Finding Time For Personal Reading

There are days when I feel like I live in a constant whirlwind of words. As a second-year English Language and Literature student, my life is saturated with reading. Whether it's essays, academic journalism or critical theory, the course novels pile up like a mountain. Each day feels like a race to conquer them all, while in the depths of my mind, amidst this avalanche of required reading, the simple pleasure of picking up a book for enjoyment feels almost like a guilty pleasure. The irony is bitter, the way it dissolves on my tongue like the countless words, in every corner of the books I read. The very act of reading for joy, which was once a heartbeat of my love for words, has become relegated to a quiet, almost forbidden corner of my day.

I remember the evenings when I would slump into bed, exhausted, a stack of coursework by my side and yet a book I had been dying to read would call to me from a shelf. The relentless urge to escape into a story, to immerse myself in a world that wasn’t bound by academic deadlines, was almost unbearable. There’s a constant gnawing pressure that reminds me: you have an essay due, and so, reading for enjoyment becomes a casualty of necessity, a luxury that slips between my fingers like the words that slip off a page with every unread book.

Finding the time for personal reading isn’t easy; it's an act of rebellion against the constraints of a reading-heavy curriculum. Lately, I’ve tried every strategy I can think of, like substituting scrolling on my phone for the embrace of a chapter or two of a novel. The literary escape I ironically feel I lack often proved ineffective, as I rarely had enough time to get through more than a page. Another strategy is reading before bed, letting a story lull me to sleep instead of the blue glow of a screen, though this also proved ineffective, as I couldn’t stay up to read out of the pure exhaustion of the day passed. A never-ending sea of ticking clocks and full calendars have prevented me from enjoying so many stories.

However, after all this time, I have managed to find a way that has truly made a difference: waking up an hour earlier. That hour, still steeped in the quiet calm of dawn, belongs solely to the books I choose for myself. Like a sacred ritual, it's a promise to myself that my love for books and reading will never die, even amidst the chaos of academic life.

There’s an intimacy in these moments, a reminder that reading is not just about information analysis, but connection - connecting with characters, ideas, and emotions that transcend deadlines and coursework. It’s about nurturing the part of myself that exists for the love of stories, not just for grades, and that is why, despite the relentless workload and the suffocating sense of never having enough time, I continue to wake up early, turn my phone off and let the words guide me. It’s a small act of defiance, but it is also an affirmation: reading for joy is worth the fight.