“We’re pushed all over the place, but it won’t be like that forever.”

I came across a writer who said she pitied her work because it could only ever come from her own lens. And I thought, well, that’s why we read. So, in honour of Banned Books Week, I thought I’d read a children’s book and selected A Journey to Joburg by Beverley Naidoo, a story set against the backdrop of apartheid South Africa.

The book places the innocence and naïveté of childhood against the realities of the world around it. When Naledi and Tiro’s little sister falls ill, they believe only their mother, who is working in Johannesburg as a maid , can help her. So they decide to make the journey there and bring her home.

In their minds, it is that simple. In reality, it isn’t. You can’t just walk into an office, ask for your mother and expect her to leave her work. There are permissions, courtesies and the unspoken rules of a world where your mother’s time belongs, in part, to the family she works for.

And when the children reach the city, their rose-coloured glasses begin to fall. The old saying that the grass is greener on the other side takes on a different meaning when they realise that their mother’s work as a maid is not all it has been made out to be. Which made me think: there comes a point in childhood when the fantasy of who our parents are, what they do and what they sacrifice can break your heart.You don’t want to realise that your parentsvare restless because they need to help you. That they worry about affording things. And in this case, that her labour is being spent making another family’s life easier while she struggles to make her own family’s life better. There is something particularly painful about a child encountering that feeling of being both inconsequential and helpless.

But perhaps the most revealing moment for me is another kind of divide: the difference between what children from certain environments (race, class and gender) have been taught to dream and what they have been taught to expect. Naledi realises that when they write essays in class about their dreams and aspirations, their dreams are not necessarily to become doctors or engineers. Instead, their aspirations have been shaped by what they have been taught to see as possible: to cook better, to clean better, to become better at the work already expected of them.

It had me thinking, when we talk about diversifying the roles of protagonists in stories, it matters because representation teaches us what to expect from one another. And representation can disrupt the conditioning that teaches us to see people in only one way, and teaches people to see themselves in only one way. Thus, our limitations at times are set by the environment around us and masked as worthy aspirations. And sometimes you need to encounter a life, a person, a story, a place, a possibility that exists outside the small world you have been handed.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of books: they give us evidence that the world can be larger than the one we know.All we need to do is look, not necessarily for the same thing, but for something different. Because sometimes it is only when we encounter something beyond what we know that we discover how much more is possible.

And sometimes life has to break your heart before you realise that the walls around you were never the measure of your worth.

“We’re pushed all over the place, but it won’t be like that forever.”