Reading and writing has always had an element of escapism for me. I was anxious, sometimes depressed, and as a kid, I couldn’t parse any of that. I knew I was afraid, but of what, I couldn’t be sure. At school I countered this by being loud and aggressive, but at home I wanted to get away. I journaled to empty my brain of whatever was plaguing me, and I read to fill it back up with something else. Something better.
My parents didn’t restrict the kinds of music, television, or books my brother and I consumed, so I was free to dictate my own journey. I read what I could get my hands on in the school library, many abridged classics for children we had at home, hand-me-down sets of Little House on the Prairie or The Babysitter’s Club books from older cousins. When I ran out of material, I went for whatever I could find in our house. My Dad was a fan of Clive Cussler’s novels, so I read some of those at a fairly young age. Because of one particular scene, I thought the word “navel” referred to a more intimate part of the body for a while, before I finally looked it up in the dictionary. I shot high, attempting (and failing) to read Gone With the Wind at ten. It took me a long time, but I slogged through Little Women and Pride and Prejudice, understanding little, but feeling accomplished for having read them. I read lots of words I didn’t know how to pronounce, but I tried them out in conversation anyway.
If I wasn’t imagining myself as Elizabeth Bennet or Jo March, I was reading fantasy novels. The Harry Potter books were published throughout my childhood, and I would sit in my room and immerse myself in them. I read His Dark Materials in middle school and cried at the end. A cousin introduced me to the Sword of Truth series and the violence and sex made me feel like I was reading something deliciously adult. High school English introduced me to Shakespeare and I fell in love. I started writing poetry alongside the short stories I was already writing. Then I went to college to get an English Lit degree.
Sometime between consuming the classics as a child and studying them in college, I became a book snob. If other people were reading it, I didn’t want anything to do with it. I eschewed what I saw as excessive, overt fandom. I wanted to be a serious reader, and a serious writer, but when I graduated, I didn’t write for years. My reading pendulum swung in a new direction. If it was dense, difficult, depressing, or ideally all three, it was for me. Perhaps I was looking for a new way to mentally flagellate myself because I was focusing on building a practical career and sidelining my writing ambitions. Still, after a boyfriend broke up with me one month after I first moved to New York City, I returned to the Sword of Truth series like running back to an ex.
In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I turned thirty, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wondered what I could do with my thirtieth year that would mean the most to me. I had a career and a partner, but not a solid writing practice. I gave myself a goal: to write every day, for at least an hour a day, for 66 days in a row, the amount of time current research suggests it takes to build a habit. I successfully completed my 66-day challenge, and on day 64 I finished the first draft of the novel that has been bouncing around my head for the past decade.
While I was at home hiding from a rampant virus and finally writing, I needed to read more to keep my brain engaged, and I wanted an escape again. It didn’t matter what I was reading while I was stuck at home, no one would see me on the subway and decide that I had bad taste in books, so I dove back into what I once loved most. I re-read His Dark Materials and I cried harder reading the last chapter than I had when I read it at thirteen. I finished the Dune series, even though a friend told me you didn’t really need to read past the third book. (I think they were right, but God Emperor of Dune was kind of fun). I dabbled in Young Adult fiction again, after avoiding it for a long time, and found that my bias against that genre is unfounded, just like many biases tend to be.
I don’t regret the years I spent building my career, finding myself, and not focusing on writing or reading. I needed to focus on living and to make mistakes. What I do regret is the time I spent holding myself back because I was trying so hard to be cool, or smart, or what I thought a cool and smart person should be. I faced myself during lockdown and had to recognize some things I didn’t care for, like the fact that I wasn’t finishing my novel because I didn’t think it was “literary” enough.
I feed my imagination now. I read what calls to me and try not to limit myself because of preconceived ideas about genre or an arbitrary scale of literary merit. I’m writing a speculative/sci-fi novel. I write short stories and let them be as strange as they need to be. I give myself over to fandom and fantasy and excitement. I even hung a print of the Bene Gesserit litany against fear, from Dune, above my desk because it inspires me to push through hard moments instead of crippling myself. If that makes me a big fucking nerd, so be it.
