Why I Don't Hate "The Fault in the Stars".

For those who don't know what this is, The Fault in the Stars (TFIOS) is a book by John Green turned movie about a teenage girl with terminal cancer who falls for a boy with terminal cancer; sadness and heartbreak ensues. The problem a lot of young people who suffer from cancer or other difficult chronic illness have is how Hazel's cancer seems to be romanticized or how the actors are healthy non-disabled people or... well I could make a much longer list but that's not the point of this.

Truth is, while, yes I do see the "fault" in this movie (yes, I hate that I said that too) there is one element that I do enjoy as someone who has a ever failing respiratory system. I always hid my illness and tried to seem as healthy as possible growing up, but TFIOS changed that for me. It was the first time I saw someone sick on screen who was my age. For the first time I was seeing a chronically ill person, who was my age, represented in a very familiar young adult romance setting. Especially with respiratory complication I often found that most of the people who shared my woes were those over the age of 75; at least that's how I always saw it represented.

So even though I can't say TFIOS is the most accurate movie I've watched, it still changed for something for me in the way I saw my self and my illness and the way other people saw me illness as well. It normalized a part of me that I always saw as weird and abnormal.