(ARCHIVE)Who am I as a Reader?

(Originally published August 26 2022)

To put it simply, I think of reading as a sort of vaccine. I never want to take it, but I know I have to take it for my own good. Sometimes I read because I want to, sometimes I read for school, and sometimes, I read as a 'vaccine' for my future, since I've started feeling like I need to get ready for SATs and stuff soon because I'm a high schooler now. It's kind of annoying because I know it wasn't like this before.

Original Artwork by me(i'm overusing it but i'm proud of my work so whatever:))

Before I came to my current school, I used to go to another school in the same city. My old school was much, much smaller than my school right now(my current school is like the biggest international school in my country), so making friends wasn't that easy. You see, if the school is small, there are less students, and less students mean less choices to make friends. Therefore if you don't get along with one friend group, the chances you get to make new friends are close to zero.

..Which is what happened to me in 3rd to 4th grade. My 'old' friends weren't mean or anything, it was just that my #sad#lonely#emo self wasn't able to fit in with the major friend groups. None of the teachers really saw a problem, because I always looked like I had a lot of friends during class, but those (about)2 years were extremely agonizing to bear without a distraction. Finally, here comes the reading part: The only source of 'distraction' I could find in the entirety of my tiny tiny school was reading in the library at lunchtime. I hadn't started drawing then(these days drawing is my main source of healing), so young Na Yoon thought it was a great idea to go to the library every lunch to read any book I found was interesting to me.

In my final year at my old school(5th grade), my friendships were finally stable, so then, I started dragging my friends to the library too to read books(great job baby Na Yoon, this is probably why you weren't fitting in in the first place-). I was that immersed in reading.

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So, what happened in these past few years that pushed me to the point of bluntly saying that "I don't want to read" in the first post of my book blog? Well, I think I started to experience a phenomenon I randomly named "book block". As aforementioned, I read a whole TON of books from 3rd to 5th grade. In fact, there were awards given to students in my old school that read 30+, 40+ and 50+ books, and I got close to two 50+ awards in Grade 5(almost 100 books in one school year). Not to brag, but at the end of Grade 5('Primary School', because I was in a British School), I had access to the Senior Library because I had read most of the books in the Primary Library.

I guess I read too much(yeah i know it sounds weird, bear with me-), so when I came to my new school in 6th grade, I wasn't able to read. Like, I couldn't. Physically and mentally, my body sort of 'rejected' books. This sounds like an excuse, but at that point, I was really frustrated and annoyed at myself as well as all the books I tried reading to get the reading habit again. And 6th grade Na Yoon very much disliked anything that she felt she couldn't solve alone.

...Yeah. A few months of frustration lead me to virtually stop reading for 3 whole years.

"Reading is a vaccine" is what I said in the first sentence of this post. Just for my future self, I want to, and feel like I need to, start reading again. A lot. To catch up on the three wasted years. I'm currently reading a lot of mystery books, specifically Agatha Christie books, because I always loved those ever since I was a kid and felt like maybe starting slowly from the beginning might be a good idea. I'm also reading the Da Vinci Code series by Dan Brown, a recommendation from my bookworm parents.

Okay, that's all I have for this post(please try and ignore the abrupt ending, this is my first time writing a blog) If anyone reading this took interest in my very boring, very typical story describing myself as a reader, consider coming along with me on my excruciatingly slow reading journey. Thanks for reading and I hope to see everyone again the next time I post:DD

Bye~