Bookworm. I wasn't always one. For a while my all consuming passion was drawing or TV. The shift was a gradual one and started sometime around middle school. It's that awkward phase when the body is doing all kinds of strange things and friends start acting weird. Of course, I didn't have a lot of friends but as mystifying as I thought people were in elementary, by middle school I was convinced that the world had gone crazy and anyone under the age of 20 had fallen victim to body snatchers.
I always felt on the outside, but it got worse in middle school. The more I felt left out, the more I found solace in books. They helped me in a way the T.V. and drawing didn't. Through books, I became enmeshed in other worlds where the awkward protagonist was eventually recognized and loved. Heady stuff when you are 12.
So people started calling me a bookworm. At first in an amused tone, but eventually it was pronounced with faint alarm from the adults in my life and derision from my peers. It took years for my love of books to grow into something other than escapism, but even when I was 12 and 13 I was picking up books like Wuthering Heights (which has the dubious honor of teaching me what it means to loath something) or Frankenstein in with my fluff reads of Dragonlance novels or Anne McCaffrey books.
I still don't understand people most of the time, but that's ok. I don't think most people really get humanity as a whole which is why we have so much conflict. When I get lost in a book though, it's because I'm seeing what another person might be like under all of the layers or maybe I'm seeing a situation I could never have insight into being played out. I think books are the closest we can come to really understanding what happens outside of the echo-chamber we call a brain.
I wish more people read. I think the world would be a better place if more people experienced a life outside their own heads.
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