Jacey Verdicchio - A Children's Author

I recently posted about an incredible book I was reading, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand.  The book tells the true story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic athlete turned American POW during World War II.  I gained an awe and respect for the suffering Zamperini endured, and the victorious postwar life he led, positively affecting the lives of many people.  Recently, I learned that the author who so meticulously recorded and illuminated Louie’s life story has endured a suffering of her own since 1987.

After an extreme case of food poisoning that turned into an illness lasting several weeks, Hillenbrand was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome as a 19 year old college sophomore.  Her illness was so debilitating that it forced her to drop out of school.  She has spent portions of her life bedridden, sometimes for several years.  Six years after the initial onset of CFS, Hillenbrand developed severe and chronic vertigo, which causes the sensation of spinning, pitching and rolling.  She recounts being unable to read or write for two years as a result of her extreme condition.  Yet, despite a life of chronic suffering, she has written two bestselling books, one of which became a movie and Universal is currently working on the Unbroken movie.

In the back of Seabiscuit, her former masterpiece before Unbroken, an interview with Hillenbrand is printed.  Here are a few of her words about writing Seabiscuit:

“Writing this book was immensely important to me, but my illness made it very hard.  I had to accept that there would be a large physical price to pay for undertaking this project...For the four years that I researched and wrote this book, I did virtually nothing else.  I devoted everything I had to it...I stacked my research books in a semicircle on the floor around my chair so I wouldn’t have to get up to get them.  I couldn’t travel to my sources, but found ways around that...I worked whenever I had strength, sometimes at odd hours, and I often worked until completely exhausted and dizzy.  There were days when it was almost impossible to move, but I usually found something I still had the strength to do.  If I was too dizzy to write, I did interviews.  If I was too weak to sift through books, I sat still and wrote.  Sometimes I worked while in bed, lying on my back and scribbling on a pad with my eyes closed.  Though it was hard to do this, there was never a point at which I became discouraged.  These subjects were just too captivating for me to ever consider abandoning the project.  The price I paid was steep.  Within hours of submitting the manuscript, my health collapsed completely...Well over a year later, I still haven’t completely recovered.  But it was worth it...

"...Being sick has truncated my life dramatically, drastically narrowing the possibilities for me.  For fifteen years, I have had very little contact with the world.  The illness has left me very few avenues for achievement, for connection with people.  Writing is my salvation, the one little area of my life where I can still reach out into the world and create something that will remain after I’m gone.  It enables me to define myself as a writer instead of as a sick person.  Because of this, I felt an immensely powerful motivation for writing this book, and writing it as well as I could.”

She overcame every obstacle in the path toward her goal, accomplishing something most writers never will in a healthy lifetime.  So often, we define ourselves by our limitations, the boxes we put ourselves in to avoid the discomfort of playing in a bigger space, of taking the risk of significant work.  Hillenbrand is inspiring because she proved that reality and circumstances limit us only to the point we allow them to.  What’s holding you back?