I love reading. That’s definitely not a secret, whether you know me a little bit or a lot. Words are my life, both through reading and writing, so it should come as no surprise that I had thousands of books on my To Read list on Goodreads.
Anytime I saw or heard about a book that sounded vaguely interesting, I added to that list. Over time, that list got mighty long, like with well over 2,000 books.
Needless to say, that got a little overwhelming for when I was looking for books at the library or Barnes & Noble or wherever. It just finally got to be too much for me, so I started deleting books from that list.
It was quick and innocent at first, deleting one book here and one book there, and then I noticed I took off hundreds of books from that list. And it felt good. Really good.
So I started paring down the list even more. Like, yes, I want to read that book eventually, but do I really? Or do I just feel like I should because someone else likes it or because it was on some company’s top books list?
I can’t even explain how incredibly good it felt to remove so many books from a digital list. The point of the Goodreads app is that you can add however many books you want to your list and keep going. Well I definitely took that to heart for years, and I didn’t really realize until I started removing books from the list how much of a mental toll the large To Read list was taking on me.
My ego is saying it feels silly to talk about this, but deleting books from this list was a really eye-opening breakthrough for me, believe it or not.
As I deleted more and more books, I decided to just delete them all. Most of the time when I went to the library or Barnes & Noble, I would just walk around and browse the books in person because that list was too overwhelming for me anyway. So why not just clear the list completely?
It was like a literal weight was lifted off my shoulders when I deleted that digital list. And I’m still riding that high a few weeks later.
Now I view my currently empty To Read list as full of possibilities. It always was, but it didn’t feel like that to me anymore before. But now I’m excited to find new books I’m genuinely interested in! I haven’t added any books to that list yet, and I’m not sure when I will again, but right now it feels nice to not have the pressure of a zillion books I want to read all in one place.
I’m working on decluttering and reorganizing my life, and this was just one step out of many that I’m taking to get there. If something is overwhelming you, even if it’s something as seemingly small as a To Read list, do what you can to simplify and declutter. You may just be amazed at how free your mind and body start to feel again.
Photo by Eli Francis on Unsplash
