She tells PEOPLE that experiencing "life-shattering loss" at a young age has made her "OK" with the idea of her own death.
At 28, Bella Salsberry has already experienced enough grief for a lifetime.
"A good place to start? I'm trying to think," she says to PEOPLE in a Zoom interview from her house in Florida. "I'm actually going to start before I was born."
Her story, she says, begins with her great-grandfather. He had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a disease that causes the heart muscle to become abnormally large, making it difficult for the heart to pump blood.
He passed the condition to Salsberry's grandfather, though they thought it had stopped there: Salsberry's mom received a slate of genetic testing before having kids of her own, and doctors assured her that she didn't carry the gene. She gave birth to three beautiful children.
But when Salsberry was 14, her entire life was turned upside.
Her brother Cooper, who was 12, was playing in a baseball game when he experienced a sudden cardiac event, and there was no defibrillator nearby to save him. He died before he could even reach a hospital.
"You don't think that somebody like that is going to not be around," she says. "I loved him so much."
Amidst the unimaginable grief of losing Cooper, Salsberry and the rest of her family immediately received genetic testing, and at only 14, Salsberry learned that she too had HCM.
Because the condition was so commonplace in her family, she says, she "didn't really think it was like that big of a deal." Throughout her teenage years, doctors hadn't yet identified any abnormalities in her heart, and though she had some symptoms, they didn't impact her everyday life.
"It wasn't a huge priority," says Salsberry of the condition.
But at 26, during a regular doctor's appointment to monitor her HCM progression, she received the inevitable news that her heart muscle had started to thicken, pressure was beginning to build and it was something she needed "to be taking seriously."
"It was kind of shocking to me," admits Salsberry. "Like, 'Oh, this is real. This is happening.' "
Around the time that she received the frightening news that her HCM had progressed, her grandfather was dying of late-stage heart failure from the same condition -- a parallel she says made the life-altering news even more "jarring."
"I was kind of watching the end of what this disease is going to do to me while I was like at the beginning of it," she says.
But she was ready to take the condition head-on: to "work really hard to keep a normal quality of life," she says, and to "try to change the world" in the process.
Now 28, Salsberry gets her blood drawn every month to check her kidney function and takes two daily medications to manage her condition. Her biggest symptom is fatigue, especially after staying out late or drinking alcohol -- things she acknowledges might be normal activities for another person her age. And she regularly updates her nearly 30,000 TikTok followers about her health journey along the way.
"I'm a chronic oversharer," she tells PEOPLE. "I'm just doing it on an insane scale right now."
"Heart disease has a marketing problem," continues the creator, describing the vision behind her account. "People don't take it seriously, and it's the No.1 killer around the world."
On her account, she often begins her videos bluntly -- stating the plain fact "I'm dying" -- to rope in her viewers, before she gives critical information about the warning signs of heart disease or tips for how people can manage it. She also shares her unique outlook on her condition, one of gratitude for her life and her body, rather than the fear many viewers might come to associate with heart disease.
"My heart is failing, but my heart is my favorite thing about me," Salsberry says in one clip on TikTok. "I am never going to get better. I am only going to get worse. But I'm OK with that."
Of her perspective, she tells PEOPLE: "I think really that is rooted in experiencing unexpected, life-shattering loss," referencing the death of her brother when she was young.
"When you're a freshman in high school, you don't think your little brother is going to be taken away from you," says Salsberry. "But I have this perspective on life now, where the things that have been really hard in my life have been incredibly difficult -- almost impossible for me to get through -- but I always get through it. Having that perspective has really made me OK with my death."
Through her TikTok page, Salsberry says she's grown an "outstanding" community -- people who relate to her experience of not being trusted by doctors because they're a woman or have had life-saving genetic testing that they never knew they needed.
"That's why I do it," she says of the people she's found online. "Even if it's just meaningful for one person, that's enough."
As for the future of her platform -- and her health journey more broadly -- she says she's just "going with the flow."
"It's a really great creative outlet for me, and it's very therapeutic," says Salsberry of TikTok. "I don't know where that's gonna lead me. And that's the thing -- I welcome the unknown."
And she has the same philosophy when it comes to learning her life expectancy or her ejection fraction, a measure of the percentage of blood pumped out of the left ventricle with each heartbeat, which can signal the progression of her condition.
"It's not going to change what I'm doing because the stakes are still as high," she says of dwelling on those measurements. "It doesn't really make a difference to me."
Offline, she recently made a career switch, now working for her dad in commercial real estate. She's also gearing up to marry her partner of eight years next summer -- something she's "obviously so excited" to marry her partner of eight years next summer -- even though it makes her "a little bit sad" that her brother will never get to meet the love of her life.
But in the meantime, she's just taking life day by day.
"I've had enough of those experiences where I'm like, 'OK, just trust the process,' " says Salsberry. "That's all you can do. Be in the present moment, focus on the now, and it'll be OK."