With words we feel, and with stories, we heal

Books are my oldest friends, and libraries were my first loves. Growing up, stories were a guiding hand to lead me off to a world I wished I lived in, filled with people I wished I knew, the friends I wish I had. It was easy, oh so easy to bundle up in a comforter and dissolve into the words, the prose itself so magical a piece of me always wondered if novels were enchanted. That love and sense of wonder brought on by books has also deepened as the years have gone on. As a novelist, poet, and author, my relationship with reading has evolved over the years. Books are no longer purely entertainment, or informative, they are also therapeutic. They are transformative, they are powerful. They are the hands that sculpt the world. Most importantly, stories give me permission to be patient and gentle with myself and hold space for my inner child to scream, to shout, to speak, to laugh, to cry. To express all the emotions he spent so much time repressing. Afterall, I cannot heal what I do not allow myself to at first feel, and through words and their magic, I am made human. I am made whole.