oh, how i luv my abcs
behold, as I now make desert fish relevant to my life in increasingly self-aggrandising ways!
My headers are getting increasingly nonsensical and deranged… This post is a follow-up to my previous essay, how female illiteracy became a real problem for me, personally. It’s about how I ultimately came back to reading after giving it up for several years and how I’m choosing to look at it now that I’m not consumed by the delusion that reading makes people better humans.
One winter, my friends and I embarked on a road trip through Southwest America. It was strange and terrifying and beautiful in the way that only America can be, cutting a path through Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and California. We would start our mornings driving across perfectly smooth landscapes under the blistering sun, and in the blink of an eye, spend sunset watching snowflakes fall through the canyon formations that were so deep, you could imagine throwing a penny in to watch it fall for years and years without ever reaching the bottom. It made me dizzy to think about. Droplets of water had carved out these trenches over the course of millennia, just for us to turn our backs and walk away because we were cold. The next day, we woke up to the sight of a factory spewing dark smoke across the horizon, blending into the gray of the pre-dawn sky. All around us stretched miles of red, red, rock.
A part of this trip took us through salt flats of Death Valley, California. 86 meters below sea level, the Badwater Basin was hemmed in by a low ring of rocky hills. Occasional periods of tectonic movement, rainfall, and rapid evaporation had come together to form a white crust of mineral salts across the expanse of land that seemed to stretch for miles around us with no end. I looked out at the remnants of lakes long-gone and wondered at the complete lack of anything but salt, salt, all around us, not a sign of life. We stood and shivered like the sun wasn’t real. Maybe we weren’t, either.
The years during which I did not read felt as arid and bleak as these salt flats. My brain was full of these abscesses that had been carved out by a corrosive stream of guilt and obligation. My relationship with reading and writing was so warped that I felt anxiety every time I picked up a book. I could literally feel my heart speed up from the stress of what literature represented in my life, and how I had failed at everything it was supposed to carry me toward. I had the skills to read and write, but could not do either out of a sense of sheer inertia. I mustered some wherewithal here and there to attempt reading – made it through a couple of books a year but nothing substantial or meaningful. I retained nothing.
Emotions removed themselves from my life and I found something numbing to do instead. Swathes of my personality were replaced by an endless habit of moving my thumb up and down a screen. I could no longer think beyond the claustrophobia of my immediate conditions. Time compressed itself into blocks: When I was watching something on a screen, and when I wasn’t. I couldn’t sleep if I didn’t have a sitcom playing on my laptop every single night. I once almost crashed my car because I felt so freaked out that my Bluetooth had disconnected itself, leaving me in silence for two whole minutes.
I visualised myself laying out across the flat planes of Death Valley. What if a freak accident had happened during our visit? One that took the top of my skull off. I would lie there, cranium being drained of the liquid that held my brain in suspension. My brain, slowly losing moisture, being desiccated down to its most vital elements. What would be left? After the scavengers and the wind and the sun. A smattering of crystallised minerals from the fluids that had once formed the gray matter of my brain.
Then, like a trickle of rain: A random weekday in 2023. Me, unemployed. Mental health, ill. Bank balance, low. Ateez, blasting my eardrums to smithereens. It is 4.32am and I have just emerged from a haze of mainlining N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy in three days. For those who may not know, this series is the one where where are three gods who are siblings and also are polyamorous somehow who function as personifications of the ego, id, and the self. It’s much more complex than I have just made it sound, and you’ll have to take my word that it absolutely destroyed me. I can’t even remember why I picked it up, but I think it had been mentioned in passing by someone at a party. There is truly nothing I hate more than being left out of a conversation, so I ended up reading The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms because I wanted to be in on the conversation the next time it came up. Suddenly I had finished it, and devoured the other two books in the series, as well.
I put the epub on my iPad down (god, what a profoundly unromantic sentence). Eyes swimming from the harsh light of the digital screen. Distantly feel that I am angry. I am seething in a way that I have not since I was seventeen, and it occurs to me that it is because I have been made to feel something. What I have just read has caused a twinging in my chest, right behind my sternum. It is a physical sensation that I thought was long-dead, gone like the deleted fanfictions of my youth from a sanitised Tumblr. It had been years since my emotions had taken up residence anywhere that wasn’t my prefrontal cortex.
I was ill-prepared, overcome by the stupidity of it all. I hated the fact that I had let an unsolicited emotion in. Years of perceiving only carefully curated videos on my social media had lulled me into a state of false invincibility. I spent so long on those books that I could have spent doing anything else. Maybe a creating a viral TikTok sound or something. Instead, I had spent it ingesting something that would bring me no money or tangible outcome. I found it appalling to have been vulnerable in this way, just me and some silly little words with no one between us to mediate the interaction. If the author is dead, then who is making me cry? Just myself?
What a stupid thing to cry over events unreal, characters merely imagined. Visions of these imagined people swam through my head. A boy runs past, followed by a string of floating orbs. A sun cuts off his hand and does nothing as he bleeds onto the floor. Oh god, to have cried over these little imaginations. And to go so far as to generate physical sensations in my body – how cringe. A cosmic embarrassment to care so much. I felt so disgusted at myself for enjoying it. It was perverse, somehow. I had inhabited the idea of reading as punishment for so long that I no longer knew what to do with myself when I loved it.
How hard it was for me to rediscover this feeling! Like the pupfish of the Death Valley, I seemed to have discovered some hidden reserve of water amidst a vast expanse of desert when I was absolutely dying of thirst. You have never heard of the pupfish or Devil’s Hole, but they are an endangered species of tiny fish that live in a very specific water-filled cave in Death Valley National Park. Pupfish have evolved to survive and thrive in very low-oxygen saltwater at a temperature of 90 Fahrenheit, conditions that would have killed a small Victorian fry and most other fish in the world.
There is something romantic about the idea that in one of the world’s driest locations, there exists a cave filled with water that goes so deep, humans haven’t found the bottom. In this geological fault named after Satan, we find that something has survived, after all. It was not all gone. Some fish had discovered a miracle and made a home there. I too, had found a miracle in the wasteland of my mind and was eager to submerge myself in it.
Together with this relief was the realisation that if I did not act, the reserves might run out and disappear forever. In the 1960s, someone installed a well on the border of Death Valley National Park and nearly drained the pupfish’s home dry. They might have all died, if not for the immediate action of nerds everywhere to save this tiny species that consisted of less than a hundred specimens. Drastic action was needed to save them, a long and drawn out fight with local communities about what water sources could be used and what couldn’t.
If we think about it, saving endangered species is one of the worst decisions we could possibly make under capitalism. The benefits are few and the animals can be ugly. I hate pandas. I think I can say this as a Chinese person. I think pandas are gross and slow and a tool for propaganda. I think more money is put into panda conservation than the welfare of children in many small countries. I think we should just leave the pandas be in the wild and not do all that nonsense of parading them around the world. But I also think that the moment we start to play this game of cost-benefit analysis is the one where we resign ourselves to complete annihilation of our own species under capitalism. If we habituate ourselves to the idea that certain species should be allowed to die just because it’s more economically sensible, it’s not such a stretch before we start thinking that certain humans, who have famously been considered species of indigenous fauna by colonisers, should be allowed to die for an economic benefit.
I know that it’s insane to compare the conservation of endangered species with my little reading vibes, but the truth is that I am a narcissist with delusions of grandeur and will do so anyway. It occurred to me that if I let my love for reading die, then capitalism would have completely cannibalised me. We often feel to assign reading with some kind capitalist value (that it creates better workers, or generates revenue, or whatever), but Lyta Gold points out that once we assign anything a value under capitalism, it instantly becomes negotiable and thus erasable. It becomes replaceable with language learning models that artificially simulate the experience of not being lonely. The value of my love for reading is entirely absurd and therefore completely human. I can say that now without wanting to gouge my own eyes out with my car keys.
At the time of my watershed moment, I was going through a miserable miserable very not fun time of being unemployed and needed to escape from the gross realities of my waking hours. Even when I found a job later, this frustration did not go away. As my friend’s mother puts it, “Employed also complain, not employed also complain…” And it is true! I am miserable under capitalism either way! I had such a deep and persistent hatred of my normal life where everything was sticky with it.
I was overcome with a crazed desperation to save my ability to read. What could I do? In the Death Valley of my mind, could my metaphorical corpse even twitch? It occurred to me that I needed a watershed – a deluge, an excessive wash of rain that could reinvigorate everything that had leached out in the absence of water. Maybe it would bring life back to my mind. I told myself that for a year I would care about reading. I would care about it so much that it disgusted me, and I would make it everyone else’s problem, too. If I could care about this, then I could care about something that wasn’t capitalism.
Why do you want to read, beyond the social value of being perceived as a reader?
It is not anti-capitalist praxis to consume a book. No action is in and of itself activism. I consider it to be a thought terminating cliché to say that reading is inherently a moral good. I have already written a long and nonsensical essay about all of that, so I shan’t repeat it here. What I will say is that I identified a turning point in my life where reading became monotonous, grating baseline, instead of being an experience that I was consciously choosing to do. It was at this point that I started reading for cruelty rather than consideration, for punishment rather than pleasure. The assumption that reading could facilitate my own moral ascension within capitalism was something that reduced me to its narrow logic of constant guilt and overwhelm. Every second that I wasn’t reading was wasted, but every second that I read could have been time spent doing something else.
We are all Buridan’s ass, stuck between the capitalist incentive to consume for long-term social mobility and the other capitalist incentive to consume for the feeling of little serotonin synapses firing in our brains. To assume that reading is inherently good is a thought terminating cliché because it removes the crucial individuality of the enterprise. Reading is precious precisely because it lives purely within the individual. There is no other activity in this world as personal as reading, where everything takes place in your own head with no one to share it except yourself.
The truth is that I love it. The whole truth of it is that I love reading so much I could die. I have loved it for as long as I have had a memory. For a long time I tried to justify this love in a way that served some larger social good, because I thought it was hedonistic to experience pleasure on its own, but I have come to understand that I love it for the simple, selfish fact that I love beauty, and words are the way I understand beauty the most. I love it because it breaks me apart and puts me back together. I am obsessed with, consumed by, the silly experience of self-delusion.
The most horrific thing about love is that it can go away. I often think of it as a muscle that you must train through practice – we learn to love in the choosing of it, in the making of these strange, economically unfeasible intentions grow it for no reason other than our own desire to love. We keep thinking that love beyond capitalism will find us as long as we wait patiently for it to arrive but it has occurred to me that capitalism will never allow that to happen. Everything that comes into your lap will have been placed there by a marketing algorithm if you keep waiting. I find that it is worth thinking about it like this: If we do not strengthen our capacity for love within ourselves, how will we do the difficult work of loving other people? You have it within you to care about more than capitalism. You have the ability to care about anything at all.
Reading books is hardly the most difficult thing one can do to resist capitalism. However, it was something that I chose to do, even when it was inconvenient and painful and laborious in very minor ways that affected nobody except myself. In the year that I made myself read, I found that it was possible to love something even when I was tired of it. I would sit and read until I was sick of it and remember why I loved it and start the cycle all over again. It was possible for me to turn away from my phone and repopulate those areas of my brain that had been eroded by the slow drip of Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithm. In the year that I came back to reading, I found that I could sleep again without needing the sound of canned sitcom laughter to calm my anxious mind.
When I read, I am in communion with myself and nobody else, not even the author, who I have murdered in gory fantasies of literary analysis. I find my love for it when I am balancing my iPad pages as I stand on the train. It comes to me in the smell of a used book that someone has written something tender and loving in. I remind myself of loving it when I fold a corner of the page down and think about who I must share a lovely quote with. I love it for all these reasons that will be none of yours, nor should they be. I love it in spite of everything the world had done to extricate it from my open brain lying out in a bloody spatter on the brilliant white crust of minerals that covered the ground.
Somewhere in a cave in a desert in America, there are little fish swimming. I love them as much as I have chosen to love reading, in this cringey, vaguely pathetic, sort of way. I hope you have something that you love, too.
Is it too cringey to say that I’m planning to do a series of posts on the practical side of how to read? Like the tips and tricks of actually reprogramming your brain to develop focus and read more (if that is something you want to do).
Please subscribe if that’s something that interests you! I promise not every essay will be me spiraling over my lack of a personality.
Let me know if there’s something specifically that you might like me to write about! Someone has asked me to talk a little about reading different genres and the merits of doing so. I have flowcharts… Matrixes… Details about how to navigate reading with compromised executive functioning… Idk… Please… Write to me…