Life Lessons

Reading has become a struggle for me. I find myself easily losing focus and failing to stick to it. In an effort to pick it up again, I read It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover. I finished the book, but trust me, it was not easy to stay interested. I can definitely attribute this to my short attention span.

The book goes a little like this: A girl, Lily, meets an enticing but angry man and falls in love with him, Ryle. Her first love, Atlas, however, comes into the picture shortly after. Atlas was homeless when Lily first fell in love with him, and she helped him find a place within society again. After some time, Atlas joined the marines, moving to Boston as Lily moves on her with her life. She also ends up moving to Boston, after the death of her abusive father. Back to the present, she encounters Ryle who she quickly marries, but throughout their marriage, he abuses her and she ends up filing for a divorce. Atlas and Lily rekindle their love at the end.

Ryle, who had unresolved anger issues as a kid, was unable to let go of his insanity around the people he loves. Surprisingly, I connected with Ryle. I am not violent whatsoever, but when it comes to the people I love, I find myself getting angry easily, sometimes ending up becoming vengeful. I found myself in the pages of this book, within all characters. Including Lily, who was too forgiving for too long.

I also read that it is human to make mistakes. We all hurt, we all cry, we all have our issues. Taking away from the book, it's the circumstance that drives us to behave and act in certain ways. Our histories are all intertwined into our present, every experience leads to another. If you faced struggles in childhood, those scars may unveil themselves through constant arguments. If you were forced to be really independent, you could have struggled to understand the difference between confidence, ego, and pride. Either way, no matter how much we try, it's difficult to force yourself to understand other people. The way that I have learned to make peace is by defining other people’s actions as human. Ryle's behavior with Lily showed me something about literature that I had forgotten previously: its ability to give me multiple perspectives and see the outcomes that can occur when you interact with things in a certain way.

If you took another angle to Ryle and Lily's situation, you could say that love is the reason he was driven to abuse his wife. You had to have loved someone to take the betrayal to heart. Ryle felt that for Lily when he confronted her. Again, without literature, I wouldn't have two perspectives on the circumstances at hand.

Reading made me think on a deeper level. These days, I tend to not think about the philosophy of the actions around us, but with this book, I found myself connecting situations to the world around me. As one of this books' main themes, I'm led to the question: what do we gain from hate if all our actions are a result of being human?

I’m sitting here typing this out as if I’m modern Socrates or Buddha. But I struggle to forgive and forget the most, just like Ryle. Reading this book allowed me to recognize the hurt that I may have caused people. I'm also human enough to know it's not easy to let go and not hate someone. It’s draining to think about memories with the people you love and see them tainted by your anger and jealousy. I hope that the next time around, I’ll find the peace inside myself to not be resentful. I don’t want to be anything like Ryle or Hamlet. I don’t want ego and pride to take over who I am. I can only be happy if I accept who I am. Bold, spontaneous, clingy, caring yet cold, sometimes really angry, with out-of-pocket humor. These are examples of the lessons I take away from literature.

Literature has given me the ability to introspect. It's like your parents may have told you: you can choose to learn from experience or by making mistakes yourself. I do both. As I get back into reading, I hope to learn from the experiences of century-old characters as well as modern fiction. I compare everything to myself, and I think that without the knowledge that books give us, I wouldn't be as developed as I am today.

It’s human to make mistakes, but we can also learn from experiences.