While middle school can be challenging for any pre-teen, try getting through seventh grade in a bulky, inflexible plastic brace wrapped so tightly around your torso that breathing is tricky and bending to pick up a pencil is nearly impossible.

For freshman Rachel Mulvaney, who wore a brace every waking hour, and many sleeping hours too, from age 11 to 14, memories of being teased are fresh. In the locker room, classmates would take her brace and refuse to give it back. Students called her names. At lunch, she sat alone.

“The girl who was once outgoing and happy was quickly disappearing,” Rachel writes in Straight Talk with the Curvy Girls: Scoliosis – Brace Yourself for What You Need to Know, a publication she co-wrote with eight other young women about what it’s like to grow up with scoliosis. She wanted to turn her suffering into an opportunity to help others. And it’s working. Response to the book has been positive and thousands of copies have been sold. It is especially popular with patients, orthopedists, physical therapists, and orthotists, the people who make the braces.

“We hope this book helps parents and kids on their journey,” Rachel said. “I want to give back the unconditional support that I received during my time of need, and participating in this book is one way of doing that.”

Some of that unconditional support came from a nonprofit support group, Curvy Girls, which started as a chapter in New York with only Rachel and three other girls. She says her life changed for the better when she met Leah Stoltz, who started Curvy Girls. “I felt so incredible to be in a room with other girls who had the same feelings I had. I realized I wasn’t alone.” Curvy Girls has since has expanded to 55 chapters in 35 states and four countries, and Rachel is now working with a local girl to start a chapter in Rhode Island.

“It’s been incredible to take something that started off so negative and turn it into something so positive,’’ said Mulvaney, who kept her brace and uses it as a prop when she visits middle schools to talk about bullying. “It’s funny; people ask me if I would ever take anything back. I’d never take anything back. Everything that happened to me makes me who I am today.’’