Impatience

My bookshelf before I organized it.

It didn't hit me at how impatient I've become till I forced myself to sit down and read a book. I'm at that point in my life where I want to have the book finished already so that I could move on to the next one, and the next one after that, and the next one after that. It also does not help that I have a whole bookshelf full of unread books staring at me every time that I'm in my room. Taunting me, forcing me to pick one of them up so it can graduate and move on to the bookshelf full of already finished books. Instead, I would end up on my phone scrolling through Facebook, looking through various job descriptions, messaging various people, spend endless hours on Youtube, and just generally do anything but reading.

After running into a Grant Snider picture called, "Stages of the Reader," it didn't hit me how true it is until seeing it. I'm on stage six, no books, but I'm also on stage eight, where I'm hoarding a lot of books. Working at a bookstore does not help because there are a lot of new books and books that I've been eyeing for quite a while that I keep on getting for myself because it's cheaper with my employee discount. There are also a lot of advanced reader copies (ARCs) that I occasionally like to get. However, collecting a bunch of books does not help me get out of this reading slump.

As mentioned in a previous post, a reading slump is when a person is "not reading as many books as often to not reading any books at all." For six years of my life, I've been in a reading slump. It may not look like it because I constantly carry a book with me, but most of the time it goes unread. And it is true that I graduated as an English major, but most of the books that I've read in the last four years, I read because I had to if I wanted to pass my classes. And I'm not going to lie, being an English major burned me out in a way. I had to put in a lot of thought and time in analyzing the stories that it just tired me out and it made me not want to read for fun most of the time. Yeah, I liked reading the stories that were given to me, but that didn't always make me want to branch out on my own.

And when I did try to read for fun, my mind would rather be doing something else. Plus, it would either take forever to finish one book (like several months to a year) or it would be really quick (like one to two days at most), rarely was there an in between. Either way, I forgot the importance of slowing down and just enjoy the moment and the story before me. For most of my life, I've learned to rush through things, but really there was no need to do that because, in the end, I had plenty of time. Time that I cannot get back, but still plenty of time to learn that life is not a competition, but more of a leisurely stroll full of people who are important to me, plenty of fun (and sad) events, and activities that I realize I cannot live without like reading.

And now the weather:
Khalid's Young Dumb & Broke cover by Christian Kuria

~ Stacy N.