This blog has fallen off in the past months, and for that, I
am sorry.
Frankly, reading just hasn’t been a priority. Instead, in what may be my last summer off in
my career, I spent most of my time writing, not reading.
It’s not a decision I regret, at least not
whole-heartedly. I wrote an 85k word
novel in about two months, from June to August – I’ve never started and
completed a work of that size before, so I can’t deny the pride that comes with
the accomplishment. But between that
project, a number of short stories, chapters on another larger work, and of
course some blogging, I didn’t have a lot of time left over to read.
I’d complain, but I rather enjoyed the break.
2016 has been a weird year for me regardless of my shift
from reading to writing. Anxiety and
depression have been my constant companions for over a year now, starting back
in 2015. (It’s not a sob story, it’s a
fact. I’m dealing with it, slowly, and
it’s getting better. That’s the important part.)
Part of this reality is a surprising difficulty in choosing
what to read.
For the majority of my life, I had no trouble picking a book
and putting it down if I started to hate it 20, or 50, or 100 pages in. But since anxiety took up residence, the
decision to start a book has been paralyzing.
Picture this: You are driving an unfamiliar car down the
freeway. It’s snowing, heavy enough to
make the roads icy and dangerous without being enough to shut them down
entirely. Your hands are clenched on the
steering wheel, tension in every muscle as you move forward ever so
slowly. Every movement, every turn,
every press of your foot to the brake is carefully calculated so you don’t end
up in a crash. So you make it home again.
This is anxiety.
This is what my world has felt like, what the world for far
too many people feels like. And for some
reason, picking a book has been like choosing to suddenly go 50 mph on that icy
road and hope for the best.
As you can imagine, I’ve simply chosen not to drive.
 |
| Things were safer this way. |
What little reading I have done is largely fanfiction or
other works, like Crichton’s Jurassic Park, that I’m intimately familiar with
and thus hold no risk. They are
safe. I know the characters, the basic
plots. I know I like them. Safe.
There is no anxiety that I won’t like them, because I know
them.
The unintended side effect of this reading pattern has been
that instead of anxiety over what to read, I’m experiencing it because I know I
should be reading something better.
Something new, more fulfilling, less bullshit fluff that offers nothing
new to stimulate my mind.
As much as I love the community, I’m getting sick of reading
fanfiction – and it doesn’t help that I mostly read just the one basic
story. I’m more invested in the writing
of it, hence the 85k novel that’s slowly getting edited and posted. I’m active there still; I haven’t lost
that. I still love the characters, the
romance, the inner workings of the world built into the game.
But I’m bored.
Before I knew it, I’d made the decision to stop reading
almost entirely, and like it or not, it was crushing my soul.
Then one day just after school started up again, I had an
off hour during the day with nothing to do.
And because it was sitting on my desk and recommended by a friend, I
picked up Eleanor and Park.
Reading this book is like being sore for days, maybe weeks,
and then suddenly finding that perfect stretch that releases everything that’s
been pent up.
I devoured this
book.
It’s such a simple story: two teenagers who fall in
love. It doesn’t sound like anything
special; how many hundreds of stories out there are about teens in love? But
something about Eleanor and Park is unique, and lovely.
Their connection is pure if not innocent, haunting without
the ghosts, beautiful and messy and so very real.
When my husband came home to find me sitting in my office,
20 pages from the end with tears streaming down my face, I screamed at him to
leave me alone to finish it.
He did, wonderful, supportive, and probably confused man
that he is.
Since reading this book, I’ve stepped back into the
world. I’ve read AT LEAST four other
books in the weeks since I closed its covers, and while I’m still writing,
still creating, everything I thought I’d lost to anxiety has been reborn.
Eleanor and Park is the kind of book that makes me fall in
love with reading all over again.
It’s not a feeling I’m unfamiliar with. I’ve fallen out of love with reading, with
writing, before. I spent all of 2014
playing video games, sucked into the worlds so lovingly created by
Bioware. I was still reading, of course,
but that was never my focus. I’d get
sucked in by Shepard (Mass Effect) and not The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
It wasn’t until March of 2015 that I
even considered going back to the passions I’d so loved before, and then it was
only because I started reading Dragon Age Inquisition fanfiction.
I remember getting a Dragon Age tattoo that spring and
thinking that in all my life, I would always remember Inquisition for getting
me writing again. I hadn’t pursued
creativity like that since I was in high school.
And with that writing, my reading vanished.
I have never been so happy to be pulled under by a book
again.
It's not a perfect change -- October has been mostly
fanfiction again, because once the school year booted up into high gear, I lost
myself to anxiety and sleep-deprivation once again. There is a repetition, a cycle, to my loss
of reading time, and so I knew that would happen. But Eleanor and Park helped remind me of what
could be, if only I give myself the chance to fall in love with a book
again.
