Growing up with words (I)

Growing up through reading

As a child (I was really young, perhaps 7 or 8), one of my biggest life goals was to have a large bookcase in my bedroom where I'd keep my collection of all my favourite Enid Blyton books.I envisioned that when I was 20, I'd be living alone in my apartment with the bookcase and all the books I've collected, then I'd randomly pick one to read every night before going to bed.

Then when I was 12, I stopped reading altogether.

I never touched a book again. I stopped going to the school library to read after Netball practice like I would normally do. My focus, as I was told, should be the impeding Primary School Leaving Examinations. Otherwise "I wouldn't be able to go to RGS", otherwise "I'd ruin my life", "I'd end up sweeping the roads" yada yada. When I was in secondary school, I nonchalantly told all my friends that I did not read a single book at all. Even the compulsory Newsweek that we were all forced to subscribe to, I chucked in a corner of my study room.

Throughout my growing years I relied on my imagination to make sense of the world around me- I thought about many issues in the world and formed my own conclusions about them. I ended up with an angsty teenage blog full of unorthodox opinions (e.g. I remember a post I wrote proposing National Service for spoiled girls, and another about why having long hair is bullshit).

Then I started reading online articles (no choice, forced to because we had General Paper). Despite this I was positively clueless about so much that was going on in the world. Economics (boy did I suck so bad at that subject), politics, current affairs... I knew pretty much nothing as soon as GP A levels ended.

I started picking up reading again when I was in college and had quite a bit of me-time. It first began with socio-political FB pages, followed by online articles, then I started following people like Alfian Sa'at, Limpehft... articulate people who wrote about issues in society.

But why do we read? Why should we read? What turned me off from reading in the first place, and why did I suddenly decide to read again? Why do I choose to read certain people? Is it saying something about how I've changed?

I figured that in my earlier years I never really understood what I was reading for. I was reading with an end purpose in mind, doing it simply because I needed that knowledge to get me a certain grade. I lost interest very quickly. But after entering college as an engineering student who has practically zero readings to do for her course, I was given a lot more liberty to explore what I really wanted to fill my head with. I started reading stuff I really wanted to read, and got hooked back onto reading.

I feel that a good writer, or a good piece of writing, is so much more than an articulate string of words put together logically to bring about a convincing argument.

A good piece of writing, book, literature, even a Facebook status, should make you feel a whole array of emotions. It should cause you to apply your own life into the words that's been said and feel the words being written through your own senses. Yet at the same time it should jolt your out of your chair, open up a brand new perspective and make you question everything you've thought you knew.

There's a reason I go back to certain social commentators, certain blogs, certain books, even if I never wholeheartedly agreed with everything they said. I think I writer hasn't really served his/her purpose if he/she doesn't make you uncomfortable, or doesn't challenge the status quo in the minds of readers. It has taught me to learn to see through the eyes of another, and appreciate that not everyone will experience the same circumstances in the way that you do. This will go a long way in improving my interactions with people.

As I've grown up and become slightly more...profound, I've also started to see an appeal in fiction. Why people are so emotionally attached to characters in a non-existent world, why they care about problems that aren't even real, why they cry over the joy of a fictitious character instead of working on their own lives\. It is because too often in the real world we're too preoccupied with so much- harsh realities and pragmatism, politics, money etc. (I'm not saying that these are superficial or that people who care about these things are shallow; I'm just saying these things are inevitable realities of life.) Yet in fiction, a writer can take all the things a person craves deep in their soul, magnify them in a fictional world, and create a place people can escape to should they yearn for a peace of mind.

Isn't it great to be temporarily absorbed in a world where you're free to feel and explore your deepest philosophies, thoughts, wishes, emotions, desires in the eyes of a story's protagonist, without being distracted by other inconvenient needs like to need to get a job, pay their bills, make ends meet?

I speak for myself when I say that not reading enough, from a variety of different readers with a variety of different voices, causes some sort of void in the soul.

Reading is what makes the difference when you look into the sky, whether you see the same "circular piece of blue with occasional white patterns" or an ever-changing piece of vastness with endless possibilities.

It will mean the difference between a worldly, sophisticated person who can understand different walks of life and make others feel accepted, and a narrow-minded Singaporean Chinese heterosexual cis-man with a degree from NUS who genuinely thinks he's the most oppressed being in the world while labelling protected groups "childish and petty" for standing up for their right to be human.

It will mean the difference between an empty shell running on the clockwork of routine, and a person who can appreciate the different dimensions of living.