In my youth, my Granny described me as a voracious reader. I thought she was right because at that young age, I believed I understood what that word meant. Voracious was the prefix of a card in the gearhulk cycle of Magic: The Gathering’s Kaladesh expansion. “Voracious” gearhulk is a card that’s art depicts a giant humanoid construct covered in foliage, its colossal scale emphasized by the people surrounding it looking miniature in comparison. Thus, for about a month following that interaction, I had the idea in my brain that voracious meant large and growing. This was a definition I was content with until I had the bright idea to bring up my love of “voracious gearhulk” in conversation with my friend James, where I quickly learned that my misreading of “verdurous” had led to a month of me using a cool word I assumed I had known the correct definition of incorrectly.

What I’m trying to say is that I make a lot of assumptions, and the assumptions that have hurt me most throughout my life are the assumptions that I am correct about absolutely anything. Each time I assume I know something about anything I am swiftly made a fool of, and rightfully so. I spent so much of my life making these assumptions that at some point, I started assuming I was alone in this destructive mindset. Nobody else needs help knowing these things, so I shouldn’t either. At the same time I am frequently too self conscious to ask questions about these assumptions to confirm or refute them, or too lazy to research them for myself. These assumptions that I have made in the past and admittedly continue to make today have led to a depressing lack of drive to expand my understanding of topics such as literature, history, and life itself. To be honest, the only thing that has ever really changed about me is my outer layer. Beneath the superficial changes of mood and facial hair I’m still the 13 year old who assumes he knows what words mean because he’s seen or heard them in some media he consumes. I am tired of being lazy and ignorant, I want to be able to learn again.

Ever since I was a little kid, I always loved being creative. I loved making up my own stories or just daydreaming. I was never a big fan of science or math since there only seemed like one way to approach a certain topic. That’s why books were always a safe space for me. I could just read and read for hours and escape from the real world and delve into a beautifully crafted fictional world. Even though these worlds are fictional and not real, they are very much real to me. Harry Potter, The Mortal Instruments, The Maze Runner, and An Ember in the Ashes are all fictional worlds that make me insert myself into them and really live and breathe through them.

            I remember when my sister started reading Harry Potter, I instantly wanted to start reading it as well. Partly because my big sister, whom I look up to, is reading something and loving and the other part is because I absolutely loved to read. My parents were always reading to me as soon as I was born. As I grew older, I always wanted one of them to read me a bedtime story, I wouldn’t go to sleep without it. Now that I’m older, nothing much has changed. I still read every chance I get whether that’s a physical book or reading books on my phone, it’s always been a hobby of mine and I think it always will be.

            That hobby of reading eventually grew into a love of writing. Now, I have a love of writing my own creative stories or just writing my thoughts down in a different and creative way. One day, I hope to write and publish a novel. I’d be happy if I was able to publish just one thing. It’s always been a goal of mine since I was in Middle School. My love of writing and reading has only grown and contributed to my goals of where I want to go in life.

I was destined for a life rotating around an axis of literature. Like a quick tumble down an endless rabbit hole, it was inescapable. 

When I was young, I spent every day at the public library with my nose glued to any sort of book. To this day all of my local librarians know me by name. In the first grade, I took after my favorite people and started my own library in the basement of my house. I named it after my great-grandfather, a Greek immigrant, and the originator of my surname. It was called The Athanasius Pantazopoulos Memorial Library, a certified mouthful. On a visit to the more accredited library, I was gifted a stack of due date papers for the inside of the covers of my books, and one roll of receipt paper. I spent every day of the winter of 2009 marking every book with a custom stamp that read “Property of Athanasius Pantazopoulos Memorial Library”. Then organizing them all with my own makeshift version of the Dewey Decimal System. 

The following summer I started a neighborhood newspaper called “Kids Page”. The staff consisted of my sister, my two best neighbors, and me (and of course my mother as our typist because none of us had any idea how to use a computer). Our cover story for our first issue was a thrilling interview with my neighbor down the street who worked as a librarian in our town. My article was followed closely by one about how a vicious fisher cat was loose in the neighborhood, but, in my eyes, nothing could be more exciting than knowing a real librarian. We peddled the newspapers to every house within a one-block radius and donated the 15-dollar profit to the animal shelter. 

While I have evolved deeply as a writer and reader since my days on the Kids Page staff and as a librarian at the APML, I never lost the spark of excitement that literature brings to me. No matter what happens, reading, writing, and lots and lots of time in the library are a certainty for the rest of my life.