I couldn’t stop to go to bed. I’d be angry or irritable whenever interrupted. I’d hide from people. I was reclusive. My happiness depended more on it. I was rejecting my agency and let an author who didn’t know me dictate my emotions.
I was addicted to books. My books were prison my guards, my jailors. They dictated when I could sleep and eat. They put me in solitary confinement. I felt so alone. So I turned to my jailors even more. It made me feel almost completely empty inside. I was a stomach that no amount of food could fill.
My drug of choice one night was a novel titled, No Longer Strangers by Rachel Ann Nunes. My lamplight had been blazing for more than six hours. My eyelids were heavy, but I’d just rub them a little and keep reading. I’d stayed up until about five o’clock AM. The book wasn’t even enjoyable anymore but I just kept reading. At the time I didn’t think of it as an addiction. I mean people get addicted to drugs and food and alcohol and shopping. Who in their right mind would get addicted to books? Well, I did. I needed to read. I couldn’t stop easily.
I have no idea how it started or when exactly it ended, my addiction with books, with novels. Actually it wasn’t just any books. It was particularly romance novels, LDS romance novels. These are novels that you’d think would be filled with happiness and love and they pretty much are, but they are mostly about people with major sorrows overcoming them and finding true love in the end. And I mean the end. Reading about real people being depressed or really really sad is depressing! Well here I was chugging down story after story of some depressed person who found their happily ever after but it took what? A whole two hundred pages to get there! And when I finally got my high the book would be over and I’d need a new one. For this addiction were there withdrawals? If you consider needing another dose right after it to keep my mood up because it didn’t last long to begin with, then yeah, there are withdrawals. But if I didn’t have another book I could survive until one landed in front of my willing eyes.
I sometimes would skim the books I was thinking of reading so I’d know if it would fill my craving or not. I skimmed a book where the girl had a twin. Her twin died, she got into drugs and alcohol, had a baby, then the baby’s father accidentally killed the baby. She was depressed the whole book. Finally near the end she met up with some LDS missionaries who shared with her what they knew to be true of there being life after death and there being a Savior. She then converted but she was persecuted for being “bad” before she converted by another Latter-Day-Saint who was jealous of her. She’d fallen in love with one of the missionaries who shared the gospel with her and it was going to be almost the most depressing book of all time! Up until the last few pages it was still depressing, so of course I chose not to read it all the way through. Those kinds of books wouldn’t help me feel better at all.
There are a multitude of reasons for a person to become addicted to something but the main reason would be that that something is addicting. It made the person feel, and normally that feeling is a good feeling or in other words a high. So according to my own definition you could assume that the books I read were making me high or giving me a good feeling. The only problem with this conclusion is that they did but only until I compared the happiness the characters were feeling to myself and became even more depressed because fake people had real relationships with people. Relationships with people are what make life interesting, enjoyable and not enjoyable, easier and harder, but especially interesting. That is what is unique about book addictions compared to other addictions. Shoes can’t smile or laugh or cry. A cigarette isn’t going to yell at you. And no drink is going to fall in love. When you read a book you can imagine the people in them. You can imagine them having emotions and you relate. Because I spent all my time reading about fake people and substantially less time with real people I had few strong relationships with actual people. And all I could talk to people about were the books I’d read because that is all I’d been doing. And that is just sad.
Addictions steal your agency. You forfeited the ability to choose for yourself. You became weak, and that addiction now rules your life. It is your king. The only way to get rid of it is to choose, or cause, anarchy. Replace your addiction with things in your life that you actually want.
I chose one day to just stop, to stop reading books. And now I’m in rehabilitation. But I am starting to read books again, in moderation.
