So… it’s been a few weeks since I last posted again, and I wanted to talk a little about why that is and how my ADHD affects my reading.

The biggest thing over the last month has been a shiny new hyperfixation. Hyperfixation, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a trait of ADHD that means intense focus on a particular thing for an extended period of time. After wanting one for a couple of years, I finally bought myself a Nintendo Switch in the pre-Black Friday sales. And promptly fell down the rabbit hole of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It is wonderful and I am in love. I have many many issues with Tom Nook – the fucking crook. I signed up for a deserted island, and found that 2 people were moving there with me, along with Timmy, Tommy and Nook himself. Then Blathers – admittedly, he’s wonderful – and his museum moved in. I’ve got my house and done the first two upgrades, currently working on paying off getting a second room. And somehow… somehow I’ve been conned into building a shop for Timmy & Tommy and now… Now I’m building THREE HOMES for more people to move to the island?! I didn’t get a fucking furnished house – no, I got a tent.
I LOVE THIS GAME.

Another way ADHD affects my reading is that – as you’ve probably noticed – I’m great at starting books. The finishing thing? Not so much. And once again, I hit the point where I had over 25 books in progress, all my library books were suddenly due back and I got really stressed out. Reading stopped being fun and I was really overwhelmed, and knowing that I wanted to be writing about the books I was reading made it feel like extra pressure to Do It Properly.
And when I feel like I have to do things properly, it makes it feel like I can’t start it because I don’t want to do it wrong and so there’s no point in doing it.
(Logically, I know there’s no way to ‘do’ my own blog ‘wrong’ – that’s just how the brain feels in these situations).

Added to that, I’ve started the second year of my degree and have been struggling a little bit. I’ve been finding it hard to get motivated to study, and had my confidence knocked by getting a low grade in my first assignment – caused by misunderstanding the question. Being a distance-learning degree, there’s a lot of reading, the more I struggle with this the more difficulty I have reading for pleasure because that voice in the back of my brain yells at me every time I pick up a book that isn’t for school that I should be studying.

I have started reading again in the last week or so, I picked 4 or 5 of the books I was reading and tried to focus on those and have actually nearly finished a couple of them. Woohoo.

But the combination of all of these things, I haven’t been able to figure out how to come back to blogging. And the longer it’s gone on, the harder it’s become to open up that new blog post window and start typing. It ended up becoming this big thing in my head that I didn’t know how to breach.

Obviously, writing this post, I DO want to come back and start blogging about books again. And that’s the thing. I want to blog about books and reading, rather than writing a ‘traditional’ book review blog. I love sharing my love for the books I’m reading and geeking out about them, and enthusing about books. I’m definitely learning I don’t enjoy writing ‘proper’ book reviews, but I do enjoy my paragraph long drive-by reviews. I love doing the weekly link-ups, they’re probably my favourite thing. I just need to figure out how I’m going to make this work for me – because I really do want to find my rhythm, because I really really enjoy being here.