These are just some of the books I’m not reading right now.
For the past year or so I have struggled mightily with reading. As a writer and a lover of words and meaning, this is difficult to admit. For a while it was even embarrassing. I thought that perhaps the cause was my pandemic-worn attention span, or that I wasn’t choosing the right books. Yet, over time I found that even the books that I was excited about – the ones where I’d highlight and make notes on nearly every page for the first fifty or sixty pages – couldn’t get my attention back after the first reading session.
All of this is weird. I have always (or almost always) read a lot. My mom started teaching me to read when I was barely three years old because I wanted to learn. My first grade teacher ran out of books in the classroom for me. She would assign a book to read over a whole month, and the next day I’d bring it back to her complete. Some of my clearest memories from early childhood are of laying on the floor by the doorway of my bedroom after lights out, reading a book I’d set at arms length just over the threshold into the hallway where the light was still on. Sometimes I even wrote in the books I was reading. My favorite was experimenting with a capital letter E. I was convinced I could make a better E by stacking as many horizontal lines in it as possible, and that one day, with practice and skill, I would write down the very best and most perfect E that had ever been.
Somewhere in my late twenties I lost interest in fiction, but five or so years later pursued a masters degree in fiction writing – why? (Fine, real talk: I know why. I had to pick one. Fiction was kind of a square peg for me; I am a better poet than fiction writer, but poetry gets on my nerves and creative non-fiction sounded blah.) I didn’t mind reading fiction in grad school because it wasn’t about escapism, it was about creating a vehicle for conveying meaning that couldn’t be conveyed directly. It was a way of conveying feelings. Senses. Consciousness. The stories in my thesis were based on the idea of form as meaning, and the process by which the words and forms are processed into meaning by the reader, and how this ultimately brings forth a third reality, co-created by the writer and the reader. After all this time, it turns out that my weird ass over-reach of a thesis was really about connection. I could have tried, you know, talking to people or something?
Anyway, why tf can’t I read anymore? This was feeling like an embarrassing problem that needed solving, until it didn’t. It wasn’t the books or writers I was choosing, nor was it something broken or dysfunctional in me.
Most of my thirties and the first half of my forties contained a spectacular amount of input: a 200 and 300 hour yoga teacher training, a web design certificate, a masters degree, training in hypnosis, HNLP, reiki… certificates in various professional disciplines/platforms (I literally cannot remember all of them without looking at my CV), and a perpetual schedule of ongoing workshops on everything from activism to Zen meditation. And then there is all of the research and reading that went into co-developing the curriculum and materials for 500 hours worth of yoga teacher training.
This is not to say there hasn’t been output over the past 14 years. There has been a lot, professionally and personally. But, the balance tilted heavily toward input, driven both by innate curiosity and, if I’m being bare about it, a sense that intellectually, morally, ethically, and spiritually, I’m perpetually a day late and a dollar short. That’s likely why even now, it feels like there is not much to show for it.
So, now I find myself in this liminal state. It’s time for a reset. Since the last post about permission, I’ve made the conscious decision to give myself permission to stop reading/advancing for now, and put my attention on output, and possibly also some shitty TV, and certainly keeping up with hairdresser reacts videos.
What that means practically speaking, is that it’s time for me to stop fussing, hit publish, and go live my extra life.