This is something I struggle with, anxiety and depression.
Reading helps me cope with them. It lets me focus on something else and get out of my head. Lets me avoid my self and the problems around me, lets me avoid reality.
But just because it’s a way for me to cope with my anxiety and depression doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. I actually struggle a lot. I love reading but sometimes it’s hard to find the motivation to pick up a book or read long enough to where I’m focused on the story and not the thoughts in my brain and feelings I’m having.
Sometimes it’s because I’m extremely restless from my anxiety and other times it’s because I’m in such an unmotivated place because of my depression. It’s hard to start and concentrate to get to the point where reading is therapeutic to me in those times.
One of the things that sucks as well is that it’s hard to read books with anxiety and depression in them. If a book doesn’t delve too much into a person’s anxiety and my anxiety isn’t bad, I can easily read it with barely any repercussions. If the whole book is about the main character dealing with anxiety I can’t read it because it’s like facing my anxiety head on and amplifying it by 5.
But depression in books? I cannot read. If I read a book where the main character has depression I tend to start to spiral and it’s horrible because I haven’t quit figured out how to stop when that happens.
I still read books where characters have anxiety and/or depression despite this. Those books just take me a very long time to finish because I can only read little bits one week at a time.
And honestly I need those books. I need them because they validate what I’m feeling and what I go through constantly. Sometimes I have the thought that oh, maybe I’m just being over dramatic and I’m just anxious and maybe a bit sad. And than I see how other people talk about their depression and anxiety and what they go through and I read about the stories people write from their experiences and I’m validated that I’m not blowing things out of proportion and that this is real.
I still need them. I still need to read despite the struggle. It’s just a bit harder for me sometimes and I struggle to not send myself into a reading slump.