I can’t reach out to that girl and tell her that she is worthy and good and that it is okay to trust others.

That because I was sick, I’d never be the hero of my own story. That chronically ill, disabled girls couldn’t be main characters. I thought that meant stories like mine, about people like me, weren’t worthy of being told. … When I was at my most sick as a teenager, I lost myself in books, despite never seeing myself in their pages. I was never a teen in seventeenth-century France, dueling in ball gowns … but I was the girl in high school who hid in the bathroom between classes in order to take medication without anyone seeing. But she does represent my experience as a chronically ill young woman.

She does not, and cannot, represent every person with POTS-or for that matter, every person with a chronic illness. Tania’s experience is just one of thousands of unique experiences. So if you don’t want that information – re: the heroine’s chronic illness diagnosis – please just skip over the quoted paragraph. It doesn’t really spoil anything, but it does explain a major plot point. So I’m going to start this review at the end of Lillie Lainoff’s One for All, with part of her ending author’s note. Especially when they’re written by & for sick girls. It’s why Boot Camp is good for creating troop morale & cohesiveness, right? – People who experience the same sorts of suffering just get it in ways other people don’t.Īnd I’ve previously talked *so many times* about how the same goes for books, so y’all know I have a special place in my heart for books about sick girls.

Because there’s nobody who knows the experience except the people who know. Worst, continuous hazing ever, and yet? The (worldwide, online, offline, near, far, complete strangers until the absolute moment they’re not) sorority of sick girls has saved my life, many, many times over. I’m a long-time member of the chronically ill girls’ club, and boy does the initiation SUCK. And yet somehow – once you ARE a member – the people in these clubs/groups with you become some of the most important in your whole damn life? Members that save you, and that you save, time and time again? Definitely clubs you do not want to belong to, ever.

Have you ever heard the saying (not the Groucho Marx version, but the earnest one) about becoming a member of a club you don’t want to be a member of? It might just be pretty common in the circles I’ve run in, because I’ve mostly heard people talk about it in relation to loss – How you never want to become &/or welcome a new member to the parents of kids who’ve died club, or the widows’ club.

One for all lillie lainoff