Between the Lines, Head in the Sand
As someone who was never interested in social media and developed an outward appearance of a serious nerd, newer acquaintances would often clock me as a magical creature who's somehow immune to today's vice: doomscrolling. What they don't know is I actually have a lifelong relationship with my own version of doomscrolling, and it's one of my biggest (though not the healthiest) coping mechanism.
I read.
Books, in the dead tree form and the digital form, from txt files in my old Sony Ericsson that could only display about two sentences at a time to epub files in my Kindle today.
But wait, you might say, what is this about? Reading books isn't a vice, it's not like you're trawling Twitter!
Except, in my case, I don't only read for fun, no. I often read to drown, the same way people describe doomscrolling. When the world feels too suffocating, when the voice of my depression becomes too loud, when I don't want to think about what I actually have to do, I read. In the darkest days, my life would blur between reading to working on whatever and somehow I would survive all that even if I couldn't recall a single thing. In a way, it's no different than the helmet and backpack in O. C. Blanco's story, a signpost to fix your mind on.
In these moments, my choice of reading materials are nonfictions. Not because I'm a hoity-toity elitist who believes fictions have no merit, quite the opposite actually. I can't bring myself to consume fictions mindlessly. I want to revere stories. Fictions are for my waking moments, to savor and to play with. Nonfictions are easy to read for me in detachment, it asks no emotional investment from myself, and I can just let the word pour into me, shutting off my brain from thinking about anything else. I would then emerge to welcome a new dawn, everything a hazy dream, a vague recollection, word-drunk. I'd have the words swim in my head as I live my life on autopilot, senses numbing. What have to be done. What have to be done. Done.
When I was a child, I was able to remember everything I read. Could also tell you the position of that text block on the page. When I started getting brainfogs and turned to reading as a form of sedative, I could spend a long time on a page without registering even a single word. At the end of each book I could usually tell you a very big picture overview of the text, but my memories would be patchy. Looking at my reading journal from several years back, especially during the hardest time in my life, there were big holes. I would sometimes read a text twice before hearing echoes and realizing I had read it before.
So I slowly accumulated a bird's nest of the most random trivia out of the scant parts I could remember. While everything I read is still personally picked and remotely interesting to my person, my definition of acceptable reading materials for this purpose is so broad that among my Project Gutenberg plunders was a government report about the state of education system in 1915 Cleveland. It was so dry and oddly specific I killed a few weeks with that, and at one point it was genuinely entertaining (weird that a lot of things could still apply in today's system). I appreciate the author's voice.
I suppose what I want to say is: we can do many traditionally meritorious activities as a form of avoidance and perhaps reap some benefits out of it, but at the end of the day it doesn't change the fact that we're avoiding something. Maybe for me it's reading. Maybe for you it's spinning yarn. Maybe for some it's gardening. I'm aware of my tendency and I make efforts to curb it a bit (operative keyword "trying"). I'm fine with the amount of time I spend reading (I really do like to read), I just want to be mindful about it and not do it in expense of everything else. Confront my problems. Find a way to deal with my fears and anxieties that doesn't end up with shutting myself down into living on autopilot. I'm not getting younger, I can't just kill my senses whenever things don't go my way. Sure, I get things done. People like it. I get to where I am. But I keep feeling the absence left by the holes in my memories, my heart mourning for something I couldn't remember losing.
Here's to all words lost and still to be found, to all words undiscovered and waiting to be rediscovered.