Share one of the best gifts you’ve ever received.

One of the best gifts I’ve ever received didn’t come in a package. You can’t hold it, touch it, smell it, hear it, see it. It has brought as much pain as it has joy.

What is one of the best gifts I’ve ever received? Literacy. Not just that, but a hunger for reading. An insatiable appetite for the written word. A need for information and stories.

Reading led me to stories from other galaxies and taught me to think. Reading gave me other worlds to escape to when life got too unbearable, and in escaping, I found others like me, people I could finally relate to who had gone through the same things I had.

Reading led me to authors who taught me to dream, and told me it was ok for me to write too.

Reading led me to writing, one of the most painful and difficult things I’ve ever done. But in the struggle, I also changed for the better. I learned to see through other peoples’ eyes. It taught me patience: for others, for myself, for my work. I learned that a little bit of writing every day grows into a book. I can’t overstate just how important that has been in other areas of my life—to know that small, sustained effort is what enables you to accomplish massive, complex tasks.

Writing gave me a voice. Unlike most people, I have struggled all my life to speak. Call it social anxiety, selective mutism, shyness, introvertion, whatever—writing gave me an outlet to say all the things I’ve had bottled up inside my head.

One of the greatest gifts I’ve been given is the gift of literacy.

Thanks Mom, Dad, and Grandma.