Autism, Reader Guilt and Being a ‘Book Person’

Have you ever had that feeling when you feel like you should be reading, and you really do want to read, but the pressure to read means that picking up a book feels impossible, so you don’t read and you feel guilty for not reading, and that guilt makes it even harder to read and so on…

Just me?

I frequently come across readers online who talk about how they should be reading but get distracted by other things, or how book buying and book reading are two very different hobbies and should not be mistaken as the same. I’m not sure I’ve seen someone quite describe the obsessive guilty feeling where you feel almost obliged to pick up a book and find yourself just staring at your TBR pile, desperately willing yourself to just reach across and open one, but maybe that’s just a me problem.

As a child I would read constantly. My mum worked at my primary school and I would sit in the classroom and read as she prepped lessons for the next day. When it was time to go she would have to lead me by the shoulder out of the building and to the car, and then from the car into the house, all because I would refuse to look up from the book I was totally absorbed in.

Now I’m a librarian and work with books on a daily basis, creating catalogue records for a major academic library, and ironically I read less than ever. Some of it is time, some of it is energy, but mostly it just doesn’t make sense. It’s different from a Reading Slump, because in a Slump nothing appeals, whereas with Reader’s Guilt I’m genuinely excited to read a wide variety of books and then I just…don’t.

I think that having based so much of my identity around being a Book Person has quite a lot to do with it. I was an Avid Reader as a child, often praised for reading above my age and how fast I could get through a tome. Then I was a teenager and English was my subject. I joined book clubs, I got ahead on the reading for the year, I could hold my own in a debate with a teacher, and my essays were often passed around the class as good examples (which didn’t feel like a good thing at the time – it was largely embarrassing). I was going to study English at university until I decided that higher education wasn’t for me, and then I got an apprenticeship at a highly respected library which turned into a full time job. I started this Book Blog. All my life I have been a Book Person.

Don’t get me wrong, I still adore books and reading. There’s no feeling quite like giving yourself over totally to a story, getting lost in a new world and becoming the characters. When I’m fully ‘in’ a book it will absorb me fully until it’s all I can think about. I’ll read on my breaks and my lunches and on the bus. It just happens less and less nowadays.

I often find myself carrying a book around everywhere I go simply because that’s what I’ve always done and knowing that it’s just taking up space in my bag. It’s not going to get opened. Sometimes I even catch myself holding the book and feeling smug: ‘Look, I’m a reader. Aren’t I such a bookworm? Isn’t that special?‘ I don’t like that part of myself, especially because at no point does she actually open the book and read the damn thing.

I don’t know if the answer is to step away from books for a while. I don’t want to do that. I think I would miss that part of my identity too much. Books have always been a grounding point for myself, back from when I was a wide-eyed child devouring Harry Potter for the first time to when I was an acutely anxious teenager hiding behind a Margaret Atwood to avoid having to talk to people.

This year I found out that I’m autistic. It came as somewhat of a surprise, but the more I thought about it the more it makes sense. It certainly explains why I centred myself in fictional worlds so much. I know that a lot of people with ASD struggle to connect with fiction, but to me books make far more sense than reality. Plots progress in a logical way rather than just a series of seemingly random events. Characters have clear motivations and characteristics and everything they do and say are grounded in this logic. Everything has a reason, and no-one is ever just randomly in a bad mood or does something out of character. I didn’t realise that I was doing it, but I think I was using books to try and learn about how people work with a formula of ‘X feels Y because Z happened’; if I could gather enough data on what causes various emotions then I could apply that to the real world. It’s not perfect – people frequently confuse me – but I’ve realised now that that was why fiction was so important to me. And somewhere along the way I absorbed this into my personality so much that I became a Book Person.

I think that’s why the idea of just disassociating myself from books seems so painful for me. I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t have a novel at my side. I’m worried that if I separated from that bit of my identity then I would never pick up another book again and I would have lost a fundamental part of me, and that’s too agonizing to consider.

Perhaps this isn’t a struggle that other people can relate to. Maybe it’s just my particular combination of ASD and ADHD causing me a problem that no-one else has ever dealt with. But somehow I see those memes about not reading and think that maybe I’m not alone.

So what’s the solution? For some people stepping away for a bit would be enough. After all, if you’re forcing yourself and not enjoying it then what’s the point? For others a change of genre works. We get so stuck in our comfortable reading ruts that we don’t notice ourselves getting bored. For others, like myself? Honestly, I don’t know. I’d hoped that by this point in writing I’d have come up with some kind of solution, or at the very least something profound to say, but all I know is that I need to re-evaluate my relationship with books. I need to work out if I want to recapture the old connection that I had or if I need to forge something new, something less all consuming and more grounded in the real world. Either way, I don’t think I’m ever going to stop being a Book Person. Even if that just involves writing thinkpieces about it instead of actually reading.