Just my favorite junk

breadsticks:

Of bread.

A friend brought this to my attention after I lamented to them that I had just realized it’s been over nearly 2 years since I’ve read a book for fun. I’ve read plenty of new things that eventually turn into books, cause that’s my job as an editor. But for the honest to goodness life of me I can’t remember the last time I read anything for fun, the exception being short fanfic snippets, and even then those were usually things people were actively thrusting in front of me going “look at the shiny thing!”, otherwise I would have never sought it out myself. I sort of assumed I was just suffering from burnout due to the last 3-4 years of my life being nothing but a constant hustle to survive, both in terms of my ailing health and tying to work hard enough to afford the ensuing medical bills. I kept telling myself once things calmed down (ha!), then I’d read something for fun, then I’d find it enjoyable again…

Except I’ve tried and I can’t. I’ve tried audiobooks and had some better success with them, but if it’s on a page in front of me the words just glide away without imparting any meaning. There’s no fun in reading for me anymore, it’s either something I wrangle myself into doing cause of work, or it’s something I just don’t have the attention span for anymore. And I miss it, I miss it so much and I’ve been worried for the longest time that my job had finally killed one of the things I truly used to enjoy… but if you read the article and the correlation between trauma and not being able to use your brain to process things, well that’s just downright interesting to me cause the last two years of my life have been nothing but unending trauma. Longer if you include all the other stuff, but the last two years have been particularly hard, and that’s what I’m currently struggling to process in therapy. Among other things, evidently.

I feel like… like you know that commercial with the eggs that was like “this is your brain on drugs”? I feel like that except “this is your brain on trauma”, and it’s just a lump of smoking char on the ground, the handle of frying pan sticking out of the dirt.