A New Way Of Living

Earlier this week I read a spectacular blog post by a friend of mine called Zara. (You can read it here). In the post she talks about how important books and words are for her and how they’ve impacted her life, especially as she has recently been diagnosed with Autism. And the post made me look at my own life and how books have helped me.

I’ve always been a lover of books. For as long as I could remember I had my nose stuck in books. From Roald Dahl to Jacqueline Wilson to Karen McCombie to R.L. Stine to Lucy Daniels to J.K. Rowling to Cecelia Ahern to Jodi Picoult to Linwood Barclay. One book after another after another. Diving from one story to the next. I feel lost without the comfort of my books.

When I was a young child until my teens, I read every single night before bed. Devouring the words on the pages as quickly as I could and escaping into fictional worlds that were different and more exotic than my own. Eventually I started reading at other times of the day too. At breaks in school and at work, on the bus, whenever I got a few minutes spare. I would rather dive into a story then sit and think about my life.

And today I do the same thing. But I also don’t. It’s a difficult balance now. There are times when I want to read, so I decide to take the bus or the train rather than drive or walk and then open my phone and end up playing a game or scrolling through twitter because it’s easier than opening my book and exiting the world.

For once in my life, I sometimes find myself rooting my mind in reality. And it has caused a great deal of confusion. Because I am also struggling with life too. So I should want to just escape from it all, surely? And yet I don’t. No matter how much I itch to read, something always seems to stop me.

Once upon a time I would have classed this as a “reading slump”. But now I am trying to embrace it because maybe it means that there is something in the real world that I want to enjoy. Maybe not escaping into a book could actually, somehow be a good thing.

I guess only time will tell. But I am certainly going to try to turn this negative into a positive. Life is already too hard without feeling guilty for not reading a book.

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Buried in Books

You could say that it's the last day of summer considering how tomorrow is SEPTEMBER (*takes a moment to hyperventilate*) so I feel like today would be a good day to reflect on how I spent this summer.

Simply put - I spent about 75% of the last three months cramming stories into my eyeballs. I read like a book shortage was imminent. I devoured hundreds of pages of words at a pace that would give other people cramps. I poured dozens of chapters of adventures into my brain and it never felt like it was enough to fill the empty well of apathy I've been sat at the bottom of this whole time.

Between the 1st of June and today I've read 86 unique books. That isn't even including the few books that I re-read in that period which I'd already read & counted towards this year's reading total, and the fact that I read the entire Shatter Me series three times through in one weekend in July. In July alone I read 52 books and did very little else.

Reading is my coping mechanism for when I'm feeling truly shit and I've felt shit for most of this Summer. I had great ambitions that I would make amazing progress with my book and really get stuck into rewriting the draft I finished at the end of May. I opted to avoid throwing myself into getting a new job after I left my last one because I thought "hey let's give this whole writing business a fair crack while I don't have uni work to do". But as you might have seen from my constant twitter griping, that plan was brutally shot in the face before June was even out.

I hated that draft I'd spent over two years writing and three WEEKS reading with such violence that I contemplated on many occasions just setting fire to the damn manuscript and forgetting I'd ever subjected the world such a heap of shit (thank fuck the people of the world *haven't* read it, but I'm sure Nature despises me). It's been consigned to a drawer until I decide whether I care enough to take it out ever again.

So as any well-adjusted human-creature would do I decided to bury myself in books, in the metaphorical sense although I do own enough to build myself an actual coffin out of books. I started to read and read and read. Losing days to other worlds and times and stories of people who seemed far more interesting than me. Let's just say that clothing & food were not utilised in the correct manner for large swathes of time.

I suppose I was hoping that one of these books would give me some inspiration of any kind. The jolt of energy to step back into *my* reality and face the problems that I was desperately avoiding dealing with. But none have been the lightning strike I've needed - with perhaps the exception of Alice Oseman's Solitaire & Radio Silence which had me crying in the small hours about how much of myself I saw in those words (a future post will be looking into the thoughts that Radio Silence provoked at 1am last week).

But now as we stand on the cusp of September I know that I need to act my goddamn age and do something about the situation I'm in. I have what should be my last OU module starting in October so I need to get my head around not fucking that up (since it's another Creative Writing module I'm already anxious enough that I won't have any ideas worth writing let alone submitting for marking).

I know I need to get a job because my bank account is gasping and I can't spend another three months in this house alone & getting nothing done. It turns out that having little free time is when I'm actually most productive so I gotta work on getting myself employed ASAP. Who the fuck knows what job but it's gotta happen.

I also need to read less and probably see a doctor or something...y'know to deal with that whole depression issue that I've been carefully avoiding for weeks...

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