Read what you love until you love to read

I don’t remember much, to be honest, in the early years of young Kevin and his journey with words. Somewhat surprisingly, I’ve realized a number of formative moments with literacy that have happened beyond those days and actually from these past couple years.

Long before I realized, my Mom was fostering me as a lifelong reader. As one of my earliest memorable interactions with literature, I have this flashbulb memory, from when I was around five years old, where my Mom and I would read aloud this comic book series, Sticky Burr, recounting the adventures across the glade with Sticky Burr and his fellow burrs and arthropods.

As I outgrew animated plant seeds, my continued desire for reading was fulfilled by the recommendations of my elementary school librarian (Hi, Mrs. Roberts!) to many series I still look back in fondness, including Magic Tree House, Percy Jackson, Ranger’s Apprentice, and Harry Potter. In that window of time up until around middle school, weekly trips to the school and public libraries frequently involved bee-lines to the same few bookshelves, in search for the increasingly familiar three-letter abbreviations of the authors. 

Keep in mind, this is still a chubby, no-glasses, twelve-year old self: I was engrossed in the novels because I found enjoyment in living vicariously through these fictitious characters, and that was all that mattered. Just like the little prickly seed across the panes of Sticky Burr, I was the seed, latching onto the story part of the story, developing as a reader with the care of the necessary environmental factors.

Entering middle school, my mom encouraged (read as: pushed) me towards reading the “classics”. Some were okay on the prepubescent-interest-in-reading scale. Others were borderline insufferable. Who in their right mind would want to read 800-page Don Quixote, for leisure? As you can tell, there was little conscious consideration for literary elements, themes, or any of the “intelligent” stuff. That comes later, with time.

Do enough bad writing and some good writing is bound to show up

My relationship with writing takes on a much more condensed timeline. 

I think, like most, multi-sentence writing began as this means-towards-completion endeavor. In middle school, literary analysis became the name of the game, and so I became entrenched in this perspective that writing was a meet-spec task, a necessary academic suffering. This notion for me was reinforced with the routine essays throughout high school.

And then, we have the most non-routine interruption: COVID-19. First came the excess of free-time. What more can a rising junior ask for? 

Then come the thoughts of what-the-heck-am-I-doing-with-my-life. Somewhere between seeking answers about these internal dialogues and wanting to simply document and reflect on the daily happenings, I started a daily journal. (I confess that “daily” has become “weekly”, at best, these past few months, but I digress.) In illuminating my own beliefs and the driving force behind each day and acknowledging the barriers to “the work”, I felt a turning point on the practice of writing as a whole, that “Hey, you know what? Writing isn’t all that terrible.”

Somewhere along the way in high school, I found myself latching onto this one quote from a podcast by this business marketer, author, and blog writer: 

“There’s no such thing as writer’s block. There’s simply a fear of bad writing. Do enough bad writing and some good writing is bound to show up.”

I mean, the first bit sounds totally click-bait. Here comes this guy on his high horse to denounce this widely accepted phenomenon. Though, the more I thought about it, the more I found it to be true. I never had difficulty in coming up with bad ideas to write about, but rather in putting down those words into a document that, in reality, was presently a work-in-progress that no one could see or judge.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… the man who never reads lives only one

In seeing the value of writing, I began to see the other side of reading – for not just entertainment, but in the name of growth. In reading from books that hold truths stretching across generations, centuries even, one gets a glimpse behind those on the other side of a particular definition of success, breadcrumbs on the beliefs and processes by which they did it.

And for me, I think there’s a unique beauty in this act, of learning through not just your own experiences, but those of others – to stand on the shoulders of giants.