In 2nd or 3rd grade in elementary school, we had a contest where we competed to see who could read the greatest number of books. I had extreme difficulties with concentration and couldn't really read, so I read no books, and my best friend B. read something like 500 books or something ridiculous. I took it as an utter defeat. I felt like a complete failure and I never read another book until almost my 18th birthday. I read the Dhammapada when I was 16 or 17, and a few years earlier I think I read two books by Anthony Robbins. That was about the extent of my reading for my entire life up until that point. I had read the lines to Macbeth and to Oliver Twist in elementary school, because I played the part of Banquo in Macbeth in the 5th grade and also played Fagin in Oliver Twist in the 6th grade. Otherwise I read almost nothing. I maybe read a bit of poetry, by e.e. cummings and Lord Alfred Tennyson.
In any case, the situation with the reading contest that I experienced as complete existential failure, I experienced as trauma, and it affected me for the rest of my life. It still affects me today. It's become part of who I am as a person, going through those difficulties. I still have trouble at times with my concentration, for various medical reasons, of a neurological nature.
A.G. (c) 2020. All Rights Reserved.
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