No Pain, No Gain

                Migraines suck. This isn’t an opinion—it’s an unfortunate truth. I’ve had my fair share of these horrible headaches, and they’ve caused me a lot of pain and wasted time. But I’m not to blame for having to deal with them—it’s really J. K. Rowling’s fault.

                One afternoon, my dad strolled through the door to announce that he had purchased the recently- released Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I was an avid reader, and my interest was piqued. He told me that I couldn’t read this book until, of course, I started from the beginning of the series. Bring it on, I thought. I picked up Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and started to read.

                The next day I had my first migraine. I remember lying on my bed, curled in agony, as I listened to my mom’s side of the phone conversation with the hospital.

                “It started about an hour ago. She’s just been reading… No, since yesterday… Harry Potter. She’s read the first book and part of the second. Probably about five-hundred and fifty pages… Yes. She’s ten years old.”

                For a single almost-weightless moment, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t see anything or feel my hands, and I didn’t care that my temples felt three sizes too big for my head—I was proud of myself. I had read books my entire life, but now I felt like I was really a reader. This was now a part of my personal and permanent identity.  I felt like I had been given full permission to truly love books and to dive into the fascinating worlds and complicated characters that had captivated me for hours on end. The doctor suggested that I read less, but I was a girl in love. There was no way to stop me.

                Years later, I felt a familiar tug in my heart when I read Shel Silverstein’s “Invitation”:

If you are a dreamer, come in.

If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,

A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…

If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire

For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.

Come in!

Come in!

I had been a pretender by the fire long before I read these words, and I felt like it was my own voice echoing off the page. I had come to love the sound of turning pages and the smell of new books pulled right off the shelf. I still reached for the moments when I forgot that I was reading and instead was experiencing the text as if these characters’ lives were mine. I even lived for the moments when I slammed the book cover, horrified, and realized that maybe “the real world” wasn’t so bad. I had learned what it was to be alive, not just to live, and what a person could do when they really put their mind and heart into it. I didn’t just want to be human—I wanted to know what it meant to be human, and I wanted to be the best kind of human that a person could be. Some of my greatest memories were preserved in paper and ink.

I knew how it felt to be a wisher and a liar in a hundred different lands by a thousand different names. I understood the price of magic and of hoping for a happy ending. I had brought my own sloppy tales to this fireside—maybe not gold, but silver or bronze, and I was content with that. I celebrated others who loved words the way I did, and I invited anyone and everyone to learn with me. I loved that this invitation—“come in”—did not imply overwhelming requirements. Come as you are, flawed and longing for more out of life, and you will find solace here in these pages. Pretending isn’t so bad when it’s presented inside a book cover and requires your greatest imagination. Perhaps in putting on a mask for a few hundred pages you will discover goodness and greatness in yourself and in your world.

This journey of self-discovery takes commitment and even sacrifice. It’s true that I have suffered pain for my passion of books, both physically and emotionally. But I have gained much more that I have given. If it is true that knowledge is power, then I owe nearly every powerful cell in my being to a book. It is as simple and as profound as that.