Well, At Least I'm Reading Now

So this has been a weird year.


I can't help but feel that all year I've been... off. Not myself. Lacking luster. I think I've talked about on here. Repeatedly. I've looked for excuses, and made resolutions, and had good days where it seemed like everything was going to be fine again, but... overall, looking at the big picture, the whole year's just be a weird one and I have no good explanation.


Okay, so maybe saying that the whole year's been weird is misstating the situation somewhat. Generally speaking, it's actually been a pretty great year. I've spent a lot of time with friends especially, hanging out, emailing, liking the people I spend time with more and more and, more importantly, feeling more liked than I ever have before. I've had some truly amazing days. My life, my real, solid, outside-of-my-own head life has been flourishing in ways I'm utterly unaccustomed to.


It's the other life that's been weird, the one that plays out between the pages of books and the keys on my keyboard and the margins of journals. I feel like I've been reading more slowly and enjoying books less. And as for writing... oof. I've started books and not finished them. I started a short story and didn't finish it. I've said I'm going to start books and not actually done so. I didn't do NaNoWriMo. I haven't posted on this blog in FOUR FREAKING MONTHS. I've gotten ideas and gotten sick of them immediately. I've actually opened my word documents, determined that today, today I'm going to start in earnest, today is the day that the writer's block will finally be broken, today is the day I will start feeling like my old self again... and then proceeded to write only a sentence or two before closing them and pushing them to the back of my mind again.


Now that I write it, now that I put it all into words (heck, now that I'm actually writing something that isn't just an email or a comment on Facebook) it sounds so wrong, it feels so wrong. It's baffling to face it, to admit it, to recognize that these failures I'm describing are my own, that this whole past year has transpired in my life and can't be relived, rewritten, fixed. But only now. It's like I've been in some kind of haze for months, blissfully unaware that something somewhere is somehow broken. I've been at peace with my inactivity. My stillness. My wordlessness.


But I think something may finally have changed. Because I'm reading again.


Of course, I never stopped reading. It'd probably be easier for me to go without food than to go without a book or two on my nightstand with bookmarks comfortably positioned somewhere among their pages. But over the past few weeks, I've suddenly been reading quickly. Really quickly. To give an example, since this time last week I've read three and a half books. Short books, sure, but considering the fact that several of the books I've read this year took me more than a week to read, I think I should be allowed to celebrate small victories.


Can I explain this unexpected change for the better? No. Well, maybe, but the vague theory I have involves a lot of factors and would take a while to explain and still doesn't really fully account for the kind of change I've noticed.


Luckily, I don't need an explanation. I'm just happy that whatever's happened has happened, and hopeful that I keep reading the way that I am now - that the enthusiasm I've rediscovered persists, that I keep finding books I like or even love, that I don't fall back into a reading slump. And I'm also hopeful, cautiously, tentatively hopeful, that this shift is only the first sign of something bigger. That maybe, just maybe, my words are going to come back. That in the coming year, I'm really going to write.


So... there you go. A long-overdue update of sorts on my life.


Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a book to finish.