Some books hit a place inside you that you never talk about. Not a big trauma. Not a sad story. Just a small memory you keep quiet. A moment from childhood. A fear. A thought. A feeling you never said out loud.
I felt this while reading Norwegian Wood. A simple line about how some memories stay warm even when life gets cold. It felt like the writer knew a part of me that I never shared.
I felt it again in The Book Thief, when a small moment showed how a single kind act can stay in your mind for years. It felt real to my own life.
Books do this sometimes. They pull up a memory you did not expect. They understand something you never explained.
Share the book and the moment that made you feel seen in a quiet way.
Thank you.
by gamersecret2
7 Comments
Bunny by Mona Awad perfectly encapsulated my experiences with academia.
You felt those related to your real life because things like that relate to everyone’s life. “some memories stay warm even when life gets cold” and “a single act can stay in your mind for years” aren’t secrets the author knows about you, they are universal.
Oh man at the beginning of Boys Life by Robert McCammon when Cory is talking about how everyone starts off knowing magic, but then we get the magic educated, spanked, churched, right out of us. How we’re made to grow up and how the people making us do these things do them because they’re afraid of wildness and youth. That really touched my soul and I definitely felt seen.
A couple years ago I bought this zine called “I Sometimes Feel Like An Alien”, and it was the most seen I have ever felt by a person who does not know me. It just captured how it felt to be in a group with no-one else, and how alienating it sometimes feels to only be yourself. I really connected to it
The Velveteen Rabbit:
What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?” “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.” “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.
…
This passage profoundly got to me as a kid. Still does as a middle-aged adult. It sums up my way of being neurodivergent in a perfect way and how I don’t want be to be any other way…. even if it hurts.
One of the Iron Druid Chronicles, maybe the 7th? Anyway, he’s talking about the concept of home. I didn’t find ‘home’ until I was well into my 20’s and it hit me like a brick. I am a firm protector of my own peace and this place, this city, is where I am rooted. It’s where I grew into the person I am now and I’ll be heartbroken when I leave. On the flip side, I hated where I grew up. That was being tied down.
“I forgot how good it feels to be rooted. And to be rooted is not the same thing at all as being tied down. To be rooted is to say, here I am nourished and here will I grow, for I have a place where every sunrise shows me how to be more than what I was yesterday, and I need not* wander to feel the wonder of my blessing. And when you are rooted, defending that space ceases to be an obligation or a duty and becomes more of a desire.”
*edit, forgot a crucial word
Felt this way reading Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.