What Growing Skin Taught Me About Nurturing an Audience

Four years ago today, I learned the hard way that if your jeans have been sitting on the closet floor, you should shake them out before you put them on.

I did not do that.

I put them on, walked into the kitchen to make coffee, and felt what I can only describe as a hornet-like sting in my groin.

I scrambled out of my pants, and a highly venomous brown recluse spider fell out.

So now, by the power vested in me by absolutely no one, I declare June 3 a national day of observance: National Shake Your Pants Day.

That morning had started like any other regular workday. I was getting dressed, making coffee, and mentally running through the list of things I needed to get done. I had pulled the jeans off my closet floor, which was clearly mistake number one, but at the time I was not thinking about spider habitat. I was thinking about work.

My husband, who has more sense than I do in medical situations, told me I needed to go to the doctor immediately. I, on the other hand, had already been nibbled by a brown recluse once before. That snack-sized bite had not turned into anything dramatic.

So I made what I now recognize as a classic Lori decision: “I’m sure it’s fine.”

Which is really just Midwestern for, “I do not have time for this.”

Within 45 minutes, my eyes were starting to swell, and a bruise was forming, so I capitulated. The doctor’s office gave me a steroid shot and an “it might help but we don’t really know” leprosy drug to help preserve my cells. They also directed me to take two antihistamines. That sounds like the beginning of a very strange vacation, but it was actually the beginning of one of the most painful things I have experienced.

The next five days were awful. The only way I could sleep was to keep ice on it around the clock. My blood oxygen dropped into the mid-80s. And because I am, apparently, both optimistic and ridiculous, I still tried to work.

Over the next two weeks, the bite became a five-inch by two-inch eggplant-colored area that started to liquefy. There is probably a more delicate way to say that, but there is not a more accurate one.

And because timing is a beautiful thing, I had a business trip to Chicago during this process. So there I was, trying to walk through airports and attend meetings like a normal professional woman while part of my upper thigh was essentially staging a horror film.

By June 30, I finally ended up at a hospital wound care clinic, under the care of someone who knew exactly what she was looking at. She cleaned out the dead flesh, which was every bit as fun as it sounds, and then the nurses taught me how to grow skin.

That is not a sentence I ever expected to write.

But it turns out skin does not grow because you want it to, because you are impatient, or because you have a lot to do and would really prefer for your body to move this situation along.

Skin grows when you create the right conditions.

I had to eat a ton of protein. I had to keep the wound covered so it could find its own moisture and temperature sweet spot. I had to not mess with it just because I was curious or annoyed or wanted to see if it was “better yet.”

One of the things they told me was that every time air hit the wound, it could set the healing process back by about four hours.

That fascinated me, and also made me deeply regret every time I had peeled back the bandage to look at it like a raccoon inspecting a trash can.

The nurses were weirdly excited to have me as a patient because most of their patients were older people with diabetic wounds. I was younger, relatively healthy, and aggressively eating protein, so my skin was growing much faster than what they were used to seeing. They would come in and say things like, “Oh wow, look at that granulation tissue!”

Thank you? I have been working on it?

I documented the whole thing with photos, because once something becomes that gross, it also becomes scientifically interesting. I will not include them here because I want you to keep reading my emails, not unsubscribe and file a police report.

But the whole experience exposed the obvious: growth is not magic. Growth is conditions.

We often want growth to happen on demand. We want to send one email and have people respond. We want to launch one campaign and have people care. We want to post one story and have people give. Mostly, we want the audience to be warm the moment we need them.

But that is not how trust grows.

Trust grows when you feed it, protect it, and show up consistently. It grows when you keep the relationship covered with useful, relevant communication instead of exposing it to long stretches of silence and then ripping the bandage off every time you need something.

Yes, that is a gross metaphor. I also think it is a pretty accurate one.

If the only time your audience hears from you is when you are asking them to give, register, attend, vote, approve, volunteer, buy, or share, then you are asking for action from tissue you have not been nurturing.

That might work once in a while, especially with people who are already deeply connected to you. But if you want more people to care, understand, act, and stay with you over time, you need more than a campaign. You need a nurture system.

A way to keep giving your audience the “protein” they need: stories, clarity, proof, encouragement, useful information, human connection, and reminders of why the work matters.

A way to build trust before you need to put weight on it.

At 7:30 that morning, I did not know I was in a crisis. I thought I had a painful inconvenience. By 9:00, my body was making it clear that something much bigger was happening.

This happens with organizations, too.

A donor audience goes quiet. Event attendance softens. A campaign does not get traction. People stop opening the emails. The community does not understand the decision. The board assumes “people know what we do.” The staff realizes they have not communicated consistently for months.

At first, it may not look like a crisis. It may look like a small problem, a weird dip, a busy season, or a thing to deal with later. But trust, attention, and engagement are living things. They need care before there is an emergency.

So, on this fourth anniversary of the spider-in-my-jeans situation, I offer you two pieces of advice.

First, observe National Shake Your Pants Day with the seriousness it deserves, especially if you live in a geography with venomous spiders.

Second, take a look at the audience relationships your organization is counting on. Are you nurturing them consistently? Are you feeding them what they need to understand and care? Are you creating the conditions for trust to grow? Or are you waiting until you need something and hoping the relationship will be strong enough to carry the ask?

Because whether we are talking about skin or strategy, growth does not happen just because we want it to. It happens when we build the system that allows it – and stop leaving important things on the closet floor.

Lori