Brave Enough by Jessie Diggins
Hi, I am Sarah. I am fourteen years old and an avid reader; it is one of my favorite things to do. Inspired by authors’ creations of magnificent places and surprising havens built by simple letters, I aspire to be an author and, meanwhile, nurture the love to write.
“I can do it myself,” said twelve-year-old Jessie Diggins, tromping through the Boundary wilderness, vehemently resolved to carry her own canoe. She was fiercely determined and had long since fallen in love with the wilderness.
This was the same sentiment that pushed her across the brightly-lit, fan-clogged finish line in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in 2018, her left ski thrust in front of her, her arms thrown up in celebration as she crossed the finish line to win the first-ever US cross-country gold medal in the Winter Olympic Games.
It’s this same drive, I can do it myself; this same independence that streaks through her everyday life, as a professional Nordic skier and beyond.
How’d Jessie go from a scrappy twelve-year-old to a famous, professional athlete? That’s the story of Brave Enough: a Nordic skier’s autobiography. This is a bubbly story, one built of sweat and hard work, of triumph and hardship, of slippery skis and grueling races, peppered throughout with a healthy amount of glitter. And it is an honest story, these pages extending far past races and ribbons. Diggins openly shares her struggles with an eating disorder and her recovery, reaching out to spread hope to others with her shared experience.
Ultimately, it is a strong story, and an independent one: of finding your own drive, your own, fierce voice, that one that tells you that you can do it. That you are brave enough.
