I stopped doing the Goodreads Reading Challenge in 2024 because I was trying to answer a very important question: who am I?
All my adult life I’ve struggled with a brain that swings between two opposites; the desire to dive deep into an activity and not resurface again for air until it’s done, and the desire to fill my time with novelty and quick dopamine hits. It’s like being a tortoise strapped to a firework.
It was only in late 2023 that I began to realise what the seemingly unconquerable force within me was: the pendulum of autism and ADHD combined.
So what was it about this that made reading such a challenge, and did I really need to give it up to figure out who I was?
Without this, I’m…?
I’ve spent a lot of my life not knowing why I do the things I do – or, rather, why I get so obsessed with them, and why it causes me such distress to both do and not do them.
All those years I’ve been desperately trying to get my novels finished, only to often choose not to write when I get the opportunity. All those books I buy that pile up and never get read; or the one half-completed that I want to finish but just can’t pick up. Or the TV show I dived into and devoured a season or two, only to just…drift away from it.
These things would have been fine if I could have just shrugged, said, “Oh well, another time,” and happily got on with something else. But they hurt. God, they hurt. It’s like a splinter in the brain, or an itch on your soul.
The autistic brain likes order and certainty. It likes – craves even – routine. It wants to finish things, because then they’re done. They can be ticked off a list, or put away, or given back to the library. The ADHD brain, however, wants things that are new and exciting. It gets bored quickly and wants to try something different.
Having both means you have a brain that loves the idea of sitting in the same chair for five hours to consume a novel in one go, but also starts thinking about doing literally anything else once you get three pages in.
As someone with ADHD, I have a lot of abandoned projects. That’s cultivated in the autistic brain a fear of leaving things unfinished. Going just a few days without doing something I enjoy or want to do makes the anxiety bubble up.
I often can’t tell the difference between ‘I’ve had enough of this for now’ and ‘I don’t think this is right for me’. I’ve therefore developed a fear of letting go of things, in case they are abandoned forever. If I don’t keep up with the things I think I enjoy, what will happen to them?
Two brains, one Rewan
This is the pendulum – a brain that swings from one set of preferences to the other. One half tends to dominate the other, until things become too overbalanced. The subdued side rebels, the pendulum swings back the other way. The good times are when it passes through the middle on its way to the other side. Everything is in balance. Both brains are happy.
I know this now. But I didn’t for a very long time. Which meant I had no idea why I was behaving and thinking the way I was. And that led me to doubt myself a lot: how could I say I wanted to be an author, if I didn’t write books with every second of my spare time? How could I say I loved reading when I’d choose gaming or flicking through my phone instead?
Once I was diagnosed, I was ready to find out what I actually wanted. Which meant removing the leashes my autistic brain had wrapped around me in desperate attempts to choke me into compliance.
All the demands and expectations had to go. I had to allow myself to just do whatever it was I wanted to, and to see what happened.
Which meant the Goodreads Reading Challenge had to go. If I didn’t read a single book in 2024, so be it.
So…did I read?
Off-the-leash Rewan didn’t fare too badly in the end. I read nine books, which is the same amount I read back in 2019 when I first set a reading challenge. Over the following years I had pushed the number up to 12, then 18, then 23 for two consecutive years.
Good, but clearly a big drop-off in reading.
So…did that mean I wasn’t as much of a reader as I thought? Had I been pushing myself too hard, forcing myself to read a lot when actually I wasn’t that into it? Was this a form of neurodivergent masking: I was adopting the façade of a reader in order to fit in with the bookish community because I wanted to justify the fact I write books?
I don’t think so. In fact, what last year taught me was that I do love reading, and that having a challenge is actually a good thing. That autistic fear was proven wrong; I can stop things and come back to them. My reading was very haphazard – for the middle six months of the year I read nothing at all. But I still came back to it of my own accord.
So, reading is good and a challenge is helpful. But it’s important to understand it in the context of my brain.
Before I had any idea about my neurodiversity I wrote this post exploring why we even need challenges in order to help us do things we supposedly love doing. I don’t think that my conclusions are any different now that I know the truth about myself. In fact, they’re stronger – I talk about the tendency towards instant-gratification, which is true of everyone, regardless of neurotype, but even more so when you have ADHD.
It’s very easy to get shunted off course. Most of the things worth doing are difficult – that’s what people flouting the need for AI in all aspects of a creative’s life don’t understand. Difficulty often creates meaning.
Goals and targets can be really useful for a neurodiverse brain. We often have trouble with organisation and focus, so outsourcing this is no bad thing. And for a brain starved of dopamine, giving yourself a little extra satisfaction upon finishing a long project by ticking a box or seeing a progress bar on a challenge rise is helpful.
What’s important, though, is to realise what was happening under the surface. Many of the reasons I initially started using reading challenges were wrong. They were around trying to force myself to be something I’m not.
I was comparing myself to the book bloggers who read 100-200 books in a year and finding myself lacking hugely. I was thinking about all the advice that writers must be reading all the time, otherwise they’ll never be good writers. I was panicking about what happened when I was published and someone asked me a question like ‘Who are your influences?’ and I have to sort of admit that I’m not really sure, other than Pratchett, and I just write stories because I like writing them.
Finding balance, slowing the pendulum
Now, though, a reading challenge is something that I can use to keep me focussed on long-term gains. It helps me keep an eye on the bigger picture, while also acknowledging my atypical productivity style. I struggle to do most things consistently unless there’s a massive expectation or negative consequence of not doing it, and reading is no different.
I’m currently blasting through this year’s tentative reading challenge – on track to complete my fifth book before this post goes out. But I may not read anything else for a month, or two, or three after that. A yearly reading challenge is a good way to lessen the autistic brain’s need for consistency (it’s not a cure; I will get distressed by this) and remember that actually it’s the end result that matters.
If I read six books in the first six weeks of the year, and six books in the last six, and nothing in between, I’ve still completed the challenge.
The ADHD part of me will always go chasing off after instant highs. The autistic brain is always going to expect to be able to pick up a book and then not move until I’ve turned all the way to the back cover. The cumulative effect is always going to be that of two raccoons trying to play a video game with one controller.
But things like reading challenges are a way of slowing down the pendulum and increasing the amount of time it spends in the happy middle place.
As in said in the other post on this topic, it’s less of a challenge, and more a reading nudge. But that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
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Header image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
