The books that gave me words for things I couldn’t explain

There is a specific jolt that happens when a sentence describes something you have felt for years and never named. A small physical event. You stop, you go back, you read it again to check it said what you thought it said.

That has happened to me perhaps thirty times in my life and I can remember most of them.

What I was actually looking for

People talk about reading as escape, and sometimes it is. But that was never the main thing for me.

What I was doing — without any idea that I was doing it — was looking for vocabulary. I had a set of persistent internal experiences and no language for any of them, and language turns out to be load-bearing. A feeling you cannot name cannot be examined. It can only be endured.

The first time I read a description of the specific loneliness of being in a room full of people who like you, something loosened. Not because it solved anything. Because it moved the thing from weather to object. Weather happens to you. An object can be picked up and looked at.

A feeling you cannot name can only be endured. A feeling you can name can be examined.

The words I did not have

I did not have a word for the exhaustion of monitoring yourself. I experienced it constantly and would have described it, if pressed, as “being tired.”

I did not have a word for the difference between someone being unkind and someone being honest, which meant I gave a great deal of unkindness the benefit of the doubt for far too long.

I did not have language for boundaries at all. The concept was simply absent. I understood being upset, and I understood being fine, and there was nothing in between where you might notice a line and mention it.

Each of those arrived through a book, and in each case the arrival was disproportionate. A phrase in a chapter would reorganise something I had been carrying since childhood.

Where I did the reading

Libraries, mostly, and I want to say something about that, because the class dimension of reading gets skated over.

Books are expensive. The idea of buying whatever you fancy and abandoning half of it is not available to everyone, and a great deal of writing about reading assumes a budget it never mentions.

What a library gave me was permission to be indiscriminate. I could take out six things on a hunch, hate four of them, and lose nothing but the walk home. That is precisely the condition under which you find the books that matter, because the books that matter are almost never the ones you would have chosen on purpose.

The books that gave me language were not recommendations. They were things I picked up because the spine was interesting on a Tuesday afternoon in a building that let me.

Reading about people unlike me

The other thing I got wrong for years: I assumed the useful books would be about women like me.

Some were. But a surprising number of the sentences that landed came from lives with no obvious relationship to mine — different countries, different centuries, men, people whose circumstances I could not have guessed at.

I think that is because the specific feeling underneath was general. Being watched. Being categorised before being met. Wanting to be somewhere without being observed arriving. Those are widely distributed, and reading them in an unfamiliar setting made them easier to see, because I was not busy defending myself against the details.

A book about my exact situation would have been read defensively. A book about someone else’s got past the guard.

Fiction did more than the self-help

This surprised me and I still find it slightly funny.

The books written explicitly to help me were less useful than the novels. Self-help tends to arrive with a system, and the system requires you to already be the kind of person the system works for. It tells you what to do. Which is fine if the problem is that you do not know what to do, and useless if the problem is that you do not yet know what is happening.

A novel does not instruct. It shows a person doing something recognisable for reasons you had never articulated, and you see your own machinery from outside for the first time. That is a different operation, and for me it was the one that worked.

Recognition is not the same as advice

A caution, because I have overcorrected on this before.

Finding yourself in a book is not the same as finding a solution in one. Some of the books that described my situation most precisely offered nothing whatsoever about what to do next, and one or two modelled things I would not recommend to anybody.

Recognition is a beginning. It is a very good beginning. It is not the whole of it, and I have watched people — myself included — mistake the relief of being understood for the work of changing something.

What I read now

Less about bodies, oddly, and more about attention, work, friendship, and what people owe each other. The body writing did its job and I no longer need it in the same quantity.

I reread more than I used to. I have stopped feeling that this is a failure of ambition. A book at forty is not the book it was at twenty-two, and the difference between the two readings is one of the only reliable ways to see how far you have actually moved.

If you are looking

I am not going to hand you a reading list, partly because the books that did this for me were specific to me, and mostly because the useful ones are rarely the recommended ones.

What I would say is: notice the jolt. When a sentence stops you, mark it. Not because it is beautiful — because it named something. Those are the ones worth going back to, and they are almost never in the book you were told would change your life.