From learning to read in kindergarten until about 6th grade, I was a huge reader. I couldn’t be torn away from books. My mom would often find me asleep with a book in hand and the light still on. My favorite place at school was the library, and I would often finish a book per day.

I credit the Internet, depression, and ignorance for taking my ability to read. I don’t mean I became illiterate, but I become unable to sit through a book without being forced to (and even then, I usually didn’t do it). I didn’t read a single book on my own during high school.

Only since I started my gap year have I been able to return to reading for pleasure. Something which I dearly missed. It wasn’t that I wasn’t trying, but I just didn’t have the bandwidth to retrain my brain to sit through long things.¹

What happened #

I think my losing my ability to read came mostly from frying my attention span. I started to become really online after 7th grade, and become a heavy social media user. I spent most of high school off of ADHD meds (which I had been taking since 1st grade), and so I was already running a dopamine deficit, which made building new (healthy) habits really hard.

I tried many times to get back into reading, and failed every time. I felt immense guilt for having lost such a valuable skill, and it was cause for a lot of self loathing. This really sucked, and was the last thing my depressed, unsure self needed. I think being able to read would have both really helped me do better in school (another pain point) and discover my queerness faster.

The only long-form content I consumed was video essays,² because they were what could hold my attention. Frequently I would get burnt out on YouTube, Netflix, etc, and nothing would do the trick.

What has worked #

Since graduating, I’ve tried again to get back into reading, and I’ve been successful. It’s been awesome. Hopefully this can be useful to other people experiencing the same thing.

I started with shorter, easier, things. I reread The Great Gatsby, which I loved when I read it in class, on the Coast Starlight, and I really enjoyed it. Then I moved on to longer, unknown stuff. My friend gifted me The Topeka School by Ben Lerner, and I loved it. For a while, I was working as a bike messenger, so I had lots of time to listen to things, and I started listening to The Power Broker (the audiobook is 70 hours!), and I loved it. I ended up riding more just to listen to it more.³

The Power Broker was big for me, I didn’t think I would have been able to get through any nonfiction for a long time. After that, I picked up some queer books from Green Apple Books (support your local bookstores! Green Apple is even union!), and sped through them. Then I started reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, and loving it. After that, my mom gave me a Kindle, which was a game changer. I always carry it with me (its home is a pocket in my bag), and I read whenever I have downtime away from home (the bus, waiting rooms). I also gamified reading just a little bit, with Goodreads,⁴ but that and the ease of getting ebooks made me start too many books, many of which I had to ax from my reading list. Still though, now I’m reading multiple fiction and non-fiction books at once, and enjoying it.

Recently, I’ve started making heavy use of Omnivore, a read-it-later+feed-consumer app. I dump anything that looks interesting into there, and now instead of scrolling on my phone during downtown, I read. It syncs my progress across devices, has a nice distraction free reader, lets me follow a ton of feeds.⁵

I’ve recently added a books section to my new blog (this), here. I’m working on getting everything from the old site over to there.

Takeaways #

This has been a lot of yapping and rambling. Here’s some of my takeaways that I hope are helpful.

• Slight gamification helps in the beginning, but ditch it ASAP.
• Read things that you’re actually interested in (this seems obvious, but it’s so important)
• Start easy, build up (but always have something easy to fall back on)
• Having multiple things going at once is helpful as long as they’re spread across difficulty levels. Being able to say “oh The Second Sex sounds a little dense for me right now” and still have something to read is great, and helps build the reading habit.