Read It, Don't Weep!

I was always a bookworm as soon as I first learnt to read. Early memories consist of the typical kid’s books we all endure, classics such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar, with a variant of bright colours, to Five Minutes Peace, a book apparently designed to explain to children using characters in elephant form, that they cause their parents a great deal of stress. Graduating to books with scarceness for pictures, Roald Dahl would be my preferred author, along with a few young reader classics, such as C.S. Lewis, a lot of whose novels I recall following on tape in accompaniment to my book.

As I got older, whilst I found myself more of a regular reader than others my age (or older!), a few years into my teens and books were being cast aside for films, another personal love. Instead of reading stories in a book, I would watch them on screen, some of those books I used to read being reimagined on film.

I did continue to read regularly, but I did find myself struggling to start and finish within a reasonable amount of time, if finish at all! My concentration levels were not so strong, and I found myself fantasizing about stories that could possibly be projected to film one day.

One genre I will say could always keep my attention though was that of true crime. Both mysterious and terrifying, some true crime stories could indeed leave one’s spine tingling, and it paved the way for an (as others might consider) unhealthy interest in the macabre.

Creativity and the arts can provide a tremendous effect towards recovery with mental health woes. In my twenties I had a breakdown and took a good few months to try and come to terms with the mental health issues that had plagued me through most of my life, to explore the root cause, the feelings I was experiencing and what I wanted and needed to be healthy again, or more accurately, for once.

One day, after having spent so much time feeling nothing had improved, I had an epiphany in the form of what you might call sticking my middle finger up at the world. I’d had enough of feeling low and enough of being stuck in my head.

So what did this have to do with books? Well, as part of this reactionary approach to some venting voice within my head finally having lost it, I took a somewhat rebellious turn and decided to cleanse myself and stick to just one sure thing. One thing that would allow me to immerse myself in, where I could take my mind of the mental garbage that was relentlessly flowing through my head, moving the focus from worries and anxieties and doing something straightforward: reading. I would seek out a series of books; find something I was interested in and could get pulled into, be excited about and follow. I began reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, a collection of books my husband had read and regarded highly amongst fantasy fiction. I had no interest in the genre much before and was jumping in at the deep end considering the length and small print of the books! Feet first: no going back.

I was rekindling my relationship with the library, a haven of literature, right on my doorstep and free - free!!

Yet it wasn’t enough just to read one book. The more excited I became about my newfound healing process the more I wanted to consume. That’s when I started the 3 books at a time policy: 3 books, at least one from the true crime genre, and something for every occasion (bus journeys, waiting for busses and eventually when I went back to work, lunch time reads).

To this day, I have not relented. I try as much as possible, though non-fiction has taken a front seat over fiction. Not only has physical book reading become an obsession, but reading in general. Thanks to Wikipedia, I would get a taste for all kinds of (yes, mostly true crime) stories out there and be led into a rabbit hole of finding out more from books that have been written about them. I have come across the infamous, the obscure and all kinds of other topics of interest.

Whilst I like to write, paint and generally be creative, it is reading that captivates, entertains, enlivens, and inspires and its both a great comfort and a healer.