07/24/2026
Long before I owned a marketing agency, I learned one of the most important lessons about storytelling. I just didn't realize it at the time.
This blurry photo is one of the few pictures we have from 1999.
Back then there were no smartphones. No Facebook. No Instagram Stories. Just one early digital camera and a website my ex-husband built to keep family and friends updated on our newborn son, Zephan.
Looking back, it was essentially a blog years before blogging became mainstream.
Zephan was born with two life-threatening conditions and was placed on ECMO, a machine that temporarily does the work of the heart and lungs while a body fights to heal.
Every day we posted another update.
It wasn't to build an audience or have anything to do with content marketing.
We simply couldn't emotionally survive making dozens of heartbreaking phone calls every day.
So we wrote.
People kept coming back, not because they were fascinated by ECMO or medical terminology.
They came back because they cared about a little boy they'd never met.
They celebrated every victory with us, like the day he came off ECMO, the first time I held him, the first time his dad held him, the first bottle, and finally when we brought him home.
This week I reread those journal entries for the first time in a very long time.
It struck me that the most important lesson about sharing a story is this:
People don't connect with information. They connect with humanity.
No one came back to our website because they understood ECMO.
They came back because they cared, hoped, and prayed.
Today, I spend a lot of time helping businesses tell their stories, and it's funny to realize that one of the greatest lessons I ever learned about storytelling didn't come from marketing at all.
It came from one of the hardest seasons of my life.
Platforms and technology will change. But people will always be drawn to stories that remind us what it means to be human.