About Jill, the story behind The Unbroken Smile

The dog bite that changed everything.

I was 32 years old and working when a dog bit me. It was not the dog's fault. It was the owner's. But the bite gave me Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, and CRPS does not always stay where it starts. Mine went full body, which is the rare and brutal version of an already brutal thing.

I went to numerous doctors and specialists. They all said the same thing. And for years after, I was mostly bedbound. The wind could hurt me. My husband Aaron washed my hair and fed me. There were days I could not get out of bed at all, and my oldest carried chores no kid that age should carry.

I became disabled at 32. I have lived with CRPS for going on seventeen years now.

why i built it

I went looking for company. I found doom and gloom.

When you get a diagnosis like this, you go online looking for other people who understand. I did. And almost everything I found was heavy. Hopeless. Hard to even sit with. It was difficult to find anyone who had CRPS and was still standing.

So I made a place. I started a support group, and it grew. But a support group can only hold so much, and CRPS is known as the suicide disease, so a lot of my days went to keeping people's heads above water. I wanted to reach further than that. I wanted to build something that said the truer thing out loud.

That no matter what you have been through, you can still smile.

I called it The Unbroken Smile. It started as a website where people submitted their own stories, their own lives, their own proof that they were still here. The coloring books and journals came after, because people kept needing something to hold.

His, mine, and ours.

I was 19 and pregnant, and a single mom by 20. I met Aaron at 24. He had a son who was two years old. I do not call him my stepson. He is my son. Then Aaron and I had a daughter together.

His, mine, and ours. Three kids who grew up faster than they should have because their mom was sick, and who somehow came out the other side close, strong, and good. They are grown now. College, master's degrees, families of their own. The hardest season of our lives did not break them. It built them.

It got popular. Then it got heavy. Then I lost it all.

The Unbroken Smile took off. The website was getting noticed. But I started to see something I did not expect. The more doom and gloom a post was, the more likes and comments it got. The whole thing began pulling toward the dark, and everyone was reaching out wanting me to carry them through their storm while I was still trying to weather my own.

It was not good for my mental health. And then the website got hacked. I lost everything I had built.

So I said forget it, and I walked away. For years.

A wellness doctor, a strict diet, and years of small choices.

About six or seven years ago, I went to a wellness doctor. We did the labs, the full workup. I went on a strict diet, added vitamins and supplements and CBD oil. And slowly, I started getting better.

I will not call it remission. I still take a pain pill here and there. But my pain is managed now, in a way it was not for over a decade. I have learned to give myself grace on the hard days, and to actually use the good ones.

Why I am bringing it back, now, on my own terms.

The kids are grown and thriving. The house is quiet. Aaron has had three back surgeries of his own, lost the physical work he used to do, and built himself a new path that he can do from home. Our marriage got strong in the fire. We have dreams and goals now, the kind you let yourself have when you finally have a little room to breathe.

I am bringing The Unbroken Smile back because it is who I am. I have been through it, and I can also be there for others. This time I am building it soft and strong instead of doom and gloom, because I learned the hard way what the dark version costs.

I want to help carry our household so it is not all on Aaron. Winters are hard on both of us, and I would love to be able to escape them, to see new places, to live a little wider than this illness once let me. And I want to hand other people what I did not have at the start. Proof that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Because there literally is. I am the proof. And so are these books.

It started with a diagnosis.
It became a place to land.

The dog bite that changed everything.

I went looking for company. I found doom and gloom.

His, mine, and ours.

It got popular. Then it got heavy. Then I lost it all.

A wellness doctor, a strict diet, and years of small choices.

Why I am bringing it back, now, on my own terms.

Start with the free kit.