26th
Reading with detachment
I’m reading a book about BDSM and finding myself fascinated by the story but trying to hold back from immersing myself in it. Nostalgia and wistfulness are not things I want or can handle in my life so I’m reading with my work brain on, nothing more personal. It feels a little robotic to do so, like turning off a switch inside me, but that’s a pretty accurate assessment of what I’ve spent the last year doing, just more slowly. It’s a strange sensation, and reminds me why I like to read mysteries and YA and other genres that don’t speak so personally to me.
It’s progress, though, because a year ago I wouldn’t even been able to read this book without a sense of loss. Now it’s a kinder, gentler sense of that, of knowing my place. I do, very much so, but it makes me feel a bit ancient. Not jealous, exactly, but definitely knowing that all those other girls, the seemingly perfect ones, much as it pains me to admit it, are lucky in their way, and I’m lucky in mine. And that we make, and sometimes unmake, our own luck, even when we don’t quite know we’re doing it.
