In “Dreams,” Langston Hughes writes about the importance of holding onto dreams. Without them, he says, life is meaningless. His poem describes my relationship with reading almost perfectly — a relationship that shaped me, sustained me, and revealed something troubling about the society around me: we are losing the very practices that teach us empathy, nuance, and patience.
My love for reading, instilled by my mother and grandmother, was my first pastime. Over time, that relationship began to fray, leaving an indescribable loss. Only recently have I understood that letting go of reading was like breaking my own wings — destroying something that once brought me joy.
Let me take you back to a few of my earliest years. When I was young, my grandmother watched me while my mom worked. I spent my days cooking and gardening beside her, with my favorite “job” helping with the grocery list. I would listen to her name the items she needed and scribble my own “list.” And at night, my mother read me bedtime stories, unknowingly fueling my love for nighttime reading that continues today.
Throughout elementary school, my love for reading, first nurtured by my family, grew exponentially with the help of my teachers. When I started pre-K, I was already the kid attempting to read during nap time, continuing a habit I had started at home. By the following year, I was sitting in on a second-grade class, reading along and listening to their discussions. I had solved my nap-time dilemma; instead of staring at the ceiling creating stories, I had real ones to discover. Later, one of my teachers not only noticed my love for reading but also encouraged me to write.
I checked out book after book while filling my notebook with ideas. Some were inspired by topics explored in the books, and others by imagining continuations of books I loved. By the middle of the year, the notebook was filled with thoughts. I absolutely loved how books expanded my world: on any given day, I could be exploring the Catacombs of Paris, imagining the Purple People-Eater, or discovering how to candy the roses off of the bushes outside as decorations for cakes.
That spirit carried into fifth and sixth grade, when reading nearly became my whole life. I would rush to finish classwork, in the hopes of discovering how Aslan created Narnia, or whether Auggie would be okay. My gifted teacher fueled that enthusiasm, giving me imagination-based projects, including one where I wrote about life in another country and time. The books I’d read helped me imagine that world. With her added encouragement, reading spilled into every part of my life.
Every day, I checked out one book from the school library and eight or nine from my teacher’s shelves, returning them the next morning.
But a few months into seventh grade, something shifted. The school librarian publicly remarked that there was “no way” I had read that many books so quickly, and that she could only read one or two books a week. I can still feel the confusion and hurt from then. Up until that point, how I read was normal, even encouraged. I had never come across an adult who questioned and laughed at the fact that I was reading at a fast pace. Though she apologized — quieter this time — the damage was done. I pulled away from reading. I still read, but the joy was soon replaced by shame. My pace dropped from two or three books a night to a few a week. By late seventh grade, continuing into tenth, I drifted from novels to news articles, read mainly out of boredom.
Technically, it was still reading, but it quickly became a whirlpool of negativity, whisking me deep under the surface. With each article about the state of the world, it became easier to believe that humanity as a whole was irredeemable and that nothing would ever change. When I did read novels, they were generally about suffering, violence, or some of the worst parts of human nature. My hope and imagination, once beacons, were little more than tea lights, flickering, about to die out — the dimming Hughes warned against.
Just when I thought they might fully extinguish, something unexpected happened. In high school, with the help of my teachers, I started to fall back in love with books again. It started with the novel “Percy Jackson,” but it reopened doors that I thought were nailed shut. Despite my objections to the plot, the sheer childlikeness of it brought back the spark of joy I lacked, and I rediscovered what went missing so long ago. I started exploring Madeline L’Engle’s stories, with each book bringing forth a world of wonder and imagination that had been dormant for so long.
However, the pressure of high school soon caught up with me. In my junior and senior years, I felt pressured — and required to — make test scores and grades my priority. I no longer had as much time to read for fun. Creative writing faded into academic writing, and the younger version of myself — the little girl reading under the covers — was pushed to the back burner. Nowadays, finding balance is harder than ever. Managing academics, clubs, and a social life is challenging, let alone trying to find time for myself. It seems as though the only hours I am entirely free are when I am asleep. Life moves so quickly that it is difficult to take a break without fearing I am falling behind. Should I apply for this internship? Should I join that organization? It becomes a never-ending cycle, constantly chasing the next opportunity and rarely finding the peace that once lived on the pages of a book. Each time I reflect on this — and write about it — I come to the same conclusion: It’s not a personal problem; it’s a societal one.
We, the American public, have stopped giving reading the time of day that it deserves. In not doing so, we lose nuance — we forget that between black and white, there is still grey. We lose the basic shreds of empathy, of being able to imagine someone else’s life struggles. We lose the quiet skill of thinking before we speak or write. Most importantly, we continue to lose sight of the goal: progress and unity. Instead, we continue to be divided, time after time, by party, by ideology, and by race. Instead of talking to each other, we retreat into echo chambers, amplifying our prejudices, our wrongs, and our shortcomings. When we stop reading deeply, we stop thinking deeply, and our politics is representative of this. Our current politicians have been pushed so far to the ends of the spectrum that “moderate” has become little more than a title of a bygone era. Reading will always be the counterbalance to this. Through stories, we maintain and grow the values that were embedded in us as children: peace, equality, love, hope, joy, and compassion.
Reading has, and will continue to shape every version of who I am, who I have been, and who I am yet to become. The act of reading a book slows my world down enough to make sense of all of the information — political, academic, and social — coming my way. Its value to me will always be close to my heart, but its value to society is perhaps more important. If we want a more thoughtful, joyful, empathetic country, we have to choose reading again.
