This week's creative therapy's catalyst thirty-one. This one was "What’s a novel that has impacted your life and why?"

Here's what I wrote:

I read a lot and there are many books that have changed my life. To Kill a Mockingbird, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Great Expectations and The Little Prince just to name a few. Each of these books gave me permanent lessons and made my life different. But Jonathan Livingston Seagull stands above all of them for mostly one reason. It’s the first book I read that changed me. It’s the first book that taught me that books can change you. Change how you look at the world. Change how you look at yourself. Change the possibilities of your future.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull taught me that it was ok to be different. To have differing dreams and hopes than the people around you. How it feels to be judged, but more significantly how it’s ok to be an individual. To be different. It might even be at that moment that I decided to leave Turkey one day and find more people like me in the world.