Struggles with reading fiction…picking apart a “block” against something you love and repairing the connection
This is a long post about my struggles with reading fiction lately. If you’re struggling to read stuff–or to do things you like in general–it might be useful. But it’s long and I’m working out my thoughts as I go, so it’s not tidy.
Today letters don’t make sense; I look at words and go, “But shouldn’t the little red underliney thing appear under that word?” Not fiction (I have the auto spellcheck turned off forever); just on social media. I also feel twitchy, have swollen hands/feet, and am having sympathy cramps. I don’t have a headache but it feels like my eyes can’t focus on things (even as they DO focus on things).
I’m going to say some stuff that’s not positive; to clarify, I’m having a pretty good day! It’s just that I have a meal of difficult thoughts in front of me. I can eat it so I can get to the fun stuff today, or I can turn my nose up and have it served to me cold, as it were.
I mentioned last time that I intended to talk to some people; I talked to two of the three as well as had a long conversation with Ray. People have been giving me good advice, too, as well as serving as examples of What to Do and What Not to Do.
Story stuff: talked out. Should be good, if not precisely fun, to write the next scene.
Life stuff: in progress.
What it seems like, gathering all the conversations and ponders and observations together, is that I’m scared of losing myself IN things, specifically losing myself in reading fiction.
–I just had to revise that sentence multiple times to take out intellectual verbiage. I’m so scared that I’m trying to defend myself with big words!–And yes, I had to rewrite THAT sentence, too.
I’m using reading fiction as an example, the BIG example for me, but not the only thing like this that I’m dealing with. “I can’t do that! It’s dangerous for me to get distracted from what’s important!” comes up a fair amount in my life.
During COVID, I stopped reading, mostly. I read webcomix and nonfiction, but not a whole lot of fiction. I actually mostly stopped reading before official COVID struck, while I got sick with pre-COVID (my nickname for it; who knows what it was) the previous October. I felt so shitty that I didn’t even have the energy to read. Words just bllllllllllllllllllll—–
Then official COVID hit and all around me, people were saying the same thing: they were struggling to read and focus during lockdown.
I went: “This is due to COVID. This is due to lockdown. This is due to stress.”–The stress of getting divorced just adding on top of the stack of everything else.
I’m still struggling to read. Words swim in front of me, I can’t remember what I just read, I get mad at the writing for being better than mine, I feel pre-defeated and unable to feel what I used to feel while reading. I have trouble creating that space in my mind.
I used to read a lot. A LOT.
The underlying reason that I’m struggling to read shook out while talking to Ray yesterday, after all the other conversations and advice and “don’t do that” examples:
I’m mad at fiction.
I think initially I was struggling because of health stuff. I slept like ten or twelve hours a day, instead of my normal six or seven. I couldn’t carry laundry upstairs or down. I couldn’t remember things, period. But after a couple of months, I started to get SOME energy back, and by official COVID in February/March 2020 I was getting enough energy back to go on walks and shit. I was back to writing at that point. I also restarted daily journaling.
My split with the ex happened in May 2020, but I have journal entries that talked about feeling like I was at the end of my rope that went back to the previous August. I didn’t *remember* them until I flipped through a couple of notebooks, but I *wrote* them.
Part of recovering from the assholes in my life has been accepting that what they did hit me hard enough–even though other people had it far worse–that I did a lot of fucked-up stuff to protect myself.
Example: I erased or suppressed a lot of my memories.
Not of anything dramatic like being hit (I wasn’t). But I have a poor memory for certain things, and a remarkably accurate one for others. I can’t remember stuff that happens to me or things that I did, which means I often took the blame for conflicts I have no memory of, BUT I have a running record of a) other people’s likes and interests, b) their moods, and c) how they see themselves that is uncannily accurate.
Remembering MY memories was dangerous; being able to predict whether or not I was about to get lashed out at was important.–I ran into someone else saying this the other day, as something like the past being malleable but the future being locked in place. Just so; and also, how dare someone say such a thing before I could? I erased pleasant memories because they were too close to unpleasant ones. I also erased all kind of random-ass memories because I didn’t need them in order to survive.–As I cut things off with my mom, I was overwhelmed with remembering all kinds of random-ass things I had completely forgotten. Same with the ex. Some of it made sense why I wouldn’t remember it (“I think that guy with the motorcycle was flirting with me! HAH!”); some of it didn’t (the way the slide in front of my grandpa’s house would rock when you went down it, the brutally sharp metal joiner that had come loose and would slice up your leg if you hit it wrong–okay, that one makes sense now that I think about it; grandpa wasn’t a good guy and everyone was always on edge around him, ha-ha, I mean he was a GREAT guy, I’m such a kidder!). Anyway: a lot of memories came back when it was safe enough for them to do so.
Example: I lost parts of my personality to them.
Anything that started to blossom got lashed out at, mocked, stamped down–unless they saw it as serving them somehow. Everything I did was a reflection on them, AND I was a dumping ground for everything they didn’t like about themselves. Assholes can leave you feeling proud of yourself for making them proud of you, and ashamed of yourself for making them ashamed of you, over the exact same trait. I’m smart (not top-tier smart, but I use it well). My mom would brag about how smart I was while also shaming me for it, usually bragging in public and shaming in private. I play the fool a lot, both because it’s fun and it takes a TON of intelligence and subtlety to play a fool well (thank you, thank you, save your applause for later), and because it was safer. I had to bring home straight As AND look like I spent no effort doing so, so my mother could tell me that I was going to fail in college because I never studied. It was a fine line to walk.
Example: I destroyed my health.
In high school when I was around my mom I would slouch and she would scream at me for slouching. Working at the nursing home gave me enough of a belief that I wasn’t evil and deformed that I could stand up straight–I needed to, in order to have the strength of lift folks safely. And I adored most of them. But if I stood up straight around my mom, she would find some way to sabotage and shame me until I stopped. I fought back once about it (that I remember), and WOW that got bad when I pointed out that I only slouched around her. My dad even got into that one, playing the “you’re just like your mother” card to help shame me. OUCH.
With the ex, I had to constantly work to preserve my looks and health, but only for him. This meant having multiple sets of clothes: work, home/slouch, home/ex’s preferences. I was also not able to take any health-related actions without him, or more effectively than he was. He wanted to see himself as strong and fit and healthy, but he couldn’t control himself. So he’d go on a diet and I’d have to go on one too, even as he insisted that I not “have” to do so. As soon as that didn’t work out for him he’d make sure that it didn’t work out for me, too. And then he’d say things like, “You’re still sexy even when you’re fat” and I wouldn’t even blink. He was okay with me going for long walks (it got me out of the house so he didn’t have to engage with me when he didn’t feel like it, as long as I was available when he wanted me available), so I went on more and more of them, because it gave me privacy–even if I had to report on everything I did and said when I got back, under the guise of entertaining him.
–I feel like I’m rehashing a bunch of stuff that I don’t really need to, but I feel wrong taking it back out, too. It was fucked up. I did increasingly fucked-up things to navigate relationships with assholes and their flying monkeys. I made excuses for it, saying, “Oh, it’s not as bad as what other people go through,” and “These relationships are important to me,” and “They’ve had hard lives,” and “But they’ve given me so much.”
So. Back to fiction.
As I said, I used to read a lot. It was my escape.–People say that. But what if you get to a point where you no longer need to escape your life?
I feel like I used to read to escape, but reading did not help me actually escape. Reading kept me *there.*
Other people have other things that were/are their “escape” that really helped keep them trapped. Hobbies, volunteer work, jobs that keep them too drained to think or feel, constant bickering that doesn’t lead to change, etc. I know this. I just hadn’t let myself think about fiction this way.
Sorting through the idea:
–Things that are “escapes that keep you trapped” seem to come up as a type of defense when escape seems impossible.
–I came to grips with the memory thing by standing fast beside the memories: *this* is what I remember, no matter what assholes say about it; they don’t get to gaslight me into remembering something else. *They* get to have demonstrably inaccurate reinterpretations of reality; *I* also get to have a point of view and I don’t have to check in with anyone else to make sure my memories don’t conflict with their egos.
–I came to grips with the personality thing by doing therapy, writing my WIP “therapy book,” writing these entries, taking practice out into the real world. Taking lots of small risks to express myself, then building to larger ones.
–I came to grips with the health stuff by doing the work necessary to recover my health. Dancing, walking, yoga, eating when I feel like it and not on a schedule (other than Ray cooking), NOT eating when I don’t want to, having food on hand that I can eat when I can’t brain, not cooking when I don’t feel like it, cooking when I do, going new places to eat, and–particularly this–eating what I want without regard to other people’s egos.
–I’m going to have to do a lot more work with financial competence/dealing with pain in the ass tasks, I know. I’ve been pre-failing a lot on those, but I talked about that recently and haven’t sorted out much new stuff since then.
–When I was a kid, I couldn’t escape my parents. That whole fucked-up system wasn’t something I could avoid or change. Using *something* as an escape was vital to survival. My mom could cope with me using reading (and playing music, and doing crafts). I could take on a rule of being “bookish” without getting unduly hurt. Sports, not so much. I don’t know why, other than that she used to be in basketball and people kept telling me that I should be, too.–I *want* to say that I was never interested in sports, but I actually love doing physical stuff (qajaking!). She was hot and heavy about how “clumsy” I was (except for playing an instrument or doing crafts), and I thought I was just naturally clumsy until very recently. I wasn’t allowed to be as good as my next-younger brother at video games or foosball, either. It was weird. I’m pretty sure there were lots of things my brother wasn’t allowed to be good at, too, but I can’t speak to that.
–When my ex got hold of me, I *could* have escaped, but he jerked on the loose threads that my parents had left behind, that I had never really dealt with. It soon felt like I couldn’t survive without him (and why would I have wanted to?!?).
–Reading was the way I’d defended myself when I couldn’t escape with my parents; why wouldn’t I turn to it again, with the ex? I couldn’t even let myself know there was anything I needed to escape from.
–It’s not fiction’s fault that I couldn’t let myself know that.
–Given that, fiction gave me a place that was imaginatively safe from the ex–mostly. He’d still get after me if I read anything with romance or sex in it, unless it was extremely dark horror. When it’s safer to read brutal horror than romance, there’s some serious squick going on. I *do* genuinely like reading many types of horror, although I probably don’t have the reaction that the writers would like me to have: “Oh! That is so gorgeous! And romantic!”–That was my reaction to the movie Bones and All. AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! So good (so tasty!). If it’s horror and it’s rich and psychological, I’m probably all over it.
–One of the excellent things that I read recently was that one author, a fiction writer herself, felt uneasy about letting herself get lost in fiction during COVID. She didn’t feel safe taking her eye off the world for a long time, and obsessively consumed news instead. I (briefly) mentioned my issue with reading to her, and she suggested that I was being hypercritical on my writing, too, and that I look into letting the critical voice go. She’s not wrong.
–I am mad at fiction for keeping me trapped, but it was ME that kept me trapped. Like any other fucked-up thing I’ve done to survive, I did it because I didn’t face what I needed to face, and needed some way to cope.
–Fiction has given me, as a reader, ways to cope with the world that I would not have otherwise. Even while being closely monitored and controlled by assholes I had more freedom of mind than most people ever get. I understand people better because of fiction. I can weave together disparate ideas better because of fiction. I can contextualize better because of fiction. I can explore inner and outer worlds better because of fiction.
–Fiction played a long game, where escaping to other worlds meant I stayed in place, but also acquired (slowly) some of the tools I needed to thrive. Given that I wasn’t dealing with shit that I needed to deal with, there were worse things I could have done (than reading so much, than losing memories, than suppressing parts of my personality, than hurting my health–all of it).
–Writing fiction is helping me repair the damage now. Reading fiction might also help me repair damage, although maybe not the same methods as I’m used to.
So I’m down to one real question:
Is it safe to lose myself in fiction now?–Imma make some tea and take a stab at answering that.
–I may never read as much as I used to. I may never get that lost in fiction again. I might not need to.
–Webcomix feel safe because they’re just pictures with dialogue, mostly, and they’re structured to be SHORT and easy to digest, something you can skim through in a few minutes (even if you subsequently go back through and binge to absorb them deeper later). The rhythm of them is different even than a comic book, because you get only one panel at a time. This is not to say that they’re not deep or immersive. I’m just not as deeply trained on them as I am fiction.
–When I *have* been reading fiction, it’s out of the house in short, defined spurts. I’ll read at the laundromat because it’s a 20-minute chunk, and I don’t have to worry about losing an entire day to reading, for example.
–I’ve been acting like a borderline addict trying to navigate a safe space around their addiction. “I can stop anytime I want to.”
–When I’ve been reading nonfiction lately (still a struggle but not nearly as much as with fiction), I’ve been pausing to integrate/ponder what I read. Maybe that’s a technique that I can use in fiction, too. Other people talk about doing so. I usually just throw myself at a story and slice through it to mainline it, only doubling back to savor the story on a few things. The fiction I have been reading has been challenging enough to slow me down. I have to stop reading to process.
–Maybe it’s okay to read more slowly and deeply, and let that affect what I read and how I read.
–Maybe it’s okay to take a while to read a book; maybe I’m not doing it wrong, just waaaaay differently than I’m used to.
–Maybe I defined myself as a “super-reader” for a long time, and freaked out when part of me changed and no longer fit the word I was used to, and part of me is like, “Who am I really, if I’m not the thing I already know how to be?”
–Maybe as a writer, I really liked feeling like I “knew” a genre because I was doing pretty well at keeping up with that genre, digging through most of the Big Classics and the Cult Classics of those genres, and vaguely keeping up with the Best Of The Year stuff, too. And now that I don’t feel that way, I feel like anything short of that is a failure.
Hey, self. Big hugs. No wonder why you’re upset. This is a lot.
It’s okay if you don’t go back to the way things used to be. You don’t have the same capacities you used to. You may never be able to plow through books you hate in order to feel accomplished as a reader and professional writer. But it’s not a black-and-white situation. You can read the books you’re pretty sure you’re going to LOVE (it can be a serious love or a silly one or whatever!), and savor them the first time through, taking the time to let them hit you fully. You don’t have to know right now how to deal with the practicalities of when to read, how much, etc. Right now you just need to know that you have been through a lot and you’re not the same person you used to be. She’s gone; she left you this HUGE treasure of books read and experienced and taken in. She did her best and you have no regrets of her.
Reading fiction will not make you unsafe, as long as you can face what you need to face and do the things you need to do. Even then, what it will do is help preserve you until you CAN face and DO those things. Reading takes time; you’ll have to make choices around that time. And right now, you have to acknowledge that it’s going to take some brainpower to read. It may never be as effortless as it was before the pre-covid stuff.
This thing you loved, it did not betray you. May you find peace with it, and use that peace to create good things for the world, even if sometimes it feels like they won’t help and might keep people trapped, too.
THAT also is not true.
…
Midjourney prompt to celebrate a love of reading.
The “troll” at twilight, at the crossing-point into the part where the Most Favored Tree sits. Ray and I went out for Korean Fried Chicken and took a walk afterwards to Most Favored Tree; she was vastly amused by the “rules” I follow when I’m out there, to help maintain a liminal state of mind.