Dear Reader,
I am slightly hesitant to post this piece online, because why should anyone spend time inside my head if I am not teaching or giving something practical/useful? But I do believe in offering a space to think and feel, and that is the very essence of my blog.
I would like to think about it this way: we read novels, poetry, or even diaries not for any instructions, but because we want to experience someone else’s mind. To see the world from a perspective we do not have, to feel, and even recognize ourselves.
So, I am opening my mind here; not to tell you anything, but to show how reading and borrowed lives leave traces inside me, silently reshaping who I am. If it resonates, great. If not, it is still an honest piece of thought.
I think I am a reader of books, but really, I am a reader of time.
Because while I read, I do not simply absorb text; I absorb lives, pieces of selves I will never live in reality. These are the pieces of consciousness that slip into mine without asking, constantly rewriting me as I move through imaginations across time. They rearrange my thoughts silently, frame fears, desires, or hopes I did not know I had.
Have you ever felt that? The feeling that a book is not just words, but some sculpture silently reshaping you? Trying to push you into a version of yourself that did not exist before?
When all these lives accumulate, layer upon layer, it becomes impossible to know where they end and I begin.
Each life leaves a trace, like a bloodline/DNA/inheritance. Each trace is what I call a space between what is said and what is missing. I hunt for these gaps, these hidden meanings, because reality itself feels like the same game: we try to map meaning into our lives, to fill voids with something that will make us whole.
You may recognize this: how a sentence, a character, or a single image can stay with you for hours or days, which internally alter your choices and instincts without your permission.
When I read, write, or question, I live in these in-between spaces, I become new each time. Something like each visit leaves me slightly remade.
When that happens, I wonder: are these thoughts my own? Do they belong to me or to any lives that have written themselves into me, over time, without asking?
Even as I ask, I know that this is the gift and the danger of reading: to be rewritten is to live more fully, to meet new versions of yourself you would never otherwise know. And between all these lines, you are fully alive.
Like a metamorphosis through reading, writing, and questioning.
So my dear, choose wisely what you consume, for that is who you become.
Yours in thought,
Yana ♥️