How Reading healed me…

I read incessantly as a child.
Anything I could get my hands on.
Narnia, Heidi, Anne of Green Gables - man, was I in love with Gilbert Blythe.
I read Pride and Prejudice, Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, and endless Terry Pratchet, and all before the age of 11.

I remember distinctly loving English in school, and being praised for my creative writing. I remember one time in particular, I had written a futuristic piece of creative writing, and my parents were brought in because the school had assumed I’d copied it from somewhere.

But I hadn’t.
The situation was quickly backpaddled, and what started as an inevitable detention, ended up as an overly enthusiastic congratulations on my impressive creative writing!

But then life happened.
Reading wasn’t cool in the 90’s, and the 00’s. The internet was everywhere, and we weren’t deterred by the dial-up or the brain-melting modem sounds as we jumped onto MSN, MySpace and Hotmail. Reading wasn’t mainstream, there were no bookclubs, - not that I knew of or heard about. There were no conversations about book crazes, or characters that anyone knew about, and the only reading I did for many years was the required reading lists for studying - none of which I enjoyed and none of which I remember!

But then came the dawn of social media.
And bully it as we may - for me, this was the dawn of a new age.

See, what I’ve come to realise as a grown woman, is that I had a very controlled childhood. I wasn’t allowed to watch Disney, or Home and Away. I wasn’t exposed to movies like Dirty Dancing, Grease and The Bodyguard, and the small exposure I did have to books and TV dried up quickly and became stale.

Why?

Because I was essentially taught that my imagination was only ‘good’ if it was used for a very limited list of things.
Anything outside of those parameters? - Bad.

Fear not - since then I have rectified the situation and watched all the necessary movies, and moved the lines that were placed on me - but books took a little longer.

It was only when I turned 40 and did a little self-reflection that I realised I didn’t recognise myself, from any angle, in the metaphorical mirror.

I embarked on a journey of re-discovery, which inevitably means reinvention, but one of the easiest things to restore was - my love of reading.

I set myself a GoodReads challenge of 12 books, and read 82.

I was HOOKED.

And how was I hooked?

BookTok / BookStagram made me do it. (that # is truth in my world)

Someone out there in the cyberworld of algorithms and hashtags told me about a little book called “A Court of Thorns and Roses” - which I had never heard of. I’d never read fantasy, or heard of Romantasy - but I thought I’d give it a whirl.

No one warned me that this book was a gateway drug, that I was essentially joining a cult, and my TBR was about to become my entire personality.

But here’s the truth of the matter.
I was reading.
More than that - I was reading books that challenged my creativity, that sparked my imagination, and took me on emotional journeys that I can only describe as brutally beautiful.

It was then that I realised how stunted my own exposure had been, both to the fictional world and to the real one.

It started to unravel me, I was empowered to confront parts of myself that I’d never noticed lingered beneath the surface. I started to question things I’d always taken as a given, and I started to remove rose-tinted glasses from a world that was pretty dark and undeserving.

Reading saved me in so many ways.

It gave me a sanctuary to have private moments of escape when I needed them.
It gave me a view into worlds where people thought differently to me and as a result, had different outcomes to mine.
I gave my imagination a jump start into creativity that I’d never felt.
It wrapped my soul up in story after story, of passion, conflict, love, and brutal truths, that I was never allowed to see.
It took me on a journey back to my most authentic self, where playing dress up isn’t necessary, because what lies beneath is enough.

Reading saved me.
Because it made me realise that the me that grew beneath the concrete of control - that me?
That me was ok.