As a child, I remember laying on my twin-sized bed. On one side, all my stuffed animals lined up by size and importance, then me and my mother on the other. Each night, smelling like strawberry shampoo, I would line up my cotton menagerie, wiggle under the covers, and rest my head on my pillow, as my mother told me fantastic myths and legends whilst braiding my damp hair. I drifted off to sleep on the ebb and flow of my mother’s intonation. To a childhood me, the power of story was merely a way to fall asleep, to be carried off to another realm on the words of my mother. This ritual continued into elementary school, but abruptly stopped.
As small hands and effervescent voices began to experience books that lacked hues and put my glasses to use, then only did I truly discover the power of story. Nuzzled up with my inanimate friends, I would read to them late into the night (which for me at that time was roughly around 9 P. M. ). I would tell them of the mythical world of Ella Enchanted, laughing about giant cheese puffs and fairies, or of The Phantom Tollbooth, and I would entice my calico audience with stories of orchestras painting the skies in pastels and vivid marketplaces where every word and letter imaginable is sold.
This ritual continued into middle school, but soon I only read to myself, molding stories in frames that I sought fit, and appealing to only my own imagination and wants. Books became a way to titillate my brain, to escape into a world unlike my own. I would reread stories, each time fingerpainting different illustrations across the walls of my skull. Few times I would imagine myself as the main character, such as an orphan forced to perform in grandiose seances like Maud in A Drowned Maiden’s Hair, but usually I was an omnipresent being, overlooking mass estruction and vengeance like in Abduction! or … At the time, I found some things too difficult to comprehend.
Books became morose. Books ached and suffered. I wandered from stories derived from daydreams, books that made me giggle like bubbling creeks that weave through lush woods, to books that left me quiet and still, heavy like dense air before a tempest. Literature began to shove me into stories that told of the human condition, of relentless greed and malice. Books began to slowly peel back the intricate layers of life, and expose the putrid and corrupt.
This is when literature began to change my perspective. I had always believed all people were inherently virtuous, that wicked behavior like murder, kidnapping, and deception were almost fairytales in their own like, vile but fictitious. Call it ignorance, but I was a child. Seeing the world behind rose colored glasses made me content, and I tried desperately to keep my universe of giant food and kaleidoscopic skies controlled merely by symphony alive. Like a sunflower that grew with my five-pointed stars toward the sun, I was plucked from that world.
It did not help that during this period in my life | was finally learning about world history: plagues, sackings, mass murders, and my grandma had fallen a victim to cancer as well. In retrospect, the colorless and wretched books that I read during this period in my life, fortified a backbone within my being. I started to see those same debased books through a different light. I began to read The Diary of Anne Frank, and I was “Kitty”“. Through me, Anne’s story could live on. Her struggle moved me in ways not many books have.
I began to see stories in this way. I started to see books as a way for the narrator to speak through to me, to tell me that this happened to them, fictitious or not, and to let their story live on, to let their story impact and change me. Today, I am the complex amalgamation of every book I have encountered. I stopped trying to contort stories to fit my mold, to alter and adjust them to fit the confines of my imagination. I let them be. Stories were no longer big, misshapen pictures that I cut with kid-safety scissors to fit into perfectly carved frames.
Stories were theatrical, stories were symphonies of the incessant drums of agony and the glimmering and rolling notes of promise. Stories wailed in misery and they roared with thunderous laughter. I became a passenger instead of the driver. I let the story direct me, instead of the other way around. Because of this, I learned empathy. I sought to see an issue from every side, not just the one facing me. I learned to be patient, to let the story guide me, whether it was slowly like desert nomads who leisurely follow camels across sandy dunes, or quickly like riding on the back of horse through seas of delicate green.
Literature became an escape, but an escape into not my own convoluted world, but into someone else’s. It was a way to accompany the book’s consciousness. Before, only my idyllic view mattered, now my view was secondary. I read stories envisioning vividly the world in front of me in the way it is presented, but still allowing my own views to see the spotlight. In this way, I truly connected with the story. I could finish entire novels in one sitting. I was encapsulated into this wonderful combination of my own commentary along with the story.
I remember distinctly reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, and muttering to myself when Jeannette’s mother showed infantile behavior, or closing my book in disgust when Jeannette was raped whilst playing hide-n-seek. I remember finishing all 480 pages of Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami in one sitting, and then subsequently bawling my eyes out at the death of Nakata whilst simultaneously texting all my friends to read it so that I can ask them their opinions on the labyrinthine plotline. The entire Harry Potter series was a blur of laughter, tears, and papercuts.
Stories became their own entities that influenced me deeply. Stories had always made me tear up and laugh when I was a child, but now it was different. As a child, I would tear up simply because a dog died, or someone who the narrator loved was hurt. But as I grew up, I would cry because I felt that loss. I saw it not from an outsider’s lens, but I felt that ting of unyielding sadness within me. This applied to any emotion the narrator experienced. I saw it all through them. I became a more wellrounded person. Rigid corners turned soft and malleable, I was in a state of constant experience and change.
Each book I read changed some part of me. Each story allowed me insight on an experience I have yet felt, for no one experiences the same thing in the same exact way. It all relates to merging with another’s consciousness, which is in a sense the true power of story. Experiences shape people and our opinions. Each person on this planet is the product of his or her own internal monologue, but also the product of all the external discourse that they encounter, which is someone else’s internal conscious thinking. The precise blending of these two is crucial to creating a well-rounded member of society.
Too much of one or the other, and you either have someone who is too arrogant and insular or someone who is indecisive, going whichever way the wind blows or the currents sway. Books allow people to be able to find a balance between these two through experience, to live by another consciousness through complex words on delicate pages. The power of story taught me things that I would not have been able to experience in my suburban bubble. Literature taught me not what to feel, but how to feel. How to connect with someone who carries different burdens on their back, and to understand that the human condition is complicated at best.
A story can be an escape to one or a merely a way to pass the time to another, but it is in our human nature to connect with one another, and no matter why someone flips open the cover of a book, they are in one way or another seeking to find a connection somehow to something within the pages of a story, and that truly is the power of literature. Literature has the ability to build bridges and make those connections for us so that we can flourish and grow as people, and the amalgamation between our internal and external monologue is not water that helps us bloom, but the roots that keep us anchored, it is the foundation of our beings.
