Teaching myself to read again

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

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.