When I was a kid, I hated reading. It's probably because I was being forced to do it. Whenever I did something "wrong", one of the punishments my aunt would give me was to read a book and write her a summary of it in English. Since English is my second language, that was a real challenge at the time. And if she wasn't satisfied, I'd be given something even harder to do.

I think it was in my late teens or early twenties when I discovered the beauty of reading. But before I got there, I had to hit a kind of bottom first.

After my family migrated to Australia from the Philippines, I felt completely liberated. On the surface, everything was fine. We had made it, we were here. But inside I was homesick in a way I couldn't explain, grieving a life I hadn't been given the chance to say goodbye to. I was also at a crossroads, with no idea what career to pursue or who I was supposed to become in this new place. The pressure was immense, and the loneliness was worse. Whenever I tried to talk about it, my parents would brush it off. They came from a generation where mental health was taboo. They thought I was just being a silly kid. And maybe to them I was. They had far more serious things weighing on them. So I stopped trying to talk, and I turned to books instead.

I read a lot of self-help books. Through writers like Tony Robbins, Dale Carnegie, and Tim Ferriss, I found something I desperately needed at the time, a sense of order. I could take my messy, anxious life and organise it into categories, set tangible goals, follow a system. It felt like being handed a map when you're lost. For a while, it worked.

But eventually, the books started to blur together. The same ideas kept recycling in different packaging, and I started to suspect that some of them could've been condensed into a 10-page essay rather than stretched into 300 pages. So I drifted toward memoirs, stories of people I admired or wanted to become. I learned a lot from them. But as I got older, I found that the questions I was carrying couldn't be answered by someone else's success story.

My goals had quietly changed. It was no longer about earning a certain amount of money or reaching a certain position. The questions that were keeping me up at night were harder and stranger than that. What does it mean to be a good person? Am I one? What is a good life? Am I actually living it?

That's when I started reading classic literature.

I was intimidated at first. These were books people wrote essays about in universities, books with reputations that felt heavier than the books themselves. But after going down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos on the subject, I decided to just try. And something unexpected happened.

Reading Anna Karenina, or Dostoevsky, or the Stoics, I kept finding myself stopping mid-page because something had reached through the centuries and grabbed me. These people, writing in worlds completely unlike mine, were wrestling with the exact same things I was. The guilt, the confusion, the longing to live well and the fear of falling short. There's a line I came across from Marcus Aurelius that I've thought about almost every day since: that you have power over your mind, not outside events. Such a simple idea, and yet it landed differently coming from a Roman emperor who had every reason to believe otherwise.

What classic literature gives me, more than anything, is a way out of my own head. For a little while, I'm not stuck in my own life. I'm in someone else's, following their struggles, and somehow that makes mine feel more bearable. More human. Less like a personal failing and more like just... the deal. The thing everyone gets when they're born.

I sometimes wish I had found these books earlier. Maybe I would've handled things better. But honestly, I don't think I would've been ready. The questions have to find you first. And when they finally did, the books were waiting.