Positive Paige Rawl

About the book

Positive is a story about Paige Rawl, who is an all-american girl who was born HIV Positive. When classmates found out, she began to be bullied because of her HIV status. Paige is a pageant winner, cheer leader, and soccer player who suddenly finds herself being homeschooled when her administrators failed to protect her. She decides to take a bad situation and turn it into something good. She becomes a national youth speaker, starts a new school, and continues her life by not letting HIV define who she is!

Positive By Paige Rawl Audiobook

POSITIVE became a Today Show's Book Club Pick.

Paige Rawl has been HIV positive since An astonishing memoir for the untold number of children whose lives have been touched by bullying. Positive is a must-read for teens, their parents, educators, and administrators—a brave, visceral work that will save lives and resonate deeply. Paige Rawl While adolescence alone can pose challenges, Paige Rawl held an even heavier burden growing up: a positive HIV diagnosis. Having acquired HIV at birth, Paige grew up unaware that her daily medication or frequent doctor’s visits were a result of her positive status. Positive: A Memoir audiobook written by Paige Rawl, Ali Benjamin. Narrated by Paige Rawl and Jay Asher. Get instant access to all your favorite books. No monthly commitment. Listen online or offline with Android, iOS, web, Chromecast, and Google Assistant. Try Google Play Audiobooks today! The answer is simple: it's because millions of kids go through the same thing every day, different faces but the same story, and as Rawl points out, way too many of them don't make it. Paige Rawl's Positive is a five out of five. I cannot remember the last time I was this emotionally affected by a memoir. Positive, also titled Positive: A Memoir, is a 2014 novel by writer and HIV activist Paige Rawl. Born with HIV, but a privileged beneficiary of recent advances in medical science, Rawl was able to medically negate its symptoms, and never had much reason to believe that her HIV positive status defined her.

Positive was chosen as a Junior Library Guild book.

POSITIVE also was nominated for the 2016 Abraham Lincoln Award.

positive won the 2017 Joan f. Kaywell: books saves lives award.

n','url':'https://youtu.be/em2PUZ7vWwU','width':854,'height':480,'providerName':'YouTube','thumbnailUrl':'https://i.ytimg.com/vi/em2PUZ7vWwU/hqdefault.jpg','resolvedBy':'youtube'}'>

After one of the lowest points of her life, Paige Rawl made a friend, a fellow teenager named Louis, in the locked-door facility where they were both hospitalized. While waiting in the cafeteria line, the incredulous Louis said to her, 'So let me get this straight....I'm gay, and kids say that I have AIDS, even though I don't. And you're the straightest, skinniest little white girl I've ever met, and you're a beauty queen, and you actually do have AIDS.'

'Not AIDS,' Rawl told her friend. 'HIV.'

Louis was neither the first nor the last person to blink at the knowledge that Rawl lives with HIV. She fits none of the common assumptions about people with HIV. Yet that's partly what makes Rawl, now 20, an effective AIDS educator and anti-bullying activist.

Rawl is visiting bookstores promoting her memoir, 'Positive' (HarperCollins), co-written with Ali Benjamin, and talking to school groups. She'll speak at 7 p.m. Thursday at Boswell Book Company, 2559 N. Downer Ave. The event is co-sponsored by the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin.

Rawl, an Indianapolis native, was born with HIV, contracting it from her mother, who had unknowingly received it from her father. Her mother made strenuous efforts from the beginning to keep Paige healthy. In fifth grade, Rawl, who had always cooperated with Mom's strict medical and health routines, put enough facts together to ask her Mom if she was HIV-positive.

During a recreational lock-in, Rawl shared her HIV status with a friend, who blabbed it everywhere, leading to several years of bullying that included brutal notes and the hateful nickname PAIDS. School officials were worse than no help, variously ignoring, discounting or even blaming Rawl for the problems. A soccer coach even suggested that Rawl's HIV status be used to the team's advantage — girls on opposing teams would be afraid to make contact with her.

Eventually, Rawl found a high school that treated her like a human being, but she had internalized so much pain from past abuse that she swallowed 15 of her mother's sleeping pills. After that incident, and with help, she began to embrace a more positive outlook. Her first visit to Camp Kindle, a program for kids with HIV, was a turning point in her life. (If the bullying scenes in 'Positive' don't bring tears to your eyes, her words about the love and acceptance shown at Camp Kindle will.)

As a teen, she became a certified HIV/AIDS educator through the American Red Cross; her testimony helped pass anti-bullying legislation in Indiana in 2013.

While Rawl believes a sixth-grader with HIV today would find more understanding in school about her status, she knows there are always people ready to apply a stigma.

'Being older now, people who don't accept me are the people who don't matter,' she said in a telephone interview.

One surprisingly source of strength for Rawl in those years was her participation in pageants, which she began at age 8 and continued through high school. 'For me, pageants have always been a combination of four of the things I love most in the world: dressing up, singing onstage, speaking in front of people, and meeting new friends. They've helped me to think on the spot and respond to all kinds of situations with warmth,' she writes in 'Positive.'

'My last couple ones I used anti-bullying and HIV as my platform, to educate people in the pageant world about HIV and AIDS,' Rawl said during the phone interview.

Education and prevention are the most important things schools can do about bullying, Rawl said. Unfortunately, children, some as young as elementary school, are killing themselves because of bullying, she said.

Rawl said she takes one pill a day for HIV and the virus is undetectable in her. She'd also be the first to tell you that doesn't mean she's cured. (Rawl's a good explainer: Her book includes a clear, easy to follow explanation of the difference between HIV and AIDS. )