We do not read stories. Stories read us. They find the soft places in our understanding and press against them until something gives way.
I remember the first book that broke me open. I was twelve, and the world was still a simple place of clear boundaries and certain outcomes. The book—I will not name it, because your book must be different—showed me that endings are not conclusions. They are merely pauses in a longer conversation.
What happens when a story enters us? The neuroscientists speak of mirror neurons, of empathy as biological mechanism. But this explains nothing of the feeling—the way a character's grief becomes indistinguishable from your own, the way a fictional landscape supplants your memory of real places.
We carry these stories forward, letting them color our perception of everything that follows. The angry father in one novel becomes the lens through which we see all fathers. The doomed lovers become the template for all love that feels impossible.
This is both gift and curse. Stories expand our capacity for understanding, but they also constrain it. We see what we have been taught to see. The unread story is also the unseen possibility.
I try now to read against my instincts. To seek out the stories that feel wrong, that sit uncomfortably in my existing frameworks. This is where growth happens—not in confirmation, but in disruption.