There were moments I wanted to close a book and never return to it. If it's riddled with a suffering that is cyclical, relentless, and maybe a little too suffocating. But I kept thinking about my own childhood; about all the moments I wished someone would pick up my book and refuse to put it down. To stay. To witness. To not turn away when it became uncomfortable. As often it happened.

Reading books with suffering became an act of that staying. There is something quietly redemptive in remaining open to suffering; not to indulge it, not to romanticise it, but simply to bear witness. Every book to me has something to offer, a learning experience. Sometimes they test how long you can remain emotionally available without retreating into numbness. And sometimes you could not enjoy the book, but respect what it asked of you. To stay. To keep looking. To not abandon something simply because the reality is difficult to sit with.

Lately, I’ve been told, gently, repeatedly, that if a book isn’t enjoyable, I should simply stop reading it. That advice is often framed as self-care. But for me, completion, even for a books that make me miserable, is not self-punishment. When I try to explain this and am met with dismissal; as if my instinct to endure is pathetic, performative, or self-inflicted, and they spew the same rhetoric again - and now it begins to feel like a silencing – a desire to tidy it away. It assumes comfort is the highest good. It assumes disengagement is always healing.

My insistence on finishing difficult books is not a performance or competition of toughness. It is anger translated into structure. It is energy directed somewhere contained and survivable.

Audre Lorde writes, “Anger is loaded with information and energy,” and that translating anger into action is a “liberating and strengthening act of clarification.” My endurance is exactly that translation. It is anger structured. It is pain metabolised into completion. It is me saying: I can look at this and survive it. She also writes that “it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman's voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed.” That difficulty is what I feel when people insist I should simply stop reading. Further, she says, "rendering her invisible by assuming that her struggles [...] are identical with my own has something to tell me that I had better learn from, lest we both waste ourselves fighting the truths between us." People blanket me with their own philosophy of comfort. They overwrite my coping with their preference. Lorde is speaking about race, power, and systemic oppression — suffering of a magnitude and structure far beyond a reading habit. But the principle resonates: when someone names their survival strategy, dismissing it because it makes you uncomfortable is a form of silencing. It replaces inquiry with correction.

I’m not going to engage in “it’s not that deep” conversations. If that’s the framework you bring to books, or to other people’s lives, then we are simply not operating on the same wavelength. And that’s fine. Not every reader is meant for every text. Not every philosophy of survival is meant for every person. But if you’ve read this far and your only conclusion is that I am overthinking, overfeeling, or overenduring, then you have chosen not to listen. And that's more revealing.

I don’t believe everyone should do it the way I do. I would never conscript someone into suffering simply to prove a point. If you don’t want to pick up a difficult book, that is completely fine.

Endurance, for me, is generative. It does not drag others down into suffering; it expands the space in which suffering can be acknowledged without shame. My endurance lifts both those who suffer and those who do not. In that way, it is not unlike feminism, which benefits all from its expansion of dignity and space. Strength practiced by one can widen the ground for many.