The other day I was on a Zoom with a friend and I pulled some random factoid out of nowhere and she laughed and shook her head and wondered where I got it all.
This isn’t the first time. Years ago now, the company I work for had a benefit where they’d buy your books. Any books. I’m a voracious reader and I probably had that program buy me three books a week. A colleague marveled and asked me how I could read so much.
I’m a fast reader, but the real answer? I have chronic illness and no kids.
The no kids thing is the most obvious. I’m not spending hours of my day keeping a little one from accidentally doing themselves in or listening to a teenager’s heartbreak. I’m not checking clothes for things they’ve outgrown and spending hours on the computer trying to get them into summer camps. I’m not driving anyone to regular classes or games. I’m not up in the middle of the night with a newborn who can’t settle. I’m not figuring out spirit week or going to parent-teacher conferences or navigating between siblings.
Kids take up enormous amounts of time and energy. And even when they aren’t directly the thing you’re dealing with, they often make other stuff (chores, errands) take much, much longer than it would if you could just plug into your headphones and go to town.
But I know plenty of childfree people who don’t have gobs of time to read about microbia and adult ADHD and whatever random thing I’m reading about this week. The other half of the answer is that my life is very, very small, because it had to be to prevent me from crashing all the time from overexertion. I save my energy for work, for household chores, and for my relationship. That means that I’m not going out very often. I don’t take classes (and didn’t before the pandemic). I don’t have a social life.
What I have is a tablet and the life of the mind. I have books and podcasts. I have puzzles and music. I have movies and tv and a couple of slack channels with like-minded people.
I know that I’m probably more satisfied with this life than would be someone without my introverted, bookish temperament. But it’s as much structural as anything else.
I feel weirdly sensitive about this, defensive almost. I think it’s because it’s so easy for people to overlook how small my life is and how necessary that smallness is. It’s how I live fully within that smallness. And that matters to me.
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