I know you’ve been on the edge of your seats all week. My phone has been ringing off the hook. So here it is, folks; here’s what I have been addicted to for as long as I can remember.
I am addicted to reading.
I know what you’re thinking. Reading? Reading? Reading. Isn’t that a great and wonderful pastime? Don’t some people make a living reading, like editors or even writers? How can reading be bad for you?
I’ll tell you how. It can be bad for you when you care more about what’s on the page in front of you—a page you can return to at any moment—than you do about the person you are with at that moment. Anytime you are distracted by what will happen next in a (fiction) book, anytime you refuse an opportunity for relationship to (stay home and) self-soothe with your literature of choice. Anytime you choose the pseudo-relationship of paper and ink over the real relationships of flesh and blood.
I’m not talking about nights when you don’t feel like going out so you choose a bath and a good mystery or chick lit novel. I mean when you arrange your schedule around reading; around when you can do it, how long it will be before you can do some more, constantly calculating in the back of your mind when you will be able to read again. I mean thinking of libraries or bookstores as places where you can “just stop by” like any normal person, but losing all track of time when you’re there and having to be forced out by closing announcements or children waiting forlornly to be picked up. Then when you finally do leave, feeling like you’re coming out of a haze of smog and your mind is all foggy and out of focus.
I did all the things people say to do to maximize your time regarding reading, and I justified it by saying it was recommended. I always had something to read with me– I read in the car, yes, even while driving. I read while on hold over the phone, I read at the gym, I read in the bathroom. I read first thing after waking up in the morning and last thing before I went to bed at night. I thought it was a clever way to “bookend” my own day. Many times I wished I could read two things at once, and wondered if they would ever come up with a surgery that would let your eyes operate independently and each read something different simultaneously. I thought that would be nirvana.
It was impossible for me to sit in on my couch in front of a TV show or movie and not also be reading at the same time. My family eventually just stopped responding to my questions about plot twists or character development in whatever we were watching. I called this being productive, multi-tasking, not wasting time, and I felt virtuous about the fact that I never just sat zoned-out on the couch focused solely on the “boob tube”, but that I was also improving my mind at the same time.
Fiction or non-fiction made no difference to me, although I did try to read more non-fiction around other people, because I thought that made me look smarter. I certainly didn’t flash the books with pink covers on them to the world. I got a certain amount of pride from having already read 99% of what my friends or acquaintances were reading; like seeing a movie on opening night, I enjoyed getting books before others had and devouring them as quickly as possible.
You have to understand also that reading is sickeningly easy for me. According to my parents, I taught myself how to read when I was 2. Family lore has me reading the paper with my dad at the breakfast table when I was 6 and asking “Daddy, what’s Vietnam?” I don’t remember any of that. I do remember rejoicing anytime I was sent to my room, because that meant I could read in peace without my bratty little brother bothering me.
I read while walking to and from school every day. I read at recesses and lunch. I read every afternoon, on the window-seat in the living room where I could see other kids playing on the street. When my parents would take us to other people’s houses for dinner who didn’t have kids our age, I brought books. I can read 2-3 books a week just by reading a few hours each night. To this day, my suitcases are shockingly heavy whenever I travel because I pack so many books- or at least they were, before I got an iPad. And a Kindle. Because some books only work on one or the other. You see my point.
More times than I can count, reading has brought me to new heights of insight, sensitivity, awareness, joy, or peace. Some of the best moments of my life have been while reading a great book. If not for reading, I definitely wouldn’t be anything like the person I am today.
If reading was a sport, I would be a gold medalist, combining natural talent with the kind of love and affinity for the sport that defines elite athletes. Never once have I felt intimidated or challenged in my abilities while reading. It is by far the most facile thing I do. I am more agile at reading than I am at anything else in my life. Out of everything in the world that is possible to do, I think reading is what I do best.
The written word has been the strongest drug in my life, and it is one that I am utterly unable to resist. It has been my antidote; saving me from pain, confusion, and doubt. In my life, there has been no truer friend and no safer solace than reading. At the same time (literally), reading has also been my Kryptonite. It has kept me at a distance from people I love and things I must face. Many times, it has dulled me and isolated me from reality, truth, hope, and redemption.
So, now you know. That’s my secret. And that’s also my point; keeping addictions secret gives them much more power and makes them even harder to escape. It’s not enough to ask ourselves the tough questions about addiction, as I mentioned last week. We need to share the answers to those questions with others. Otherwise , we’ll stay sick.
As my favorite quote from Frederick Buechner says so eloquently:
I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition–that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are–even if we tell it only to ourselves–because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about. Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell.
Buechner, Frederick Telling Secrets (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991) p.2-3.