On reading to feel better

Books as therapy

I’ve spent my life turning to books. For comfort, self reflection, consolation, catharsis, understanding, companionship and connection. When things are challenging, books are there for me to understand myself and the world around me.

This week on the podcast, I spoke to bibliotherapist Bijal Shah, about just that. The healing power of books. It was a deeply fascinating conversation about her new book Bibliotherapy and specific tools we can use to deepen the therapeutic aspect of reading.

Photo by Matias North on Unsplash

The conversation we had sparked an interesting memory for me about when I became more conscious of the power reading. I had always been a reader as a child. But it wasn’t until I was a young adult that I really understood what reading could do for me.

After finishing high school, I had the opportunity to go and work for a Thai NGO (Non Government Organisation) which focused its work on family planning, sexual health and women’s education. I was so excited to go. I had Thai friends at school in Australia, already loved the food and the culture and was looking forward to the challenge of learning a language from scratch. I wanted to see what I could achieve if I threw myself in the deep end. But boy, was that end deep……

A couple of months in to my new life in a small city in the north of the country, where I was one of only a handful of foreigners, I was very homesick. I’d already been very independent for years, largely due to being a young carer, so it wasn’t that I missed my own house, or being looked after, or even my mum (although I did miss her quite a bit). What I missed was feeling like I belonged.

I missed blending in to a crowd. I missed being able to easily speak with strangers in shops. I missed being understood. I was afraid, almost all of the time, of putting a foot wrong, wearing the wrong clothes, behaving in a way that wasn’t ‘proper’ for a girl in Thailand. People were friendly but I was constantly the centre of attention, stared at, asked intrusive questions and having things pointed out about myself that I wasn’t accustomed to (‘foreign girls are so fat!’), things that I nodded at politely, smile frozen on my face, uncertain how to respond.

On one particular day, after being asked questions, and being touched and stared at one too many times, I felt completely hopeless. With all my usual tools and distractions unavailable (it was pre wifi and smart phones, I had no tv and all the foreign films at the cinema were dubbed in Thai) I had no idea how I would manage another nine months. Out of desperation I set off for the only foreign restaurant in town and splurged, ordering a lasagne I couldn’t really afford and savoured every delicious, familiar, cheese smothered bite. In the corner of the restaurant, I spotted a few shelves of books and saw they were almost all in English. A book exchange for backpackers. I picked one out at random and headed back to my room.

I read late into the night. It was a novel I’d never heard of called Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson. A story about a mother and daughter chasing an American Dream from the midwest to LA. It was funny and heartbreaking and had so many recognisable moments for me as the daughter of a mother who had become unreliable and erratic*. But it was also about the loneliness of movement and travel, of not feeling like you belong. It was so deeply consoling that I cried all over its pages. And when I woke up the next morning, I felt a lot better.

I read quite a lot over the following weeks and months. And though the experience of living there continued to be up and down, I never felt like I did the night before I picked up that battered paperback. Because I had found a way to process what I was feeling. And I had found comfort and connection too.

Within a few months, my Thai language was getting much better and I didn’t find it quite so tiring to speak anymore. I got used to and started rolling my eyes at being called farang (foreigner) and being pointed at by random children in the street. I learned to brush off intrusive questions and observations about my body. I stopped trying so hard to get everything right and accepted that I was going to make mistakes. Reading had helped me adjust and kept me sane, until I learned how to be in my own skin in this strange and beautiful place.

18 yr old me in Thailand in the 90s

I learned many things that year I lived in Thailand but two things stand out in particular. Firstly, I learned I was a feminist (working in reproductive health and witnessing the impact it has on women’s lives will do that to you), and I also learned that no matter what happens, though reading may not fix everything, it will always make me feel a bit better.

I have read through a number of international moves, through my mother’s death, through break ups, financial difficulties, becoming a single parent and lockdowns. I have read myself through everything life has thrown at me since (except the post-natal period, which had been terrifying and thankfully, fairly short lived).

Whenever I am having a hard time, and reading lifts me up, even just a little, I think about that day and how lonely I was when I picked up an unknown paperback and learned I could always rely on books to make me feel better and understand the world and my place in it a little more. And isn’t that an amazing thing we can get for under £10 (or even less!), that is small enough to carry round in a handbag?

*In a strange twist of fate, 4 years later, the film version of Anywhere But Here (starring Susan Sarandon and Nathalie Portman) was showing on my flight from London back to Melbourne for my mother’s funeral. I sobbed all the way through it, strangely consoled by the fact this mother and daughter story had found me again when I most needed it.

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