Dana Lane

Dana was born in 1976 in Livingston New Jersey. She was diagnosed with Classical Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome at four years old. Growing up in rural Hunterdon Country, she vowed to move out of New Jersey after High School to explore her passion for photography. Her photography teacher advised her she did not have an eye for the medium, so she turned to filmmaking. Not getting very far geographically she ended up at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she earned her BA in Electronic Filmmaking and Digital Video Design. Along the way, she created monologues, poems, screenplays, and even a few short stories but never thought of herself as an author. Too many individuals had expressed that she did not have what it takes, and to her, it didn't matter since she found her true calling. When her opportunity to move to LA arrived, she decided not to go and moved back to her hometown. Working as a freelancer at Entertainment Tonight she determined the entertainment business was not the corporate monster she wanted to be connected to. A year after college, she was offered a photojournalism position for NJN Publishing. After a year and a half, she was promoted to Chief Photographer.

Ten years as a full-time photojournalist, the newspaper industry came to a screeching halt. 2009 the economic collapse had her laid off and uncertain of her future. After a week of examining her options, she opened Dana Lane Photography. For the next ten years, she ran a successful photography studio while dealing with the complexities of her Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. As time passed, she realized she could not remain on the path she had chosen. Her condition was causing joint, tendon, and ligament issues that would leave her in chronic pain.

Deciding to leave her career after twenty years was not a simple decision. She had lost her creative connection to photography the last two years because of the pain, and felt she was doing her clients a disservice as well as physically harming herself. Closing her business, she took a position as Operations/ Business Manager at a general aviation repair shop in hopes her joint pain would subside. Four months into her role, she started having migraines every two weeks, and by four years, they were happening twice a week. Having multiple imaging and doctor's appointments, she realized that no matter what job she took, there would always be some form of pain.

She searched for years to find her creative connection again, and in 2020 when Covid hit, she joined a writers workshop that had a weekly virtual gathering. She would have never attended in person, so this opportunity was perfect. For a year, she wrote and found her connection to her creative spirit again. In 2021, four years after taking the position at the repair shop, she was laid off. Two weeks later, she went to her fourth physical therapist, who was able to find the cause of her migraines and start the healing process. Two weeks after that, she started writing her first fiction novel.

In April 2021, Ehlers-Danlos struck again and ruptured her Achilles tendon while walking up her second-story steps. Surgery, a hard cast for two weeks, and then a boot for eight weeks loomed in the future. And her mental health started to suffer. She started writing about her journey with EDS to work through some of the past and present trauma. She did not know just how emotionally traumatic her past had been until she started typing it out. Through her writing, she felt emotional healing begin.

She intends to write two blog posts a month and continue on her journey with her fiction novel. The novel will be self-published by the end of 2021.