🕑 Added 2018-05-07 04:38:45 +0000 UTC
As a small kid, before some of the worst things happened and I became a rather awful person for a while, I had an addiction to reading. Now, understand, when I say addiction to reading, I don't mean I merely liked to read. No, I NEEDED to read.
I couldn't sit still and do nothing. My hands had to be busy, or my brain directed at something I was reading. Later on it would have been diagnosed as a type of autism but back then I was just a troublesome child. I had little skill at socializing, couldn't maintain focus, was quick to catch on concepts in everything except math, where I struggled horrifically to learn multiplication. Once I mastered it, I was set, and could do math in my head just fine, but pounding the concept into my head was frustrating for my teachers, me, and even my classmates.
Reading, though, reading was a glimpse into not just the reasons for things in the stories, but a glimpse into what those incomprehensible others were thinking. I understood the motivations of fictional people much better than I did real ones, and I fled to books because in books, the world made sense.
I'd hoped that through reading, I could understand real life. Unfortunately, as Mark Twain once said, truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, while truth isn't. Or maybe, more saliently in my case, fiction had to have reasons for the things that happened, while reality doesn't.
I sometimes wonder if that's one of the things that pushes people to write: a desperate desire to make sense of events, and thus give an illusion of control, if not by ourselves, then at least assigning agency to SOMEONE.
