BROOKVILLE, Ind. – Paige Rawl has turned the negative into a positive.
The Indianapolis native was born HIV positive.
Midway through our interview, Paige tells me she has to check her phone because it keeps buzzing.
“Sorry,” as she reaches into her purse.
She looks at her iPhone 6 puzzled, “French?”
“What?”
“Positive might be translated into French,” she hesitantly replies.
Paige wrote a book in English but also remembers a few Latin words, because she had to sit through that class in high school.
Life has made the 20-year-old stand up when most others would sit down.
It was Paige who told her best friend in sixth grade she had it. It wasn’t hours later she heard it.
It was middle school classmates that nicknamed her “Paids”. It was a soccer coach that joked how her HIV could help the team get a win because opponents were too scared to play on the same field.
Paige was at Franklin County High School telling her story Thursday.
“I just hope in some way the students can relate and connect. If they can take just one thing away I am happy. If it is something positive, then that’s good,” Rawl said as she prepared for the presentation.
The Marion County girl was bullied, pulled out of one school, homeschooled, and later enrolled into Herron High School in Indianapolis.
Sharing her story to a gymnasium full of teenagers isn’t anything new for Paige.
In high school she was the one who addressed an audience full of peers when rumors swirled about how she contracted HIV.
“People started finding out because I was doing all these news articles, and all these rumors going around, that ‘she got it this way, she got it that way’, and this and that.”
“So my sophomore year I spoke to my entire high school and I said look, these are the facts,” Paige recalls.
“I had people come up to me after, like, sorry, we really didn’t want to be friends with you because I had this view of people with HIV, or whatever, I educated them, I gave them a couple facts.”
Paige graduated high school and enrolled at Ball State in the fall of 2013. She is taking this year off and plans to be back in Muncie next year continuing her major in molecular biology.
During her freshman year on campus, she joined a sorority but it proved too much, due to her being in the university’s dance marathon plus writing a book.
Positive was released this past August.
It was Paige who had to relive the days she wanted to forget.
“Writing the book, I have always told myself that if my book can save just one life then everything I have ever been through has been worth it.”
On Thursday, Paige also spoke at the high school library and at Brookville Library, just three months after having heart surgery. She said her recovery brings good and bad days, and yesterday was a good day.
Paige and her story will be featured on NBC’s Today Show November 14. Positive is the first non-fiction selected for the show’s book club segment.
Paige will then be traveling across the country to California for a movie premiere Nov. 18.
Award winning filmmaker Andrew Jenks has created a documentary about personal stories of young people from around the world whose lives are affected by HIV/ AIDS.
Paige is the only U.S. citizen featured in the full-length documentary titled “It’s Not Over.”
Rawl is an avid book reader and country music fan who told me she wants to try out for The Voice.
In the meantime, if her story can save one life, then she is doing something positive.
