we have things going on. But yes, people really struggle or I struggle with getting people to find the stuff. And people have reached out to me thinking that I just stopped doing this. It's like, no. Been doing weekly podcasts over the last eight years. What do you mean? So, yeah, the algorithm is just not rocking with me. Herpes support groups. This is new. So we have a tab for herpes support group. I've tried to do this before and it's failed just flat out. The herpes support group was for anybody and I found that only women came but men. There was a time, I remember specifically a man showed up, he was on camp camera, he went off camera and shortly after people were joining, it was more women joining he left, blocked me. I've heard from him. I don't know what happened. And I think that that's maybe representative of maybe how a lot of men navigate this space. So rather than having a support group which isn't saying, hey, this is for you or you, I'm breaking it down by gender. So there's a men's support group, there's a women's support group. It's facilitated from a yoga informed approach. So this is really going to be what I use in order to make sure that the space is respected and that the people in it are respected. The group schedule is going to be the first and third Monday, 7:30pm Eastern Time, women's group, second and fourth Monday, 7:30pmite Eastern Time, men's group, same time, same day, just an alternating schedule. Now, it's really important that for this process I need for you to take responsibility because I have to maintain a lot of people's anonymity and their safety and their identities. And it's really, really difficult for me to do that without having to implement systems in place that they're unconventional. And it requires me to remember to do the things or have it written down somewhere for myself because I can't just put y' all on an email list and send out the calendar invite. Because then everybody sees a calendar invite, right? So I'm doing things a lot different than I have in the past. What this is going to require one is vetting. We have to schedule a one on one support call. It'll be 30 minutes. So if you want, if you are interested in the support group and something new now is there's a checkbox for if you're interested in a support group, if you're interested in the men's group or the women's group and that'll tell me like the gender to associate with your name so that you are guided to the right place. All right, now what I need from you is to have that call and then you donate to the right group. So at the very bottom you'll see that there's an option here to donate. Now when we donate, this is for the support call, so you can choose your option accordingly. But again, at the bottom of every page there's the option for you to donate to whatever it is that you are looking to donate to. So in this case the men's support group or the women's support group, you select that you make your donation of whatever amount you're choosing to donate. It can be a one time donation or if you know you're going to be coming regularly. Just make it monthly. And then when I see you no longer on there, I can know to remove you from the list and that you've graduated the support groups. All right? So once you do that on the back end, I'll see that you donated to the support group. So for that week, you will receive a calendar invite the day of the support group within 30 minutes to an hour prior. Now, the reason, reason I'm doing that is because people are going to sign up over the course of time for that particular support group. I can filter on the back end, pull an Excel sheet of emails. I can send the email with the link for people to join. Just click this link to join and you'll get it 30 minutes before. All right, so I'm being as clear as I can and simple with the process as possible. You put this in your own calendar. You put this in your own calendar. It's going to be every other Monday, 7:30pm Eastern time. And you have to make a donation in order to get vetted or in order to get added to the group. Okay? So that's for every call. Now, if you're a monthly member, that's different. If you're donating on a monthly consistent basis, you do not have to do this. Okay? I'm saying this as openly as possible for everybody, because if you're listening to this, you might be new here. And I want this to just be a smooth process. Okay? Boom. The women's group. So there is a women's group. I'm leading it. I'm facilitating it. I'm aware that I'm a man and I'm sorry, this is all we got. I had somebody donate 75 cents for a support call and then asked to speak to a woman. It's just me. I have board members, but there is no one who is in this space or that I trust at least to come in and be consistent for something positive. Repository people and facilitate the space. I've run the most of the people, almost all that I talk to are women. So when I've put these spaces on before, it's been the same thing, only now, like, I want to be more mindful of bringing in people who want to be here and not people who are going to come trauma dump and leave that with everybody and then we never hear from or see them again. So I have to maintain the integrity of this space. I'm bringing in people who are aligned with being able to come here, be in community, learn from and grow through what it means to have herpes and navigate the stigma. So here it's listed again. First and third Monday for women. Do the support call, donate to do what you can to support the space and also have that accountability. Now we also have a men's group. I'll talk about that later. But yeah, the process is the same. So you get vetted via support call and then when you're ready, you make a donation to the fund that is prevalent to your option. So it's the women's support group or the men's support group. And you will receive the link within 30 minutes to an hour before. You ain't gotta worry about nothing else. And if you don't get the link, reach out to me. We'll. I'll take care of you. But this process is smooth. I've already seen how it works. I tested it. I'm good. I got this. All right, if you don't want a support group that's led by facilitated by a man, click the women led support groups and you'll be taken to various herpes support groups for women. So it's not something positive. I recognize again, I'm a man. So here are spaces that have been facilitated by women. We've got Drew Rabineau, who's in Rochester, New York, and online we've got Love Profound, which is for everyone. It's for people of all genders. This is online and I think Devin. This is run by Devin Elise Wilson, who runs Love Profile in New York City. But yeah, that's for people. I think there might be like an annual in person thing. We talked and she said she did want to do more in person stuff. So I'll update this as necessary. Safe Slut. Shout out to Trisha. She runs a support group for women and queers. So if you're not a man, if you're not assist gendered heterosexual man, you can join this group. So this is a support group that is led by a queer woman. And that's what I got for you. And then of course, the virtual support group for women, which is not led by women. This one's me. So this will just take you back to being able to sign up if you don't like any of the options that are available to you. All right. And mine are all just donation based. You get what you can and then you're at it. All right. I don't like to put a minimum on this, but Please don't donate 75 cents. And I hate that I have to say this like, you know what you can afford. I heard someone say this before. Pay what you can, but make sure it's enough to where you're a little bit uncomfortable. And it's that value that you assign to whatever it is that you're giving to that reflects what you get back out of it. All right, so I'm going to close these alternative women support groups tabs. And now we go to the men's group. All right, fellas, this is like a. I don't want to call it the locker room, but I want it to have that feel right. So this is not therapy. We need to have one on one support calls as well first. Just like A1 on one call. I hear you out your intentions, we talk through it a little bit and we see that this is a space that's right for you. There's a men's content page as well. And this is where I ran a non profit organization very shortly called Self. And I put on emotional wellness symposiums for men, symposia for men. And this was if y' all know Brick City Buddha, he was one of our guests on there. We talk about. Yeah, Docs Diggler. That's Brick City Buddha with Jeremy from Let's Talk Bro Podcast, a podcast on black masculinity. Cam Frazier talking about sex. He's a men's coach and sex educator in Australia Day. Dr. Rye. And then who was this one? This one was with Mike Joseph, the detoxicity podcast. I talked about I am controversy on Instagram. Anthony Tony. This was another conversation where we spoke about leadership or the absence of it. And then Teddy the comedian shout out to him for being vulnerable and sharing his experience with suicide ideation and ego. But these are resources that can be found. All it is just supplements what it's already there. I thought this was useful. And even though I'm not running Self as a non profit organization anymore, it is still a podcast. But my own Self exploration decompression chamber for me that still exists as a podcast. It's kind of like my out loud journal, but that's for me. And if anybody wants to listen to maybe you can learn from it. Cool. But I'm not structuring that in a way that it's like a thing I'm selling. It's just me expressing myself. So that is what the Men's content hub is about. You'll see those videos there and it's easy to navigate. If you're reading and you're interested, click the thing. It'll open the tab and you can come back to it later. All right, Donations required. You gotta donate. You gotta donate to participate in the groups. And then you'll get the. You'll get the link if you donate, I will know if you donated because it'll go through. I had someone donate, but they donated to the wrong organization. They donated to another herpes organization, the herpes care advocacy program. Shout out to them. And he sent me a receipt. I was like, that's. That's not me, bro. He was like, yeah, I donated already. Give me. I want my call. No. So we're donating to something positive for positive people. And again, this is a yoga informed approach. I'm not gonna come in and talk to y' all about the yoga philosophy and everything. I gotta shorten these white space gaps here. So I'll take care of that and make sure to do that here, too. Men's page. No, of course the pin doesn't work. Men's page, main page, shortened gaps. Okay. All right, now, so that's the support options. I think that's the biggest thing that I wanted to share with y' all is just how to navigate that more than anything. Yoga for herpes. That's yoga therapy. Stigma informed training. So if you work at a healthcare organization, if you are a healthcare provider, physical health, mental health, this is for you. So we train people from a very stigma informed approach to navigating herpes. Conversations with patients, with clients, and this is where you can find more information about that. Our goal is to minimize stigma. We want to minimize the psychological, the emotional, the behavioral, the social impacts of stigma. But we do that just in general by minimizing it. So we go into the public health field. We go into therapy practices, clinics, public health, whatever. And we offer. What that video is, is our promo. It's a promotion of what it is that we offer at something positive for positive people. We create scripts. We bring in educators or people who have lived experiences with herpes. And these are volunteers or paid people to come in and they sit across from your clinician while they take a history. At the end of that, we exchange feedback from the group and you get to see what it was like to have this person as your patient and get feedback from them. Because we don't get that. We don't get feedback from people, especially real time, especially in settings where there's a huge inherent power dynamic. Like, you're the provider, they're the patient. Right? So that is what the experience is that we create. It is not a cheap experience. So, yeah, if you want that, we gotta talk That's a customizable thing. However, what we do have are the herpes stigma conference recordings. So those recordings will help physicians. So I'll click that here. So we've got Evelyn Swift, minimizing herpes stigma in healthcare. You can download her presentation here, and you can share that among your staff. We also have Nikita Fernandez, who is a sex therapist. She speaks about the psychological effects, how to support your clients if you are a mental health professional. We also have Dakota Rampin, youth sexuality educator, who speaks to minimizing stigma in youth. Youth sex education. You can also access that recording. And then finally, not to say we save an invest for last or anything, but we got. Oh, I need to remove that lock. Okay. All right. Just learn something else. Hold on. Conferences, because that one comes with the password and it shouldn't remove password. Okay, there we go. Damn. All right, well, and then there's the. Here we go. Descriptive analysis of the 2024 herpes in the survey that will. That is led by me. I speak to a lot of the information that people want when they're diagnosed with herpes, but we just don't have. We don't have information about. We don't have the data, we don't have the research. But I present this virtually. Again, this is something that's available for purchase for you and your staff. This isn't really marketed to individuals living with herpes. So if this is something that you're looking for as just a person who's curious, reach out to me. I don't. I don't think that you should pay $165 for that. But institutions, organizations, trainings, like, I have to make this something for sale. All right, so that is all of the downloads, stuff for the stigma, free training. I love that. It does open new tabs. People told me to do that, and I was like, no, I don't want people to feel spam. But reality is like this. It's a business. You can see the board members. There's Elise, Evelyn, Jordan, and Amber. Shout out to all of them for keeping me in check. We also have the press page. This is where you'll find me, like, 97 of the media that I've been part of. I've been a guest on different podcasts, so you can see anywhere where it's something positive for positive. People accordingly are mentioned, talking about herpes, talking about stigma. It's a long list of links to where I've been featured, where something positive has been featured. And then here you can see the reviews, what people are Saying, here's also an option for you to review us. Like we, we need this. We need for people to be able to see what people are getting out of it. Like from the podcast 2021, 2022, 2020. Like, these are very old reviews. It's like people just stop doing it. But I also think the algorithm. Right. A lot of the promotion that I've done has been on Instagram and Instagram has not been friendly lately. We've got the podcast. If you're someone who wants to be a podcast guest on the best herpes podcast that that exists, click here. Just scroll down a little bit, be a podcast guest. We have a search bar for you to be able to type in the search bar, whatever it is that you're looking for. So for example, if you're looking for Discordant dating and you type that in the search box, what that'll do is it's going to browse something positive for positive people archives. You'll see episode 325 that talks about discord and dating. This must not have a photo with it. You'll see Disclosing Non Monogamy, the Discordant Dating series. This was a series of podcasts I did, interviewing the partners of people who were living with herpes, talking about transmission raids. And the titles and the descriptions offer just information on what you will hear in the podcast episode. All right, so that is one way to use this. If you are looking to disclose. You can type in disclosure and what will pop up is, well, also things on the website. So a disclosure workshop, Evelyn's episode 99 on disclosure, deceptive disclosure, non disclosure. The free herpes. Oh, that's no longer free because that, that expired. So you can register for that and Download that. Where's 299? That's. That's wild. That episode 299 is in my hair. Okay, see more. It might be there. All right, so that's how you can navigate the podcast tab and then the services already showed you that contact. Now, there's a lot more pages, but a lot of these pages aren't relevant if you are someone looking for the damn, I gotta, I gotta include that somewhere kind of way. If you're looking for some of the videos, the stuff that you want to pay for, right? Like the herpes stigma. Com friends, the dating and disclosure workshops, the presentations that we've had and done, you can download these things for purchase. We also have our 400th podcast episode coming up. I'm anticipating that being December, the week of December 12th. That'll be episode 400 and so. So, yeah, we want to just have a get together. It'll be a talent show. Karaoke at the house in New York City. I already paid for the space. I ain't sold no tickets. So we gonna see what happens. Like, worst case scenario, I'm in that, having a party by myself. All right, so I'm going. I hope to see y' all there. But yeah, these are. I. I like for this to be donation based. You donate what you can and you help help us with just facilitating the atmosphere. If you're someone who knows a good caterer or food truck or something, we can have that pull up outside. I would ideally be able to pay for the entertainment, pay for the food, and just like cover some type of a bar tab that people are able to get like a free drink or something like that. If they want. Alcoholic or non alcoholic, there's a bar, there's going to be a dance floor. What I want to emphasize is the socializing, the talent show, and I'm gonna have a guest performance from someone who I think people here will be very excited about. So, yeah, that's what I'm looking for. That's what I'm looking forward to, especially with this event and putting all this together, man. Like, this has been a journey. It's been a journey to get to this point because it's not. It's not an easy thing. Especially doing this on my own and struggling with asking for help and trying to figure out not to identify help from people who I can trust to help. I can't tell you how many times people have been like, courtney, I want to help. And then like, I give them a task and then I never hear from them again. So, yeah, it's a little bit of a challenge, but we're making this. We're doing what we can with what we got to work with, so making all of this accessible and available. And one thing that I notice. Yeah. When you click the logo, it takes you to the homepage. You scroll down to the bottom and you see just about everything. Everything. Trainings, the data. You can take the survey. You can review our past statistics. Like whenever you are at the website, these will take you to everything you need to get to. Here's how you. Why is this going to. Taking the survey? We're supposed to be reviewing statistics and this one should be taking the survey. So I need to fix that too. Bottom home. All right, so gotta fix that as well. But the herpes. Frequently asked questions. We've Got the Herpes blog. I invite you if you have a story. Maybe you don't want to talk about it, but if you want to write something and just send it to me and I can put it up on the blog, do that. I'm going to be writing here more. I am a writer for the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center. Shout out to Dr. Lori Botito, who's the director of that. And not everything you know is fit for pornhub Sexual Wellness Center. A lot of it is for here. I answer a lot of questions people have on the blog of theirs. So now, like, I think that as I'm getting into a groove and a rhythm, some of the more nuanced things can be added here to the something positive for positive people herpes blog. But, yeah, we on this blog, you'll find useful writings, readings, things like that. I'm still going to do the podcast. I always view the podcast as a blog, but it's not the conversation. So I come here and I can just like, type something up that tells a story, beginning, middle, end. And yeah, we go from there. But you'll see herpes is a disclosure, not a confession. You see herpes and spiritual healing, like, that's a topic that I'm very big on, is the. The spiritual aspect of living with herpes. And then the female to male transmission rates. Does anyone really care? Honestly, no, but that's there. And then I was at the bottom here. Okay. Yeah. The herpes support for men, for women, the newsletter, the blog statistics, the FAQ and the statistics. And then there's also at home, herpes test kits if you're looking for one of those. Here's the data. So we got slides, we got some graphics if people are curious about those things. And then if you want to watch that presentation, this is where. Yeah, this is my presentation from the 2024 Herpes Stigma Conference where I go over the statistics and data that we got in for that. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen, y'. All. It is very important that you subscribe to the newsletter. I. I can't say that enough. If you are someone who is living with herpes and you're navigating stigma, I don't care if you're in your ideal relationship right now, anything can happen. If you're single and you feel so far disconnected from this, anything can happen. And so if you find yourself looking for this information, I ain't going nowhere. Like, I feel like every time I try and leave or try and Stop doing this. My life goes to. So I'm gonna go ahead and just listen, take the hint and make this what I do. This is what I do. I'm committed to it. Transmuting stigma into healing, both for myself and other people. And I'm working on some, you know, feelings that I have around rejection right now as well, personally. And yeah, I look forward to being able to just hold and facilitate the spaces in order to help other people do that. Also wanted to mention, there are no LGBT or trans or non binary herpes advocates or activists that exist that I'm aware of. And partially, I think, because the LGBT community does have a lot more support as it relates to stigma, stereotypes and identity, and a lot more straight people or people who've been socialized, men or women, they just don't experience that. So there's a little less resistance, resilience when it comes to navigating an STI diagnosis, a herpes diagnosis, because there's just an unfamiliarity with that. One thing that I've learned from queer people in general is that there's this, there's this balance of challenge and liberation, right? There's more freedom that comes out of the well, there's more liberation that comes out of challenging identity and getting to a place of being able to express themselves. This herpes diagnosis shouldn't be something that's super impactful. I can't speak for everybody's experience, but I know that there's a lot more support and welcomeness in the LGBT community. The sex positivity communities and a lot of cisgendered heterosexual people, men, women, don't necessarily have access to or don't know exists. So because I've been facilitating these spaces mostly for women, it makes sense for me to continue to do that and just say, hey, here's for women. And also create a space that's not for women so that the people who are men feel comfortable with that. I can't facilitate an LGBT only non binary gender, non conforming space. That's not my identity, that's not my experience. I don't talk to enough people that warrant the demand for that. If someone emerges from nowhere and they want to facilitate that, awesome. I'll observe, watch, look for consistency, and then maybe offer an endorsement to be able to guide people there. But right now, safe sluts, queer and femmes, only women and women and queers. I believe that's the only alternative that I'm aware of at this point in time. So, yeah, the alternatives are out there and I, yeah, I'm I'm happy to have a website complete. It's updated. There's like, little technical things I gotta fix, but that'll. That's nothing. I can do that real quick. But I appreciate y'. All. I appreciate you for. If you listened, if you watch this and you went through the presentation with me, the sharing screen or whatever. Thank you. Thank you so much. Last couple things that I want to leave y' all with again. December 12th in New York City, or Brooklyn specifically, we're going to host the 400 podcast, episode 8 year ish anniversary of something Positive for Positive People as a podcast. There are things coming up. I'm going to be presenting at the Midwest Love fest in Indianapolis, November 7th through 9th, which is the day before my birthday. My birthday is November 10th. So I'll be back here in New York on the night so I can get my black ass up and go to work. I gotta work on the 10th. And then. And also we'll be facilitating a support group on the 10th. Like, hey, we. We take this seriously around here. All right, so there's that. And then I have before that, actually, next week, I need to make my presentation the Sexual Health Conference. As a national sexual health conference, I'm going to be presenting on herpes informed approach to minimizing stigma in healthcare settings. So I'm looking forward to being able to do that as well and just share my experience, my story, what people have shared with me, a couple of statistics and be able to give people some takeaways from language and offer the stigma free training that we offer. It's so funny. Like, I can just say that here, but I haven't made the presentation yet. I'm so, so resisted, so resistant to making presentations, y'. All. It's crazy. The National Sex Ed Conference in February in Baltimore. I'll be presenting there. And then there's also the ending, the Epidemic Conference that's going to be in Albany, New York. I'll be presenting there as well. So lots of stuff happening this winter. You'll see a little bit less of me on social media because, yeah, this stuff is really picking up now. And I think it's because I found myself in alignment with being where I'm supposed to be. I'm in an environment that is validating to my identity. I don't feel stagnant. I don't feel stuck. I feel like I'm moving, moving with purpose, moving in the right direction and aligned people, opportunities, challenges, relationships. Everything that's coming into my bubble is grounding and supportive of My identity expression. So I probably sound different, probably look different. I. One of the reasons I want to do the video as well is just to, like, show my face. I don't think I really have. Since being in this place, I'll say that I've consistently been good for about two. I'm not facing up here. I've been good for a while. And I think that I got called out yesterday for, like, dumbing down or dimming the light and, like, hiding. Hiding is the word. And it's one thing when my therapist says it, but it's another thing when, when a person says it. And yeah, that's true. Like, I'm very nervous and uncomfortable about putting my experiences back out there, my life, my lived experiences, and, like, speaking so openly and being myself. And this is something that I'm reconciling. I'm talking to my therapist. We working on it. We ain't seeing each other twice a week anymore anymore, but we are still seeing each other. Last thing I want to do is like, oh, I'm good. Stop seeing my therapist and then need to see my therapist twice a week. And we ain't doing that no more. But, yeah, I appreciate everybody who's checked on me who's, you know, wondered if I was okay and people who show up for karaoke. So if you're in New York, I love going to karaoke on Wednesday nights, usually 7:30pm in Brooklyn. So if that's something that you're curious about or interested in, hit me up. Like, once I was able to get like six of us together, which is big for me because a lot of people don't like showing up to things. But I regularly extend the invite. That's my thing. I like to go there, get wings and see people perform and sing and dance, socialize. And I'm like, you might even perform myself, you know, I mean, but yeah, where we are right now, it's a good place and I'm happy to be sharing this update. And again, like, just like last episode said, help. Like, y' all can still help me be a podcast guest, write a testimonial, write a blog, do something. You can join the support group, sign up for a call, become a yoga therapy client. If you have anything to offer. If you are someone in the mental health field and you are comfortable with facilitating support groups and, you know, you are someone I can and trust. Like, let's, let's connect. Let's connect and get this going. Like, I, I, I'm getting older. Like, I'm about to be 37, I'd say I'm gonna die, like, shortly after 37. But when I'm gone, this stops. Like, I realize how much of the life I am, the lifeline for this. I don't want to be. I want this to be a community thing. I want for this to be an organization, for it to be something that people are proud to talk about, that people share, that people come into and they invite people into, and for it to not be a thing. Just like how HIV is a community. Like, the organizations are community run, community led, and people who are in the community, there is no shame that keeps them from being part of progressing, making progress towards something. That's a big deal, right? So, yeah, this is me putting that call out. I'm here, I'm doing it. I'm remaining consistent. I'm sorry, y', all for trying to leave y' all back when I was pursuing, you know, being in the family, having a family and. And thinking that I needed to do something different. My bad. I won't do it again. It won't happen again. That's one thing. I do not make the same mistake twice. It might look a little different, but I ain't gonna do that. So the advocacy is, I'm too two. I'm ten toes down, locked in, getting ready to go into Zook Fest. So Zook Fest is this weekend in New York City. I look forward to getting my practice moves on. Can't wait. And, yeah, that's. That's it. Take the survey if you haven't already, and just play around on the site, like, let me know what your thoughts are about it. Give me some kind of feedback. Because I just be doing this and randomly out here from a person that. That is like, why don't you have this? More people would like, isn't it like. Well, no one told me that. So if you all don't tell me, I don't know. I just do what I'm supposed to be doing. That's my philosophy. All right, till next time, stay present.