ONCE UPON A TIME, I was the Book Lady. Little ones called me Miss Liz, teens knew me as the Book Witch, and, to adults, I was either just plain old Liz or “I heard you can help me.” For 10 years, my mornings started with the rattle of a brown truck pulling up to the back of the independent bookstore I owned in Broad Ripple, Big Hat Books. Seeing how many boxes of books my favorite UPS man, Rod, had for me was like counting presents under the Christmas tree. Small boxes held the special orders from the distributor but the much bigger ones—often 30 pounds or heavier—came from the publishing houses. Those were the highly anticipated new releases customers lined up for. Boxes were the store’s lifeblood, filled with food for the brain.
But not long after I closed the store, those boxes began to represent something else: fear.
In spring 2015, when I set out to unpack my belongings from Big Hat that had started to gather dust in my garage, the boxes felt much heavier than they had just a few months earlier. Worse, when I opened them, I was having trouble reading what was inside. I had read a book every day or two since I was a schoolgirl and even bound and carried my vocabulary words everywhere, like scripture handed down from on high. But now I couldn’t seem to focus or remember details from the previous pages. I dismissed it as my brain demanding a vacation; this was the first real break I had taken in 24 years of working intense hours, first in New York City, and then as a small-business owner in Indianapolis. I thought maybe it was burnout.
Within a year, my condition worsened to the point where I was stopping mid-sentence and struggling
