As a long established introvert, books became my safe haven as early as the age of five. One of my earliest memories is sitting outside on my porch with a notebook on my lap and not a clue on how to write. Naturally, crayon in hand, I scribbled away and made my very own dialect that was lost the instant I put the crayon down. Nevertheless, a relationship with words and thoughts took birth. The majority of my teenage years sees a slight annoyance with most people and anxiety lost in the pages of a good book. For those of you whom I just described, we have a hard awakening after us. Or maybe it had already hit you. Because the truth is, as much as we insist that hiding behind a book will work for the rest of our lives, it never will. As Jennifer Donnelly once said, “Books are wonderful things, but you can’t live in someone else’s story. You have to live your own story.” This quote and ending my junior year of high school led to the creation of a bucket list, and a habit of carrying a book in my bag everywhere I go. Because although books can’t be the entirety of our existence, they can certainly be a part of it. In brief, allow books to be a source of comfort, creativity, knowledge, and experience but allow yourself to be one too. For this, I will be forever grateful to every author and storyteller, whether they are a graduate writing for the New York Times, or a five-year-old girl writing on her parent’s porch.
