Penelope

Sometimes stuff that is GENUINELY SCARRING to you can also be a surprise tool that helps you later.

I had to read Bridge to Terabithia when I was ten, and when I tell you that book fucked me up. I'm 37 and sometimes I still remember the ending and just stop in my tracks.

But it helped me to better appreciate my grandma's art when she died.

I've still got some of her work in my house. One of her painted plates is literally hanging behind me right now.

I read The Giver by choice when I was eleven, without any real idea what I was getting into, but when you guys hear me yell about the sanitization of the world, that is entirely The Giver and Brave New World speaking. The Giver taught me that pain and joy are intertwined and you can't pick and choose and still have a full life. That's why I rail so hard against censorship. It's The Giver, it's literally The Giver.

I read The Trial by Franz Kafka when I was nineteen. Yeah, the Metamorphosis guy. His work is abstract and reading it feels like looking through a melting mirror and the end is both horrifying and inevitable, and you will never read a more incisive critique of the concept of the panopticon.

Read it not "even if" it disturbs you, but because it disturbs you. Think about what you've read. Think about what it has to say to you.

I run downstairs, thinking someone has died or something and see THIS:

… my hand slipped