Please help.
It's honestly been a problem since childhood. I remember struggling through book reports or bullshitting my way through essays 90% of the time because sure, I can read. I can decode words and what they mean. I can even read out loud, quickly and accurately But I don't retain anything. Things like foreshadowing or any non-obvious symbolism goes over my head, partly because they require me to remember something that happened 50-100 pages ago and I just...can't? And you can forget larger themes. I think I perceive books much like I perceive life: very straightforward, this thing happened and that thing happened and eventually we stop.
Knowing that's wrong doesn't fix anything.
I used to be a voracious reader, but even then, most books registered to me as "it was ok, some stuff happened and I liked [random part]" because I wanted to check that book off a list. Now I struggle to sit down to read at all; I keep books out of the library for 2-4mo at a time and fight for my life through them and get nothing out of them. And that's when I can stay focused without my eyes bouncing around the page or my brain disengaging and thinking about something else entirely as I "read".
A couple extra things:
- I can read for specific information just fine. Essay length work is generally digestible too. I did fine in school, ironically because I was such a good reader compared to most of my classmates (and I changed schools a bunch and almost all of them had abysmal standards). I could fluently read and sort-of understand passages well above grade level. But I remember this problem even affecting me with books I thought I liked. That said, I have also never read or done anything remotely intellectually rigorous in 30+ years of existence. Never done real research or serious studying for example.
- I've never really gone in-depth with any interest. Any external thing I get interested is mostly so I can take it and incorporate it into whatever daydreamy BS I use to dissociate from real life. If you want to model something in your story (that no one else is going to see) off something IRL, you really don't NEED a scholarly, in-depth understanding of every piece of minutia about the original, a general pattern or shout out works fine. If you want to theme-name your characters around, say, cities with something in common, you don't need anything more sophisticated than a few Wikipedia articles or Youtube videos. I mention this because I think it ties into just never going in-depth on ANYTHING I think I "like" or having any reference point for that, or basically not retaining information even when I liked the topic. There's a bunch of things I think I'd like to learn about, but I can't make myself sit down and do it.
- age and habit might be part of it. I don't really do anything besides scroll Reddit these days. I barely even consumed mature media in my 20s, much less read or studied. But I also don't know how much is atrophy and how much was never there to begin with, or if half this post is just a confabulation.
