I have been reading since I was three years old, which means that perhaps millions of words have passed through my eyes in the last 45 years.  Imagine my dismay upon discovering that I essentially had to relearn how to read after The Zombie Years, which is how now I refer to what I once called “the dead years”.  I didn’t have to relearn the alphabet and how to form words and sentences in the sense that a child has to learn “how” to read, but the neurons and pathways in my brain that could once suck down a 500 page book in a day struggled to process anything more than a short article in the last couple of years.  The first book I read since the Harry Potter novels in 2003 would be laughed at by some: the Dark Phoenix comic book saga, but colorful pictures with bubbles of brief text and easily understandable dialogue were about my speed.

It’s more than just attention span, which is something I struggle with in any activity that isn’t directly related to reducing anxiety, which is my primary goal in life at the moment.  Regrettably, the inner centurion that is in charge of keeping my anxiety level down hasn’t yet gotten the message that sitting down and reading is quite good at reducing anxiety and that it should allow me the mental space to do so.  Alas, that part of me is still “on guard” about something I haven’t been able to pin down quite yet.  Something for the Mental Dinner Party to discuss.

Since reading Dark Phoenix, I have begun, but not finished, several books.  I’ve made the most progress on Stephen King’s “On Writing”, in which he expounds about the value of reading if you want to be a good writer.  This makes sense to me: writing is output, and like the human body, if you want good output, you need good input in the form of fuel, whatever form that takes.  It seems to me that I’ve been generating a lot of output for the last couple of years, mostly in the form of writing and art, and now that my life is getting more stable, perhaps it’s time for more input.  That still requires a conversation with the inner centurion, who tends to make me pensive when I’d rather be relaxing, and they’re not always very forthcoming in our inner dialogues, but I’ll get them to talk eventually.  In pictures, if I have to.

I know part of the anxiety comes from a nagging sensation that there is something “better” or more important that I “should” be doing, and there isn’t.  A little of that comes from being daunted by the length of most books: because I’ve read so little in so long, 300 pages seems like a lot to me.  Aside from what relatively little time and energy is needed to keep the household and family running and happy, my time and energy is my own to do with as I please, and I struggle to fill this time in a way that leaves me feeling satisfied at the end of each day and feeling like I accomplished something “useful”.  What precisely constitutes “useful”, I’m not sure of yet.  I often tell myself when I query my inner self what I “should” be doing, “You’re doing it, chill out.”  After everything I’ve been through, perhaps it will take some time to let go of some of my older, and therefore more nagging, sensations and neuroses.  When they do, I have a house full of books to rediscover, and hopefully I will discover that, like the therapeutic process, reading a book takes “longer than I want, but shorter than I think”.