Someone mentioned a book they loved. Really loved. The kind of love where they immediately start telling you about the characters, the plot, the exact moment they knew they were obsessed.

Then they mentioned the genre. And almost instantly, they added:

“Don’t judge me.”

That was the part that stayed with me.

Not the book.

Not even the genre.

The fact that someone felt the need to defend enjoying it before anyone had actually criticized them. Because we all know the categories by now, don’t we? There are books that make you look intelligent. And then there are books you apparently have to explain.

Classics are cultured. Philosophy is serious. Literary fiction means you have depth. History is educational. Poetry is sophisticated.

Romance?

Hmm.

Fantasy?

Depends how defensive the person asking is feeling.

Thrillers?

Fun, but surely not important.

And I started wondering when exactly we agreed to this ranking system? Who decided that spending four hundred pages thinking about existentialism is inherently more respectable than spending four hundred pages trying to figure out who committed a fictional murder?

More importantly:

Why do we care so much what other people are reading?

Apparently, We’re Reading Each Other Too

I think books have become one of those things we use to quietly evaluate people. Not always maliciously. Sometimes we barely realize we are doing it.

Someone tells you they love philosophy and you might immediately assume they are thoughtful.

Someone reads classics and they seem well-read.

Someone says they mostly read romance and suddenly there is this ridiculous temptation to assume their taste is less serious.

And I hate that.

I should probably clarify that I like classics. I like philosophy too. I enjoy books that make me stop halfway through a paragraph and stare at the wall for a minute because the author has just said something I need to sit with. But liking those books does not make me intellectually superior to someone who reads romance. It just means we enjoy different things.

That feels so obvious when you actually say it aloud, and yet reading culture has somehow managed to make it complicated. Because we do not only ask, “Do you read?”

We ask what.

And the answer seems to matter.

There is almost an unspoken points system.

Dostoevsky: +10.

Camus: +8.

A dense philosophy book nobody has enjoyed since 1847: +15.

A contemporary romance with a happy ending: please explain yourself.

And before someone comes for me, no, I am not saying difficult books are secretly terrible and everyone should abandon philosophy for beach reads.I am saying something much less dramatic.

Your preference is not your intelligence.

That should not be controversial.

I Couldn’t Help but Wonder…

If nobody could ever know what we were reading, would our reading habits change?

Not because of the covers.

Not because of what looks nice on a shelf.

I mean the actual books.

Would you finally stop forcing yourself through the novel you have been “meaning to finish” for six months?

Would you still choose the book everyone calls important?

Would you admit that the supposedly shallow series you read last year entertained you more than the award-winning novel you kept falling asleep over?

Would you still feel guilty for wanting something easy?

And maybe the more uncomfortable question:

How much of our reading taste belongs to us, and how much of it belongs to the person we want other people to think we are?

That is where things get interesting. Because I think most readers have at least one book they hesitate to admit they loved. Not necessarily because the book is bad. Because the genre has a reputation.

Maybe it is romance.

Maybe it is young adult fiction.

Maybe it is fantasy.

Maybe it is self-help.

Maybe it is one of those absurdly dramatic thrillers where every person in the house is secretly lying and nobody has apparently considered calling the police.

You enjoyed it. Then you saw what everyone else was saying. Suddenly you start editing your own reaction.

“It was fun, but…”

“It wasn’t good good.”

“I know the writing wasn’t amazing.”

Why?

Can we not just like things anymore?

The Romance Reader on Trial

Romance gets the worst of this. And again, I am saying this as someone who does not naturally reach for romance. I am not secretly defending a collection of seven hundred fictional boyfriends. It simply bothers me how quickly people associate romance with stupidity.

Someone says she reads romance and there is often an assumption that she must only want predictable stories, uncomplicated writing and attractive fictional men. As though reading about love automatically switches off the analytical part of the brain. Which is particularly funny when you remember that literature has been obsessed with love for… basically forever. Half the classics we worship are filled with desire, marriage, jealousy, heartbreak, affairs and people making catastrophically bad decisions because they are in love.

Put it in an old edition and apparently it becomes literature.

Give it a contemporary cover and suddenly we need to discuss whether women are reading enough “serious books.”

Interesting.

And I think this is why the judgment bothers me even though romance is not my genre. Because it is not actually about romance. It is about the belief that some forms of enjoyment are intellectually superior to others.

Maybe You Don’t Hate Reading

There is another thing we do that makes absolutely no sense. We tell people they need to read more. Then we give them a list of books they are supposed to read. Then they hate those books. Then we conclude they simply “aren’t readers.”

What?

Imagine doing this with music.

You tell someone, “You should listen to more music.” They say okay. You give them an opera. They hate it. And you announce, “Unfortunately, music just isn’t for you.”

No. You would ask what they like.

Maybe they want jazz.

Maybe pop.

Maybe classical.

Maybe Arabic music.

Maybe they want something loud and ridiculous while driving home.

Books should work the same way. You might not hate reading. You might hate the books you keep trying to make yourself read. There is a difference.

Maybe you need plot.

Maybe you care more about characters.

Maybe you want beautiful writing and almost nothing to happen.

Maybe you need something to happen every seven pages or you will mentally leave the building.

Maybe you like mysteries because you enjoy trying to outsmart the author.

Maybe you read historical fiction because you want to disappear into another century.

Maybe romance comforts you.

Maybe fantasy gives you something reality cannot.

Maybe philosophy genuinely excites you.

Maybe you like all of it.

That is the fun part.You are supposed to find out.

How Do You Actually Know What You Like?

I think people make discovering their reading taste far more complicated than it needs to be. We start with labels.

“I should read classics.”

“I want to become a literary fiction person.”

“I should read more nonfiction.”

But maybe the better question is simpler:

Which books make you forget to stop reading?

Look at the books you actually finished. Not the ones sitting impressively in your reading list. The ones you devoured. What did they have in common?

Were they fast?

Dark?

Character-driven?

Funny?

Unsettling?

Romantic?

Psychological?

Did you care about the prose or were you mostly desperate to know what happened next?

When you finish a book you love, what do you immediately search for?

“Books like…”

That search might know your taste better than you do. And I think there is something freeing about admitting your real answer. Maybe you want complicated ideas one week and an outrageous murder mystery the next. Maybe you read a classic slowly for a month, then finish a thriller in one evening. Who cares?

We are not applying to become Head Reader of the United Nations.

When Did Reading Become Self-Improvement Homework?

There is another reason I think we have become so strange about books. We have become obsessed with making everything useful.

Read because it improves your vocabulary.

Read because successful people read.

Read because it increases empathy.

Read because it improves concentration.

Read because you need to spend less time on your phone.

Read twenty books this year.

No, fifty.

Actually, someone on TikTok has already read eighty-two and it is only June, so perhaps you should panic.

Reading has slowly acquired the energy of a performance review. And yes, books can educate you. They can completely rearrange your understanding of something. They can introduce you to history, psychology, politics, cultures and ideas you may never have encountered otherwise. That is one of the reasons I love them. But reading does not need to justify its existence every single time.

Sometimes I do not want a book to make me a better person.

Sometimes I just want it to be good.

Sometimes I want to close the last page and think:

That was insane.

Sometimes I want to laugh.

Sometimes I want to be disturbed.

Sometimes I want to spend six hours trying to solve a fictional murder and discover that I suspected the wrong person the entire time.

What exactly have I achieved?

Nothing.

I had fun.

I think we have forgotten that fun is allowed to be the achievement.

The Books We Hide

And then there are the books we quietly keep to ourselves. Not physically hidden behind the classics on the shelf. I mean the ones we hide in conversation.

Someone asks for your favourite book and suddenly the answer you genuinely want to give feels too embarrassing. So you choose the respectable answer.

You mention the classic you liked.

Not the ridiculous book you have reread three times.

You talk about the novel that made you think.

Not the one that made you happy.

And I think that is such a strange loss. Because the supposedly embarrassing answers are usually the interesting ones.

Tell me the thriller you stayed awake until three in the morning finishing.

Tell me about the fantasy world you genuinely missed when the series ended.

Tell me which romance made you cry even though you saw the ending coming from chapter four.

Tell me about the terrible book you inexplicably adored.

Tell me which classic everyone worships that you never want to see again.

Those answers actually tell me something.

“I enjoy acclaimed literature” tells me very little about you.

“I have read this absolutely ridiculous murder mystery five times because it comforts me” makes me want to know more immediately.

“People Don’t Read Anymore”

This one always makes me laugh. We complain that nobody reads anymore.

Phones have destroyed attention spans.

People cannot concentrate.

Everyone needs to read more.

Then someone starts reading romance.

“No, not that.”

Fantasy.

“Isn’t that for teenagers?”

Thrillers.

“Those are so predictable.”

Self-help.

“That’s not really literature.”

At some point you have to wonder whether people actually want everyone to read or whether they simply want everyone to read like them. Because those are completely different things. If someone reads twelve romance novels this year and genuinely loves all twelve, they read twelve books. There is no secret literary committee that removes nine of them because there was kissing.

If another person reads three enormous classics and loves every page, wonderful.

If someone reads only biographies, wonderful.

If someone decides life is too short and they will read nothing except locked-room mysteries until death, honestly, I respect the commitment.

We do not need to have the same taste for our taste to be valid.

Your Bookshelf Is Not an IQ Test

Maybe what bothers me most is how easily preference becomes character judgment. We do it with books, films, music, clothes, food, almost everything. You like this, therefore you must be that kind of person. But taste is messy.

Someone can love philosophy and reality television.

Someone can read Tolstoy and still want a completely ridiculous thriller on holiday.

Someone can read romance and understand complicated ideas.

Someone can read every classic on earth and still be an idiot.

Books are not magical intelligence certificates. And perhaps the best thing about reading is that we are allowed to wander. You can spend a month reading history because something has fascinated you. Then become completely obsessed with murder mysteries. Then discover poetry. Then hate everything you try for three weeks. Then accidentally find a book in a genre you swore you disliked and realize you have been wrong about yourself the entire time.

That feels much more interesting than deciding at twenty-two that you are A Literary Fiction Person and remaining loyal to the branding forever. So maybe the next time someone tells you what they are reading, we could resist the instinct to rank it. And maybe the next time you catch yourself saying:

“I know it’s silly, but…”

Don’t.

Tell me you loved it.

Tell me why.

Because I am starting to think the books we are most embarrassed to enjoy might reveal something far more interesting than the ones we think we are supposed to admire.

And I couldn’t help but wonder…

Maybe becoming well-read was never about reading the most impressive books.

Maybe it was about becoming curious enough to read widely, confidently and without asking permission first.

Confidentially Yours,

Taz.

Someone gets a new job.

Someone gets married.

Someone moves somewhere new.

Someone starts a business.

Someone announces the next exciting chapter of their life with a suspiciously well-designed Instagram carousel.

And there you are.

Still figuring things out.

It’s strange because five minutes earlier, you might have been perfectly fine.

You weren’t miserable. You weren’t necessarily unhappy with your life. You knew there were things you wanted to change, of course, but you were working through them at your own pace.

Then somebody tells you what they are doing next. And suddenly, your pace feels less like a pace and more like a delay.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

Maybe because, technically, I’m late.

I will graduate a year later than I was supposed to.

Which means I’m also a year later starting the whole job-searching, career-building, becoming-a-real-adult part.

I still don’t have my driver’s licence.

And somehow, when you put all these things together, it starts to feel less like a few delayed milestones and more like evidence that you have somehow failed adulthood.

Which is ridiculous, I’m only 24.

FOR GOD SAKE, I AM ONLY TWENTY-FOUR.

It’s still, there are days when I feel 10 years behind everyone else. There are periods in life when I simply need more time.

Time to understand what I want.

Time to change my mind.

Time to become comfortable with a decision before making another one.

Time to do absolutely nothing impressive while I figure out what comes next.

The problem is that “I need some time” is apparently not a particularly impressive life plan. People want to know what you are doing.

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What’s next?

What time are you working?

Where are you going?

When are you starting?

When are you finishing?

When are you getting your licence?

Have you found a job yet?

And perhaps the most terrifying question of adulthood:

So, what’s the plan?

I don’t know.

There. I said it.

Sometimes I don’t know.

And I wish I don’t know yet were considered a complete sentence. Instead, saying it can feel like admitting that you have somehow fallen behind. Because society seems to have created an invisible conveyor belt for adulthood, and once you are standing on it, you’re expected to keep moving.

Study.

Graduate.

Work.

Earn more.

Drive.

Find someone.

Get married.

Build something.

Buy something.

Become something.

Next. Next. Next.

There is always a next.

And God forbid you stand still for a moment and ask whether you even want to go where the conveyor belt to take you.

The strangest part is that nobody has ever actually shown me the official schedule. I’ve never seen the document. I don’t remember signing it. And yet somehow I still know when I’m supposedly late.

Maybe that’s because I don’t talk to comes with invisible deadlines.

Not the real kind, the ones printed on forms or sent in emails.

The worst kind.

The ones we absorb.

By this age, I should have…

Everyone else already…

I thought I would be…

Why haven’t I…

And it doesn’t help that people often treat slowness like a lack of awareness.

As if you haven’t noticed.

As if you don’t know you’re late.

As if the solution is for someone to point it out to you one more time.

Trust me, I know.

I know I graduated later.

I know I haven’t started working yet.

I know I should have got my licence by now.

I know exactly what people my age are doing.

I’m not walking around with a child’s mind, completely unaware that adulthood is happening around me.

If anything, I’m too aware.

I notice everything.

Every delay.

Every question.

Every person moving faster.

Every comparison.

And anxiety has a very good habit of making ordinary things feel much larger than they are.

So sometimes I move slowly.

Not because I don’t understand life.

Not because I don’t care.

Not because I need someone to tell me to “take things seriously”.

I just have a slower pace.

And apparently that is much harder for people to accept than it should be.

Suddenly, other people’s lives become measuring tapes.

Someone else’s engagement makes you question your relationship status.

Someone else’s career makes you question your ambition.

Someone else’s graduation makes you question your own delay.

Someone else’s car makes you remember that you still can’t drive.

Someone else’s independence makes you question your progress.

Someone else’s certainty makes you embarrassed by your confusion.

And before you know it, you are no longer asking yourself, what do I actually want?

You are asking:

Why am I not there yet?

But we are exactly is there?

And who decided I was supposed to arrive at the same time as everyone else?

I couldn’t help, but wonder: when did having your own pace start feeling like falling behind?

Maybe the problem isn’t that we are moving too slowly, maybe we are simply surrounded by evidence of everyone’s movement.

We see the announcement, not the uncertainty before it.

The new job, not the months of rejection.

The wedding, not everything that came before the relationship.

The achievement, not the ordinary Tuesday when they sat in their room wondering whether anything was ever going to happen for them.

Life has always moved at different speeds. We just weren’t always watching everybody else’s clock.

Now we are.

All day.

And comparison has a peculiar ability to turn a perfectly reasonable pause into a personal emergency. You can spend months trying to figure yourself out and feel completely fine about it until you see someone your age doing something you thought you would have done by now.

Suddenly, you need answers.

Immediately.

You need a five-year plan by dinner.

Perfectly colour-coded.

You need the job.

The licence.

The next milestone.

Anything that proves you are not wasting time.

And perhaps that’s what I’ve struggled to explain to the people around me. I’m not saying I don’t want anything from life. Quite the opposite.

I don’t need to be reminded that life is moving.

I know it is.

I can feel it.

What I don’t understand is why everyone seems so uncomfortable when somebody moves at a different speed?

Why does taking longer automatically sounds like an excuse?

Why does a year-long delay have to become a personality flaw?

Why is “not yet” treated like “never”?

Why does everybody need an explanation?

I don’t want to make a decision simply because everyone has become uncomfortable watching me take too long.

I don’t want to choose a life because it was the quickest one available.

I don’t want to arrive somewhere on time only to realise I never wanted to be there.

But how do you explain that without sounding like you are making excuses?

How do you tell someone:

I’m trying.

I’m thinking.

I’m becoming.

It just doesn’t look particularly impressive from the outside right now.

There are seasons when progress is obvious.

You graduate.

You get hired.

You launch something.

You move.

You achieve something with a name people recognise.

And then there are seasons when progress is almost embarrassingly invisible.

You are changing your mind.

You are recovering from something.

You are learning what you don’t want.

You are trying again.

You are sitting with uncertainty instead of grabbing the first available answer just so you can tell everyone you have one.

Or maybe, sometimes, you are simply moving slower.

Nothing profound.

Nothing poetic.

No dramatic lesson.

You are just taking longer.

And that should be allowed too.

Nobody congratulates you for those things.

There are no announcements for:

“after considerable thought, I have decided I still have absolutely no idea what I’m doing”

Although, personally, I think there should be.

Maybe we would all feel a little less alone.

The truth is, I don’t want to spend my entire life racing toward the next milestone just because everyone else seems to be reaching theirs. I want time to live between the milestones too. I want room to change direction.

To start late.

To stop.

To reconsider.

To take longer than expected.

To graduate a year later without acting like my life is ruined.

To start working later without feeling as though everyone else has already passed me permanently.

To get my licence late without treating it like proof that I have somehow failed at being twenty-four.

To build something slowly enough thatI actually recognise myself when I arrive.

And yes, sometimes that means watching people pass me.

That’s the difficult part nobody includes in the inspirational quotes about “ everyone having their own timeline”. Having your own timeline sounds beautiful until someone younger than you achieves something you have wanted for years.

Then suddenly enlightenment becomes considerably harder. Maybe having your own pace isn’t about never comparing yourself. Maybe it’s about feeling the comparison and refusing to let it make your decisions. Because I’m beginning to think that there are worse things than I’m being late.

You can be right on time for a life you never wanted.

You can rush into a carrier because everyone else is working.

Rush into a relationship because everyone else is settling down.

Rush into adulthood just because everyone around you has decided there is a correct speed for it.

You can spend years desperately trying not to fall behind, only to eventually realise you were running somebody else’s race.

So yes.

Maybe I’m running late.

Actually, in most areas, I definitely am.

But maybe the strangest part is not that I am late.

Maybe it’s that we have created a culture where being late to ordinary milestones feels like something you need to defend. Like slowness needs a diagnosis. Like every delay requires an explanation. Like everyone is entitled to ask when you are going to catch up.

Maybe there are questions about my life that I still don’t know how to answer.

And maybe the people around me won’t always understand why I need the time that I need.

I am learning to be okay with it.

Because perhaps life isn’t asking me to keep up, perhaps it’s asking me to pay attention.

And I’d rather arrive late to a life that feels like mine than arrive perfectly on time to one I chose because everyone was waiting.

So, if you will excuse me..

I’m running late to my own life.

For once, I don’t think I’m going to rush.

Confidentially yours,

Taz.

Their taste in music. A phrase they say so often that one day you hear it come out of your own mouth. A restaurant you still think of as their restaurant, even years after you’ve stopped speaking.

And then there are the things we pick up that are harder to recognize.

Their anxiety.

Their anger.

Their sadness.

Their shame.

Sometimes, I wonder how many feelings I’ve spent hours trying to understand only to discover they might not have been mine in the first place.

I recently read The Silent Patient, and for a book built around a murder, a marriage and a woman who refuses to speak, the thing that stayed with me had surprisingly little to do with solving the mystery.

It was a psychological idea.

Countertransference.

The term comes from psychotherapy. In simple terms, countertransference is what happens when a therapist begins having emotional reactions to a patient feelings that might come from the therapist’s own experiences, but can also be stirred up by what is happening between them in the room.

A patient might, for example, speak very calmly while the therapist suddenly feels unusually anxious. Or the therapist might find themselves feeling protective, irritated, rejected, helpless or even guilty without immediately understanding why.

The interesting part is that those feelings aren’t always treated as meaningless distractions.

Sometimes, they can become information.

They can offer a clue about what the patient is communicating without actually saying it, or about the kind of emotional experience that seems to form around them in their relationships.

In other words, one person can walk into a room carrying something they cannot quite express, and somehow another person begins to feel it.

Of course, therapy is far more complicated than one person simply “absorbing” another person’s emotions, and countertransference doesn’t mean every feeling a therapist experiences belongs to the patient.

But that idea, the possibility that feelings can emerge between people rather than neatly belonging to one person, stayed with me.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Not because I’m a therapist. which I'm not.

And hopefully not because my life is beginning to resemble a psychological thriller.

But because I started thinking about all the times I’ve walked away from someone carrying an emotion I didn’t arrive with.

You know the feeling.

You can be having a perfectly ordinary day until you speak to someone who is anxious. They tell you everything they’re worried about. You reassure them. You tell them it’ll be fine.

Eventually, they feel better.

Wonderful.

Except now you’re anxious.

Or someone is clearly upset with you but insists that nothing is wrong. They become distant. Their answers get shorter. Their face changes.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

So you ask again.

Still fine.

And somehow, despite being the only person in the conversation who apparently has a problem with absolutely nothing, you leave wondering what you’ve done wrong.

They walked away from the feeling.

You carried it home.

How convenient.

And I couldn’t help but wonder:

If emotions can move between people so quietly, how do we know which feelings actually belong to us?

Maybe we’ve all become accidental emotional couriers.

We carry a friend’s insecurity into the mirror.

A parent’s fear into a decision.

Someone else’s disappointment into our confidence.

A person’s bad mood into what had been a perfectly good afternoon.

And because the feeling is happening inside us, we assume it must have started there too.

But feelings don’t always arrive with receipts.

Sometimes they simply show up.

And perhaps that’s part of being close to people.

We talk about empathy as though it’s always this beautiful quality. To be empathetic is to understand. To care. To feel with another person.

And it is beautiful.

But nobody talks quite as much about how exhausting it can be.

Because when you love someone, you don’t stand completely untouched beside their pain.

When someone you love is heartbroken, a little bit of your heart breaks too. When they’re scared, you worry. When they’re grieving, the room feels different even when nobody says anything.

We carry one another.

Maybe that’s one of the loveliest things humans do.

But I’ve started to wonder whether there’s a difference between carrying something with someone and carrying it for them.

The first feels like love.

The second can start to feel like luggage.

And emotional baggage is particularly inconvenient because, unlike an actual suitcase, nobody stops you at the door and asks whether it belongs to you.

So we keep collecting it.

Someone is insecure, and suddenly we’re choosing our words carefully enough for both of us.

Someone is angry, and we become responsible for restoring the peace.

Someone worries constantly, and eventually their fears start sounding suspiciously like our own thoughts.

Someone feels guilty for hurting us, and somehow we end up comforting them.

Perhaps that’s the strangest one.

There are moments when another person’s discomfort becomes so uncomfortable to witness that we abandon our own feelings just to make theirs easier to carry.

And then we call it kindness.

But is it?

I don’t know.

Maybe that’s why this idea stayed with me long after I finished The Silent Patient.

It made me think about emotional boundaries differently.

We’re often told to “protect our peace,” “set boundaries,” and “stop absorbing other people’s energy” phrases that look wonderful typed over a beige Instagram background.

Real relationships are messier.

I don’t want to live a life in which nobody else’s feelings affect me.

I don’t think love works that way.

I want my friend’s sadness to matter to me. I want to worry when someone I love is struggling. I want to be the person someone can call when what they’re carrying becomes too heavy.

I just don’t know if that means I have to keep carrying it after they leave.

Maybe empathy doesn’t require ownership.

Maybe I can sit beside someone’s sadness without making it my sadness.

Maybe I can understand someone’s fear without allowing it to make my decisions.

Maybe someone can be disappointed in me without me immediately deciding that I’ve disappointed myself.

And maybe someone else’s inability to say what they’re feeling doesn’t automatically make it my responsibility to feel it for them.

I’m still learning that one.

So lately, when a feeling arrives unexpectedly, I’ve been trying to become a little more curious before accepting it as mine.

- Where did this come from?

- Was I feeling this before that conversation?

Is something actually wrong, or was I simply standing next to someone who felt like something was?

I don’t always know the answer.

Sometimes the anxiety is mine.

Sometimes the sadness is mine.

Sometimes I really am the problem, which is terribly inconvenient for the entire premise of this column.

But sometimes, if I sit with it long enough, I realize I’ve been carrying something that belongs to somebody else.

And perhaps loving people will always mean occasionally carrying a little of what they carry.

Maybe that’s unavoidable.

Maybe that’s even beautiful.

But perhaps every once in a while, before we drag all that emotional luggage into another day, we should open the bag and take inventory.

The fear.

The guilt.

The anger.

The insecurity.

The expectations.

And ask ourselves one very simple question:

Is this feeling even mine?

Because caring about someone doesn’t necessarily mean carrying everything they couldn’t.

And maybe some things were only ever ours to hold for a moment before quietly giving them back.

Confidentially yours,

Taz.