π Healing Through Reading (And Still Writing)
Last Updated: 3Β months, 2Β weeks ago
Now in addition to writing. And possibly just through doing creative and relaxing, non-overwhelming things, and just doing things I love in general
So, I've started reading again, and this is a big deal.
In my performative upbringing, everything hobby or extracurricular I did had to lead to some great achievement my parents could brag about, or it wasn't really worth anything.
Hobbies were only useful if they could win you trophies and acclaim.
The books I read fell into this category because they were fiction, and worse, fantasy, so they didn't contain "real world knowledge" to shape me into a great "intellectual" that I could then parrot to other people as expert in real-world ... stuff..., like science, or history, or whatever was considered "important" knowledge, the type that people would acknowledge me for.
Hence, I internalised that I shouldn't be reading unless it was non-fiction, because teen fiction, children's books and general fantasy was a "waste of time" or wouldn't properly "develop me as a person" or result in a meaningful career. That was my upbringing - to become my parents' trophy.
But last night, I actually got back into reading. Even more importantly, into reading the stuff that I always used to love reading, in the simple, comforting language I found relatable.
And, similarly to starting writing again, I've started to notice some things have immediately started changing in my psyche, and how both of these seem to be helping me to discover myself, but also to feel comfortable and actually a sense of power and recovery of myself, and as if I actually have the means to get out of my depression!
That happiness. Weirdly it seems to come from delayed gratification, in what Dr K talks about here.
What I Think is Causing This (Neurologically)
I think what's happening here, and what I think I can actually feel emotionally is actually the reforming neural pathways.
Not having to have instant dopamine seems to help with not being short-circuited into depression.
Dr K talks about reforming new neural pathways by teaching the brain something different to our learned instant-gratification behaviours (which our brain learns easily through things like gaming and Youtube/Tik-tok).
He talks here about specifically how to become less impulse-driven and which I also reference in this part of my article on how to commit to writing (or some other creative process) everyday
Dr K's video on becoming less impulse-driven in order to stick to practising creativity as a commitment
But in addition, I feel I'm really benefitting from being disconnected from so much online media and social media, not being overwhelmed by dealing with and thinking about everything at once, something Dr K also talks about in this video and which I also go into here:
Dr K's video on reducing multitasking to prevent feeling overwhelmed
What Happened Last Night: Rediscovering that Familiar, Warm and Healing Feeling
Stepping back to the story of how this discovery happened. Specifically, this started last night.
Last night, I finally got around to searching for and finding an old fanfic that I last opened end of 2017 (3 months before I came out as trans and my life essentially got orders of magnitude harder and disrupted from then on - at which point I think I actually stopped reading altogether).
I had messaged the author back then because I had revisited it every few years and she'd never added to it since I'd started following it, and so I really wanted her to finish it - to let her know that she had at least one really engrossed fan, in case that encouraged her to continue.
And since then I hadn't returned, though I'd kept meaning to but always got distracted with standard ADHD/ASD/trans/busy life overwhelm from everything everywhere always going on, and then the distractions and scramble of the pandemic changing everything about life...
So anyway, I finally remembered again, and went back to find it yesterday... and to my delight she'd finished the two books that had been incomplete when I'd started reading (AND added more recent content)! π₯³ππ»π₯πΎ
So I started reading those books again. And while I was reading I noticed something - an old familiar feeling - that I felt actually really good and comfortable in my body, like, the way, way back when, I used to feel as a teenager and in my twenties.
This is markedly different to what I've felt lately and the past few years since I came out and encountered so much ongoing trauma and stress from immediate relatives, work and life and was too overwhelmed and "busy" to relax enough to do anything I loved, where I'd feel sort of foreign to myself and basically old and kind of almost... disembodied? Depersonalised? Depersonalised but more metaphorically and not physically ...maybe emotionally separated from myself, my body and my true feelings as through a veil?) which has been my feeling lately).
(Discovering and Accepting) Who I've Always Been, with Reading ... like an old Familiar Friend who Welcomes You Back and Accepts You
I actually felt, specifically, how I used to feel as a teen when I read books I loved. I also felt the same kind of carefree I felt at the end of 2017, a few months before I came out, when I was just on holiday reading over Christmas time while staying with my immediate relatives.
Basically, picking up that book I had started felt like no time had passed between the person who started reading it back then and the person I was now. I stopped feeling like an old person who missed out on life or like someone who desperately has to catch up because of the years the cult had stolen.
I felt "young" and comfortable - basically carefree and aligned with my body. I guess that's where my age-related dysphoria might just be a fear of detachment and missing out on all life has to happen and may relate to being raised with parentification and the cult.
I also realised that there was actually something the cult hadn't actually stolen from me in those years, someone I had always been despite all of that - a person who loves and has always loved and I see now will always love reading and books. That's who I've always been.
Back then I actually learned to think that what I had was "wrong" somehow. That I wasn't supposed to feel happy and comfortable for reading, for getting "lost" in a book.
That I was meant to be social. That there was something wrong with having a best friend who totally got and accepted me and who was happy for both of us to be immature kids while everyone else was trying to worry about their appearance and attract boys, or to pretty much ignore each other while reading a really good book, even when we were meant to be hanging out spending time together at each other's houses.
That best friend I mentioned reconnected with me again recently since years of "growing up" (or more like life experience, we're still the same people to each other) from both of our sides, and I now realise just what a rare and special person I met as a child, the kind of best friend who is once in a lifetime, and whom you are truly privileged if you can meet so young in your life and know throughout your life.
She is the kind of friend for whom words don't matter, because they get you, and both you and they accept that the other is not good with words, and that's perfectly okay, because you just get each other. The kind of friend who really is your soul mate.
She brings me comfort in how she accepted me as I am when we reconnected, just as she always has.
And now I'm getting a similar kind of comfort that I got from her reaching out, from starting to read books again.
My books.
The kind of books I always used to read, and feel comfortable reading, in my kind of comfortable, conversational, colloquial style of telling, which somehow just really resonates with me and makes me feel seen and included and somehow represented in my feelings, and is something I really do think I could write articles about and definitely something I want to delve deeper into.
What Happened, that Made me Stop Reading
So basically, how I'd stopped reading was trauma happened, as I mentioned above. Trauma and overload/overwhelm, particularly starting 2018. But that was just everything coming to a head near the end. It was also the cult throughout the first two+ decades of my life. Basically, high control environments and forced socialisation. And where it wasn't overtly forced or pressured, the well-instilled self-policing, guilt, shame and obligation I learned from the cult took over.
Reading Fiction and Fantasy "too much" also used to be seen as a Bad Thing. And so I tried to modify it, like with all "wrong" or "unhealthy" behaviours, in my learned self-policing from the cult (in general) and from society (as a neuro-atypical and female-raised person in conservative culture). I tried to "fix" it.
I realised last night that reading actually makes me HAPPY, truly happy.
As a kid and teen I felt guilty for this. It's true, reading in my first few years of school was encouraged, as something which would be good for my educational development, to be "ahead" of my reading age.
But as I became an older child and then a teen it started to be more and more frowned apon, something that was seen as an unbalancing force in my life. I was told reading was "taking [me] away from the 'real' world" - a concern that wouldn't have mattered if I'd been raised as male because I'd be further encouraged to pursue it as furthering my goal of becoming an author rather than it being seen as a worrying distraction from all the female socialisation I needed to have.
Specifically, this required socialisaton was in learning to be relational and do emotional labour for people and anticipate their emotions and one day become a wife and mother... yeah... all-girls high school was surprisingly rough in that way, It was weirdly traumatic to grow up in an environment where my entire grade were actually kind and teachers were on the look out for bullying and I was actually nurtured and supported.
But actually, looking back it's not that surprising. The bar was high for being able to anticipate the emotions of girls at my school, and accidentally misreading a situation and saying something intended to be friendly that was interpreted as unkind (goddamn my tough love upbringing confusing those boundaries!) had catastrophic consequences both in wrecking friendships and in gaining me way too much attention from my peers at my school.
So I guess it's not as weird as it sounds for something intended as wholesome support and building a nurturing environment to actually be traumatic for me... my autistic little brain just wanted to get out of the spotlight, take a break from the hyper-visibility and ongoing concern about my wellbeing in being "shy" (and probably extra weird-acting in my affect, as someone socialised by a cult and general abuse) so I could just read my books.
Dr K. talks a lot more about he "inappropriate affect" of cult survivors here by the way:
So all-girls high school focused on emotional intelligence and supporting one another did actually have its traumas from the most unexpected of places! That said I was incredibly thankful to not go to an all-boys high school, let alone a boarding school, and have to experience that terror of ongoing physical violence and not feeling safe or being able to sleep lest I be pranked by "harmless fun" which in those environments was anything but.
And weirdly, my relief at not having to go to a terrifying boys' boarding school and my ADHD hatred of watching agonizingly boring Saturday sports was a way that I tried to convince my female-raised self I definitely couldn't be a boy, through arguments in the form of "thank goodness I'm a girl or I'd have to [do X]".
The Lingering Learned Fears that kept (Re)Discovering Reading, and Other Things I Loved, at Bay
Something I've realised from the past 24 hours though is this: I'd learned to fear giving in to things I loved, lest they be taken away, and learned to fear things closest to my heart most of all and subconsciously wall off those passions, not let myself acknowledge that those things were truly important to me, and dismiss them as "silly" and "never going to lead anywhere".
This was perhaps a similar subconscious learned knee-jerk fear response or fear-conditioning to shut down all I really need to learn the name of this psychological phenomenon that causes what I'll call "trauma-blocks" - and likely also brain fog, and dams up the river of healing - I think it's no coincidence that in the past 24 hours while reading I've started gaining back some more memories of feelings and situations I used to have of just reading in the past, and am now really aware of how it makes me feel, and used to make me feel!
Finally I just want to note that I have always had a fear of getting addicted to anything. My mom had a very satanic panic type of attitude to a lot of things that could be "evil" and one of those fears I learned and built my own hyped up internal fear castle of was the fear of addiction - to ANYTHING.
There was always the fear in my mind of loving or enjoying anything too much and not being able to quit, perhaps unless it was one of those things objectively considered "healthy" by society, like exercise or learning or becoming a prodigy at a musical instrument, or perhaps reading encyclopaedia. Unfortunately I wasn't able to force my ADHD to be interested in things, possibly because I tended to associate school and education with punishment and manipulation rather than being truly fun.
This tends to happen in fundamentalist circles, possibly in evangelicalism at large, where you learn to fear fun and mistrust anything "educational" because you know there's hidden punishment in there somewhere, relaxing too much or enjoying anything tends to get punished, and you learn hypervigilance and to anticipate the disapproval of others and be ready to pivot away from something you love if it becomes seen as "sinful".
I guess this really affected my attachment style. I also know it contributed to what I would later refer to as "commitment phobia" because of my fear of loss, eventually making it hard to love anything, hence the really great sense of accomplishment I feel in being able to overcome that level of trauma, as well as the performative perfectionism, in order to actually commit to writing a daily blog, and to not get caught up in it being perfect, or in plaguing thoughts about how "worthwhile" following my passions, or even a simple interest, will be to myself or the world in the long run. I really am starting to heal!
Trauma Healing: What I Feel that is Different, from (Re)-Taking up Reading and Writing
So I think discovering and now doing the things I love might be greatly helping heal my trauma and my depression - reading and writing most of all.
I feel different. It's like I can feel the different neural pathways Dr K speaks about, because my brain isn't short-circuiting itself into the same defeatist thoughts it used to instantly go to whenever I tried to think of anything I could do that could lift me up.
I think I'm starting to get it.
Writing Helps Me Process (Think) And Find My Way
Writing is really freeing! It's not only a release of pent-up thoughts finally processed, and documented into some "complete" form, but it actually is properly uplifting when I have published a post or an article, as if I've finally accomplished something I always set out to do and perhaps knew I was meant to do! It actually makes me feel bouyant!
Writing is "work", but not draining (and still something I have to watch myself not to overdo) because unlike a lot of past work it's not trauma inducing or eroding, it's freeing!
Previously, I used to think work, any work, had to be like a manufacturing of something out of nothing or out of what limited resources I had to spare and it drained me. That was what led to my burnout - giving things I didn't really have to give, as if I were a beast of burden being overworked and eventually trying to work through injury, burning out and breaking from the strain.
But with writing what I feel it's not the manufacturing but a channeling of a natural outflow, like there is a spring of creativity in me that just needs to be directed the right way to being water to a village!
It's active exploration of what is already there in my head - my thoughts and experiences giving me pause, and processing them, kind of like digging; or ploughing, in farming metaphors, breaking new hard ground, actively processing what was buried, pulling up stumps and stones to plant seeds!
Reading Helps Me Relax (Feel), And Find Myself
Reading, similarly, is, well, really warm and comforting and familiar, and I'll get into the details of all of that in a moment and recount how I discovered it, but first I just want to get my theory on what is happening out of the way.
Reading is exploration, absorbing, something the mind is allowed to do, a receiving. I guess in farming metaphors it's planting the seeds and watering or watching the rain fall. It's less about work and more about the preparations of the ground (the mind) being willing to receive nourishment from the elements and rest now that it's been disrupted.
But neither, to me, is meant to be eroding who I actually am or taking away from it.
Rather, they're enhancing me.
The slow release and peaceful and comfortable belonging feeling of just reading... just like I used to feel when I was younger. Unrushed.
The realisation that I don't have to be a "go-getter" like so many adults wanted me to be as a child when I was so sensitive to the pressure to be someone people could live vicariously through.
The realisation that reading is a worthwhile life ambition, because there is so much one can experience through a book, and that it's ok for me to get my life experiences largely through books! The books I've always wanted to read on my reading list yet been afraid to approach for fear of "wasted time"!
The fact that I can actually live that life, aspire to have my own bookshelves of books, even though this was considered being a "pack rat", (because the things I kept didn't have meaning to other people and thus were considered junk, plus my parents' constant threatening that anything not packed away or that they thought we didn't use would be thrown away), the idea that I could aspire to one day have my own "library" for reading in.
It makes me start to really feel and really get that life has meaning.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe to my free newsletter or follow my RSS feed!