When I was younger, I worried a lot about keeping my books in pristine condition. No bent spines, no wrinkled pages, no folded corners, and no torn dust jackets. I wanted my books to look nice, as if how nice they looked was a direct reflection of how well I took care of them, and in turn, how much I cared about them.

The first book I properly trashed as an adult was my hardcover copy of The Hunger Games. I bought it for myself on a weekend shopping trip a few weeks into my freshman year of college. It was a story I could read over and over again without losing interest, which is how I ended up carrying it in my backpack every day for the entire fall semester a year later. Because you know what couldn’t hold my interest? Anthropology. The Hunger Games was my cure for perpetual narcolepsy during the six hours I spent in two anthropology classes each week—in a class of thirty students in a lecture hall with seats for a hundred, there’s nowhere you can fall sleep where the professor won’t see you.

A semester spent at the bottom of my backpack wasn’t enough to ruin it, but it took the shine off. Scuffed the edges, dirtied the pages, ripped the jacket. And I was upset about it. This book I loved—that helped me survive the consequences of my misguided thinking that anthropology was the major for me—and I wrecked it.

I ended up carting that copy of The Hunger Games to and from school all four years of undergrad. And somewhere along the way, I stopped lamenting its sorry state. It wasn’t a wreck; it was a reminder. Not of a crappy semester when I took a couple of classes I hated, but of a semester when that book went everywhere with me. Because it saved me.

Use isn’t destruction. It’s a memory: The greasy sunblock stains in my copy of Persuasion a testament to the week I spent reading it at the beach; the chocolate smudge in my copy of The Fault in Our Stars evidence of the days I spent reading it on my lunch break. The broken binding in my favorite Eloisa James novel proof of the number of times my sister and I traded it back and forth to reread it.

My books hold a lot of value, but they aren’t valuables. They aren’t precious because they look pretty on a shelf and wearing them out doesn’t mean that I don’t love them.

It just means that I do.