Sometimes a book meets you at the exact right moment. Not because it has answers, but because it names feelings you could not explain to anyone around you. People mean well, but they simplify, judge, or try to fix things too fast. A book can just sit with you.
For me, that book was Norwegian Wood.
I read it during a time when I felt disconnected and emotionally stuck, but I could not explain why. The characters live in that quiet space between sadness, love, and confusion. Nothing is rushed. Grief, loneliness, and longing are treated as normal parts of being alive, not problems to solve. It understood that sometimes you are not broken, you are just going through something heavy.
That honesty surprised me. It felt like the book knew what I was carrying before I did.
I am curious what book did that for you. A book that understood you better than people did at the time, and why it mattered when you read it.
Thank you.
by gamersecret2
5 Comments
Crawl by Max Delsohn
Idk if it counts as a book, but Superman comics saved me from depression a couple of years ago. I was so rough with myself in that time, but the boyscout showed me kindness is the key.
Meditations by Mark Aurel (stoicism) has been really good!
The Sorrows of Young Werther
I read Moby-Dick when I had just dropped out of college due to a nervous breakdown. I had a lot of religious trauma (among other types of trauma) and was in the throes of admitting to myself that I didn’t believe what I was taught, and that everything I’d ever believed in and lived for was based on something that was untrue.
I related to Ahab’s obsessive search and self-destruction. If I remember correctly, Ishmael expressed a lot of doubt about & criticism of Christianity, as well–I’d felt the same emotions, but more tumultuously. His frankness about his thoughts and feelings re: Christianity made it easier to accept mine.
I’d actually been assigned Moby-Dick at the start of college, before my religious crisis began, but I only became ready to read it 2 years later, when it was primed to hit me harder than it ever could’ve.