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Lasaunia Thompson

Go Through to Get Through: How Lasaunia Thompson Turned Seven Years of Pain Into a Movement for Women

She spent seven years battling a disease doctors couldn’t name. She built a women’s organization in the middle of it. She showed up every single day making great efforts not to look like her situation. This is the story of So Be It.

There’s a phrase Lasaunia Thompson comes back to more than once in conversation, and it carries the weight of everything she’s lived: go through to get through.

She didn’t stumble upon that wisdom at a conference or read it in a book. She earned it in the hardest possible way — seven years of wounds that wouldn’t heal, doctors who couldn’t explain what was happening, misdiagnoses and medications that made things worse, and 100% cotton sheets that she couldn’t let touch her skin because the pain was that severe. All while serving women every single day. All while making great efforts, in her words, not to look like her situation.

What came out the other side of that season is a women’s organization, a nonprofit raising awareness for a rare disease most people have never heard of, a deck of affirmation cards, a forthcoming journal, and a woman who is absolutely certain about her purpose.

“Every layer just opened the door,” she says. “One thing led to the other, and they all together came for me to say: you are a person of service. This is what you’re destined to do.”

A Name That Became a Seal

Before there was So Be It the organization, there was So — the nickname Lasaunia picked up in cosmetology school when a classmate decided her full name was too long. It stuck. Years later, when she was building something and searching for what to call it, the name arrived fully formed.

“I later learned that ‘so be it’ also means Amen,” she says. “Having that as a seal of the deal — having that as a covering — okay, no matter what you’re doing, we gonna seal this with the amen. It means no matter what, it’s gonna happen. It’s gonna be okay. God already said it’s done. He sees you.”

People walk up to her and say “So Be It” without always knowing what they’re actually saying. They’re saying amen. They’re affirming something already in motion. She finds that quietly profound.

The mission of So Be It is to develop women for greatness — taking them from where they’ve been to where they aspire to be. That sentence sounds simple. The life behind it is anything but.

Thirteen Years in a Mental Hospital

Before So Be It, before the retreats, before any of it, Lasaunia was a cosmetologist. For thirteen years, she provided hair care services to women in a mental health hospital setting — sitting across from women who were at their lowest, doing their hair, offering words of encouragement, teaching wellness classes, and making a choice every single day not to reduce the person in her chair to their diagnosis or their history.

“I didn’t want to put them in a box and say this woman was homeless, or this person committed a crime,” she says. “I am here to make them look better. I am here to make them feel better. They’re human beings at the end of the day.”

She grew up feeling unseen herself. That experience shaped a lifelong commitment to making sure other people felt the opposite.

What those thirteen years also showed her was that life can turn in an instant — that mental illness is often something life causes, not something people simply wake up with one day. And that if you can meet someone exactly where they are without judgment, without labels, something shifts. She watched it happen, chair by chair, year after year.

“I am eternally grateful I was able to do that.”

That work also showed her something else: the women coming through that system were getting housing, food, basic care — but not always the kind of wraparound support that addressed their inner world. Their confidence. Their sense of purpose. Their self-worth. Lasaunia saw the gap and decided she was the person to fill it.

What So Be It Actually Looks Like

So Be It is a women’s organization built around goal-setting classes, vision boards, and its signature offering: themed women’s retreats. Orlando. North Carolina. DC. Arizona. And if everything goes according to plan, Ghana in 2028.

Each retreat carries a theme — Self-Love, Do It Bold Brave and Beautiful, Relax and Release — and the theme isn’t decorative. It shapes every element of the experience. The workshops. The speakers brought in. The playlist. Even the swag bag, which is curated to give women actual tools they can take home and use: affirmation cards, journals, breathing exercises, yoga, whatever serves that particular theme.

“Not everybody is ready to throw in a towel and shift gears,” Lasaunia says. “Not everybody walks around with tools in a tool shed. Some people have dealt with so many traumatic things, who are triggered easily. I do my best to meet them where they are.”

The last retreat sold out in three days. Twenty-three women. Some came alone, conquering a fear just to walk through the door. By the end, they felt like they’d known each other all their lives.

“It’s like that safe space with the soft landing,” she says. “Nobody is left alone. And it literally became that relationship between them.”

Seven Years Without a Name

In 2015, Lasaunia thought she’d been bitten by a spider. She went to a doctor. She took the medicine. It got worse. Wounds developed that would last well over a year. She went from doctor to doctor. The medical system’s honest answer was: we don’t know. You’re a mystery.

For seven years — seven years — she battled a disease without a diagnosis. Without a name. Without the right treatment. She endured medications that didn’t work and sometimes made things worse. She sat with pain she says no human being should have to endure. She did all of this while serving women, while working, while showing up.

“How do you deal with your own stuff in private, encourage women in public, still make great efforts not to look like your situation — and you’re dying inside?”

She leaned into her faith. She journaled. She wrote affirmations as reminders to herself that this was not the end of her story. She found a rheumatologist who refused to give up on her.

In March 2021, she rang a bell. She had finally received a correct diagnosis — Pyoderma Gangrenosum, a rare and aggressive inflammatory skin disease — gotten the right medication, and gone wound-free. She has not been back to wound care since.

“March 21st, 2021. I rung the bell. And I haven’t had a wound since.”

All Things PG: From Surviving to Advocating

After years of participating in a Facebook support group where PG patients helped each other navigate a disease most doctors had never seen, Lasaunia was approached by a fellow member who was building something bigger. A nonprofit. A platform. A way to make sure no one else spent seven years without a name for what was destroying their skin.

All Things PG launched last year. Five founders. A board that includes a dermatologist, Dr. Ortega, who has helped Lasaunia piece together her own complex medical history — connecting her PG diagnosis to the uveitis she experienced in her twenties, to her Myasthenia Syndrome, to her rheumatoid arthritis, helping it all make sense for the first time.

The organization has already won grants and launched its first fundraising campaign for Rare Disease Day. Monthly virtual meetings begin in April, open to patients, families, and caregivers alike. More than 4,000 people are now part of the Facebook community they support.

“People have committed suicide from this disease,” Lasaunia says directly. “People have suffered in silence. People have been in spaces where they just don’t know what to do. Your story is your story. And if I can help, I’m going to help as best I can.”

The biologic she takes — an injectable needle every two weeks plus a weekly medication — gives her the quality of life she has now. Not everyone can access it. Cost is a barrier for many. All Things PG exists, in part, to change that — to connect people with resources, with each other, and with the information they need to stop being treated like a mystery and start getting real answers.

Mental Health Is the Foundation

Ask Lasaunia why mental health sits at the center of everything she does and her answer is immediate: because everything starts in the mind.

“When we are in a healthy mind space, we can make healthy decisions. You can’t thrive if your mental health is off. You can’t live a joyous life. You can’t live a prosperous life.”

She grew up in a household where what happened inside the house stayed inside the house. She watched what that cultural silence costs people. She watched it in herself. She watched it in the women she served in the mental hospital, in the women on her retreats, in the people navigating PG without support systems or language for what they were experiencing.

Her prescription is simple and she offers it freely: feed your mind good things the way you feed your body good things. Journal. Write affirmations. Breathe. Find a safe space. And if you need clinical help, get it. It’s 2026. Go outside and get the help you need.

“Do whatever that thing is to help you regain and control your mental capacity.”

What’s Coming

Lasaunia co-authored a chapter in Turning My Pain Into Purpose, Volume Two — sixteen women telling their stories, hers woven through the arc of PG and So Be It and what it means to develop women for greatness when you yourself are still being developed.

She won a speech competition and told her story on a stage in Canada. She never imagined any of it.

Her affirmation card deck — 32 cards, launched in December 2024 — is Volume One of something that keeps growing. She flips one every morning, writes about it, and is consistently startled by how precisely it speaks to her day.

“You be surprised,” she says with a laugh. “You’re like, how did it know?”

By this summer, a journal will accompany the deck. Monthly PG meetings begin in April. The So Be It retreat community keeps growing. And somewhere in the vision, Ghana in 2028 is waiting.

Lasaunia Thompson has been a hairstylist, a disaster relief worker, an educator, a cosmetologist in a mental health hospital, a patient for seven years without a diagnosis, a disease advocate, a speaker, an author, and a retreat host who sells out in three days.

She is, above all else, a person of service. She has known it for a long time. Life keeps confirming it.

“Go through to get through,” she says. “Just keep going. Whatever it is, you’ll conquer it.”

Lasaunia Thompson is the founder of So Be It, a women’s organization dedicated to developing women for greatness, and a co-founder of All Things PG, a nonprofit raising awareness for Pyoderma Gangrenosum. Find So Be It at https://sobeitllc.com/ and All Things PG at allthingspg.org.

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