How do you tell someone to keep going — without saying "keep going"?

Somewhere, a woman picks up her phone.

She's a few months into treatment for a rare tumour. Today wasn't dramatic. It was just long — the kind of long with no end in sight, where holding on is the day's real work. And today, her treatment reminder came with something else: a small illustrated card, about the size of a name card.

That card has one job: help one person, on one hard day, find the strength to keep going.

Here's who sent it. My client, a global pharmaceutical company, runs a support programme for patients on this treatment journey. They have the treatment. They have a patient companion app. The team had seen my illustration work and believed this kind of visual could reach patients in a way clinical content doesn't. What they needed was a way to motivate patients — without the overt encouragement that the rules of their industry are strict about. So they brought me in to create the emotional bridge between information and a patient going through a difficult year.

The stakes are real. A year of treatment is long, and people who feel alone in it tend to drift away. That's why patient support programmes exist.

Now, those rules. In healthcare, everything a company says to patients goes through medical, legal and regulatory review — MLR, as the industry calls it. These are the teams whose job is to make sure no one overpromises to a person at her most vulnerable. You can't promise things will get better. You can't encourage her to stay on treatment; that conversation belongs to her doctor. You can't even write "keep going."

These are good rules. They protect her. But they leave a narrow path, and the whole project lived on it: how do you tell someone to keep going without saying "keep going"?

I started by mapping the emotional territory of the year she actually lives. Week one: a new diagnosis in one hand, a new prescription in the other, everything unfamiliar. Month six: the novelty gone, the fatigue very much not. Month twelve: tired of being brave.

For every moment in that year, one discipline. She feels A. The insight underneath it is B. She needs to feel C. So we create D — and D serves C, not A. The illustration exists to move her, not to mirror her. A person who feels broken doesn't need a picture of broken things; pointing at pain isn't the same as meeting it.

What she needs is something like this: a spoon standing in a glass of water. From where she's looking, it's broken. But it isn't — the light is playing tricks. The message: it looks broken. It isn't. And neither is she.

There's nothing in that image for a reviewer to object to. It promises nothing. It prescribes nothing. It hands her a mirror at the right angle — and she feels something true.

That's the craft in one line: metaphor carries what claims can't. Beavers building a dam together, because some things shouldn't be built alone. A mountain of tangled laundry becoming sorted baskets, because a feeling you can name is a feeling you can carry. And the answer to the question in the title, the line that went out to patients: the journey is one step at a time. Same warmth as "keep going." Fully inside the rules.

At the project's conclusion, we had twenty-one approved illustrations, mapped to the patient experience across a one-year treatment journey — arriving now, one each month, in the app on her phone.

You probably don't work in pharma. It doesn't matter. If you lead anything, you own a message that lives inside constraints — legal review, board politics, a sceptical market, a ten-second attention span. And you've watched that message die in the gap between what you're allowed to say and what people need to feel.

That gap closes with better translation, not louder claims. The question was never "how do we say it?" It's "what do they need to feel — and what's the one image that gets them there without saying it at all?"

That's the work I do.