G.J. Hodson is a facilitator, public scholar, and community health worker who designs and supports community care and health education in online spaces.
Hodson excels at communication across a wide range of contexts, whether professional, experiential, or academic. As a facilitator, G.J. balances participant enthusiasm, information needs, access tensions, care burdens, and concepts of community directly to keep conversations moving. As a writer, G.J. has produced research, essays, blogs, quotations, and podcasts (some of which have even been publi
03/13/2026
The National Institute on Aging no longer has a social media presence?!
As of March 11, 2026, this account is no longer active.
Please look for our content on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) page and follow along for the latest news and information from NIH!
To find the latest information on the National Institute on Aging, visit https://www.nia.nih.gov/.
03/11/2026
After caregiving, I went to grad school to "relearn my brain".
Now, for the better part of two years, I've been trying to "relearn my body" and it's still a daily process. In my head, I can still walk 10 miles a day, smell across a room, have a deep conversation, and memorize a phone number with no effort. But like many people after a major infection, I've become a "spoonie", someone whose chronic illness/dynamic disability are complex and somewhat unpredictable. Sometimes feeling "better" gets hard, because it's still so far from where I expect to be. This time last year, I didn't have the energy to think about what "better" might look like. Now I can tell when my joints are weak, my movement is stiff, and my balance is tentative. Sure I'm in my 40s now, and I wasn't as active as I could have been before that, but this level of symptoms management is far beyond typical aging and it affects everyone around me.
Fortunately, I'm not alone. I've been close to people with similar conditions for well over a decade, some of whom gave context to subtler conditions I've had as far back as I can remember. But best of all, I've found in Disability Justice a thoughtful, humanizing, and supportive community who see humanity's interdependence as our greatest strength.
After decades of trying, I don't believe you can create community from scratch, but you can strengthen communal ties that already exist and Disability Justice folks are connected to EVERYONE. I was only ever pre-disabled, you see. Probably most of us are.
I don't have clever shorthand or SEO to tell you about all the work we're doing, but I've never felt so invigorated or innovative. Sometimes my role is simply to remind others where we can look for hope. And patience. And solidarity. If it ever sounds like something you might be able to use, come find me. I'll be the tall -- and admittedly thicker -- white person in a colorful š·, talking about community care in one way or another.
Big thank you to for giving me this amazing shirt. Thanks also to .p for joining me on the windy banks of the Trinity and helping me find and show the beauty and power of my present body.
08/21/2025
To celebrate 7 years as G.J. Hodson, I'm launching a Name Day Fundraiser for Professional Development! All funds raised between now and August 27th will go directly to facilitation classes, materials, and similar skills development. No amount is too small to help advance this endeavor!
11/20/2024
Hey DFW: Got plans Thursday evening?
I'm proud to be the community host for this month's Q***r Professional Networking event at the Bar Dryce, so let's show up for community care!
As host, I'll give a small presentation on LGBTQ+ aging and care, give out free masks and demonstrations ahead of the winter respiratory surge, and give a very brief preview of the community health outlook for winter.
This is a great way to meet local professionals in the community! Allies welcome.
11/14/2024
I made it to Seattle!
Today I played the roles of token extravert/networking host, app trainer, sensitivity trainer, navigator (twice), dataset cataloguer, editor, cheerleader, and social media intern (experimenting across platforms). Can't wait to see what Day 2 brings!
If you're at , let me know what sessions you're checking out, and catch my panel workshop Saturday morning with NAC & .
11/08/2024
This is my last week to save up for Seattle! My plan is to network with academics and other professionals while representing LGBTQ+ and other underrepresented in the spirit of ! Link in bio. Please share!
10/14/2024
I was thinking earlier today about sneeze guards. I've always noticed them because I'm taller than most, and I've felt extra conscious about my breath and coughs/sneezes standing by one.
Nobody wants to mask any more, but you don't see them politicizing sneeze guards. Masks are sneeze guards for your face. And just like how sneezes sometimes catch us by surprise, so can asymptomatic or emerging C0VlD.
So please support your local sneeze-guard-wearer. They just want to keep everyone safe.
In the early 2000s, I watched my grandfather care for my grandmother. I learned more about them in those six years than I had over the rest of my life: their partnership, their devotion, and their limitations. After she passed away, I lived with my grandfather so he wouldnāt have to be alone. In 2011, he was diagnosed with Alzheimerās Dementia, and I became his caregiver. I had to learn a lot in a short time, about his condition and how to care for him, but also how to practice self-care and improve my resilience. I was very young for a dementia caregiver, often the youngest in my support group, and I experienced a profound sense of isolation as my peers moved on with their careers, educations, and families while I stayed in place.
Eventually, I succumbed to caregiver burnout, right about the time he started to have bad falls; this was the time to move him into memory care, where I continued to oversee his care and provide him snickerdoodles and ice cream. As I tried to find my way out of my emotional abyss, I found I didnāt really process information as I previously had; moreover, I wanted to understand my care experience more deeply. I enrolled in graduate studies, because it seemed like the best place to re-learn my brain and leverage the experience toward helping others.
What I found was that although caregiving is a natural social phenomenon, social research into caregiving is all over the place, with little attention to caregivers and no attention to broader care networks. I soaked up perspectives from Medical Sociology, Social Stratification, Black Feminism, Social Psychology, and Q***r Theories and built connections with staff in Social Work, Multicultural Womenās and Gender Studies, and Education. Meanwhile, I started volunteering, first as a support group facilitator for Alzheimerās Association, and later presenting a session for an organization that provides free yoga retreats for dementia caregivers. I even got to present some of my research at academic conferences from Orlando to Chicago to New York.
My grandfather has passed and my post-caregiving life looks very different from how I imagined, but I maintain my passion for the art and science of caregiving, and I share what Iāve learned wherever I can. In the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, I submitted my thesis on āThe Social Lives of Dementia Caregiversā; now with school out of the way, I can expand my engagement and start to offer individualized services. I still volunteer and help out individuals with small bits of guidance, but for caregivers who need ongoing involvement I now offer caregiver coaching. My research interests are expanding as well, from applying intersectional methods to secondary caregiver datasets to growing news reports on the long-term health consequences for people who recover from COVID-19 -- possibly even developing a new category of caregiving.
| Monday | 12pm - 8pm |
| Tuesday | 12pm - 8pm |
| Thursday | 12pm - 8pm |
| Friday | 12pm - 8pm |
| Saturday | 12pm - 8pm |