I just realized this probably-obvious thing, but: you consume what is made available to you.
If books are a little harder to get or trust, then the ones on your TBR become heavier with hopeful expectations and also dread. If it's easier to put a show on in the background and call it productive, or a podcast while you cook because the audiobooks have been a little hard to find and then are on hold, well, then you're not reading. Slowly you lose the habit. Then suddenly, you sit down to read and it feels like a waste of time.
The horror! You've always been a reader. You're a writer for goodness' sake! But you're just in the story and doing nothing else, not exercising, not cooking, not learning or studying or drawing, not anything. You're just reading. And it feels so wrong. And it feels more wrong that it feels wrong at all!
You panic. You've lost that focus skill. The one that blocks out the world and falls into the story.
It's a slump. It's a reader slump. So you reread your favorites and you're fine. Okay... So what then?
You consume what is available... So you hide social media apps and unsubscribe from streaming apps and scroll through synapses to refill your TBR when it hits you: you've over-consumed. You're bored and not trusting authors. You're reading like a know-it-all instead of falling into the story. So you start to backtrack to find the bitch who hurt you, and it turns out: it's all of them. But mostly it's you. You hurt yourself and scared yourself, and now you expect disappointment. You've created a self-fulfilled prophecy.
The reader's responsibility is to try. I think I just started looking for tropes and stopped trying to be entertained. I was so focused on analysing or looking for something new.
Time to start over again, just reading. Just making time to only read, no second-screen, no background noise, no excuses about productivity, just only reading. It's stupid that it's scary.
