it's comical how despite being a text creature and also an actual academic researcher i'm almost incapable of reading at all
as usual it's a problem with my eyes. my eyes just can't really be directed to a particular place of my choosing for more than a split second at a time. it's the same reason i can't see motion except as analogous to the frames of a flipbook. most of the time my eyes are not where i want them to be or worse, moving, and i can't see while they move and even if they stop moving for a second to give me a glimpse i cannot see most of what i'm looking at. i have to already know what i'm looking at. hence why i can speedrun hollow knight 112% or a randomiser for the hundredth time. i can't quite do it with my eyes closed but it is so visually familiar to me that most of it happens in my head, not in my eyes. (yet i will make mistakes that betray my lack of sight, not noticing many things that i am ostensibly looking directly at, not noticing things that are moving unless i know exactly where they are already, that sort of thing)
i usually compare my way of reading to shotgun sequencing
ew, that looks really blurry. uh but yeah usually i don't even get to look at all the letters in words longer than like… well right now i can see about three letters at a time, if there's no spaces between them, but sometimes it's better or worse and sometimes the size of the letters is different and sometimes the screen is a different distance from my eyes; it's really about how narrow my visual field is at the moment and how much space they take up in the visual field
my eye involuntarily skips around on the page and i can't even confine it to a particular paragraph. i've found it's actually better/faster/easier to understand to skim things in their entirety and then go back and do multiple passes. but that ruins the pacing of fiction so i try to force myself to read fiction really really linearly and it's an interminably slow effort. moreover it requires incredible amounts of focus. it'll usually be by far the most effortful thing i do all day, if i do that. and i can't do more than idk 3k words in one sitting
sometimes i use a screenreader instead but that is a painful experience in its own way. screenreaders interpret text so artlessly and i have problems with auditory processing of language. (i do not have other kinds of auditory processing issues. it is part of my language-related disabilities in general)
so yeah i have a long backlog of things i need to read. academic papers are relatively easy since the exact wording doesn't matter and they don't care what order i read them in. it is fiction or more generally artistic writing that i find very difficult to do. so that is my excuse if you recommend me a thing and i haven't read it yet…
(my eyes have gotten worse over time, partly due to traumatic brain injury, but sight has always been difficult and spurious to me. i would appreciate it if nobody would characterise my site issues as adhd; they are perfectly well explained by my schizotypy and neurological issues. i meet the diagnostic criteria for adhd in other ways but this isn't an attention issue, it's a visual processing issue, and adhd is not the only thing under the sun that causes visual processing issues. people only seem to buy that my visual processing issues are schizotypal when i talk about my hallucinations, and that gets annoying, because it betrays that they know nothing about schizotypy.)
