Everyone deserves to fall in love with a book. Everyone deserves to stumble upon that one book that saves your life, impacts your thought process or simply causes you pure joy or heartbreak. Everyone deserves a book that is kind of like a best friend. My book is, and forever will be, The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.
I read the book for the first time when I was 16. The boy I had a crush on lent me his copy. He had written in the margins. He encouraged me to do the same. I read the book, and that opened up a whole new world of literature that has impacted every decision to read a book since then. What is it about this book, written in 1999, that causes such a strong impact on my life? I've read it three times and hold the movie just a near to my heart as the book. I'll tell you why.
First, it's because Charlie writes the story in first person and address each chapter to an anonymous "friend." This person is kind of like his best friend, if you ask me. We never find out who he is actually writing to. But the act of telling the story in that way allows for the writer to more deeply know Charlie and connect with the characters or feel as the plot moves along. Entering high school is such a hard time for me. When I read this book at 16, I was struggling with self-harm and had just been diagnosed with anxiety. Sometimes, all we want is someone to talk to. That is something I can relate to on a spiritual level. Charlie could have started a journal and written the same things. But he chose to address them to another person. The act of talking or writing things out with another living, breathing human being is the most helpful of coping mechanisms. I believe this stuck with many of us readers. It allowed us to feel, to relate and to understand. It honestly didn't matter who the letters were to. Just writing to "someone" helped deal and sort through such a transitional time.
The mixtapes are another powerful part of the story for me. Charlie makes mixtapes for his friends and discovers a new favorite band via his older sister's boyfriend's mixtape. The book gave me my first introduction to The Smiths. "Asleep" is a song we see discussed throughout the book. That and the ongoing search to find "the tunnel song" stuck with me. Music is such a powerful tool to bring people together, to feel emotions we may not want to feel, to heal and to enjoy life. "Heroes" turned out to be "the tunnel song" and makes Charlie, Sam and Patrick feel infinite. What an emotion it is to feel infinite. The world may try to bring you down, but music is a theme throughout the novel that still makes me feel as if I could survive anything. I learned that through Charlie.
The most powerful part of the novel are the quotes that have stuck with me ever since I read it the first time. "We accept the love we think we deserve", to me, means that in order to be loved by others, you have to love yourself first. I find it extremely hard to love myself and push others away as a result of that.
A quote that stands out even more to me was when Sam tells Charlie at the end of the novel "You can’t just sit there and put everybody’s lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love.You just can’t.You have to do things.” (p. 200) Loving is about putting yourself out there, experiencing pain and rejection, being bold and loving yourself as well as others. Love is not as easy as Charlie thinks, as easy as any of us thinks. Charlie was so timid and worried about hurting other people's feelings, losing his friends or not fitting in that he did what he could to please these people. He thought of them before himself. He wasn't truly living or feeling life. In order to truly love Sam, he had to live for himself too. He had to experience life and not sit on the sidelines. I think that is something we all can take away from this book. Life does not stop for any of us.
I experience such harsh anxiety and self-hatred at times that I cannot accept any form of love or help from others. At other times, I am so scared about pleasing others that I put myself last. It may be cliche to identify with the main character on such deep levels. But my connection with Charlie is what drove me to read the book over and over again. I learned so much about myself and growing up from him. And all of that was leading up to the final scene when he listened to the tunnel song and felt infinite. I think that's what we all want to feel--INFINITE. We all want to experience life that way. It just takes us forgetting worries and actually trying.
Life is for the living. Life is about a strong of moments that make up your crazy and beautiful existence. Life is not about standing by waiting to live. I hope you find your tunnel song and your life changing book like I did.
