Being able to concentrate, read & remember while struggling with your mental health

 Aaah, being able to concentrate on things and rely on your memory. For me that's long gone. 

I used to LOVE reading books - damnit I have a bookcase full and lots on my Ipad - 99% of them in English as that's my preferred language to read in. Most of them fictional, but some non - fictional and some biographies. Over half of them read and the others waiting to be enjoyed. 

I lost my ability to concentrate on something - esp. books or larger texts - a year and a half ago. It can't keep my attention anymore. I have to read, reread and then read it again and I still don't know what I've read. Or sometimes I can read a few pages and they refer to something that already happened and I panick because I don't know what is was anymore. So then back we go. It's really frustrating. 

I experienced this before in the past few years but it never lasted longer then a few months. This is the longest I've been without reading. Even reading instructions is difficult sometimes. 

So the next thing I tried were audiobooks. Unfortunately I encountered the same problems so no more audiobooks for me. 

Same with remembering things. I used to be so good at for example summing up what we've eaten the last couple of days or what I did last week - don't even try to ask me now because I will get frustrated with myself and that's not a a good look. 

There is one thing that I can still do to train my brain and memory and can somewhat focus on - learning lyrics. I've always been good at learning and remembering lyrics, even if I haven't heard a song in years, I will still remember 90 % of it - if not all. That has never been a problem. I sometimes even wished during my collegeyears I had the ability to write songs with all the theory I had to remember. Maybe my exams would have been a bit easier, lol!

So that's how I try to challenge my brain for now.

One day I hope - and my bookcase hopes with me because I keep buying books - that I can pick up a book and enjoy reading again. 

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