My experience of reading

Don't know why I'm writing this in English, but sometimes it's simpler for me to write a certain thing in English. Or, I might just want to practice before taking an English test.

Anyways. Recently I've been trying to read a lot. I've been focusing on reading, once again.

At university, I studied English literature and read different texts. But to be honest, originally, I'm not a diligent reader. I like reading. But I often get distracted. Sometimes I can't focus on the book and it takes me over a month to finish it. When I was younger, I couldn't accept that kind of myself. I tried to hide it, because I thought I had to read a lot since I was a literature student. Besides, sometimes I felt like "I have to read this, because it is, everyone says, a masterpiece." I kind of felt compelled to read something. And you know, that sort of reading is not very much fun.

In my opinion, at that point I was in the process of figuring out what I really want, what I really like, and who I really am. In that process, we tend to pretend to like something that we don't actually like or understand, because we don't know yet what is valuable to us. We are not confident in our own taste and ourselves, so we try to like something people highly rate and make ourselves look bigger than we really are. This happens to everyone, I believe. And it happened to me. I wanted to read what people I respect recommeded and to understand it. But it didn't always work.

That's what my university years were like. Afterwards it gradually changed. While I was doing job hunting in the fourth year (technically fifth year), and after I graduated, I had less time to read. I went through different things. The biggest was developing type one diabetes (I have lots to talk about it but that's another story). I had a few small challenges during this time as well. Those things made me face myself, learn I can't be anything but what I am, and realize I need to read. Having shaken off the feeling of obligation to read, yet I need books.

Also I've realized I can be a lazy reader. It's okay sometimes not to be able to finish a book. It happens, relatively frequently to me, but it's okay. Though I'm still not confident in myself, I already started to accept my laziness. And interestingly, since then, I've been reading much more than before. In the past I confined my reading to a certain, proper style and that made me more unable to read. That was kind of my 'mind-forged manacles'. Now I'm enjoying reading in a truer way.

This is not going to end up with a conclusion, as usual. In a previous post, I wrote about a talk that Tavi Gevinson gave for TED and its title is "Still Figuring Out". I love the talk. I love how a young girl views our world and it made me learn our life is the process of "figuring it out". As to reading, I think I've got a new 'figure it out' moment. So maybe I just wanted to write about it. Of course I know, to most people it's "write it on the back of a flyer" stuff. But I don't care because this is, at least, my own flyer's back.