You Were Built Different

I have been thinking about you for a long time. Not you specifically, maybe. But the child you are. The one who knows things about hospitals that children should not have to know. The one who has a word in their life, a big medical word, that sits in the center of everything like a stone in a stream, and all the water of ordinary life has to move around it.

This is not a book that will fix anything. It will not make the appointments easier or the scars disappear or the fear go quiet on the nights it decides to be loud. What it will do, I hope, is sit beside you. The way a good friend sits beside you. Not trying to talk you out of what you feel. Not handing you a silver lining. Just present. Just close. Just saying: I know. I see you. You are not alone in this.

There is no wrong way to receive something that was made for you. This was made for you.

You know the particular silence of a car ride to a hospital before the sun comes up. You know what it feels like to sign a form that gives someone permission to operate on the heart of the person you love most in the world. You know the waiting room.

This book was written for the child in your life. But some of these pages will find you too. That you will read certain lines and feel something you have been carrying for a long time finally get named. If that happens, let it. You are allowed to be moved. You are allowed to need this as much as they do.

You can read it together, out loud, slowly. You can give it to them and say nothing, just leave it where they will find it. You can place it in a hospital bag, on a nightstand, in the hands of a child who is about to go through something hard. It will meet them there.