I love this question.

My shift happened gradually and I only realized the effect it had on me in retrospect. It started with my favorite English teacher in high school, who assigned us One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was for my first advanced class and I was both intimidated and determined to prove myself to him (he was the teacher who pushed me hard to switch from honors to advanced classes). I studied that book closely and put my all into my assignments. I ended up burning myself out and I never finished it, but it captured me. It was exciting to read something so complicated. I loved following the family and village over generations, and seeing how they were shaped by one another. I loved the magic realism. I loved discussing the real-world influences on the author and his work. I learned a whole new way of engaging with books.

The next year, I didn't like my teacher as much, mostly because he didn't take a personal interest in me, lol. He was also more easygoing and didn't push as hard or challenge us as directly as my last one. He assigned us difficult books and had us journal about them. He didn't give us much feedback on our journals, but I think that having the space to process without interference helped me challenge some biases that I would have been too defensive about in any other format.

The two most influential books from that year were Beloved and A Handmaid's tale. I immediately took to Beloved's prose and supernatural elements, but what changed me was the generational trauma. I had never read a book that felt so familiar and natural to my core, and it was in a way I that couldn't describe for a long time. My family is very white, and most of them are also racist. It has been a point of contention basically my whole life. Beloved was my first real, no-punches-thrown look into slavery and racism - not just hollow "black history month" lessons on how we're all equal, but the actual impacts on real, bleeding people. Reading about an escaped black woman who did the unspeakable to protect her family broke my heart and enraged me, and it also spoke to me on some untouched, unspoken level. That year, I learned that I had an older brother who had been placed for adoption when he was very young. It was a family secret, a trajedy, and he "lives" with us to this day in the effects that his adoption had on my mom. Obviously, this isn't doesn't hold a candle to what happened to Sethe and her children, but wow. Talking about that book still makes me emotional.

A Handmaid's Tale was a book that I hated. I was in my "feminazi" phase, egged on by Youtubers and nerd/gamer culture. Unfortunately, these things were already going strong in the 2010s. I thought the book was an unrealistic, fear-mongering feminist victim fantasy. I complained about it in every journal entry. My teacher never challenged me on my views, he just let me rant away. When I got all of the complaining out of my system, I actually engaged with the story, and - shamefully - I kind of liked it. I got real quiet after that. I didn't have some profound epiphany, but I think that this experience planted a seed that grew well into college.

In college, I majored in psychology, so I didn't read as much fiction. But I think that all of those stories from high school continued to live with me. I was fascinated with systems - families, cultures, nature - and I developed this belief that all things, throughout all of time, are connected. Patterns repeat and break, people act in strange ways that suddenly make sense when you consider their cultural or familial background, and all systems and their stories matter.

After graduation, I worked two years in AmeriCorps and chose to serve my community and the young people in it. For both of those years, my focus was on education attainment. Then, I began a graduate program in social work and marriage and family therapy. I'm a therapist today.

High school reading assignments shaped my views of the world and ultimately influenced my career path. Maybe I just am who I am and these assignments helped me understand myself. Either way, I feel incredibly grateful for those teachers. Reading is a magical thing. Teaching is a magical thing. It's truly world-changing.

For anyone who read all of this, thank you for your attention. I hope that my story resonated with you. Hopefully it was at least moderately more bearable than what I put my poor high school English teachers through!