I’ve been building things for a long time.
Businesses, brands, content, community — I’ve started a lot, and I’ve been good at most. Still, for years, I chased a feeling I couldn’t name. I always felt one pivot away from something that wasn’t just successful, but truly right.
Ill Boss began quietly, almost randomly. Before it became a nonprofit, before the Discord, before the documents and strategies — it was just me, a webpage, and a need to tell the truth somewhere.
I called it @shopillboss. It started on my main site. Readers could learn my story, buy some merch I designed, or donate — directly — to help me cover what insurance didn’t. In the back of my mind, a dream grew: one day, maybe there’d be enough to help others — a community fund for people like me, paying out of pocket to stay alive.
That was the seed. A small thing. A personal thing.
But here’s the thing about being chronically ill as a Black woman specifically — it’s never just personal.
In my first self-published book, I Am The Bag, I write about a doctor’s appointment that still sits with me. Haunts me even. A provider who dismissed me completely. Not because of my chart but because of how I looked. Too young to be as sick as I said I was. A woman, so probably just anxious or exaggerating. A Black woman, so my pain wasn’t something to be taken particularly seriously.
That’s not a feeling I had. That’s a documented, measurable pattern in American healthcare. Black women’s pain is systematically undertreated. Diagnostic delay is worse across nearly every condition category. And for someone like me — living with Polycythemia Vera, a rare blood cancer that most doctors have never treated — the dismissal was layered. Too young. Too female. Too Black. And too rare to even Google.
I wasn’t solely fighting my body. I was fighting a system that was structurally designed to overlook me at every intersection.
My hope is for Ill Boss exists in that gap. It makes space for the intersectionality of it all — for people navigating chronic illness at the crossroads of race, gender, class, and culture. The angle I know most deeply and speak to most honestly is being a chronically ill Black woman. But the mission is bigger than my specific story. It always was.
A while back, my friend Alana reached out to me.
Alana and I started as mutuals and colleagues, then became close friends. She’s also an entrepreneur living with ulcerative colitis, so she knows chronic illness personally.
She felt called to tell me: “Ill Boss is it. That’s the project you need to breathe life into.” She shared how much it's needed and believed it’s the one that will work for me.
She said it with certainty—not as a hype-up, but as a word she was meant to share.
Alana knows my history. She’s watched me build — and rebuild — and pivot — and grind for years. She’s spoken my name in rooms I wasn’t in. Some of the biggest opportunities I’ve had came through her. So when she said, “Ill, Boss is it!” I didn’t hear it as a friend being encouraging. I heard it as confirmation of something God had already been preparing me for.
That conversation reignited something in me. Not just excitement, but the spark behind my why.
I prayed this morning and asked God to help me steward this well. Better than I’ve stewarded things before.
Because here’s the thing about building a nonprofit versus building a business — it’s not the same. The metrics are different. The motivation has to be different. I can’t hustle my way into impact the same way I’ve hustled my way into revenue. This one requires something slower, more intentional, more dependent on Him and less dependent on me figuring it all out.
And I feel like He’s in this one differently.
Sunday, I posted a thread. Just a question, really. Where do Black women with chronic illness gather?
I’m used to low engagement. I’ve made peace with talking into the void in the name of eventually building something real. So when responses started coming in, I was genuinely shook.
It wasn’t just that people engaged. It was who. Black women. Exhausted. Overlooked. Managing invisible and chronic conditions alone because they couldn’t find a space that actually looked like them in the wider chronic illness community. Something I had felt for years — the abstract knowledge that there were others out there — became suddenly, irrefutably real.
Within 24 hours, 15 people joined the Ill Boss Discord. Fifteen people I’d never met found one thread and decided to join me at the table.
That’s not a big number online. But after building in silence, it means everything. It feels like God saying, “Keep going.”
I don’t have the full blueprint yet, and that’s nothing new. This time, though, I’m not afraid of the unknown. I’m not chasing a feeling — I feel called.
Ill Boss is a community and advocacy platform and will soon be a fully operational nonprofit focused on supporting people living with chronic and invisible illness. Our mission is to provide an intentional, unapologetic commitment to centering rare disease patients, women whose conditions go undiagnosed and undertreated for years, and especially Black women whose pain has been dismissed and disbelieved at every turn. Ill Boss exists to create spaces, resources, and support for those often left out of mainstream illness communities.
We’re building educational tools, community spaces, self-advocacy programs, a free health-tracking app, and support systems for the chronically ill entrepreneur who’s been pushed out of conventional employment by their own body.
And we’re just getting started.
I’m documenting the journey — the whole thing, from the first 15 to wherever God takes it. Because someone needs to see that it’s possible to build something that actually matters while still managing a body that doesn’t cooperate. And because if even one person reads this and feels a little less alone in it —
That’s already the work.
Still in progress…
All Is Well,— Ashlee
Follow the 100 miles journey at @shopillboss on Instagram, TikTok, and Threads. If you want to donate to the American Cancer Society in my name: gofund.me/01d35e697
If you enjoyed this or any other post, feel free to fuel my fire by buying me a coffee. Any contributions are more than appreciated.
