I grew up surrounded by stories. I was well studied in the fields of Star Wars and Harry Potter by the time I started kindergarten. I fell asleep each night to my dad weaving bedtime stories with all my favorite characters embarking on fantastic adventures, made vivid by my half-dreaming imagination. So it wouldn’t be a stretch to expect me to fall in love quickly with the most common modes of storytelling, reading and writing. That’s not quite what happened.
As I grew into my role as kindergartener, my parents found me a reluctant reader. I found the simple books of rhymes and four-letter words, intended to teach me to read, incredibly dull. My mom had to force me to read chapter books in first grade. This continued in a similar fashion until I saw the second-to-last Harry Potter movie, newly released in theatres. Here was a story I was familiar and in love with, one that I needed to know the end to – and therefore had to read my way to the last part of the series. I had heard that a friend had their parents reading the series to them, and demanded the same of my own: I couldn’t wait to hear the rest of the story! But my parents refused to read it to me, so I was forced to embark upon my maiden voyage in reading: the Harry Potter series.
I owe all my growth in thought and perspective to the Harry Potter series and the doors it opened for me. For the first time, I enjoyed reading. I couldn’t stop. By fourth grade, I had read the entire series four times over and planned to keep on going. That is, until my English teacher, Mrs. Staub, forced upon me a reading log, demanding books from all genres – effectively putting an end to the Harry Potter craze I had succumbed to. But the floodgates were open at this point, and I found that every book I read held a story I simply couldn’t put down. While I owe my reading dedication to Harry Potter, I owe my willingness to try new books to Mrs. Staub. It is through these two aspects of my reading experience that I have learned to live, to love, to form opinions on issues and dilemmas I would never have been exposed to otherwise.
For someone who has had little opportunity to travel and experienced very little of life’s obstacles in my relatively few years, books have been a means for me to meet all of life’s wonders and struggles on a trial basis. They have shown me places – both real and fictional – beyond my imagination and created in me a desire, a need to travel and see everything I can about the world I live in. They have prompted me to think on ethical and moral dilemmas I knew nothing of until reading them: prioritizing values in impossible situations; learning the essence of what it means to love and be loved; how to balance all the aspects of my ever-changing self. Facing these questions and contemplating them as I stumbled upon them in books was a gift, one that allowed me to prepare myself and my values before I ever needed to challenge them in a meaningful way. Just as school prepares students for their careers, books have prepared me to face life’s social and moral aspects.
In a possibly even more meaningful way, books have gifted me the power to reflect and remember the ways I have grown and changed. As I mentioned, I often learned from situations in books about what values or reactions are the most significant in life. More importantly, the more I read and lived my own life, I learned to decide these things for myself by reflecting on the wide range of things I had read, learned from my parents and other role models, and my own experiences. As I read one book that contradicted another’s themes, I discovered that no one person has the answers on how to face the world – something that at first confused and scared me until I began to trust in my own ability to create the answers for myself.
Now, looking back on who I was in elementary, middle, and high school, I can see the ways I have grown into a person with confidence and conviction in my values even as I retain the ability to continue changing and learning. Looking back at old books, I can see who I was as I read them; I can reread the moments when I learned a brand new thing about love or loss or confidence. Reading remains one of the most pivotal aspects of my life today: it soothes me when I am stressed, comforts me when I am sad, and enlivens me when I feel a hunger to see the world. After all this time, books still spark wonder and joy in me, still teach me new things about the people and places I walk among in my daily life.
The one thing I am still learning is to live a life separate from my books – to live without constant distraction and instead experience the world I live in rather than the world on the pages. I have allowed the stories I love to consume my thoughts and feelings in everyday life; recently I have made the effort to find the wonder of the stories I love in each day – no matter how mundane the days seem. One of the magics of books is the ability to turn someone ordinary into a heroine. The last lesson books will teach me is how to be the heroine of my own story.