Trigger warning: miscarriage/pregnancy loss
“I think I’m always so much more happy with books and movies and stuff.”
- Before Sunrise (1995)
There are very few constants in life, but for me it’s stories.
I’ve always been able to lose myself in-between the pages of a book and forget, even for just a moment, about the realities of the world.
I think it first started in high school. Like most teenage girls I felt lonely and misunderstood. I was being bullied by another girl in my so-called friendship group. And in the reality I’d constructed for myself I was too fat, too awkward, too ugly. Just too much of anything and everything. So it felt safer to disappear into fictional worlds rather than navigate the trials and tribulations of girlhood and growing up. In the pages of a story, I was never alone and I could be whoever I wanted to be. It was when I was the most happy.
I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. In “Lose yourself in a novel to boost longevity”, the author says “connecting with characters can help to ease feelings of loneliness”. And I think so many of us who identify as readers turn to books when we feel lost and misunderstood in the real world. Sometimes, as sad as it might sound to outsiders, our deepest connections are fictional ones. They soothe us when the world gets hard and help the loneliness to subside.
I’ve always been a reader and stories have always been my lifeblood.
And even though I always had my nose in a book, I devoured them more fervently during challenging or more turbulent moments in my life: bullying, grandparent deaths, friendship break-ups, feeling overwhelmed in university, even entering the workforce. When I moved from my childhood home into my own house with my now-husband, books were incredibly grounding in this huge life transition. Re-reading, especially, was my biggest friend.
But I struggled with reading after I became engaged and got married in 2019.
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