On Reading and Social Distancing
[image description: a woman with dark curly hair reading a newspaper while the TV is on.]
Over the years, I’ve had a fantasy that I imagine many book nerds have had. That somehow all your plans are magically canceled and that your work doesn’t need you, so you have all this time to sit at home and read, luxuriating in the pages of a good book.
Be careful what you wish for, right?
I won’t say I was looking forward to social distancing, but I’d hoped that one upside to this whole global shitshow would be that I’d have the bandwidth to get through my towering stacks of books. My piles of books are packed two rows deep on my shelves and I’m out of shelf space. And I want to actually read them, not just clean off my shelves by getting rid of books.
What I’ve learned is that it’s really hard to read more in a pandemic because of the stress of living in a fucking pandemic. I’m obsessively reading, watching, and listening to the news, checking the death tolls daily, and wondering if me, my husband, my friends, or my elderly in-laws are going to get sick. I try not to imagine my healthy 29-year-old husband on a ventilator fighting for his life like some young people in Italy have been. I try not to dwell on the gaping hole of need in the world economy that affects individual people on a deeply personal level.
In short, my anxiety is through the roof.
In the moments where I manage to forget the world’s suffering for a little while, I’ll be reading along, completely immersed in the story and momentarily oblivious to the havoc the coronavirus has wrought, then suddenly remember again. For every fifteen minutes of relative peace, the space around it is punctuated by anxiety about the future and life as we know it.
I much prefer to write uplifting posts. Or at least posts where I’ve worked out a problem, learned something new, or received a valuable insight to share with you. I want to think of this space in the blogosphere as an inspiring, uplifting, and educational spot on the internet. Though I also feel I’d be doing you all a disservice if I just pretended everything was hunky-dory and I was happily bookworming my way through what feels like an apocalypse, especially knowing that so many others are feeling the same way I’m feeling: anxious and mildly hopeless.
The truth is I don’t have a solution or insight to share––I’d venture that few do in the face of such uncertainty. All I can say is that I hope you’ll cut yourself some slack if your social distancing isn’t going as swimmingly as you’d hoped. And I hope you’re safe and healthy.
If you’re not already in the Off the Beaten Shelf Facebook group, let’s connect! Social distancing doesn’t apply to social media.
We’ll get through this one day at a time. One book at a time.
