Learning How to Read (Again)

Burnout wrecked my relationship to books. Here's how I fixed it.

Welcome back to the Apocrypha, bookworms and library mice! I’ve returned from a delicious vacation with dear friends in Mexico (picture of me squeezing limes for margaritas below) and ready to download my hard-won wisdom from the last two years of burnout, valiant struggle, and sexy recovery right into your inbox. If you’ve been frustrated by the way social media has atrophied your brain, saddened that you can’t fly through a book the way you did in middle school, and angry with yourself for not being able to stay focused on any one task, this one is for you.

Disclaimer: I am not a neuroscientist, and while there may be some cool research in the fields of nueroplasticity and cognition to back up what I’m saying here, I’ll be pulling primarily from personal experience.

Where The Hell Have You Been, Loca?

Well, strictly speaking I’ve been here, online and in the public sphere, writing and publishing and yes, Posting. But I’ve also been going through a spiritual dark night of the soul, interpersonal challenges, serious overwork, the consequences of self-destructive patterns, and a couple of nasty bipolar swings. Call it a Saturn return, call it burnout, call it Lynchian psychic torment, even call it the dark side of skyrocketing into visibility with A DOWRY OF BLOOD; it’s been a lot! Luckily, I have a strong support system of doctors, therapists, spiritual counselors, and loved ones who have helped me emerge on the other side stronger and calmer and more sure of myself.

All this to say: one of the first things to go during this challenging season and one of the hardest things to get back was my ability to read for long periods of time.

The Slow Creep of Aliteracy (the state of being able to read but being uninterested in doing so)

Here’s how it went during the worst of it: If I could get over the anxiety and decision fatigue of picking something to read for “fun”, I would get irritable and distracted as soon as I opened the book. I would end up scrolling on my phone, or chiding myself to get back to work on all those books my own that were already past due, or just reading the same paragraph over and over again, never absorbing anything, with a yawning sense of dread opening up inside me that maybe my brain was permanently broken.

Reading advance copies of upcoming books for my job was even worse: I wanted to read my contemporaries’ work and I wanted to give back to the community by providing blurbs. I wanted to see what my friends had been working on and I wanted to encounter new literary voices. But what I did was blow past every blurb deadline I was given (except for Alexis Henderson’s excellent HOUSE OF HUNGER, which I was able to finish while trapped on a plane with no wifi). Sometimes I wasn’t even able to make it more than a few pages into my most anticipated reads.

If I managed to make a dent in a book (usually no more than 50 pages), I never finished it. Every novel bored me, and the ones that didn’t bore me were abandoned as soon as they got challenging, or, more often, when the ambient miasma of apathy settled over me once again.

If you can relate to of this, let me spoil the happy ending of this essay right now: you can recover you ability to read, and there will a point in recovery when it stops feeling like “doing the work” and starts feeling pleasurable, when you can sense the gears in your brain turning faster and smoother, when the satisfaction of finishing one book will just make you want to pick up another. You can repair your literacy and reclaim your attention, I believe that in my heart. Even more, I believe doing so is a crucial building block in strengthening your empathy and your intellect, becoming a more deeply engaged citizen of the world, and inoculating yourself as much as any of us can against propaganda.

Literacy is a gift. Let’s not waste it.

Six Strategies To Read Again

Everyone’s relationship to reading is deeply personal and contextual, so not all of these angles of approach will you fix the problem. Feel free to take the ones that intrigue you, combine them or implement them solo, and leave the rest.

Start Small

Reading longform work is an endurance activity, so let’s not treat it like a sprint. If your reading muscles have been weakened or even outright injured, you won’t be able to jump right back into heavy mental lifting. So I suggest starting with a genre that is enjoyable for you, with a book that is modest in size and scope, and by taking tiny bites out of it.