As a child growing up, I’d pick a good read over an outing. I wasn’t a typical introvert but I wasn’t the opposite for sure! It wasn’t easy to buy books back then. We literally had one bookshop sourcing Arabic books from Lebanon & Egypt (English was a scarcity) and apart from the limited collection my father used to get me (as treats!), I used to wait for the annual book fair like an entertainment extravaganza that I would activate a countdown for!
Some people used to mistake me for a loner or an anti social person. I wasn’t! I loved human interactions at a smaller scale. I enjoyed 121s and getting to know people intimately, closely, deeply & personally. I loved meaningful interactions more than artificial ones and I was often warned that I will struggle to manage people in the future if I don’t do enough interactions today! But the number of people I met through reading, the characters, the personalities, the storylines, plots and possibilities opened not only a single life in front of me but many, many lives that I would have otherwise had to live for hundreds of years to be able to experience and understand. Guess what? having this much of a diverse exposure enabled me to understand people better & equip myself with interpersonal skills to interact, contain, manage and develop rewarding relationships with them in the real life at a better depth subsequently.
Reading didn’t only give me an appreciation for the differences in humans and therefore develop the human interaction skills in me, for one my brain also developed the ability to imagine and get ahead of myself to think of possible twists, scenarios, outcomes, solutions much before the pages will unfold and reveal. This later became a skill that I still deploy at work constantly to analyze and think of what ifs, plan Bs and alternatives on the go!
Today, I am still not the super extrovert some people might think I am and yes, in certain days I’d still pick a book over an outing and I still get the same thrill and excitement deep diving in a good read the same way the little “Me” used to!
