I was thinking last night as I opened my book at bedtime that reading is part of my self-care/wellness regimen. I could never go to bed without a shower and I could never go to sleep without reading. Some nights I get through a few paragraphs and my eyes start to droop, and other nights I get through several chapters, but my “rule” is that the minute I feel like it is time to sleep, I put down the book and turn off the light…I don’t push through because I am one of those people who really needs her full nine hours! To be clear, I have on a few occasions just kept reading to finish a book, plow through the sleepy sensations to get to the last page, but this is not a regular occurrence and I don’t recommend it unless you are retired can sleep til you want and take naps!

I have come to a conclusion that I have not a minute left to waste…I have been tending to a wound (metaphorical wound, not physical) for almost four years now and it is still not healed and still causing me frequent pain and daily discomfort. It is my own fault that I am in the situation I am in, & I take full responsibility for my poor judgment and deeply regret some of my choices…but none of that matters, because here I am, right here right now. I am tending to scar tissue from a wound that was not my fault but the healing from it is my responsibility…I read a quote like this, four years ago, and I think I wrote the words wrong, but I get the meaning and it has been on my mind ever since. I have put myself in a bad situation and I have to tend to my wellness while I try to get this situation resolved and scar tissue gets thick, and fast, and so tending to this metaphorical wound has a time element…tick, tock, tick, tock…if I don’t get this injury closed up it’s going to leave a dark scar that will never go away, my point is, while I was falling asleep last night, I was thinking about how to heal myself, and I realize that, as a bookworm, what I NEED to do is re-read the books that spoke to my soul and use those words to heal.

I still journal and I write regularly and that is how I vent, it’s like therapy, but reading the ideas and words that other people think of and put together is a different kind of medicine. There are MANY books that I have read over the last 50+ years that touched me so deeply that I feel like they became part of my cells, part of who I am. You might think it silly for a woman who has not yet turned 60 to reference books from her whole reading life, but I kid you not, it started with The Secret Garden at eight years old, then Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret in 6th grade, then The Outsiders in 7th grade…Great Expectations and Jane Eyre in 9th grade, The Diary of Anais Nin at age 15, The Stand in my senior year of high school, The Handmaid’s Tale, Women Who Run With the Wolves and Beloved in college..the list goes on and on and on, but these are the ones that stick out to me when I quick-think about the books of my past that really changed me…in the 90’s Outlander, in the aughts I Know This Much is True and The Secret Life of Bees, Eat Pray Love was the first book I read after I moved into my house in 2009 & The Nightingale in 2017 & Demon Copperhead last summer just to name a few LOL I think a “few” is really supposed to be three or so, but if you are a reader, you get my drift and if you are not a reader, you surely think I am a nut-case!

Where I live the property taxes are outrageous but the only two things that don’t make me mad about them are the library tax, because I have used the library every week of my life since I got my library card at nine years old, and the school tax because my daughter and granddaughters went to public school here and my daughter teaches here…otherwise every quarter I am fuming made when I write my check, but I digress, my point is that I love LOVE L-O-V-E the library and only buy books occasionally. They allow you to have 20 books “on order” at a time and so on any given day I have about four on my nightstand and 20 in my queue. I keep them organized to come in every ten-12 days or so because it usually takes me a week to read a book. Sometimes I make an error with my request dates and I end up with three books arriving on the same day and then I put post-it-notes on the covers with the due date and I reshuffle the order in which I will read them. This is all a lot of jibber-jabber silliness if you are not a reader or don’t use your library.

I am going to read the books that I have on order through November and then starting in December I am going to begin a re-reading regimen. I am going to heal my sadness and anger and disappointment (and to be clear, it is not just the election that makes me sad and angry and disappointed, that just exacerbated the sadness and anger and disappointment I was already carrying) by reading again the stories that shaped me. The stories that I read from age 8 to now that I feel like were part of what has shaped me into who I am…I don’t like the “me” that I am now, these last years have been rough…I don’t like the thoughts that I think and I don’t like how and what I feel about the current state of my affairs. It’s not at all who I thought I would grow up to become, or how I thought these chapters of my life would be…so I am feeling deeply scarred and feel like I need healing and am going to start the process with books. I know some people heal with booze, and some heal with benzodiazepines, but I am going to try to heal with books…smooth out that scar tissue…one page at a time…