Wisteria commented a while back about how “you never want to run out of something to read. My biggest nightmare. Imagine the anxiety on top of anxiety. Yikes!!!”

I resemble that remark. Or at least I used to. Back in high school, I used to have red marks on my shoulders every night from my backpack. Not the kind of red marks that come from wearing a watch that’s too tight, which fade away quickly. Red marks that seemed to be worn into my skin because the damn thing was so heavy.

I just couldn’t let go of books. My backpack usually had a ton of scrumpled-up papers going back to the beginning of the school year, covered in chocolate stains, a couple of different bars and tail-ends of chocolate bars, some smashed soda cans I had rescued for recycling (I also had, for a while, a serious soda habit which got to the point where I was drinking caffeinated sodas to relax….), a couple of binders and school books, and then at least three books I was actually reading.

There’d be the two books I was in the middle of, and the book I wanted to read next, and then… what about that book in a totally different genre? I might want to read that today! These ones aren’t appealing to me that much right now – I need to make sure I have that one on hand! And those two over there, they’re both really different and I might feel like reading them. And what am I going to do if I don’t have them when I want to read them?! In they go, to join their friends The Books I Finished Last Week And Forgot To Take Out.

It wasn’t just high school, either. It was like that in college and into adulthood. Especially on trips, local or long-distance. I remember going – underage – to a bar to see Fairy Butch’s cabaret show, and getting teased about how horrifying it was that I came in with my backpack, looking like a little junior-high kid dropping by after school. I was like, “But I have to have my backpack! I bring it everywhere! What if I NEEEED something?!”

That was the key, for me. I was terrified of not having something I needed. Not having the book I wanted to read when I wanted it. Not having anything on hand or at home that I wanted to read. It wasn’t just the backpack: I put tons of energy into making sure that I would have Something To Read. I spent a lot on books, bought them compulsively, hung on to them even if I had never read them and didn’t really like them. I HAD TO have books to read. They were my favorite way of checking out, after all. What was I going to do if I couldn’t escape when I needed to?

Or anyway, when I thought I needed to. I slowly became willing to experiment with leaving the bag at home sometimes, with sometimes just bringing one book with me, with noticing what that was like. I found that the reality was that I never used most of what I was carrying around, and that I could always amuse myself if I had down time without a book on hand.

What really struck me was how much fear I had around not having the right book to read. I was scared that I would be struck with the urge to read something I didn’t have with me and then I would be sad. Obviously this is not about what it seemed to be about. I mean, that’s not terrifying; it’s not really even sad. It’s just a minor disappointment if I’m caught in the middle of a really good book I don’t have with me; not having a book it just occurred to me I want to read is even lower on the chart.

What was really happening was that I was just terrified of my feelings, and because I was using books to escape my feelings, I was terrified of not having the right book to read. Like they were magical and the right one could protect me. Which is how it seemed, since if I couldn’t get into the book I had – like if it was no longer one I wanted to read – I would just try to force myself to push through it and feel tons of buzzing anxiety. Or not read it and feel the buzzing anxiety of not knowing what to do with myself. Because I sure as hell wasn’t going to go pay attention to what was happening inside me!

Funny thing… now that I’ve learned how to feel my feelings, and sit with them, and become willing to do that, books are totally optional. They’re awesome and I still read a ton, but there are even times when I consciously decide not to pick up a book or turn on the TV because I’m having so much fun just sitting still and being with myself. Now that’s recovery!

This week’s Weekly Geeks theme is books we loved as children… which makes a great follow-up to Why Do We Read? Beastmama made a little meme for it which I’m using here.

1. What is the earliest book you remember loving?

Little House in the Big Woods. And maybe Cassie’s Magic Flower, a book my mother got me from the Lilian Vernon catalog which I still have and which appears to have made no mark on the internet whatsoever… amazingly. Or at least no mark on Google!

Cassie’s Magic Flower… which I don’t guarantee was absolutely for sure called that… was a big picture book about a little girl who lived in “Calico Corner”, where everything was black and white and dreary. And then one day, a star falls to earth and leaves some funny-looking seeds that grow into enormous full-color calico-patterned flowers.

When Cassie takes one, she turns Technicolor and everyone else makes fun of her and is mean to her. Except for a few kind souls who believe in her and her kooky dreams, or who are outcasts themselves. And she gives each of them a flower and soon they are leaving trails of color everywhere and bringing joy to the whole world with their colors. I loved the sense of strangeness of the town, and the magic, and the way it was drawn, and the way everything centered around a little girl with crazy dreams of awesomeness.

I won’t swear that Little House in the Big Woods was the one I first encountered. I went to a Montessori preschool where for a while they were reading to us out of that series every day, and I think it was out of that book. That’s the first one I remember loving, because I had a copy of it (that and Little Town on the Prairie, where they GET KITTENS!!!!1!!1one) and Laura was just about my age in the Big Woods, plus it had great stories within stories from Pa, plus it is the one where Aunt Delia’s buttons look just exactly like big ripe blackberries and I was a sucker for anything that sounded like food. Mmmm… suckers.

2. When you were younger, which book characters did you want to be in your circle of friends?

I didn’t think about it consciously in those terms, but I really wanted to be one of the silver-eyed kids in The Girl With the Silver Eyes, (by Willo Davis Roberts, who also wrote the previously-mentioned Don’t Hurt Laurie!). I identified with feeling like a freak, and being treated like kind of a freak, and I wanted so badly to have Super Sekrit Special Powers ™ to go with it! And I liked books where kids could run away from abuse or do something about it; these kids went behind their parents’ backs to band together and ran away where necessary and totally helped each other have community.

I also really liked the kids in E. Nesbit’s books. They lived in the turn of the last century, and they were all incredibly real and brave and adventurous and clever. She just had a fantastic ear for how kids think and talk and act, and it was a lot of fun to see how much I had in common with children who lived in this completely different world – not only filled with Psammeads and Phoenixes, but also full of social commentary on the class system in Victorian England. Oh, and time travel.

3. What books do you have nostalgia for as an adult?

 All of them?

I went through a serious, many-years-long nostalgia phase. I’m sure many of you can identify with it – that place of not being willing to let go of notebooks, books, scraps of paper, toys, keepsakes, clothes, whatever, from a past phase of life….as if those objects hold the memories of that time and letting go means losing the memories. Or betraying our past selves who loved and used those things. Or betraying the people who gave them to us. Or risking not having enough, like letting go of some appliance or outfit that we never use will result in immediately needing and wanting it desperately and not having our needs met!

There were so many layers to it. The fear of deprivation, because I had deprived myself of so many of my needs in the past. The fear of loss, because I had felt so much loss in the past. The fear of all the emotions, the fear and sadness and rage, that I had felt and hidden from myself in the past, exploding out if I disturbed the objects from that time.

And then, the memories. I realized eventually that a lot of my clutter was my way of archiving my past. Accumulating evidence. I had spent so much of my childhood dissociated, burying memories I couldn’t yet deal with, that I didn’t trust myself to remember anything. I needed proof to look at, whether it was a forgotten poem I’d written in high school or a half-kept journal from third grade. I felt like I needed to have hard copies of everything I might forget.

Of course all of this was subconscious. I didn’t know why I kept so much stuff, or why I worried that I would be sad or need something as soon as I got rid of it. I was so codependent with my stuff. I projected all my fears and sadness onto it, thinking half-seriously (maybe three-quarters seriously) that if I got rid of these things they would feel sad and be betrayed. That it would be mean to a once-enjoyed doll to give it away. It felt like nostalgia for EVERYthing, because I projected everything I had felt or experienced or wanted onto the stuff around me.

But of course, there were also books that were especially special to me. Still a lot of them, but off the top of my head: those Laura Ingalls Wilder and Elizabeth Enright books of course, the Betsy-Tacy series, a lot of books by Dianna Wynne Jones who is fabulous, the So You Want to be a Wizard series by Diane Duane especially… the All of a Kind Family, the Active-Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Family At One End Street, ummm…. I might have to come back to this list!

4. What books do you wish to share with the kids in your life?

The Little House series was one of the first, for sure. Re-reading them as an adult kind of blows my mind. There is so much more to them than I could see as a child. Intense political stuff, detailed how-tos for pioneer living….

I read the first several books to my son while I had shared custody of him. We were doing a little project where we’d read books from the 1800s and look at how different people’s experiences were depending on where they lived, what their background was, and when in that century they lived. So for example, we read some of the Little House books and then the first American Girl book with Josephina, and a book called A Boy Becomes A Man at Wounded Knee which takes place in modern times but talks a lot about the history of Wounded Knee. And If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island. With that one, we looked at the world map and saw all the different places that people came from, and talked about where our relatives had come from. I wanted to read him The Great Brain at the Academy next, about a scheming young con artist/genius going to a Catholic boarding school in 1800s Mormon Utah, but we didn’t get that far. (That’s another winner of the “if it sounds like food” bonus – my favorite part in the book is where he starts his own candy store, sneaking forbidden chocolate bars into the Academy, carving a key for a hiding place out of freaking SOAP, and making a tidy profit.)

He totally loved “the Laura books”, but I think his other favorite was “Return to Gone-Away,” another Elizabeth Enright book. Of course: who doesn’t love her stuff? I want to share SO MUCH with him. It is hard to have loved so many books and want to pass so many on. Like holding a firehose.

5. More philosophical question— how do you think your childhood reading shaped what you like to read as an adult?

I’ve spent a lot of time as an adult revisiting children’s books that I loved. And I’ve found that I still love new ones too. The Penderwicks, and the Bartimaeus trilogy, and those Hermux Tantamoq books especially come to mind. I tend to like chick lit, funny fiction, speculative fiction, very personal fiction, and adult non-fiction the best – which is to say that I want things that are either relaxing or exciting to read. Or both. I guess that that comes from how I read as a child, too; I like to be able to read as a nice relaxing adventurous trip away from daily life. And now I also get to read stuff that enhances my daily life, books that teach me new interesting things about how to live and about the world around me.

Bonus: speaking of the Lillian Vernon catalog (as we were waaaay back up at the top there) this song from Hedwig and the Angry Inch is now what I think of, and what starts playing in my head, every time that’s mentioned. (The youtube page has the lyrics written out, too.)