Growing up, there was always that weird kid who constantly had their nose literally buried in a book 24/7. In my life, that kid was me.
I discovered books at an early age, and it basically was love at first sight. I tore through books like other kids played video games. When the last Harry Potter novel came out, I cried when my dad pretended that they were sold out of the book the day it was released; upon realizing he was kidding, I didn't come out of my room until I had finished the book. I read in the car. I read at my softball and volleyball games. I read at lunch. Yeah, I had friends, but I was known on more than one occasion to have told them I had to finish a chapter before I would talk to them.
My family learned to accept that I was obsessed with books, but the rest of the world continued to question why I wouldn't rather watch TV, or go out with friends, or terrorize the town. To me, though, the answer was simple. Fiction was my solace and a place I could always find friends and a home, no matter what was going on in my life.
Books are really incredible. It sounds childish to say it, but I would rather live in my fantasy worlds of Narnia or be a demigod or a dragon rider or a fairy princess than go to school and work all day. Books offer up so many possibilities. You can be whoever you want. You can do whatever you want. There are no mundane limitations placed upon you when you read, and that was something that I found great comfort in as a child, and still do to this day.
If fantasy worlds aren't your cup of tea, there are even more possibilities for you to discover in books. One of my favorite authors, John Green, writes stories that, though, at first, seem cliché and predictable, speak to issues about growing up and the completely relatable experiences of every teen and young adult. I literally have his words tattooed on my body. I think that that should attest to how greatly books have influenced my life.
Books are able to take you away from your real life and transport you to somewhere else. It can work as a distraction or as a comfort to be able to pick up a book and live through the eyes of someone else who lives a life so different yet so similar to yours. With reading, you don't have to live only one life, because with books you are able to live hundreds of lives. You can save the world and conquer cities and fall in love and go on adventures. Nothing matters in your life when you can lose yourself in a book and simply coexist with the characters that live in between the pages and ink.
In a way, books are the closest thing that we have to magic in this world. A lot of the time, it is through books that we are able to regain that naivety and innocence that we once held as children. Though I am an eighteen-year-old college freshman, I am still able to fall so far in a book that I completely lose track of time entirely. I am always able to relate to characters in the books that I read; it's in them that I sometimes am able to find the best parts of myself, and to me, that is the most magical part of all.
