Reading is like breathing.

I love reading. My mother taught me to read before I even started school. It was magic to me. I love to listen to other people, especially my favorite authors, wax poetic about the activity/skill. It brings tears to my eyes, wrenches my heart and evokes an indescribable joy at the same time. 

    As soon as I COULD, I just read EVERYTHING available - cereal boxes, product packages, manuals, magazines and newspapers, literally ANYTHING with print on it. For the most part, I can only read in English, but my Spanish literacy is serviceable, too. I honestly believe that the written word is the MOST IMPORTANT HUMAN INVENTION OF ALL TIME. It really saddens me how poorly it is esteemed at this time. People cannot even be bothered to read a tiny "tweet" in its entirety. It is amazing how abundance confers disregard.

    My feelings on reading are NOT some type of elitist thing, either. In my society of the U.S.A. from 1971 to now, the skill is handed out to EVERYONE. It has not been a skill denied anyone, for the most part, in my lifetime. There have been public education facilities and libraries available to everyone my entire life. Long before the internet and electronic screens, books, newspapers and magazines were widely distributed EVERYWHERE in this country. In my opinion too many people ignored those and now ignore more than half of the words in the "tweets" regardless of the brevity of the form itself.

    I do not understand how anyone can live without it. It is like breathing to me. Books have truly been my most trusted and dependable friends, no offense to the living, but books stay the same. They always say the same things. They don't change their minds. The story never changes. ;-) I have always been a very engaged reader, aware of my habit and ability to turn those words into images, sounds almost as if watching a video. I feel as if I could always do this, even though I know that logically it is an acquired and practiced skill. Of course this also has to be based in one's own experience of a descriptive passage. Does a boulder look the same in my head as it does in yours? <shrug> Perhaps not.

    When my head exploded, the thing that horrified me most was that I couldn't read. It was maddening. It was the first thing I HAD TO FIX. At some point, I realized that it was a problem with both vision and short-term memory. I still have to this day, a bit of a hard time with my eyes following the line. I still have a hard time reading linear charts of any kind. The other part was short-term or "working" memory. I forgot the beginning of the sentence before I got to the end. Once I realized these two issues. I devised a system.

    For the visual problem I just cut myself a slip of colored paper and moved it line by line as I read. This helped with BOTH issues. I was able to keep my place easily. I then realized that if I forgot something, it was easier to go back and find where I last remembered. The paper boundary also kept my eyes ON the correct line. I read like this for some time before the Nook and Kindle were "a thing." Once I got one of those, well, all bets were off, because I could just highlight as I read. 

    It took time, and I was forced to use audio books for a bit, but eventually I was able to read pretty much as well as I could before the injury. I am long back to my regular "read all the things" habit with no more frustration than ever before.