My relationship with reading is a bit like the history of western civilization; a bright and bustling early period, followed by a dark age, which preceded a much-needed renaissance. My early years, from first to fifth grade, were filled with comic books, graphic novels, fantasy, and adventure. I devoured books at a breakneck pace, filling my mind with stories of noble heroes and exotic worlds. When reading Eragon, I fantasized about becoming a master dragon-rider, when reading Percy Jackson, I was a quarrelsome demigod, and when reading My Side of the Mountain, I was a runaway falconer. 

Around sixth grade, my path began to diverge. Whereas previously, I had hung out with the quirky group, I now wanted to be with the ‘cool kids’. The advent of acne and the diffidence it produced made me desperate to belong in some other way, and so I rigidly adhered to the social norms. I became funnier, more social, and louder, but also meaner, less studious, and inauthentic. It was a front. And my reading ceased. I don’t remember reading a single book, outside of school requirements, for three years. The cause, unsurprisingly, was my new ownership of a laptop. What initially was a shiny piece of technology, supposed to free me from the labor of handwriting, became a drug that chained me to a screen. The greatest offender was youtube, which sucked in hours and hours and day and days. Incredibly, I convinced myself that I was learning the whole time, given that I was watching videos about geography, engineering, and whatever else caught my fancy. I didn’t see that my attention was fracturing or that my learning was slowing, or that I was missing out on countless opportunities.

My habits remained unchanged even as I saw my grades fall, and even as my mother despaired about all the time I was spending online. Eventually, I abandoned the pretense of online learning, and tacitly accepted that I went on screens for the short-term pleasure of it. But at the end of eighth grade, seeing how much I had stalled, I knew something had to change.

I began an effort to change my habits that summer. As part of that change, I picked up a book simply for the sake of pleasure. Although the change since then has been sporadic, the spikes and dips even out to a long-term trend of improvement. My greatest triumph has been picking up my reading habit once again. I’ve rediscovered the joy of libraries, of getting lost in a book for hours, and of being transported into another world. Somehow, closing a book after three hours is infinitely more satisfying than awakening from a youtube stupor of an equivalent length. Now, I want to fill every crevice of time with reading. A list of at least a hundred books dominates my notes app, and more are added every week. 

Beyond the simple pleasure of it, I’ve noticed other tangible benefits from my new habit. My attention is less scattered than before, allowing me to focus for more than a single hour at a time. I can read complicated school texts with relative ease. And I can have serious discussions with people much smarter than I am, simply because I have begun to read and take notes in more non-fiction books. And I have significantly improved my homework and school habits, thanks to a plethora of self-help books. 

For me, however, the greatest benefit of reading isn’t something that can be neatly explained in a sentence. Reading fills an ambiguous void within. It satisfies my desire to know myself, the world, and all the other worlds that exist nowhere but our imaginations.