Reading

When I was younger, say from 7 or 8 to mid-20’s, I loved to read. In elementary school, I even won a ton of book-reading awards. Up until I was 7 or 8, our lives had been pretty stable and happy. At 8 or 9, my brothers and I were sent to live with my dad in Texas. There were some good memories but mostly bad until I finally made a plan to escape his abuse and left home at 16. Looking back before moving to Texas, reading was something I did because I enjoyed it, and afterward, it became a way to escape. Reading has a way of transporting you out of the real and into a realm of possibilities and adventures.

Fast forward to today and I haven’t read a book in years. I find myself enjoying magazines, newspaper articles and instructional books I use for photography or cooking. Maybe as my life got better, I leaned less on reading and began trusting my environment and enjoying life. I find myself at times missing the hours spent disappearing into the stories I read but not enough to actually pick up a book and read again.

Part of the problem now is there are just too many distractions and things to do. I feel it’s a waste of time to just devote hours in a day to reading. I almost think I would feel guilty for doing so. Did you grow up loving to read and now find yourself never reading?

My favorite authors as a teen and early adult were tied, of course, to my mom - just like my love for cooking. We had a lot of the same tastes for things. She loved Stephen King books and the horror genre and I grew up reading Monster magazine and other horror magazines. When I was going through some of the worst abuse with my dad, I would go visit my mom for the weekend after she moved to Texas. We would sit on the couch and just talk or I would watch her cooking and felt all was right with my world even just for those brief reprieves. One such visit she took me to Sam’s Club with her and she bought me a book, Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, because that was the author she was reading while waiting on a new Stephen King novel to come out. I read it and it rekindled a sleeping passion I had for books and it did one more thing I had forgotten about: it took me out of my situation and transplanted me into adventure and dramas again, leaving behind a world of pain. It comes to me now as I write this that my rekindled love of reading was laid to rest again when my mom died when I was 27.

I have read a book since then but the passion and joy of reading was replaced with just another distraction. Maybe one day I will find that love again - maybe after retiring. Who knows?

This is Will B saying, has your passion become just another distraction?