A Personal Note Before You Read

This Founder's Note contains personal experiences involving addiction, depression, suicide, and grief. While parts of this journey are difficult, it is ultimately a story about healing, self-love, and finding purpose in the darkness.

If you need support right now, you don't have to wait until after reading:
— Call or text 988, anytime, free and confidential, 24/7, Canada-wide
— LGBT YouthLine, peer support for 2SLGBTQ+ folks 29 and under: text 647-694-4275 or chat at youthline.ca
— For more resources: CAMH Crisis Resources

-

Not the comfortable kind of dark. The kind where you don't know if you'll keep your business, your home, or your reason to get up in the morning.

I built a thriving cheerleading uniform brand called FullSwag. Then the pandemic hit.

What began as a two-week COVID lockdown slowly turned into two years. Sports across Ontario shut down almost entirely.

I kept the doors open anyway, spending for a future I wasn't sure was coming, going deep into debt just trying to hold on.

By the time it was over, I was burnt out in ways I didn't yet have words for.

I stopped drinking but found comfort in other distractions and vices instead. I was searching for connection anywhere I could find it while locked inside alone.

What began as distractions slowly became addictions.

Eventually, the searching became its own kind of prison.

The lockdowns forced me to re-evaluate everything. For the first time, I had to sit still long enough to ask myself what I actually wanted from life.

Somewhere along the way, the dream I had built with FullSwag stopped feeling meaningful to me. What began as a passion-driven business slowly became about survival. Paying bills. Managing stress. Just trying to keep everything afloat.

And somewhere in that process, I lost myself trying to become the version of me I thought everyone else needed.

And I realized something hard to admit:

I had built a life around the dreams of a 22-year-old closeted gay boy. One searching for approval. For love. For external validation to feel like he was enough.

Like he belonged.
Like he was worthy of being loved.

I sat in the wreckage of who I thought I was.

I'd started creating LOL in early 2024, but I kept hesitating. Something felt misaligned. Like another business built just to survive, not to matter.

I didn't want to repeat the same pattern that had already cost me so much.

My WHY had shifted but I didn't know yet what my new WHY was. So I sat with it.

The discomfort kept growing, and in December 2024, I lost a close friend to suicide.

The grief cracked me open in a completely new way.

My friend's passing re-triggered my own demons. The memories of losing two other people in my life to suicide. The memories of my own suicide attempts. The pain of friends who had quietly shared their struggles with me over the years.

And then the thoughts I'd carried since childhood came creeping back.

A deep depression set in. The kind that makes daily living unbearable. Where getting out of bed feels terrifying. Where facing the world takes everything you have.

I sat in that grief for months.

And somewhere inside that darkness, I found myself again.

The boy I had lost a long time ago.
The man I was always meant to become.

What brought me back was the one thing I had been running from my whole life:

SELF LOVE.

Not the hashtag version.
The real kind.

The kind that looks at every scar and says:
you're still here
That means something.

The kind that rewrites the story you've been telling yourself about who you are and what you deserve.

And for me, it meant learning to love every part of myself I had hidden from the world.

The feminine side of me that loves sparkles.
The spiritual side of me that cares deeply about humanity.
The part of me that feels everything deeply and isn't afraid to express emotion.

The one that cries when I'm sad, but also when I'm overwhelmed with joy.
The one that genuinely wants the best for everyone.

The parts of myself I had spent years suppressing because I was taught that's not what men are allowed to be.

And in finally accepting all of who I was, I found my purpose. My WHY.

I finally understood why LOL exists.

They say your greatest purpose is found inside your greatest pain. They're right.

LOL-Live.Laugh.Love.Out Loud exists because of my friends and my family. Because of me. Because of everyone who has ever suffered in silence.

For everyone who has ever felt too small, too broken, too hidden to keep going.

Because love, when it's real and worn out loud, is the thing that keeps us here.

This is not just a clothing brand.

This is a movement for everyone who is ready to stop hiding their shine.

It is a movement of radical self-expression.

It is a movement to LIVE. LAUGH. LOVE. OUT LOUD!

Vilakone Sihamanotham
Founder of LOL