I used to read like my life depended on it when I was a child. I would have rather read than anything else. I would lose myself in book series, plow through tomes with hundreds of pages, and go to the library every week for more material.

But then, my senior year of college for my English degree, I was faced with reading a particularly boring passage from the 1500s for a class and something inside me just snapped. Whether it was burnout, my undiagnosed ADHD, or something I have yet to understand, I didn’t want to read anymore.

I took a break from reading. But when I tried to get back into it, as I always assumed I would, it just wouldn’t… happen. I was unfocused, unable to sit still, and just plain not interested.

Baffled, I gave it more time to just naturally come back to me. How could something I grew up loving so much just become impossible? Unfortunately, the time I spent waiting coincided with the rise of the smartphone. And my addition span had no way to prepare itself.

Not wanting to give up, I tried again a few years ago to resume reading. I turned to poetry. That’s easy enough. Lots of white space, the musicality of it, each page could be a different poem so starting and stopping wasn’t an issue. I would set aside some time in the afternoons, put on soft music, and maintain a perfectly controlled environment. It seemed to be working! For about a month. Then I could never get the environment perfectly controlled enough and I stopped reading again.

Finally, I got to the end of 2025 and I was so fed up with being unable to read that I tackled the issue with such stubbornness, even I was surprised.

I started reading everywhere. I used my phone, my iPad, my laptop, and I went back to paper books. I read before bed, consume page after page of journal articles for my personal curriculum classes, and I’ve even been reading Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter on my phone. There was no perfect reading environment that I could conjure up with any permanence. I didn’t need less distractions. I needed to learn how to ignore distractions, because they will always be around.

Slowly, it began to sink in to my social-media-addled brain: reading was on the menu again. Also, the more I read, the more I wanted to read. I picked material I found fascinating and once I stopped letting every tiny thing derail me, I was finally about to enjoy reading again.

What’s in store for the future? Unsure. But I will definitely keep reading.