"In my spare time I enjoy reading and writing." This mantra has been my reflex response to every hobby-related question for most of my twenty-two years on this earth. And for most of that time, it was a true statement. From the time I learned to read until I got my own cell phone and laptop, my days were filled with books. I'd strain my eyes on the ride home from spaghetti supper at my grandparents' house, reading a few words at a time from the "Nancy Drew Mystery Series" or children's versions of "Jane Eyre," "Little Women," and "Anne of Green Gables" under each passing streetlamp. Even when I got a Nintendo DS, I used the light from the two screens in my hand to illuminate the pages on my lap. But everything changed in middle school.
With middle school came my first cell phone. After what felt like years of pleading with my parents and trying to think of better reasons for "needing" one besides "everyone else has one," my brother and I woke up on Christmas morning when I was in eighth grade to find identical square boxes addressed to each of us under the Christmas tree. My parents told us to wait before opening them, and as we sat as patiently as we could with them in our hands, Dad stopped Christmas to make a phone call. He punched in some numbers from a piece of paper in his hand, and after a moment we heard sounds coming from inside the boxes. We opened them quickly and found our brand new cell phones! Little did I know that I had entered a new phase of my life.
In the days to come, my time was filled with free phone games and, in time, texting. I no longer turned to books for an escape, because I had hours of meaningless entertainment in my pocket. As my fingers exercised more than they ever had outside of my violin lessons, my books began to collect dust on my overflowing bookshelves. Now, the only books I read were the ones assigned by my teachers.
As middle school gave way to high school, the books assigned by my teachers became less enjoyable and more serious. Reading became work, and since I didn't have any time to choose and read my own books between text messages and, by tenth grade, hours of Facebook, reading was only my favorite activity in theory, not in practice. Reading for pleasure had become all but extinct, and after reading the "Twilight" series, reading for pleasure disappeared entirely. I no longer had any desire to read, because most of my time was spent reading. I read my Chemistry textbook, "Great Expectations" among countless other assigned books, and Facebook, and by the time I had finished with those, I no longer wanted to look at any typed page. "Reading for fun" became "hoping the assigned reading is fun." Usually, it was not.
When I left my tiny Catholic high school for my tiny public college, not much changed, except that I read about one assigned novel per week instead of one per month. My cell phone free time was almost entirely replaced by my new toy, my laptop. I wasted hours on the internet, mostly browsing websites and reading interesting articles. I didn't realize it at first, but I had slowly returned to my love of reading, in a different form. I was again reading what I chose, though it was not in turning pages, but in scrolling down on my laptop screen. Someday, when my late nights are no longer filled with assigned books, I know I will return to my personal and public libraries, because though I don't read books for fun anymore, I still choose to read in my spare time. I have proven to myself that I will always love reading, and my choice to major in English was not a mistake. Being an English major runs in my family, and reading is in my blood. I was born to read and write, and will do so in some capacity for the rest of my life.
