A Fellow Raver Needs Your Help!

On Monday April 14th Lily suddenly awoke to a grease fire which started in the kitchen of the New York apartment she was renting out. Her, her boyfriend Brian, and a his brother Roger were all effected by this devastating fire which ruined everything Lily owned. Luckily no one was seriously injured.

With the help of her best friend Lindsay and our East Coast Raver Community we have come together to donate clothes, shoes, makeup, a computer, and some of the daily essentials she will need moving forward. Our community also wanted to help her out further by donating money so Lindsay has set up a donation fund here.

In the past few days our community has already accomplished so much but little does Lily know this will all be a surprise. On Saturday April 19th Lindsay will be delivering all of the donated items to her from our community. I have asked Lindsay to share with us a little bit more about Lily and hope others can donate to help out our fellow raver.

Lily is the walking, talking definition of PLUR.  She’s living proof that PLUR is more than just a hashtag.  At every show I’ve been to with her, I end up having to pry her away from strangers to actually go watch the DJ because she’s usually more interested in giving away all her kandi singles to PLUR newbies than she is in doing anything else.  Multiple times at Echostage in Washington, D.C. (where we attend most of our EDM events), Lily has missed large portions of shows because she was too busy playing nurse – she befriends those at shows who have clearly exceeded their limits and are in need of medical attention and stays with them until they feel better and/or until she can find them some help.

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Lily’s transition to NYC from Harrisburg, PA a month ago was a rocky one because she’s such a people-pleaser.  She had been living with her family since she graduated college in a small home with her three sisters, baby niece, and her mom and step-dad.  Her niece and sister shared one room, and her two other sisters shared the other, so Lily slept on the couch.  However, she never complained about her living arrangements, and she was more than happy to help her mom out with her little sisters and her niece.  Lily had been working at the same government job for the last seven years – a job her aunt had got for her while Lily was still in college.  Because of Lily’s aunt’s heavy involvement in Lily’s job (her aunt still works at the place Lily left) and because of how much Lily’s presence meant to her family, she thought of all of these peoples’ interests before her own when she was considering the big move.

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To make matters more complicated, Lily was facing an extremely large pay cut to pursue her dream job in NYC – a cut of thousands of dollars a year.  The only things she had to her name were her personal belongings, which was just enough to fill her small two-door car when she ended up moving.  She only had a little bit of savings, which depleted very quickly during her transition period because she had to come to NYC for a day at a time three different times for interviews and job shadowing at her NYC job.  With all of these factors floating around in Lily’s thoughts, she debated accepting the new job for weeks because she was so concerned about upsetting someone in her family.  She also feared failure, and didn’t want to have to come crawling back to Harrisburg broke and burned by NYC.  Most people weighing in on Lily’s decision were extremely against it because of the risks involved.

Although Lily has been struggling since she moved to NYC, she’s so in love with her new life!  She gets to live with her boyfriend – who she met at Electric Zoo last year at one of the main stages right before Benny Bennasi went on during Friday’s sets.  She finally got out of farm town, USA, as she always had wanted to.  She was finally working in a job she actually wanted to go to everyday.  Her NYC job is in holistic health at a nutritional response office.  After reading the book “The Secret” a while ago, Lily became really involved in yoga and believes heavily in the law of attraction.  She believes she manifested this NYC job, which made her SO happy because of what her office does.  Nutritional response testing’s objective is to treat mental and physical problems naturally, by finding out what types of nutrients and vitamins a person’s body lacks and providing supplements for those things instead of medicating a person with medication.  Someone in Lily’s family who she is very close with has been battling mental problems (like extreme bipolar disorder) for years, so Lily saw this job as a great opportunity not only to fulfill her dreams, but to also help out someone very near and dear to her heart. I don’t want anything outside of Lily’s control – like this devastating fire – to burden Lily’s dreams.

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Lily has been an avid EDM fan for a few years now.  Her favorite DJs are Mim and Liv of Nervo and Kaskade.  She didn’t leave the front row at Kaskade when he came to Echostage last fall, and she was lucky enough to have Nervo allow her to throw kandi to them in a DJ booth at a show in Las Vegas last year.

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If anyone has ever been curious as to why many ravers hashtag #edmsavEDMylife, let me tell you. Last summer, Lily and I were both going through really tough times, mostly due to really brutal breakups. The previous winter was when we started going to a lot of shows together, but we had no idea there was any significance to the bracelets everyone was wearing; so, we decided to make some ourselves and wore them to a show. A rave group from Baltimore asked if we wanted to trade. Puzzled, we replied “sure,” and were mesmerized by seeing PLUR for the first time! That small moment turned our entire lives around. At the same time, we both emerged from months of sadness and suddenly saw that there was more to life than being upset about our bad past experiences. From then on out, we began living the PLUR lifestyle every single day.

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At the end of that summer – which turned out to be the best summer of our lives after that one moment of fate in the bathroom at Echostage – we decided to get matching tattoos. We got “we are the lucky ones” on our sides because we wanted to commemorate our love for the EDM scene, the PLUR way of life, and most importantly, we wanted a permanent reminder of our everlasting friendship. We also wanted to be permanently reminded that we are in fact the lucky ones – although life might suck at times, we are very fortunate and things could always be worse.

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Please help support my best friend Lily by sharing this post with others and if at all possible, donating to her fund.

Thank you,
Lindsay
https://www.giveforward.com/fundraiser/gsf4/lily-s-fire-fund

If you would like to donate items and live in the New York area you may reach out to Lindsay at johns_0687@hotmail.com.

 


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