Bookish Randomz: Reading for myself or for others?

Hello there, long time no post. Normally, I would try and come up with an excuse for this but I can't. School's been pretty chill and I'm nearing the end of my senior year so there's that. I've also been writing my book or right now I'm actually just revising it. Back to the topic of graduation, it hit me like a ton of bricks last week. I've been getting really, really excited for my grad--so excited that I'm actually quite giddy about it. I don't know, these past few months have been really awesome. Haven't had a bad day at school in such a long time--really amazing how cutting out the source of negativity in your life can impact it for the better within days. That's literally how I was and it's awesome. But I'm sure you don't care to hear about my personal things. Well--this is a little bit of a personal post, but it does relate to books, so if you're interested in hearing this please read on!

I've kind of always been the kind of person who likes to say "It doesn't have to make you happy, it just has to make me happy," when it comes to my likes and interests. I know that people in my life judge me for certain things, I am a coin collector and the wizard of Oz merchandise who knows what else. I've been judged for popular series I love like the Hunger Games and those were areas I never let people get in the way of. Yet, there was one thing in my life that I did let others find their way into and that was my reading life.

Reading has always, always been a huge part of my life and lately I haven't had the same passion and drive to read as I did as I did in Middle School. At first, I couldn't really put my finger on it, but one day I realized what it was. It's you. It's not me, it's you. What I mean by that is that it's YA readers like you. Everyone in the book community has an influence on what I read nowadays, and usually I'm only reading certain books because everyone else is reading them. When this happens, I tend to not really enjoy them because I'm just not that into overhyped books that everyone in the world is reading--I can be but recently I haven't. This honestly takes so much away from my reading my experience because I feel so much pressure to love the book because everyone else loved it.

Not only this, I would feel bad about not liking it---feel free to shame my 14 year old self because I wrote so many fake reviews.

It came to a point where I dreaded reading because I felt all this pressure to enjoy it--love it. All the books on my TBR were books everyone else was excited for. For the first time in months I found a book that I loved so much that I was so eager to find another book like that. I miss having that experience of that itch you need to scratch you know? It's such a happy and joyous feeling and I really miss that.

I've also had to come to some sort of acceptance. I had to accept that it's okay to really hate or not enjoy a certain book. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and if someone doesn't like you because of you rating a book one star---they don't deserve to have you in their life haha.

This was just a short post to express my thoughts.

Tell me, are any of you like this as well?

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