“To those of you who seek lost objects of history, I wish you the best of luck. They're out there, and they're whispering.”
How incredible it is to realize all of the ways our favorite writers shape our hearts, and for our writers to find us exactly when we need them. On Thursday, I had a shift I wasn’t looking forward to. It was my first shift in the psychiatric hospital, and this wasn’t a specialty I could see myself going into as I thought it would be too emotionally taxing. I had walked into that hospital tired after a long night of studying, and an even longer drive to south Atlanta, missing the Starbucks that sat in the lobby of the hospital I had just left. And yet, I found myself pleasantly surprised. In all of that sorrow and stigma, I found all of these little snippets of joy and humanity. People singing and dancing to their favorite songs, laughing over stories of where they had come from, making jokes with each other in this strange sort of companionship that can only occur knowing that you've all come to a place for the same reason, no matter where you were before. My favorite small joy of the day was in reading one of my patients’ charts, only to see that his method of coping was in reading.Despite all he had gone through to be here, he still found joy in books (his favorites being the adventure of Clive Custler, quoted above, and the absurdism of Kurt Vonnegut). He told me that he “would read just about anything,” even reading a dollar novel they had at the hospital just for the escapism. This was the moment that took me out of my apprehension. The realization that I was not only here to learn how to be a nurse, but how to be a human as well. To be able to empathize with others and realize we are more connected than we know, whether to one another or to our favorite writer, and that we can leave imprints on one another's' hearts that we often fail to realize; that words are a force we often fail to recognize, giving shape to our sorrow and purpose to our despair, and that if all that we can do to make it from one day to the next is to read our way through, then we must read our way through. The books we carry with us are the lost objects we are looking for, the ones that whisper encouragement and hope to us again and again. In our greatest sorrows, we find and return to them again to again, the way divers uncover hidden treasure in the bottom of roaring seas only after the seemingly-endless endeavour to reach that ocean floor. So I leave you with this quote from one of my favorite authors, Mr. Dickens, that saved me at a time I felt so lost and neglected I had to read my way out as well: “At this time I was so conscious of the waste of any promise I had given, and of my being utterly neglected, that I should have been perfectly miserable, I have no doubt, but for the old books. They were my only comfort; and I was as true to them as they were to me, and read them over and over I don’t know how many times more.” Pictured above: Allie's Charles Dickens collection (left) and Allie in the New York Public Library with Charles Dickens' writing desk (right)
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"I'm only 19 but my mind is older." In honor of my 19th birthday, I was originally going to write 19 Things I Learned Before I Turned 19, but then I realized that a large majority of my character has been defined by the books I have consumed. Without these characters, I would not quite be the person you see today.
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AuthorAlessandra Tatoy knows that the power of words is stronger than anything, coming from a country whose fight for independence was sparked by the works of an author sentenced to death of his words. You can find her articles, poetry, short stories, and other musings here. Archives
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