Reading almost destroyed my life.
It’s easy, so easy, to slip into another world and look up, bleary eyed, and not know what has been going on around you. It’s easier still, when you’ve been doing it as long as I have.
“How do you have the time for all these books?” This was the standard question for me in those days. The answer always seemed ridiculously easy: I didn’t do anything else. I was drugged; my life only functioned to get my hands on the next book. I felt like I was world hopping, using Orchard Park Middle School only as a kind of way station for the next adventure. I read everything I could get my hands on, anything that had the resonance of a story. My mother used to come down to breakfast only to find me reading the sports section, which later she commented seemed “pretty desperate.” My parents were in the unique situation of having to actually take books away from me, until I finished my homework. I never did homework at home. I had been called smart so long; I was so arrogant, that I saw school as too easy and beneath me. I did my work on the bus, or late at night when I couldn’t procrastinate with books anymore. I must have confused my teachers. They saw a smart girl, a very mature young adult, who had the potential for schoolwork but frequently ignored or forgot about it.
This trend of me shutting out the world continued without pause until I tried something completely new: Gone with the Wind. I thought I was so smart (I was so arrogant) that any book, despite the length, would have been no match for me. I was wrong. Here, I struggled. It took me a month, a month to read a book that was no bigger than any of my other beloved fantasy novels. I was so frustrated, I yelled at Scarlett when I finished. Her, “I’ll think about it tomorrow” attitude was the cause of this whole stupid book, in my eyes. The truth was, I didn’t get it. How could such a boring book be called a classic? I didn’t get it because I couldn’t contextualize it. I wasn’t smart, I was a machine that could read words and not analyze their meaning. I know that now.
My turning point came in eighth grade. Here, I discovered friends and here, I discovered writing. I came, as so many young nerds do, to the Latin classroom of the high school that year. It was an accelerated program that bused us to the high school and back to the middle school every morning. By the end of the first week me and three other girls were making dirty sentences in Latin, (“Sextus est puer molestus”), and by the end of the second we’d exchanged phone numbers. These same girls were in my “Creative Writing study hall” every other day, a class that was put together by a very caring English teacher who had noticed the boredom of some of her top students. I was not, as I first thought I would be, immediately good at writing. My arrogance slipped, just enough to let some people in. My Latin friends became people I liked, people I could talk to as easily as adults. These girls were smart, and I wanted to be part of their world. So I worked at it. We bonded over our stories, and our creative processes, and I felt like I had met people who would never exclude me. To this day, I can honestly say they never have.
Eventually, my parents began to see a change. They didn’t have to bug me about homework, or check to make sure I wasn’t reading, because I would have done it already. The cause was simple: my other friends were done with theirs, so mine was done too. I also found my way through writing. In eighth grade, it was a fantasy story about vampires and fairies. In ninth grade, it was (of course) more teenage romance. By the time I got to my senior year, I had worked my way up to plot structure and the realms of dreams. The subject didn’t matter; I put as much work into my characters as my nightly diary. What mattered was that I had to look outside of my little world for characters, plots, settings, techniques, styles, and ideas. Through writing, I could contextualize and I could create the foundations for communication. Scarlett still makes no sense, but so many other worlds have been opened to me because I can write. In all honesty, I may never revisit Gone with the Wind. It stands in my memory as a monument to my former brilliance, and my total arrogance.