Sunday morning started brilliantly. I slept in till 9:00, got up for breakfast at the kitchen table (grits and a glass of milk, because, yes, I’m southern), then back to my warm bed to finish my romance novel. As I lay there, completely lost in this little Oregon town with a family of ranchers, a lost little boy, and an insecure clairvoyant, I felt immensely happy. Not because of the story I was reading, necessarily (the writing actually made me snort a couple times), but because of the act itself. It reminded me of when I was in high school and I would stay up so incredibly late to finish the latest Sarah Dessen book, or the day that I spent from dawn till dusk engrossed with the pages of a cozy romance, or how I would lie around the house as a teenager reading when I could be doing anything else in the world. That is what reading in bed this morning made me miss.
Somehow, college had a tendency to make me hate reading. The English major who loved to read came to resent it at times. I used to absorb books like they were food, and without them I would become malnourished and die. There was a little while in college when I became more concerned with “going out” and “guys” and “having a social life.” I was getting pressure from my mom about having friends my own age and being normal. I know she was just worried that I wasn’t becoming who she envisioned me being, but my mom has always seemed to struggle with my idea of myself versus her idea of me, and our butting heads caused a lot of stress and anxiety that I still feel the ripple effects of today. I never learned how to be the independent, focused Hermione Granger that I wish I could’ve been in college. It wasn’t just my mom, though. Em was also telling me that I needed to get over my fear of confrontation and my shyness. I felt pressure to be fearless and assertive in a world that just made me want to curl up in a ball at times and sleep away my problems. I couldn’t cope, so I fell backwards into the dark hole of apathy. It is not a place I suggest one visit.
I don’t like to call myself shy anymore. Shy was a word to describe myself at 10, 14, 17. At 22, I prefer the word “reserved.” I don’t think I can’t or shouldn’t be assertive or outspoken or fearless just because I’m reserved. I very much believe I can be all of those things and reserved by nature. Because I am. Only when I get comfortable with a person am I less reserved, more open and funny and even ridiculous. I’m sure you’re wondering what this all has to do with me falling back in love with reading.
During a first-year English course with one of my favorite professors, Ms. Nobles, she described the key to writing a winning academic paper. She drew a circle on the board, the tail-end slightly overlapping its beginning mark. She said, “when you’re finished with a paper you should have come back where you started, yet gone even further.” Think of the ending to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It is the best example of Ms. Nobles’ description I can think of, and if you haven’t read it, you should. It’s an amazing story. We see Francie on the fire escape watching little Florry Wendy read just like she used to at the tender age of 10, but now Francie is 17 and about to leave for college. After all she’s gone through, she’s back where she started, only not. Things have happened, plans have been set in motion, her life in that small Brooklyn apartment is coming to a close, so that she can begin anew somewhere else. She went further. This is what I’m trying to do with my life.
I think I will always be reserved, shy, introverted — whatever you want to call it. “Whenever I come over, she’s never out with friends, always curled up on the couch reading a book,” my dad’s friend and co-worker, Jon, said to him once. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I’ve struggled a lot over the last few years with questions of how I was, how I am, and how I feel I should be. I won’t learn about people unless I stop reading and actually watch how they act and speak and think; I won’t learn how to stand up for myself unless I stop feeling so self-repressed and afraid to confront others; I won’t find flesh and blood friends or a husband behind the pages of a book. But, for me, falling back in love with reading is about falling back in love with myself — knowing that, even though there is a part of me in my past that still remains inside of me today, doesn’t mean I can’t go further. For a long time, I’ve tried to fight myself over who I was. When I was younger, I used to hate when my dad would gruffly tell me what he expected of me. Why couldn’t he broach the subject in a way that would make me interested and eager to learn? It’s taken me a long time to realize that I’ve been treating myself with the exact same roughness. It is no wonder why it hasn’t worked. The best thing to tell a person to do is to just be themselves. I will always be awkward, I will always be introverted, I will always be reticent, but the part where I go further than where I was before is in accepting who I am. Not who I want to be in the future, but who I am today — in this moment and the next.