Words Hurt

The book I am reading is Positive by Paige Rawl.  This book is about a girl who has been living with HIV since birth.  HIV, not aids, yes they are two different things.  Paige decides to tell her best friend in the whole world her secret that nobody else knew about and within an hour over half her grade knew and were bullying her and making jokes about a topic that is not funny at all.  Paige starts to let the bullies get to her until she realizes that she did nothing wrong, it is not her fault she has HIV and if they want to make fun of her for that then that reflects what kind of person they are, not her.  She should not be labeled by a disease that has no affect on anyone else.  If nobody had told them, they would have never known that she was living with this disease.  You cannot see the HIV on the outside.  After going through some rough times and getting help she over comes her struggles and ends up coming out a stronger person than before.

I picked this book because my mother bought it for me when she saw it on a TV show recommending it be a book all teens should read.  I was going to put it in the pile of books that I have yet to read or never will, until I read the back.  I was thinking it would be the typical story about a kid getting bullied and how they did everything they could to stop it and when it does everything returns to normal, but there was something different in the words they chose, something that just told you that this wasn't going to be a happy book.  Yes, this was true, I may have been caught dripping a tear on the pages a few times.

This book reminds me a lot of the ABC Family movie Cyberbully (staring Emily Osment) because they both have a similar situation.  In both cases it is their best friends who end up causing all of the harm and doing the most damage in the first place.  This hurts them so much mentally making them believe that there is no one out there that you can trust because the one person they felt they could trust turned on them and were the reason for their pain and suffering.  It is hard to stop thinking this way after something this horrible has happened to you.  In the movie Taylor (the main character) was bullied so much by her best friend that she attempted suicide.  In the book, Paige was terribly bullied to the point that she also had attempted to end her life.  Not only did other people hate them, but the other people got into their head and convinced them to hate themselves too.  I would agree, nobody would want to live a life filled with hate for themselves, but ending your life is not the answer.  Life is a very valuable thing that should not be taken away because of others influence on you.  In result, they both receive the help that they need and become stronger and learn to understand how to deal with there bad feelings instead of burying them until they have no other way to come out than in a harmful way to themselves.  The concept of both this book and this movie is very sad, but teaches a good lesson to everyone that words truly do  hurt and that we all have feelings that need to be respected no matter what.