I went to a book store to buy a gift for a child’s birthday and walked out with some Legos and a book on Somacultural liberation. I could pretend it was a coincidence, except that of course I chose a book store with a small toy section to do my shopping and an English-language bookstore at that and once I had my toy, I didn’t walk out of the door, or stopped by a fiction section, no, I went straight to the Community and Culture and to Indigenous voices shelf.

So, me walking out of that store with a new book was pure determinism, a product of lifelong cultural conditioning. Back when I was a smart, shy, chubby, fat-shamed child living in a tiny claustrophobic community of soviet military families in Eastern Germany, my favourite place was a small bookstore adjacent to the only grocery store in our compound. The store would receive the new releases every two weeks – I knew the schedule by heart – still, I would come there almost every day, browsing fiction (children’s novels) and non-fiction (books about animals). The shop attendants knew me. Sometimes, they would put a copy of a particularly popular book aside to give me time to ask my parents for extra funds for a new purchase. I still remember a particularly devastating week in the second (or third?) grade, when I first got a 2 (D) on some subject, followed by a 3 (C) in math. That same week the bookstore received not one, but two new children’s novels that I really wanted, but I after the abysmal school performance, I just couldn’t ask my parents for new books. I felt that I didn’t deserve them.

I returned to the book store every day, looking at the two books, dreaming about them. Finally, after a week or more of this torture, I mastered the courage and asked my mother if I could buy the books. To my surprise, she said yes. She didn’t believe that poor academic performance, that was so untypical for me, could be cure by restricting my access to reading. So, I flew to the bookstore with money in my hand, feeling very much rehabilitated. To my dismay, one of the coveted books was already sold out. I came to late! I don’t remember if I cried. I might have, because the shop attendants noticed my distress and asked me about it. When I told them, one woman said to another: I believe we still have two copies in storage. Give one to the girl, she’s hanging around here all the time. I still remember that moment of my life with pure gratitude: to my mother, to the shop attendant, to life that has a way of erasing our woes that seem so devastating at the time.

So, almost forty years later, I still go to the bookshops to be around books. My choice of reading has gotten bigger and more sophisticated and the time I can give to reading has shrunk, but I feel the pull of a bookstore just as much as when I was eight. So, the compulsive book purchase was predetermined, but the actual title of the book was pure accident. I had never heard about the book or its author. It was an only copy, casually tucked between more popular titles. When I saw the words somatic, cultural and liberation, I knew I had to know. This morning, when I pulled the book out of my backpack I realized that my birthday is coming up on Sunday and I decided: let it be my gift to myself. Not the actual book, or rather not only the book, but learning how to liberate myself through my body.