Focus like it's 1998.

Or, where did my attention span go?, and how I'm trying to get it back.

This was the photo for my very first ever kit: a sock kit inspired by the picture book, Extra Yarn. Those are my boy’s feet in 2013 when he was 6.

I am going to share a secret with you: I don’t read books very often. And I miss it.

I have always thought of myself as a reader and a book lover. It’s a deep part of my self-identity, and some of my earliest memories are of books. Reading and collecting Nancy Drew mysteries. Everything ever written by Judy Blume (< New York Times gift link to the best profile ever). Novels upon novels upon novels.

My decline in reading coincided with the ubiquity of social media and high resolution screens that started to chop up my attention span into smaller and smaller nuggets. A few minutes here, or there. Moving from one thing to another. Perusing Ravelry rather than knitting. Reading a blog rather than a book. Reading on my iPad before bed, rather than reading a book, because well, I’m so tired that I’ll fall asleep when reading and won’t remember anything anyways.

I didn’t notice how my attention span was crumbling until most of it was already gone.

One of the reasons I started my book club with my friend, Kathy, was as a forcing function: to make myself read at least one book every month, knowing that it’s somehow easier to show up for others than it is to show up for myself.

I think is why I love dyeing yarn (and, frankly, this newsletter): work that takes deep focus gives my brain a slow, nourishing, quiet, restorative stretch of time to work. It keeps me from consuming information in tiny click-bait bites, and it helps me dig in. To think, imagine, and do the things that brains like to do. Deep work.

Reading a novel used to be like this for me, but it’s been hard, the last decade or so, to resist the siren call of the Instagram scroll or the news headlines or the feed of new patterns that I could make. But I want to resist.

(There’s been so much written about the addictive nature of social media, the dopamine hits that we end up craving, and helpful ways to regain your focus that it feels like I’m being Captain Obvious to say that focusing is hard. But it is.)

How about you? Do still read as much as you used to? Do you still focus deeply? Or, are you like me, and feel your attention span divided and cut and spliced into tinier and tinier pieces?