Life-saving literature
Places for reflection, community, comfort and creativity.
Reading can be a support system in tough times – a tool for lowering stress hormones in the body, processing trauma and breaking social isolation.
Both silent, individual reading and live literature can help us to find rest, recovery and calm in a hectic world. They can act as paths to get closer to ourselves and each other.
Similarly, writing about what you are struggling with can be crucial to process-ing what is happening. Putting into words the feelings that come up. Being able to express what doesn’t feel right. These are necessities for being able to ask for, and access, help and support.
Remembering teenage
I remember exactly what it was like to be a teenager and feel unable to fit inside your own skin. Feeling angry and hopeless and scared about the state of the world, about who I was supposed to be in it, about all the impossible expectations I was trying to live up to.
For me, reading and writing was like finally opening the lid on a boiling stovetop kettle, letting out pressure and heat. Reading poems by people who had felt what I was feeling, books by authors who had gone through what I couldn’t possibly see a way out of, literature by people who showed me that I wasn’t alone. That what I experienced, felt and wanted was real and valid.
Reading was a support system. As was being able to write and express what was going on inside me. Reading and writing helped me put into words who I was and what was important to me, and to find others who shared my experiences and understood what I meant. Helped me find words for who I was as a queer, trans and non-binary person. To arrive at myself. To finally stop pretending to be someone else.
Words builds identity
In giving me words to identify and express myself, reading and writing opened the door to so much joy, community and hope in my life.
At its best, that is what reading is – a place to be seen. To find a mirror for our thoughts, feelings and experiences. A place to find language for who we are, who we want to be, where we belong, and what we care about. A place to rest when the world’s discrimination becomes too much to bear. A place to meet characters who show who we are on the inside, without others’ prejudices about us. And a place to expand, to go beyond who we are, and to be able to meet other people half-way.
Of course, this vital support system is something everyone needs, not just young people who share my experiences of breaking norms around gender and sexuality. It applies to everyone who doesn’t fit the mold. Everyone who knows what it is like to be portrayed as a societal issue in the news or to find themselves completely written out of their country’s history. Anyone who appears on the outside to fit but feels completely different on the inside. Everyone who thinks they are alone. Quite simply, everyone.
Literature and the arts, reading and writing are vital tools for coping with the world around us, getting to know ourselves and building community with each other.
The effect of reading on our mental health and wellbeing lies in literature’s transformative potential to mirror, support and heal.
Learn more about
Bibliotherapy and Shared Reading