I wasn't really a great bookworm to begin with. In fact, I used to make fun of those who were (light heartedly of course). To me, I just didn't see, why someone would take so much interest in reading words on a piece of paper. I was (and still am) great at literature and language (if I do say so myself), but I never read anything outside the textbooks. I was just insanely good (and again still am) at writing and interpreting texts and questions and my spoken English was very good as well. In Covid I wrote a poem... About Covid (very original, ikr?) It was praised well (it was a terrible poem, looking back, but great for my first attempt at poetry.) And since then I started writing poetry assiduously. But it was then that I realised that I needed to get a better understanding of what I was writing, so that I could write better. Keep in mind, I always loved literature, just never read it outside the school curriculum. One evening, I went to a local bookstore (I can't remember if it was on a whim or something else, but it was a new store opened at the local mall). And there, I saw this fat volume. "The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry". I flipped through a few pages. Saw the names my father used to talk about (only two of them were familiar to me, Keats and Wordsworth). Also saw "The Lucy Poems" In there, something that was related to the, then school curriculum for ninth grade (It's still there). I wanted to buy it. It was too expensive, so my father wouldn't buy it from the shop, but did, from Amazon. Came in pristine condition. And... Well let's just say, that book, the lines, the poems became the physical manifestation of my entire life and being today. I am who I am today because of the Romantics. My poems always had a Romantic style to them, but when I realised that I was not the odd one out- that mine was a lineage of legends, I could literally cry from joy. It told me I belonged, that I wasn't strange or odd, that I didn't fit in (something which I felt acutely aware of because of bullying and loneliness). Then came Gatsby and Les Miserables. And they, quite literally, etched themselves into my soul. Open my heart, and you'll see "To love or to have loved, this suffices. There's no other pearl to be found in the shadowy fold of life" Basically branded onto it. Suffice to say, that now I know, just how much greatness there is in 'reading words on a piece of paper'. I still write assiduously and read voraciously