Take a Look, It’s in a Book?
After I graduated from college with my undergraduate degree, I quickly jumped into continuing my education with a 200-hour yoga teacher training that started just a few months later. Both endeavors required a lot of dense reading that was sometimes really hard to get through. Since every single book was assigned, reading became a chore with a deadline attached. I’m not the fastest reader so deadlines to finish a dense book filled me with anxiety and stress. I would often not finish the assigned books, look for SparkNotes (does that still exist now that the internet has everything?), and wish upon a star that I wouldn’t be called on when it was time to review the book in class. Needless to say, my grades definitely suffered whenever reading comprehension was involved. This continuous struggle, year after year, wiped the fun out of reading and led to a lot of frustrating moments throughout my learning career.
Fast forward a few years and I found myself hearing from friends about different books they were reading. I felt envious that they read for pleasure and often I’d say “I’m a slow reader” as my reason for not reading. Then one day I watched the movie “The Martian”. I saw it was based on a book of the same title by Andy Weir and that piqued my reading interest. That’s when I discovered audiobooks. Talk about a gamechanger! I listened to the audio and absolutely loved it. Immediately I craved more books. A person I follow on social media released a memoir and so I listened to it on audio. That catapulted me into the world of storytelling, and I decided I only wanted to read memoirs. Period. At the time, I felt like every fiction book was very been-there-done-that (please don’t judge five-years-ago-me, thank you). In total, I think I read eight books that year.
Since I shifted my perspective on reading, my relationship with books has changed. I used to think that to be “good” at reading you had to 1. be a fast reader, 2. read only physical copies of books, and 3. only read to gain knowledge.
Now? I have perspective and thank goodness for perspective! I’m a working mom with three kiddos 5 and under, so 98% of my books are audio books. Because, you know what? Audio books do count! For a long time, I told myself negative things about audio books because they felt like “cheating”. I also used to judge reading anything but non-fiction or a memoir. But that mindset is so limiting! I’ve learned to let those stifling thoughts go because audio books fit my lifestyle and my attention span and any book that piques my interest is worth my time.
As of now, I’m currently on book number 55 for the year. My reading goal for this year was 40 books and, at the pace I am going, I’ll probably finish somewhere around 65 books by the end of the year – not bad!
Reading is exciting to me again. Thinking back to when I was a kid, I used to read a lot! “The Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum was particularly one of my favorite books; I remember reading it many, many times and took pride in telling people just that. “The Face on the Milk Carton” by Caroline B. Cooney was another one of my favorites as a kid. All this to say, it feels good to reconnect with a hobby I loved as a child, without limitations. I read because I love it and it makes me feel good.
So many times, we have limiting beliefs around how something should be done. This kind of thinking prevents us from enjoying whatever the activity is. It’s perfectionism rearing its head and I think you should push back against that kind of thinking. Let go of the confines of the box and just jump into whatever you want to do. Let it be messy. Let it be imperfect. Let it be fun.
“If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Now go out and unapologetically love doing what you do.
