After months of lockdown, scary headlines, loved ones, friends, acquaintances, and neighbors hospitalized or even dying, debating opening schools and mask mandates, we are all more anxious than ever. They say anxiety and depression often come together.
With life happening and my own personal health journey, I found myself not reading. Or at least not reading for pleasure anymore. I read a lot--mostly researching my health, various diagnoses, doctors, treatments, procedures. My mind was full of questions and answers that begat more questions. Reading peer reviewed articles for 8 years of a doctoral program, graduating and reading more peer reviewed articles is a particular kind of hell. The shining light at the end of the tunnel of my doctoral program was the chance to read for pleasure again--not for teaching or presenting at conferences or writing articles for publication. That’s what I told myself anyway.
This was the final nail in the coffin of my academic career.
It was hard to get lost in a book with so much life happening. It’s also hard to be creative when your mind is filled with peer reviewed academic research.
I wrote a lot. I still write a lot. I’ve always written a lot. I was a kid that always had a diary or a journal and loved different color pens. Color coding notes was fun. It’s what made my doctor’s visits a little more bearable. I began to decorate my journals more which led me to scrapbooking and decorative planning. My creativity was coming out one way or another. Like eating chips or Oreos, once I started I couldn’t stop.
I found myself craving a very good thriller to get lost in. I went back to one of my favorite authors--Stephen King. I read my first Stephen King book, book 4 of The Dark Tower series, when I was 10 or 12. My father had read it. I was a curious kid. Once I was in the adult world, I kept going--The Green Mile, The Running Man, Carrie, Rose Madder, The Stand. On Labor Day, I began listening to The Long Walk, a King novel published under his alter ego Richard Bachman. If it wasn’t for working, sleeping, and well, life, I would have finished the book on Labor Day. I was back to my childhood, inhaling books like air.
If you’ve lost your passion for something you once loved, you can get it back. Remember the things you used to do. Go back and do them. Even if you don’t do it perfectly the same way (audiobooks fit better into my schedule than holding a physical book), doing it will make you so happy.
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