reading difficulties

Growing up, I find it difficult to concentrate and read.

As a teenager, I read novels as soon as I had free time, even in class. When I wasn’t reading, I would write stories on role-playing forums. My parents felt compelled to limit my screen time because I could be easily absorbed in my writing.

Then one day, I went to the other side of the planet to learn a foreign language in a host family. I decided to stop reading and writing in French to better immerse myself in the culture. I stopped the forums and reading.

When I returned home, I started graduate school. Reading has become a luxury; writing, a hobby on the train that took me back to boarding school on Sunday night.

The more time passes, the more reality and its priorities catch up with you. Reading and writing are often solitary activities; I had to learn to reduce the frequency so I could create new friendships in my life here and now.

Then came the job search, which limits all your writing to LinkedIn requests, resumes and cover letters, where the only purpose is to convince – no longer to imagine, have fun or invent.

Then came the first job, with its joys, with its stresses, and my desires to forget them in the evening in a film and series. The visual took over. I spent my first few months watching series on the bus in the morning, in the evening, and before sleeping. But, not a single book. Perhaps, because it’s so much easier to let the author impose his vision of reality on me, rather than imagining it myself from the script. I’m increasingly realizing how reading takes more time and effort than watching a video.

To read a poem and understand it is to take a break in one’s heart. Unlike a film or series, the feelings conveyed are not forced. They are suggested – the words are simply a guide. It is up to the reader to look within himself, forget his usual mental patterns, and open his inner understanding to connect with words and metaphors.

Reading is not a distraction – it is a concentration of the whole mind.

But reading has become a distraction. Would Instagram have the same success if it hid all the photos and kept only the text? We leave our creativity passive and prefer to drink from that of others. What is more, it must fill all our imaginative gaps with images and music.

We walk around more and more, not looking at the sky or reading a book, but reading a news feed, whether it is those of our friends or those of the world. As soon as the reading of a status is finished, we move on to the next. We follow a multitude of disconnected stories. We need these stories to look real, but not too much. We only like good news. We do not dare to express what makes us really sad, worried, angry. We do not dare to express our feeling of loneliness. We dare not say that we do not have self-confidence, that we blame ourselves, that we find ourselves unworthy of being loved, that we do not think we are able to love. We dare not ask others how they feel – we already have too much trouble accepting our own feelings. We learned to write about our lives without writing about Life. We feel, slightly, that our history is disconnected from those of others. Reading a thread, one feels pushed into the same current as others, while having trouble accepting that everyone is actually following their own path.

It is said that we prefer short stories to fiction because of their immediate usefulness, while ignoring that in reality we treat both in the same way. “I don’t like this policy – I’ll go talk about it with my neighbor.” The discussion naturally turns to fiction and frustration, because none of these neighbors will have the energy to realize the solutions then imagined. Fiction is part of our daily lives but we prefer to pretend to ignore it, then finding an excuse not to read more real fiction. The one that transports you elsewhere, to a new place, in the skin of another – without promises, without frustrations.

In the race for stability, we can forget who we are, what we love, what makes us vibrate. You can forget to look at your heart and take the time to connect with yourself.

This is one of the reasons why I start writing again – to fight this disconnection, to refocus, and to invite others to refocus in the same way. To relearn how to take the time to read, one word after another.

November 20, 2019