For a long time, we simply stopped reading books, especially fiction. I could blame the Internet for that—the Internet certainly exacerbated the problem, because I could feel merely from dicking around on the Internet that I'd read a lot of text when in fact I'd barely absorbed any information at all. It's far easier to react to Internet writing than it is to absorb and internalize it. All the same, the real problem was that we'd come to associate reading with trauma. Reading was something we did when we were in pain, as an escape, and more and more frequently reading was something we did only under unusually painful circumstances—we could read a book while on an awful job, for example, but we'd stop reading the book at home. It's only been in the last couple recent years that we've recovered the ability to read large slabs of reading at a sitting, but emotionally difficult material still tends to send our ADHD into overdrive. We still have to fight in order to stay focused on tough or dense reading material.
I would like to work towards a self-imposed curriculum of study for ourselves, but I've been at a loss as to how to start. We're struggling against strong lingering inhibitions, surely of traumatic origin, that seem to hinder us from studying and notetaking. Kris starts writing in notebooks and then abandons them for days. We set out with vague morning ideas about studying something in particular and by the end of the day realize that we've blown it off—a pattern of behavior we recognize as aversive, but it's been difficult to fight it. Finally, somehow, we managed to stick at a very simple job: giving ourselves an overview of the divisions of the Quran into thirty ajzāʼ, which are intended to be approximately the same length and which cut through the boundaries of the 114 suwar or Surahs. I really hope I'm not messing up all the words. The Quran is the sort of study material that frustrates us the most. It's relatively unstructured and discursive, the Surahs aren't arranged in an obvious order, and one needs a huge amount of contextual information to get the most out of the text. And it's massive. My English-translated edition of the Quran has 1862 numbered pages.
But I figure: millions of people figure out how to study this vast tome. Surely we can make a start, at least.
~Χαρά