So I work at a library, and sometimes if the day is slow, which is most days, I’ll check out an ebook to read at my computer while I’m on desk duty. The other day, I noticed that Shelby Mahurin’s Serpent & Dove had expired. Which was weird, because I’d never finished it—in fact, I think I only got about a third of the way through it.
I don’t just not finish books. I can think of only two instances in my entire life where I deliberately chose to not finish a book (maybe I should talk about those sometime, because yikes they were bad). If I get too busy for a book I’m in the middle of, I might set it aside, assuring myself that I’ll get around to it one day. But I don’t just not finish books.
But you know what else I don’t do? Pick up those half-read books again. I mean, sometimes I do. If I really am just way too busy for a novel but I was genuinely enjoying it, then yeah, I’ll probably pick it up again. Reading is pretty high on my priority list, though; it’s rare that I truly can’t make the time for it. But if what I’m reading isn’t holding my interest, I don’t like to intentionally put it away for good—it feels like admitting defeat, somehow. So I put it back on my to-read list and tell myself I’ll read it someday.
The length of my to-read list is excessive, to put it mildly.
Clearly, I really struggle with an all-or-nothing mentality. If it were only applied to the books on my shelf, I might accept it as an odd personality quirk, but unfortunately it seems to permeate pretty much every area of my life. Lately I’ve been especially aware of it invading my ability to enjoy hobbies. Yes, hobbies—those things people do purely for fun. If I put aside a cross stitch project I’d been working at diligently, simply because I’m not in the mood for cross stitching, then I probably won’t ever pick it back up. When the cross stitching mood strikes again, I’ll look at that old project and be so overwhelmed with shame at not finishing it, that I start a completely new one rather than deal with it.
If I start a blog because I have an overwhelming urge to fling bits of my overthinking mind into the void of the internet, and then don’t experience that urge for a couple of weeks, what am I supposed to do when the urge comes back? I abandoned it; can I really just go back to it?
Yes. Obviously. What the hell? That’s not even a real question.
It’s probably ridiculous that I even have to have these kinds of conversations with myself. But I’ve spent my whole life feeling like my worth lies in what I do, and in how I do it, even in things don’t really matter; that doesn’t just go away the moment I acknowledge the problem. If years of therapy have taught me anything, though, it’s that it helps to start with something small, something that’s challenging but still manageable.
So I think I’ll start here, with how I spend my free time. If something sounds enjoyable, I’ll do it. If it doesn’t, I won’t. If I come back to it, cool, and if I don’t, that’s cool too! Life is too short to stress about the right way to have fun, even for not-so-secret perfectionists like me.
Serpent & Dove wasn’t fun. I was excited going into to it, because “arranged marriage” and all variations of it is my absolute favorite romance trope. But then protagonist girl was being framed as funny and clever but she just wasn’t, and I understood where protagonist guy was coming from but that didn’t mean he wasn’t kind of annoying, and no amount of wanting to like this book could make me like it.
So I refuse to finish it. And that actually feels pretty good.
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