One Beautiful Sentence Ruined My Week (Then My Month, Then My Year)

"It's fascinating! This big beautiful world, isn't it?"
"I think it's actually you."

Reading evokes many emotions. Amazement, curiosity, joy, thrill. For me, there was one more — a sense of inadequacy. And it was a particularly strange kind, because it wasn’t stirred by the story or the characters, but by the person behind the pen.

It first happened a few years ago, when I was reading a classic. I was marveling at a brilliant sentence, a thought-provoking stance, and then immediately felt a sharp pang of disappointment. Why couldn't my own mind conceive something so profound and meaningful? Why couldn't I think of it? I asked myself, not even as a writer, but just as a human.

And so began the saga of repeatedly plummeting into frustration and misery, inflicted by words written centuries ago.

Whenever I read, every beautiful sentence became a reminder of what I couldn't conjure. New perspectives and interpretations would both light me up and let me down. I believed all these writers had a secret world inside them, bestowed by good fortune, and out of it poured mesmerizing thoughts. I envied that.

The feeling haunted me long enough that I began to dread opening a new book. I’d hesitate, knowing it might make me feel inspired and inadequate all at once. I couldn't write much either, not even in a journal. I was in love with a certain kind of profundity, but I couldn’t find it within myself. I felt empty.

Not just because I’m a Potterhead, but I grew desperate to understand how the magic unfolds within the minds I admire. But eventually, I became convinced I could never cross the line between reader and writer, admirer and creator.

I didn’t stop reading, though. How else was I supposed to find a cure for my aching heart?

Over time, part effortfully and part accidentally, I saw it. I realized what most revered authors did, again and again, was express themselves, clearly, loudly, beautifully, and sometimes crudely. It wasn't just about verbiage. They gave voice to even their most ambiguous, taboo, frightening, and disagreeable thoughts. But before they expressed, they confronted their thoughts, even in their half-baked, chaotic, and bizarre forms, with all their honesty.

I couldn't. And that was my nemesis.

In truth, my distress wasn't even about the superiority of their thoughts. It was about their ability to express the raw, personal ones out loud.

It dawned on me that what I lacked was actually the language to communicate my authenticity. It was the skill to make sense of the things I felt but couldn't speak of. Unfortunately, no school curriculum ever taught me how to express with honesty, how to speak beyond the expected. And until then, “upskilling” didn't quite occur to me beyond polishing my LinkedIn profile.

But gradually, as I found that language, I also discovered my own inner world, a place filled with wonder, ideas, and thoughts that were wholly my own. And that's when I stopped yearning for someone else’s. I stopped feeling empty.

Today, I read with much more peace. Now, the words in a book are simply a bridge, a path into someone else’s world. I walk across it, with admiration for the person on the other side, simply to connect, to learn, and to bring back a beautiful souvenir to enrich the world I have.