“Escape from Childhood” by John Caldwell Holt.

Throughout my youth, I saw the unjust way that young people are treated in society. The exclusion, the other-ing, the infantilization. Everyone around me acted like it was normal, even right, to treat whole swaths of the population more like property than people, for no other crime than having not existed for an arbitrary number of days, regardless of actual ability, experience, knowledge…

This book made me feel more seen and understood, and less alone, than anything else I had ever read. Just knowing that literally anyone else had seen what I had seen and actually acknowledged it was moving in a way that’s hard to describe.

I wish I had found it before I was already twenty years old, but what can you do?