This morning, I woke up with a strange idea in my head : I'm not a reader.
It's a crazy statement coming from me, because I read a lot. One could say text is my oxygen.
More than that, it's part of my identity. I'm the girl with a book in place of a boyfriend. I was the teenager reading 600-page bricks instead of playing makeup with her girlfriends. I'm the nerd with glasses and a commitment to ideas. The serious history student, the one with a big library in the background of her videos. you get the gist.
But I haven't enjoyed reading an actual BOOK in a while.
In fact, when I tried to make a list of the books I truly LOVED, I got as far as 5 or 6. And most of them I read as a teenager. (for context, I turn 34 in a month).
For a second, the realisation dizzied me with even more catastrophical thoughts. Maybe I'm not as smart as I pretend to be, maybe I'm just a fraud, maybe my decication to idea is superficial. Maybe that's why I'm a BAD writer.
Or... Or maybe it doesn't mean anything but that I don't have a good time reading books. Spiral over.
I still read tons of articles, blog posts, newsletters, reports and what not. I also enjoy visual books immensely. There, this has nothing to do with ideas then.
It has everything to do with format (once again, fuck format).
More to the point, it does tell me something more interesting about that one goal of mine always lurking at the back of my mind : "one day, I'll write a novel".
That's the goal I always looked up to. When I'll have that done, I'll look the world in the eye and say 'see, I'm a serious person, I wrote a fucking NOVEL' (of course, in my mind it's always a success).
But my dream never says anything about actually writing the novel.
To be fair, I do have bits of some novels already written. But they were written with a big sense of 'I should be writing that because it's the ultimate creative act'. If I'm totally honest with myself, I did not have fun doing it. Not the way I have fun doing other creative things.
And why would I ? If I don't really enjoy reading novels, it's not a surprise that I don't enjoy writing them either.
So that strange thought this morning, that could have become another blow to my self-esteem, just... freed me. Well, no matter, I'll just stop trying to enjoy something I don't and focus all that energy into something I really enjoy.
Which at the moment happens to be websites, painting, and writing online about what my brain tells me when I wake up.
Something else this realization also tells me is that there is TREMEMDOUS (what a nice word) energy in letting things go.
What was that design quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ?
"La perfection est atteinte, non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à retirer."
(Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.)
Ah yes. Well I think it's also valid for your life. As I grow older I get more joy in taking things OFF my plate than adding them in. More precisely, in deciding I will no longer abide by that or that standard of how my life should be.
Like all that energy I'm going to save by actually following my preferences and stop trying to make myself read books I don't enjoy.