Brian WallachOvjeren akaunt

At 30, I was working in the White House, and at 33 I was a federal criminal prosecutor. I worked hard and being from a half-Jewish family confronted head on anti-semitism, but I was, in short, one of those who profited from the system. At least until ALS.

With those three letters--A.L.S.--I was thrust into a system that not only had nothing it could do to help me, but one that seemed not to care about me--seemed instead content to carry on ploddingly as it had for the last 150 years as person after person died. ALS transformed me.

I felt clearly what so many before me had experienced: a feeling of surreal and complete powerlessness over your life. A sense that you were not acting, but instead were being acted upon. Experiencing this created a deep desire to regain some semblance of control and...

brought with it a realization that the belief/desire that I could regain control was a manifestation of my privilege. As I struggled with my unmoored life, I made a fateful decision that brought me to you: I decided to go all in on using every last bit of my privilege, every

last bit of my energy, every last bit of my strength to build a movement to remake my broken part of the system: to end ALS. In the 2.5 years since my diagnosis, our nascent movement has begun to light the sky where there once was only darkness.

In the 2.5 years since my diagnosis, we've gone from a family crying on the floor to a community fighting every day for more. I tweet often about the hope of this community because for the first time we have it. I tweet often about hope because you have given me a platform.

I sometimes wonder if my tweets mask the urgency of our fight. In the 2.5 years since my diagnosis I've gone from being a back country skier who ran a 6 minute mile and gave 2 hour long closing arguments to walking with a cane and struggling for words after a minute. This is ALS.

I've also seen my daughters grow into amazing young women, who at 4 and 2 give me every motivation to leave no stone unturned in this fight. I tweeted a few nights ago that every night I lay in bed thinking about how to end ALS. Out of the dark, it hit me: the answer is you.