Sorry, here is the transcript.
Transcription of video "Megan's Story: Lost in the Pages
Transcription of video "Megan's Story: Lost in the Pages."
The time I really started to love reading was probably kindergarten, and I just loved the Sam I Am books. I love books because it's just like an adventure, an escape, another opportunity, and an experience.
I lived all over Cache Valley. Elementary school—that's when COVID started, and COVID made it so I had online school for a while. Through online school, I started reading a bit more—books that were descriptive in nature.
When I went to Logan Middle School, that's when it really got worse. It was more open, more readily accessible, and it was normalized. I hadn't had a phone until this year—February 14th is when I got it. The stuff that I accessed online was a lot more roses and happy, like romance books—maybe kissing, but it wasn't descriptive about explicit sex. The books that I had found and had been recommended were definitely that—explicit sex.
When I started reading books like that, I started reading more because it was more open in middle school. It piqued my interest, and I started to read more like that, probably because I was just beginning to figure out human nature. My hormones were beginning to change, I was starting to get my period, and I also am really good at learning—I love to learn. I found everything I could on it, and I got heavily into that stuff.
It became an addiction. I had to read something like that, or I didn’t get that fix of dopamine—whatever you want to call it. It progressively got worse because after I found out what it was and what they do, basically, I felt like I needed that connection with someone. So I went online, and I chatted with pretty much pedophiles and a whole bunch of other people, just trying to find that connection.
I put myself and my family at risk. I acted like the character in my book, like life was the book for me. In my mental view, I was struggling so badly, and I just didn’t completely understand it. I was struggling so badly, and that was an escape. That was like the only thing that would make me happy.
I was a super extroverted kid, but the more I read this, the more I thought, I don’t need friends. I just need this connection. So I started distancing myself—not only from friends. I grew to hate myself. I grew to hate others. I hated my mother. I hated my sister. I hated everyone.
As it continued to get worse, I started lying more and hiding things more. I had to go to juvie a few times because of how bad my relationship with my mother was. It definitely stemmed from normal romance because I loved that love connection that was stated in books, which can really be beautiful. But then it went into something more explicit, and the explicit content definitely brought me to that point.
People literally make brain neurons that connect to the thought. As a kid, if you read that, you can't get it out of your head. You can’t just close the book and forget about it. It ingrains itself in your brain, and it will be there forever. You can’t get that innocence back, and you will not be able to unsee those words.
So when people say that you can just close the book if you don’t like what you’re reading, I heavily disagree. Because if you’re given that book in the first place, you’re going to read it. And if you read it, you have that in your head. If it's in schools, it's affecting people that it's not helping, and they’re being suggested it. So it’s being normalized—being normalized by teachers, by librarians, by their peers. So it just recirculates into teenagers, and it’s given over and over until they are eventually numb to it and have not been able to peel back that film that literally covers their every sense of it.
They can’t see what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s like putting a blindfold over someone and expecting them to run.
Fourth Wing—that was heavily influenced by peer pressure because it was a very popular book. Everyone read it, and it was like a popularity contest of who knew what was in the book. A friend who recommended it to me specifically had those pages marked.
The point isn’t about romance or a cute love story anymore. It’s about getting your reader in that aroused state. That shouldn’t be in children’s libraries. Why let schools have this on the off chance that it’ll help someone, when in actuality, it is more harmful than it is helpful?
I think that if that teacher hadn’t initially recommended that author, I wouldn’t have seen it as quite so normal. I don’t think the librarian even knew how much of a butterfly effect that would be. I’m sure she was just trying to share a cool story with an awesome reader. I don’t think she understood how detrimental that book in my hands could be.
I wish I could go back. I would take all of those stupid books out of my hands and just let myself be innocent, because it’s so hard to stay innocent these days. So just let them have it for as long as they possibly can.
If you’re watching this and you're used to reading books like this, I advise you—set some down. Set them down for a long, long time, like three months, and then see how differently you act and how differently you think.