(no subject)

When I was a kid, even though I generally enjoyed movies and plays, I always felt a sense of dread going into one, and left to my own devices I probably would have backed out. When I was in my twenties, I began to have trouble making myself read fiction — at the time, I thought it was a reaction to having majored in English; that *having* to read books had taken some of the joy out of it; but now I think that fear of being trapped in the audience and not being able to escape the story had begun to spread to the page as well. Since then, I occasionally go on a narrative binge, but I find more and more that I can only bear to read things like how-to guides or recipe books, in which there is no emotional conflict and no characters. This makes me feel like a hypocrite, because I was such an enthusiastic reader as a child, and because I still attempt to write stories myself. I just can’t deal with exposing myself to the pain of fictional narratives, though. When I read to escape I want to escape from emotion completely, not into other emotion.