I learned to read at a very young age. My parents read with me every night until I started school(and then I guess they were too tired?). After that, they sometimes listened to me read, but it happened less and less until my father passed away when I was about 7, and then we were never read to at home again. My brother was 5.
When my father died, I started to turn to reading and writing as escapes from my grief and any other problems I had. I had absolutely no sense of self-regulation, so I read books or wrote stories during just about every minute of every day. I got no sleep because I stayed awake reading books in my closet. During class, I would be hiding a book or journal under my desk, and if I was caught and not allowed to read, I still often didn't do school work- just daydreamed about the book I was trying to finish, or wrote stories along the margins of worksheets. I went through about one-two books a day, and started about 10 different "novels" just during my 7th grade year. I reached 100 pages of one of them and I remember feeling very good about it. I still have it somewhere, and it's always been a dream of mine to re-imagine and complete it.
It may sound like I had some crazy addiction to reading itself, but I'm not really sure that's the case. I have(and had) ADHD, and people with ADHD tend to have this thing called "hyper focus" where they feel the need to focus on ONE very important thing that is stimulating the brain very well at that moment, and cannot transfer to other activities. Over the years, that for me has also presented as, aside from my love of reading, a month-long obsession with a Red-Flyer Wagon in the garage that I felt I could restore, a sudden intense determination to be an Etsy seller of crochet blankets which lasted about two weeks, and plans to build an indoor hammock stand out of PVC pipe, for which I bought quite a bit of material. Becoming a teacher is one of the few things I have been able to retain lasting, intense interest in for more than a few months(it's been several years).
In the case of my childhood "book problem," however, it didn't help that reading and writing were just my favorite things to do, and I was proud of that. I fully believed I would become a writer someday, and so I didn't feel that math or science were all that important to me as subjects, just as grades I needed to make. Not only that, but other kids could not sit down with a book and get lost[stuck] in it the way I could(except a few other friends, who also happened to have ADHD). My mother would often remark that I must have read more books in one year than she had read in her entire life, and it always made me so proud, because I felt like I could really accomplish things just through reading and writing beautiful stories.
In about grade 9, I started to feel more and more anxiety about schoolwork, and was reading less and less for pleasure. By the time I reached my senior year of High School, I had stopped reading for fun and rarely wrote anything other than fanfiction. In my mind it was because high school had drained my creativity with the heavier work requirements, especially requirements to read assigned text. If I had an assigned text to read, I felt extremely guilty even looking at anything else. Not only that, but I could never seem to get through assigned text on my own- I had to have someone read it to me, or read someone's already-annotated version, or wait for my teacher to read it aloud in class and hope to god we weren't going to have a pop quiz.
I became very ashamed of myself, especially the fact that I seemed so much less creative- I felt like my entire identity had been stripped from me. Between 6th and 8th grade, I couldn't not write stories. They would just push into my mind, and I couldn't think about anything else, so I had to write them down to make room for other thoughts(and because I liked to see where the stories would go). I can still write now, but it takes so much more effort and imagination, and rarely can I spawn into existence the kinds of fairytales I enjoy writing. A few months ago my husband(then-boyfriend) tried to convince me to create a Dungeons and Dragons character so that I could play with him, and I had such an almighty panic attack over it, simply because I could develop absolutely nothing I liked(I could always design something random, but I truly wanted to design something creative that I really wanted to play).
Through college, I rarely read for pleasure. I went into a deep depression in my second year which lasted through my fourth year, and had to visit a psychiatrist and a therapist for it. Occasionally I would read things I enjoyed- short stories online, maybe fanfiction- and although it made me feel much better, I tended to get very glued in and could not usurp myself from the activity(much like in my childhood, only now I felt that I truly had to be able to regulate my time). I stopped trying to read for pleasure because if I did so I would not be able to do schoolwork, which is something I need to survive.
Luckily, much of graduate-level coursework is finding your own articles(rather than being assigned to them) and so I have been able to find things that grab my attention and read through them, rather than staring in tears at the same paragraph for hours. Being able to read academic text has also helped me in what little assigned reading I have had to do, and so I have noticed that for the first time I am reading things that are not fantasy books and I'm doing quite well. I even seek out articles on my own and do my own research without being prompted over topics I am interested in.
I still can't seem to get back into my fiction books, and when I have tried I've been unable to read anything other than YA Fiction, but I'm planning to go back into therapy with being able to read for pleasure as one of my goals. I'm reluctant to jump into it without some sort of guidance(or at least some kind of plan) due to my past with books, but I know it's good for me and I believe it will help rebuild a side of my creativity which I have often feared is forever broken.
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