On Reading Burnouts
I burnt out horribly from reading back in June after I handed in my thesis. Back then, after an entire year of research, the thought of cracking open any book made me want to vomit.
The year took so much out of me that I started to question why I entered the field in the first place. Granted, I loved reading. But like the taxi driver who resents driving after turning it into a job, academic research conditioned me to see reading as work. I gradually stopped reading for pleasure and wondered why something was off.
For the first time in a long time, I hopped on a plane to London in June without packing a book. One day as I wandered around Soho with my friend Jay Ventress, I confessed that I think I’ve lost a part of myself because I was no longer reading.
“Even in this literary capital, I can’t find a single book I want to read!” I said.
“But didn’t you just spend a whole year doing nothing but reading?” Jay said, “Do me a favour: live a little during this trip, will you?”
What followed was a strange month of wandering without reading around Europe. I had walked the paths of Beckett and Wilde near Trinity College Dublin and dined at Restaurant Polidor in Paris. It felt surreal. For the first time, my fantasies from my youth had turned into descriptions in my journal. I was living in the world I once read about in books.
So for three weeks, I threw myself into action. I drank a pint every day at five when I landed in Dublin, partied for 12 hours straight down in the South of France and rummaged through the flea markets near the Seine. I even met some of you guys in person during the trip.
And while all this was happening, reading was the least of my concerns, until I wandered into that bookshop in the South of France.
One day, when I was wandering around Le Cours Julien, my friend Loup dragged me into a café/second-hand bookshop. As he was ordering our coffee, I started to look through all the books and found an old Gallimard copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mots. After reading the first line, I pulled out two euros from my change pocket and bought it.
That was the first book I read in nearly three weeks.
Maybe it was reading in French or maybe it was the warm Mediterranean weather in the South, but I felt completely relaxed and just viewed reading as another pastime. I dipped in and out of the book when I was in Marseille and by the time I reached Paris, I’d already finished the thin volume.
My attitude to reading changed permanently after that. I dipped in and out and enjoyed every page without forcing anything and paradoxically, I read more than ever and had a better time, and this was when I found the root cause of my reader’s burnout.
It’s simply this: reading carried too much weight in my life.
In other words, it’s too sexy. Sitting down to read gradually turned from a mundane and pleasurable habit to an overly fussy undertaking.
To read a good book, the weather has to be right, the book has to be gripping and the beverage has to be soothing. For academic reading, I have to have a good coffee, a clean notebook and be surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of a library. Except… Where did all these bells and whistles come from?
Upon reflection, I was getting a high from the wrong things and had to ask myself the tough question: if all the glamour of reading is stripped away, will I still do it?
In a sense, my trip stripped everything in my environment that wasn’t essential. I was left with my eyes and words on the page and to my surprise, I loved it even more.
After returning from Europe, everything changed. Reading faded into the background of my life and I’ve read more than ever on autopilot. Sometimes I’d slip in a chapter of an audiobook at the gym and sometimes read 10 pages of an Epic Poem over my coffee.
What used to feel incredibly difficult has blended into the mundane and I think that’s why lifelong learning is a slow and deliberate commitment to stretch our minds a little bit every day.
In this case, consistency and enjoyment always trump a big sexy goal.
Until Next Week
Robin
