I wanted to walk into traffic. so I read.

How reading has been a restorative practice for my brain function, and how it's been keeping me alive.

The years when I was saddest were also the years I had stopped reading.

Saying I like reading or calling reading a hobby would be inaccurate — and I try to be as accurate as I can with my feelings. Reading and articulation are near religious to me. I’ve always pursued STEM pathways throughout my formal education, but in reality I had grown up a disciple of language before I was an acolyte of the sciences, and since I was a child, had always found exaltation in words that were cleverly and carefully arranged.

I’ve struggled with depression for nearly five years now and when the pandemic and accompanying lockdown happened, it got really, really awful. I’ll spare the details, but my heart was rotting and turning into sludge whilst my mind juggled multiple anxieties. I didn’t care some people didn’t believe I had depression, for it didn’t negate the fact that I was affected by it. Days didn’t just blur into weeks—they blurred into one really long funeral, and my footsteps were slow as a mourner’s.

Until one day, as I was mindlessly scrolling through Twitter, I saw a friend cross off books on their BTS Readathon bingo. It was a bingo-style reading challenge themed after BTS music (Read a book with the word ‘Spring’ in its title, Read a book set in South Korea, etc), and at that moment I remembered that… hey… I used to read a lot… back when I was a kid…

That was how I started reading again, with a long-lost familiar hunger. I missed myself so much. Since I had taken such a long break from my first love, I had zero idea what books were good at the time. So I read everything. I downloaded pirated e-books, but we were rationing bread in our house at the time, so I couldn’t care less about illegally reading Holly Black. There were hits (Pachinko, The Night Circus), there were misses (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, several Murakamis) and there were beloved books I revisited, their pages yellowed from the amount of time I had abandoned them.

Unfold by Fadilah Karim. Oil on linen. One of my favourite Malaysian women painters.

I realized, then, I read to live. In the vein of Black Swan, where an artist has two deaths—and the first death is when they stop dancing, I had, at one point, died because I did not read. Or maybe I had died first, and stopped reading as a corollary. Either way, each affected the other, and it was clear that reading didn’t just keep me alive, but in little increments, had been teaching me how to live, and making the world more understandable, through the reworking of the lenses and languages through which I navigate the world. The exploration of different dimensions and depths of experience through other people’s writing helped me understand and navigate my life. I read about depression, about adoption, about biomimetic design, Jungian psychology, immigration, about displacement and grief, about families that fight and cry at dinner tables. As I grew older, the literature increased in complexity, and so were the issues I faced in life. Through reading, I was constantly reframing and re-examining the ways in which I understood the world and when that active mental assessment had stopped, it deepened the mental swamp I was wallowing in, thickening the sludge.

But for the longest time, I wasn’t aware of that connection.

I realized there was always a renewal every time I read something good — a breaking of the husk, and kneading of the dough. I’m very selective when it comes to the material I read, wanting books to role-play as a sharp, heavy axe and myself to be the tree bark awaiting the axe’s strike. Me, tree bark. The axe, Kurt Vonnegut. Me, again, as the tree bark. The axe, Maria Popova. When I had stopped reading, the lack of this examination and recalibration of how I interacted with the world through language was what had partially sent me into near-permanent paralysis. It was a thick, stagnant state of mind and heart that made only one pathway seem attractive: the death of that state — nothingness.

It was then that I was reminded of what reading did for me, and why I loved it. It was because words were dynamic educators all on their own, better yet when strung together in intentionally crafty ways. Language was an educator and I loved being its compliant student. I will always be envious of words and their dexterity. I will always be envious of writers and their skills. And that envy was a healthy one that had been keeping my mind on its feet.

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I love books so much, and there are books and poems that I return to, like how tides return to a shore. The Dark Interval by Rainer Maria Rilke, I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong, In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, Figuring by Maria Popova, and a new favourite, A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers.

When I read passages from these pieces, there’s something in each of them that draws me to them, right? A same attraction, though they’re all so, so different.

In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis (who wrote the Narnia books), contemplated about what exactly binds these many interests and environments that we adore throughout life, and his contemplation verbalized what I had been trying to put into words for such a long time:

“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which others are curiously ignorant of — something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clapclap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away, but swelled into the sound itself, you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, Here at last is the thing I was made for.”

He concludes this passage with the line below, a very apt consequence of when we associate our being with things. An emotional consequence I felt when I was depressed, and had stopped reading. Stopped engaging with ‘the thing I was made for’:

“If we lose this, we lose all.”

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I’m generally a reserved person, but I do enjoy conversing with people. People are valuable conversation partners, even the less pleasant ones, and one of the most valuable skills I’ve gained from having these fertile conversations is that I’m able to consolidate those conversations along with my reading to build a more psychologically analytical approach to life. And reading— if you do it the right way, with the right material— is, in many ways, a conversation. Books and texts have enabled me to perceive and understand better the mental states of the people around me, their personal histories, their reasons, and I produce better emotional responses to people and situations.

It doesn’t make life less complex. But it does help strengthen the foundations I have in navigating life, doing less damage to myself and others.

I love reading because I want to love life, and reading good stuff makes loving life easier. So nowadays, when the days stretch into nothingness, or when the self-loathing skyrockets, and the thought of walking into high-speed traffic becomes really attractive—I think, hey. Somewhere out there is a line in a novel that would significantly alter the molecular structure of my brain chemicals and change my life forever. In my head, I go over all the beautiful lines I’ve collected over the years. Who can take on the diabolical in another human? Can you? / This mess I made I made with love. / It is very difficult, to befriend where you wish to consume. / If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.

If I loved you less if I loved you less if I loved you less—

Echoing the writer and marine biologist Rachel Carson, I’m a believer in the nature of literature and language as “…something that would raise you a little higher than you were yesterday, something that would make you willing and able for your part in the work of the world.”

So when it all gets too congested, or suffocating, clouding my ability to see from one end of my world to the other—I read. In hopes of raising myself a little higher than I was yesterday.

Fixing me just enough, so I can continue doing my part in the work of the world.

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End. Here’s a song.