While leaving the office one Friday evening, I heard a coworker say, “I just want to curl up with a good book and relax this weekend.” And I thought, “Seriously? How in the world do you find book reading relaxing?”
Or how about this one: “Oh, look at the time! I just got so lost in this great book!” I don’t get it. To me, that’s like getting lost in a diaper change. It just doesn’t happen. Reading, for me, is tactical: get in, get the job done, and get out.
Truth is, book reading has always been hard work for me. Sometimes I read right off the edge of a page and into a daydream. Sometimes I get to the end of a paragraph and can’t remember anything I just read. I’ve started books that I never finished, and I’ve struggled to find books I enjoy.
As a result, I’ve read barely one book per year for the last 10 years. But I read plenty of articles, blogs, and news, so I was cool with that. No big deal.
But at some point, things went too far. It was almost as if I started to shun book reading.
Friend: “Hey, I thought you might like to re…”
Me: “GASP! GET THAT BOOK AWAY FROM ME! DON’T YOU KNOW I’M NOT A READER?!”
How did it come to this? How did I start building an identity as a non-reader?
Well in 2015, I decided to change that. I’m not talking about a “read one book and check it off the list” kind of change. I mean a real change.
It was time to discard a petty identity and reset myself with a year of reading.
My goal? To break old habits and form new ones by reading 12 books in 2015. Seemed aggressive, considering it’s 12x my average pace, but still reasonable.
I started with a book off my shelf. Then a library book. Someone handed a book to me and said they thought I’d like it. I read it. I read on my lunch break and in the auto mechanic’s waiting room. Around yard work and side projects, leaky faucets and crying babies, I made myself read.
It was hard, and I hated a lot of it, but I met my goal of 12 books…in the spring. (Turns out that I’m not so great at goal setting either.) I still had half the year left, so I had to up my goal to a more daunting 30.
It was incredibly difficult for me, but on the afternoon of December 31, 2015, I read the final pages of my 30th book. (I also listened to one audio book in addition, but Fearless Leader says that doesn’t count. He’s right.)
Now it’s 2016 and I have a list of at least 20 books that I want to read. In my own way, I may even be…a reader (GASP!).
Here’s one of my takeaways from the experience: The more you latch on to something as part of your identity, the more you will push away anything that compromises it. So choose your identities wisely.
--88caprice
