I love books. I have loved them since I was a child. They have taken me to the most wonderful lands and introduced me to the most amazing and diverse people–lands and people far more interesting and deep than those I knew in real life. After all these years, I am now even writing my own.
I can credit books with preventing my upbringing from turning me into a bigot. When you read about people getting trodden upon, treated unfairly by their peers, their government and their gods, you get a sense for what injustice really is. This makes it really hard to perpetuate it yourself. My preferred genre is science fiction and fantasy, within which morality plays abound. From them I learned good versus evil, the difference between justice and revenge, and what it meant to sacrifice everything for the person, people, nation or world you cared about the most. The beauty of learning morality from these stories is that, unlike religious texts, after you’ve read them and set them aside, there is no existential requirement that you keep believing the fantastic reality they presented.
At some point though, I let my love of books become a part of my personality. I collected them–nay, hoarded them–and displayed them like trophies. I let my ego be wrapped up in how large and impressive my library of books had become. I know why I did this. It was because, at the time, I did not have any other way to express myself. Consciously, I was unaware of being transgender, whereas subconsciously, I had built walls around every true part of myself except that of the nerdy computer geek. Books were an excellent way to reinforce the part of me that I was allowing myself to show the world. I am not saying that having a large library is necessarily a bad thing. Just that for me, it was an exaggeration of a singular portion of a part of my identity.
For many years the idea of having to get rid of any of my books would send me into a panic. I’ve had three major purges to my recollection. When I let my friend move in with me, and I had to turn the second bedroom back into a living area from a library/storage area. When I moved into a smaller condo and could not physically keep but maybe a quarter of the books I had. And now, when I have come to realize that part of my personality is no longer a driving force in my life. Now that I have come out and begun living as my true self, that sliver that I let shine through is but a single facet in who I fully am. I don’t need the books to be a shield anymore. I don’t need them to impress anyone. I recognize that I am not going to re-read (or even first-read) the vast majority of my books. Furthermore, the last dozen or so books that I have read, I read them on my iPad. So, now I begin what amounts to my most recent purge.
I will never stop loving books, but I have cut down on the amount of time I read. Mainly that is because I am now writing my own, but also because I have become a more social person, and I find talking to real people to hear their stories is just as interesting as reading about fictional people. I encourage you to read. (And when I finish my book, I will encourage you to read it!). However, once you are done, pass the book along, and encourage someone else to read it, especially if you learned something from it. And try not to let things, even things as wonderful as books, define who you are. In the end, you are more than what you possess. Find the parts of you that are hidden, and let them out.