This morning I cried while eating breakfast—undone by a few lines from Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. Real life almost never makes me cry, but a book, well that is something else altogether. Stories are the doorway to another’s reality but also to my own feelings.

I read through my childhood; it was nearly all I did. In my family, we didn’t talk about things, and I was quiet anyway. It was books that taught me about people, that honed my empathy, that turned on the light.

I wrote something for a client recently, and he said something about it maybe scratching my itch to write, but words for a client will never scratch that itch. The only thing that will is my own words for my own purpose, helping me find my way back to myself, to the truth I am looking for. I’ll fix the words you write, but the ones I write are for me, and for anyone who can find their way home inside them.

Words are the truest thing about me. In the last years of my marriage, my husband resented any time I spent reading books. He thought it excluded him. Never mind that books made me, me. Never mind all the ways that drinking, drugs, and his other diversions excluded me. I was not supposed to read.