Hi, my name is Tasnim and I am obsessed by the whale of reading material that is available to me at the library, and I am addicted to reading. I have heard this line; 'Hi, my name is so-and-so and I am addicted to alcohol' spoken so many times in movies and on the TV, that I thought it was meaningless. It did not make me feel like this line can be a powerful line for someone who is in denial about a problem in their life, and mostly it came to me as a lame resolution of a line for someone who is struggling with obsessiveness or an addiction. I never thought I was addicted to anything, least of all that I was addicted to reading. For me, it was always a good thing to be known as an avid reader, and really if there was something I was known for - it was for my reading. I am fifty-three years old and I have loved reading books for all of my life. Recently I heard myself tell someone that the Library staff will realise first if ever I am missing because I go here so often. And then, to my amazement, I heard myself say that line again to someone else who happened to affectionately ask me the innocent question; 'where are you lost?' because we had not seen each other for a few weeks. In that moment, something shifted in my mind and I heard myself reprimand myself inside that thought, as if there was someone else who was living in my head who happened to be a no-nonsense guardian, one who was not going to let idiotic words fly from my skull without reason.
From that fleeting moment onward, I found myself not wanting to go to the library again. I wanted to put a stop to this cycle of events that kept playing over and over in my life. I wanted to stop having that errand of dropping library items and for me to stop the trips to the library for picking up my holds, and I wanted desperately to boot that routine out of my routine. I felt this like a bitterness in my gut for knowing I had this habit and the internal disgusted i felt to see the number of items I had waiting for me each time I went to the library. I found myself feeling embarrassed to have to check so many items out in one go, hating to haul those items home and hating to have so many things in a bag, and I felt my deep feelings that I did so love to read these things, yet they would be taking up so much of my valuable time, and I resented that love. I felt repulsed by that bag full of library items sitting on the floor, even though there were some interesting books and DVDs there, some that I had put on hold and waited for so many months to finally get my hands on. Everyday my revulsion grew until I wanted to burn that bag with all those library items in it and I wanted to shred the library cards and to add the shredded remains of the damn library cards to that fire too. The disdain my family members felt over the years whenever I asked them to go to the library for me came rushing to me in a sad awakening and I felt an acute ache for being so blind to my addiction. They had been telling me this for a good many years, but I never felt it like they saw it.
Today it is April 14th, 2016. I have written this down on my things-to-do-today list. ( That list - that list is next to be booted out of my life! This need to write an entire list of things that I must do each day is going to leave me for good too, and very soon.) I sat down at 10:30 am with only one line on that to-do sheet of paper and this is the one line written on it - Once and for all clear all library items and put only the ones I need in one card so that I never again use any other than my own card. You see, I use four library cards for my reading needs. Four! I use my own card, my husband's card and my kid's cards and at any given time I have twenty and even thirty items checked out on each card! So, I opened my library account on a browser and on another browser I opened my daughter's account. I took the items on hold on my own account, and put them to the wish list, leaving only one item on the holds page. Then, from my daughter's account, I took the items from the checked-out, the holds and the wish list, and copied and pasted them each, because it can only be done individually one item at a time, I pasted each to my own account's wish list. When her account was empty, I opened my husband's account, and I performed the same exercise of moving things from his account to my account's wish list and when I was finished with his, I did the same for my son's account. By 2:00 pm, I got so fed up that I simply deleted all the remaining items from my son's card and called it a day. I need to stop today and I needed this nonsense to be over today and to have accomplished the feat that all three accounts had to be completely empty.
If you think this was a quick and easy fix, then you are wrong, because the whole exercise took so much time. For every minute that passed I kept saying to myself that this is the last time that I will ever need to use all these cards and for me to have to tend to all these items on these cards. This time that Me, Myself and I were spending now on this problem, this intervention, was so that we never again spend this time on these library items, will never have all the cards working for me and thereby snuffing out the overwhelming amount of reading material that I will ever need to go through. Ever. Starting today, I will have one DVD and one book, audio or paper per week only.
Would you like to ask me whether I truly read all that stuff? My answer is truthfully 'YES"! I found that when I was not enjoying an audio book because it was read badly or that the story was not interesting then I had to stop listening to it because I did not want to endure it and so I needed at least five or six audio books, per week, ready at hand so that I would have enough audio books to find a good book playing on the CD player in my kitchen. I listened to a book or sometimes two audio books here in my kitchen each week. The pleasure I feel of having a good book playing for me like this is an immense blessing for me. I feel such gratitude that I have the luxury to enjoy this pleasure and that I have the access to the abundance of great books at the library which I freely use. On top of this, I read, physically read, a book each week also. However, for this pleasure, I needed fifteen to twenty books to choose from because I refuse to read a boring book or one that is not written with a great voice or with the beauty of the English Language at heart. I had stopped being shackled to reading books restricted by genre many years ago when I threw open my mind and allowed the awesomeness of any written work to flood into my life. With this came the need to have enough books to have at hand so that when a book disappointed me I at least had another book to feed my hunger for reading.
So today, only after I was done, completely sure that I had banished this madness out of my life and that the only library card I had any items on was my own card, and that only one item on hold, did I get up from my work-station to make myself a cup of tea and to have my lunch. An hour later, I came back to my table here and I feel a very strange sensation raging through my body. Wracking a habit was wrecking me. I have gone through the process of freeing myself from a noose yet I am shaking with a fear-like reaction. I have broken free of my bondage yet my hands are trembling as if am scared. I feel horrible, racing through me is that horrible feeling of dread that you feel when you sense that something really bad is about to happen. My knees are knocking, I kid you not, and my teeth are chattering with stress and I really feel an anxiety to the extent that I can say that I am terrified.
I decided to write how this there and then and to write it as it is happening because I am feeling this as a slave would feel it, realising that slavery is not a restraint that when the chains are open that doesn't mean that the enslaved is really released. The joys of freedom do not just pour into being now that the madness has lifted. Sometimes, the freedom is an execution in itself and the unrestricted is now faced with an unfamiliar and truly frightening reality of becoming one's own master and who knows what this equates to, and that really scares me.
