In the shit show that was 2020 I was very lucky in that I did not get covid nor did I lose anyone I love to the virus. But it was an awful year for me in a lot of other ways, and generally a very stressful time for frankly anyone, and I had a nightmarish reaction to that stress:

I lost the ability to read.

Sure, I could read a sentence, a paragraph, as long as the sentence structure wasn’t too complex. But my attention span was about 2-3 short paragraphs of uncomplicated prose. There were embarrassing situations at work where I somehow didn’t process entire paragraphs of important emails and thus missed tasks assigned to me and key questions I needed to answer. I couldn’t read academic articles (a critical part of my job), or even the Medium blog posts that explain those articles to a non-academic audience. And at the end of my workday of failing to read, I then … couldn’t read for pleasure.

There was the occasional Saturday where I woke up feeling rested and not hopeless about the state of the world and was able to spend an hour or two reading. I read The Calculating Stars over the course of 9 months this way, in 50-odd page chunks, and, because I wasn’t reading much in between, when I finished it in December I perfectly remembered everything I’d read back in March.

I turned to audiobooks, and did okay with non-fiction, but for whatever reason I often struggle with listening to fiction in that format. My mind wanders for a second and then I’ve completely lost track of the story. I did manage to listen to Mexican Gothic for the BSpec book club by playing it at 0.75x speed, but listening to it at that slower speed completely destroyed all sense of tension. Some day I will revisit that book and process it at the speed intended and relish the delightful dread of gothic horror.

This drove me to finally start listening to podcasts, particularly Writing Excuses. I walked around the neighborhood to relieve the back pain I got from sitting all day every day while going season by season through years of the show and absorbing writing tips and adding their recommended books to my TBR list for that distant future when this period of executive dysfunction would be an anecdote rather than my on-going reality.

Bizarrely, I was able to write. The inability to read didn’t affect my ability to create prose and I drafted most of the first draft of a novel, winning NaNoWriMo for the first time and completing a draft in 13 months, a personal record for me. (Notably, it was 13 months from conception to finish – I came up with the idea several days into NaNo 2019 when I was bored with my intended project and my mind wandered.)

That draft is a mess, largely because most of it was completely pantsed, but it exists. It is in the world.

And by the time I finished that draft, I had regained the ability to read. My attention block was gone. I’ve been reading voraciously ever since, as though I’ve been making up for lost time. I may even reach a personal best for books read in a year this year.

Some days it’s still a struggle and I have to accept defeat after a page or two, but they are few and far between.

I tell myself that was normal before this all began. Sometimes I would have a long day and be too tired to do anything more complicated than veg on the couch with one of the cats and watch episodes of a TV show I’ve seen a half dozen times before. Right now it’s GBBO.

Most of the time, however, I can read, and it brings me such joy to have that back.