When I was younger, I spent hours a day reading—sometimes hiding under my covers with a flashlight when my sister and I shared a room and I didn’t want to wake her up but I just had to finish one more chapter. My elementary school teachers thought I was lying on my reading logs when the recommended time for each student was twenty minutes per day and my table had two hours of reading every day. I’m sure they asked my mom, who informed them that I was just a kid who loved to read.
But, like many people I know who once enjoyed reading, there was a time in my life when the love just stopped. I’m not sure that I can pinpoint exactly when it happened; but one day, somewhere in the second half of high school, I looked up and realized that, instead of choosing a book from my ever-growing “to be read” pile, I was choosing to scroll through social media for hours. This continued on through the beginning of college, where I always said that my hobbies include reading, but I would bring a book to school from home and not even look at it for an entire semester.
The summer between my freshman and sophomore year, however, I jumped back into reading full force. I’m not quite sure what caused it, maybe just the fact that it was a way to escape from the weird empty feeling I got from not seeing my friends from school every day for three months. But every night after work, I would sit in bed and read, getting through seven books in three months, which was significantly more than the half-a-book in six months that I was reading over the school year. I reverted back to my ways during the fall semester of my sophomore year, spending the entire semester to get through half of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (which, in my defense, is a dense book).
Now that I’m home for the unforeseeable future and I’m not allowed to leave my house at all, even scrolling through social media and watching Netflix can’t keep my attention for too long. So, about a week into being home, I found myself reaching onto my messy, disorganized bookshelf and finding a book to read. Since being home, I’ve made it a point to try to read for at least half an hour every single day, attempting to find that love of reading that I used to have.
I wish I could say it was easy to get back into, like riding a bike. But some days, I’ve felt like I had to force myself to sit down and read just a couple of chapters. However, I know that the elementary school me would be disappointed if she saw me straying so far away from what it is that I say I love and that I really do think I still love (I did choose to be an English major, after all, and I still enjoy the reading that I do for class).
I hope that one day, reading will come as naturally to me as it once did, and it will become my first choice when I have any free time. I’m not quite there yet, but so far, I’ve been sticking to my goal of reading every single day and chugging towards my rediscovery of myself and my love of reading.
