Yellow

Yellow. The color of happiness and comfort, safety and joy. Yellow is the sun: warm but strong. Now you may be wondering, what does the color yellow have to do with the importance of literature. To answer that let me explain the following. Why is literature important? I can give you some basic answer on how beneficial it is for your brain and how it expands your vocabulary/understanding of concepts: or I could tell you why it is so important to me. 

Since a young age I loved literature. It was an escape for me that took me to a land of dreams and possibilities. I loved picturing each character in whatever way I wanted and feeling as if I was right there with them in whatever journey they were taking. The series that really got me into reading was Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books. When I tell you those books had a hold on me I am not lying. I remember talking about the books in elementary school with my classmates and watching the movies in theaters with my sister and our friends. We were OBSESSED. I then became an avid reader, jumping from series to series, genre to genre and just loving the different worlds I was discovering. And then middle school hit and I somewhat lost the love I had for literature. I lost yellow. 

I just stopped reading. It was kind of abrupt too and I rationalized it by saying I grew out of it. My mom would ask me why I wasn't reading anymore and my answer was always that I don't like it and that it got boring but that wasn't even true. I was almost embarrassed to read because I felt like there was this stigma around reading and anything that seemed "nerdy" or school-related. The saddest part is that I didn't even get back into reading until my junior year of high school. I was so concerned by what other people thought of me that I stopped doing one of the things that I loved. I stopped seeing yellow. 

I can proudly say that I grew out of that phase of hiding my interests to appear a certain way and my love for reading hit me like a truck. On winter vacation I brought 4 books with me and finished all of them in the span of 3 days. I didn't even think that was possible. Now back to the question at hand. What is the importance of literature? Literature is my land of dreams and possibilities to this day. My yellow. It's safe. It is calm and content. It was my safe space and I didn't even realize how much it had been missed. Even when I wasn't reading books through that little phase of mine, literature still didn't leave me. Literature is what movies come from, the tv shows I'm obsessed with, the news notifications on my phone. Literature brings the world together. It makes us feel emotions and connect to characters and live a million different lives. Literature is power. It enlightens and it strengthens as it empowers people around the world. I thank literature for existing and for being my land of dreams. I thank Literature for the comfort it has given me over these last years and the information it provides me with. A world without literature is a world without yellow: dull and unrecognizable.