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Dear friends,
Hello from another rainy Sunday in California. I don’t know why I even bother mentioning it.
What’s on your mind? Boring Zach, spring green paint trim, a potential recession? Me too! Toss in impending layoffs with a side of looking for something new to watch.
Reading Ruts
I’m in a reading rut and tbh, not sure I want to get out of it. I watched 8 seasons of Homeland over the last couple months and I stand by that being a fantastic choice. I’m sort of glad that my Kindle app or stories that I have to read the words to follow (aka books) didn’t get in the way of me following Saul & Carrie back and forth to the Middle East and Russia.
However, this rut may be persisting simply because I’m resisting scrolling through my tagged ‘books to read’ in my public library app. I just…don’t want to. I don’t feel like reading.
Could be stress. (See Layoffs in tech.) Could be Scratch that. It’s definitely stress. Books just aren’t doing it for me like they sometimes do. Not under this pressure. Is that so bad? I feel guilty for ignoring books. Like, honestly bad for them. What a waste! I think. I should be gobbling up the latest STEM feminist romance or contemporary fiction with a gorgeous cover instead of sitting here watching fictional foreign relations years old starring Claire Danes. This isn’t who I am. I’m a reader! I do the hard thing. The harder thing. I read…even when I’m tired, and restless, or listless. I’m bookish.
Why assign a moral imperative to reading, or rather reading often? To being “well read.”
No idea.
Though books have pulled me out of scrapes. Mental (depression), physical (avoiding creepy guys at the DMV or painful shyness in 7th grade), spiritual (bouts of clarity about the next right thing). One doesn’t have to look too closely to see a pattern of companionship when there was loneliness; merriment when things were going south; new worlds when mine felt small. Books have always been there for me. Just, right there. Ready. Always. Not asking for anything. But here I am, personifying rectangle stacks of paper just enough to eek out some more guilt and shame wherever I can. I’m not reading? Boom! Bad. I’m bad. Knew it. Nailed it.
But if I sit back and relax, let it be, breathe (←something i just learned about), and sink a bit deeper it’s easy to see the weirdness. (See above.) How quickly our minds scrape together shi* to mine old, wrong stories about ourselves to reinforce what we thought we thought we once knew. Once I’m back in my body and not spiraling about how disappointed inanimate objects are about me, I see how kooky it all is. One wonky thought thread pulled unravels an otherwise perfectly pleasant moment in time.
We control our thoughts. Our thoughts and feelings can be observed, accepted, and challenged. Books are books. Stress is stress. I am I. And we can intersect however I damn well please.
For the moment, I’m not bookish. I’m not reading reading. But I’m always ‘a reader’ no matter how long it’s been since I picked up my Kindle or a paperback. I’m still me and I’ll be back. Books and me are a thing and no struggle bus is gonna break us apart.
See you on the other side, Books. Thx 4 waiting for me.
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