In Common – September 2022 – Michelle Home Scholar

I struggle with General Anxiety Disorder, and this year has been particularly stressful for many reasons. Unfortunately one of the ways my anxiety manifests is an inability to focus – not just on things like tasks or important information I need to remember, but also on reading.

For months, starting as far back as the end of 2021, I have struggled to focus on anything I’ve been interested in. My Current Reads stack sat untouched for several months, and I found my only outlet was listening to music with ear buds.

Anxiety for me often manifests in this severe inability to focus my mind – and this past year has been spent learning to manage my anxiety without meds and recovering from the health issues that my previous anxiety meds have led to. I’m sure I’ll discuss these struggles more in other posts, but I mention them now only to illustrate how bad I have been struggling – when you can’t even turn to reading, you know things are BAD.

But in the past month or so, I’ve been reading again! I picked a couple of books to read – and I am slowly working through them. I’ve made the decision to limit my Current Reads stack to a manageable few – too many books will overwhelm me and I’d rather focus on the few and then move on to the next in line, rather than spreading myself so thin like I have in the past.

You’ll notice I’m reading a couple different titles about the Orthodox Church. I’ve made the decision to leave Protestantism and join the Eastern Orthodox Church. I’ll write more about that in other posts, but in short – I’ve been attending an Antiochian Orthodox Church locally for about a year and I’ve been very happy with the change. Learning about the different tradition has been a wonderful experience and I have quite the queue of books waiting to be read.