If you follow me you know I talk a lot about ALS. I talk a lot about it because I have ALS and it is killing me. If it succeeds, I leave behind a young family. I don’t intend to let it succeed. So this thread, this is not for those who follow me: it’s for the millions who don’t.

My wife and I started @iamalsorg a little over a year ago because we saw we had a chance to turn ALS from terminal to chronic. It was a small chance given that ALS should kill me within 3 years, but it was a chance and we were going to pour our heart and soul into it.

Critical to that chance were 3 things. First, we needed to empower patients to lead. To be given a terminal diagnosis is to marginalized and disempowered. Doctors say they can’t help you, society doesn’t know what to do with you. This is your new reality and you deserve a chance.

Second, we needed national organizations fighting ALS that were seized with the fierce urgency of now, not playing the long game. ALS has many amazing groups but they, for the most part, have the luxury of operating on 5-10 year plans. Patients don’t. We have now. That’s it.

Third, we need you—the folks who don’t follow me or @iamalsorg—to join us in this fight. Patients can mobilize and scream, but among the many lessons that COVID-19 has taught us is that without a true movement of millions expressing outrage, nothing will change. And I will die.

So as we are all quarantined at home worried about COVID-19, I ask those of you who don’t follow me to step outside of your daily sphere and click follow. I ask you to give us the platform that in turn gives us the chance to end ALS. I ask you to give us hope in the purest form.

If you do, I promise to use this platform to fight to empower those the system has cast aside. I promise to use this platform to fight for changes to the system to speed cures and treatments. To build a movement for all of us. Every day. Until my dying breathe.

Great changes in history happen because we demand them. We make them happen. I am a guy given 5 years to live in 2017 asking you to join me in changing the world. I know how crazy that sounds. But what if do it? We can. We will. It begins with you.