Starting with Groundings

I’m finally getting back to reading again.

I don’t know how much of my hesitancy and anxiousness about hitting the books again had to do with procrastination or fatigue. There was the obvious impact of just dealing with recovery from surgery, the constant state of tired I was in doing physical therapy and healing. There was also the general attitude that I gave myself about how I wouldn’t ever have the chance like this medical leave of absence to ever give myself the chance to just “relax” and not open a book. However, I feel like also there was another aspect of staying away from reading again that kept me scrolling endlessly through YouTube: fear I wouldn’t be the scholar (note NOT academic) I was working to be before my injury.

Prior to the accident, I was eager to give myself the chance to read anything I could, oftentimes at the expense of my homework. I’d put aside some course readings to give my first reads of George Jackson or other Black revolutionaries because it spoke to me in a far more honest manner than most of my coursework. When it came to summertime, my research and work into the RNA was similarly fulfilling me, allowing me the opportunity to really narrow into a topic and just read.

Irrespective of what the reasoning was, whether it be a combination of all the aforementioned reasons, it had been effectively two months since I gave…