I want to tell a story about a love lost and found again. In 2017, I moved across the country, lost my father to heart disease, had a miscarriage and then a complicated pregnancy that ended in another miscarriage. During this time of sorrow and doubt, I was, as I write in my book “Prayer in the Night,” “a priest who could not pray.” But there was something else I loved that suddenly seemed impossible: I was also a reader who could not read.
Reading had always been a sturdy part of my life. My husband and I give each other a stack of books each Christmas. In our home, you’d find books everywhere, stuffed onto shelves, piled in corners, cast off on couches. I am a slow reader — I will sadly never be one who could write about the 150 books I read this year. But I savor words. If I come across a luminous sentence, I read it again and again, turning it over in my mind, chewing on each syllable. I keep a pile of books next to my bed as a monument to all the quiet moments of reading ahead — something to look forward to.
So in 2017, when I already felt weighed down by grief, the loss of reading was a particularly sad defeat. I could still go through the motions. I could open a book and stare at its pages. But I couldn’t concentrate. My eyes floated on the page like a castaway adrift. I couldn’t sit still. Every few minutes, I’d pop out of my chair and get busy with something else. I’d return to the page unable to remember what I had just read.
What was worse was that I didn’t care about what I was reading. It all felt stupid and pointless. Sitting with a book requires some level of compassion and energy. A reader sits with the thoughts, stories, insights or opinions of another. She opens herself empathetically to the world of another human being. And I didn’t feel I had the requisite compassion or energy to do so.
So I couldn’t read. It was as if I had woken up one day with a different color of eyes or hair. What had happened?
I see now that my reading difficulty wasn’t caused by only one thing. It certainly had something to do with social media consumption. President Donald Trump was newly inaugurated, and I was doomscrolling with the devotion of an Olympian in training.
“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” wrote Nicholas Carr in his vital 2010 book, “The Shallows.” “Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
But it was more than just the internet that was rewiring my brain.
Trying to suss out what was happening, I asked friends about my experience. My friend Marcia is one of the most devoted readers I know. She recommends a book to me almost every time we talk. She told me that when her husband died of cancer, she found herself unable to read for almost a year. She said that this amplified her grief: she had lost not only her spouse and closest companion but her favorite activity as well. Part of her mourning process was the anxiety of wondering: “Will it always be this way? Will I never be able to read again?”
Another friend of mine, a professor who fits the part — down to his round rim glasses and tweed blazers — told me that during his doctoral program, when he lost a relationship and spiraled into a deep depression, reading became impossible. He worried he would have to drop out of his program.
Similarly, in 2017, I wondered if I could continue being a writer. Reading is a big part of the gig. Around three months after my dad died, someone interviewing me for a podcast asked what I was reading. I sheepishly admitted, “I’m not, really.” It was like a doctor mentioning that they don’t wash their hands.
No one told me that grief affects reading. No one told me that this was common. But apparently it is.
I mentioned this experience to my therapist recently and she told me that some find comfort in reading. But for others, in times of intense grief or stress, our brains decide to spend their energy elsewhere. This was the illiterate impulse of my poor, overtaxed limbic system.
She said it was analogous to her experience after a recent surgery. She assumed that during her recovery, laid up all day, she’d get a ton of reading done. But she read nothing at all: “I was in so much pain, I just didn’t give a crap about what was in the books.” She said her body had to focus all that energy on healing. It is the same, in seasons of grief, when it comes to our heart and souls.
I wish I’d known. As a pastor, I have seen that when someone suffers a loss, her community often offers books to help. And books on grief are indeed incredibly helpful. I’ve been helped by C.S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed,” Jerry Sittser’s “A Grace Disguised” and many others. I even wrote a book about grief. But, for many of us, the best time to read books about suffering or grief is not when we are actually in deepest mourning. We need these books before we hit seasons of sorrow or well after a time of suffocating sadness, when we are starting to learn to breathe again.
Part of why I wish this experience was more widely discussed is that all the friends I talked to who have faced this said that they’d worried that their love of reading had come to a permanent end. But all of us eventually found our way back to the page. For me, reading resumed slowly and haltingly. And, strangely, it followed a similar trajectory as learning to read the first time. I re-started by listening to someone else read. My husband read the Lord of the Rings trilogy aloud to me each night. Then, on my own, I read young adult books I had once loved: “Anne of Green Gables,” then the Narnia series, then “A Wrinkle in Time.” Then slowly I began to read books written for adults again. Finally, over a year after the deepest season of grief, I was back to reading almost every evening and could once again research topics I was writing on.
I also bring this up because a similar loss of reading happened for me again, though with much less severity, when Covid hit in March 2020. During those early days of lockdown, I felt like all around me people were rediscovering a love of reading. Fiction sales were up. Magazines were offering lists of books to read while social distancing. And I sat, with a newborn and two suddenly online-schooled children decidedly not reading (unless reading Elephant and Piggie books to my first grader counts). I was less worried about it this time because I’d experienced this before and knew it was common and would pass. It didn’t carry the same sense of shame or fear that it had before.
I imagine I’m not the only one who found it harder to concentrate on a page during the past two years of Covid. As we slowly return to some semblance of normalcy, part of my “recovery” has been taking up deep reading again with a newfound joy and fervor. I soaked in Clint Smith’s “How the Word is Passed” and Alan Jacobs’s “How to Think.” I’m now reading Natasha Trethewey’s “Memorial Drive” and Makoto Fujimura’s “Art and Faith.” I am feasting after a fast, drinking words down deeply after a time of drought. After these blank years of stress and sorrow, page after page is just waiting to be savored.
Have feedback? Send a note to [email protected].
Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and author of “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.”
