I learned to read when I was two or three. There are family stories about this: that I taught myself to read. That when I was two – and a tiny child for two, at that – my mother brought me to the post office and I freaked everyone out by pointing at the door and reading, “Exit.” That by three, I was reading sentences (and after that there was no stopping me). I don’t think I taught myself to read exactly. I don’t know what happened; apparently I just sucked it in through my pores. I’ve met a lot of other people who had the same experience.

You know who had a different experience? My brother. I remember being totally baffled because he didn’t want to read. He didn’t like reading. He struggled with learning to read until he was seven or eight, and resisted it tremendously because of that struggle.

My son struggled too. It was obvious to me that he was struggling because he carried so much shame and fear around reading. He had suffered through a lot of emotional abuse from his birth family (and, for a while, from a simultaneously high-pressure and neglectful preschool with a lot of violent bullying) and he couldn’t bear the pressure of reading, the fear that if he couldn’t read a word it meant he was stupid. Imagine (if you’ve never experienced that) pushing through that fear anew with almost every word on the page: wanting to try it, thinking you can get it, and then the tidal wave of fear telling you every horrible thing you’ll prove if you “mess up,” and the drowning shame of not being able to try and feeling that you’ve proven each of those fears right. With each fucking word.

I don’t know if that’s anything like what my brother experienced. The terrible thing, of course, is that besides all the emotional and performance pressure I know both of them experienced, there stands the truth that they were perfectly fine where they were. Seven or eight is a totally reasonable, healthy age, developmentally, for children to learn to read. I could see that without all the intense emotional struggles from the abuse, my son could have learned to read many years before; he was nearly there when he was three, but each hop and leap forward resulted in tremendous fear for years. But there was nothing for him to fear; he was fine where he was. It’s just that he had already been taught the exact opposite of that truth.

Both of them are enthusiastic readers and incredible writers, now, one at 27 and one at 10 years old. Which is a huge relief to me, because when I was growing up, books were my salvation, and I wanted my son to be able to have that too.

She Reads Books wrote, last night, about the question of why we read. There are a million reasons, of course, for any reader. But I think there are also reasons particularly related to abuse.

When I was growing up, were my salvation. I read to escape, as one commenter over there said. It was easy dissociation. I didn’t have to be where I was, or who I was; I could dive into a book and immediately feel total peace being somewhere else. There’s even a snippet of home movie somewhere that shows me reading while watching TV. (What? It was commercials!)

I often got in trouble with my friends, in fifth grade or so, for reading during lunch. They would protest that if I didn’t want to hang out with them I shouldn’t be sitting with them. But as far as I was concerned, reading with my friends, maybe keeping half an ear on the discussion, was a social activity. I got in trouble with strangers, too; the brats from the other fifth grade class would follow me around during recess and tease me as I strolled through the playground, reading a book. They were more than entertainment, relaxation, friends, and transportation; they were my oxygen mask.

But of course, it wasn’t just a matter of escape for escape’s sake. Books might have been portable escape hatches, but they also gave me a place to escape to. They taught me about ways of living and acting that I could never have imagined, and reassured me that I wasn’t alone. I checked out books like The Saturdays a million times over, and The Active-Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch: books that told me about kids with more power and more peace in their lives. (Triad_Serpent’s entry about the witch book cracks me up because I had the same experience: that book had a lot to do in drawing me to Paganism later, or maybe I was just drawn to it for the same reasons I was drawn to Paganism.)

And I went back over and over to another one, Don’t Hurt Laurie!, about a kid whose mother screams at her and physically abuses her. It’s a terrifyingly real story, even if it has a kind of happy ending. I felt compelled to reread it, even though it scared me and had – I told myself – no bearing on my life. It’s interesting that I even felt a need to argue that. I didn’t pick up books about castles and dragons and say “Of course, this has no bearing on my life, but I might like it anyway.” But Don’t Hurt Laurie! struck so close to home that it ruffled my denial a little, made me put up my defenses and argue with it a bit before rereading.

The truth was, it fed me more deeply than the other books could. It told me that I wasn’t alone, and that someday it would be okay to acknowledge the kind of rage and violence that bubbled beneath the surface of our family and occasionally burst out. I wasn’t willing to acknowledge my memories or feelings yet; this book could hold them for me in a way, serve as a reassuring marker while I went on with my life. Plus, it let me tell myself that somebody had things worse than I did – a hilarious myth that a lot of abuse survivors tell ourselves because we don’t want to fully acknowledge what it was like to experience our own abuse. We can always find someone else who we think had worse experiences, so that we can “comfortably” minimize our own.

So, I read for escape, but mainly for support. Books supported me by telling me my own scary and happy stories and showing me healthy relationships, healthy behavior, healthy choices. They provided reassuring consistency: they would always be the same, and anything I missed the first time or wanted to reexperience would always be there again. Plus, it seemed like they could teach me just about anything I wanted to know, if I looked for the right book. They offered me everything, even a space for self-expression when I grew older and found that now some of the books I wanted to read hadn’t been written yet. Which brings us to this blog.

I guess that I still read for similar reasons, except that I no longer have to escape in a bad way – now I can read just to relax and have fun. I read to learn, to taste exciting new possibilities, to laugh, to enjoy myself, and sometimes, to revisit who I was.

What about you? Why do you read?