Dear Reader: Brave Enough to Stop
Dear Reader,
Have you ever felt the pressure to finish a book you’ve started? Not the pressure of finding yourself halfway through a page-turner. (That kind of pressure’s one few authors will argue with you about!) But just the pressure to finish because you began.
I am the queen of abandoning books. I start way, way, WAY more than I finish, every single year.
And yet, for all that, I’ll admit that putting down an unhelpful book still isn’t something I find easy—or enjoyable.
Stopping a book halfway through takes courage. The particularly difficult, unglamorous, doesn’t-even-leave-me-feeling-like-a-hero courage that sometimes fails to look like a virtue at all.
Are You Brave Enough to Start?
This is a different question than the one we began with, but it’s a question that has to come first. Before we can be brave enough to stop something, we’ve got to be brave enough to start.
And that’s where this whole reading thing can become so complicated.
Loving and prioritizing good books is a valuable life skill. Fearing bad ones is a self-defeating trap. If we are scared about needing to stop, it’s just possible we’ll never even start.
Sounds crazy?
There are whole genres I left untouched for years for this very reason. I was afraid of what might be in them. I wasn’t comfortable with the possibility of encountering something that would make finishing the book undesirable. Instead of cultivating the courage to stop, I was demolishing the courage to start.
Why Is Stopping So Hard?
Stopping halfway through a book is seldom much fun.
(That 600-page assigned-reading biography on an obscure historical figure you didn’t even care about, is an exception to the rule, of course.)
Books aren’t written with a view to being easily-put-down. It’s just counterintuitive on the part of the writer! And so every time you have the courage to stop, you are left with questions. A ton of questions:
What happened next?
What happened after that?
Who was actually the thief, or the murderer, or the good guy?
How did it all turn out???
And then there are the more subtle questions lurking beneath the surface:
Did I really need to stop?
Was it actually doing me that much harm?
How come nobody else seemed to find the book a problem?
Is there something wrong with me, that I just can’t handle what everybody else can?
Brave Enough to Stop
Dear reader, can you do me one favour?
Give yourself a great big hug!
Stopping a story halfway through takes courage. A ton of it! It does leave you with an unresolved narrative. It does leave you with unanswered questions. But it doesn’t leave you all alone.
In fact, it leaves you very much not alone.
You aren’t in this by yourself. There are thousands of dedicated Christian authors and readers who are cheering you on.
Nor does being brave enough to stop always have to be as hard as it was the first time. A big piece of the battle is how we frame it in our minds. So here are a couple of tips for approaching the need to stop reading in a way that’s as healthy and pain-free as possible.
Good/Bad vs. Healthy/Unhealthy
I had a friend point out the difference between these two mindsets recently, and she was so right!
Approaching entertainment content as good/bad frequently ends up being anything but helpful. Don’t get me wrong. Books can be good. Books can be bad.
Food can be good. Poison can be bad.
But when we make sound eating choices, its usually not by identifying the difference between food and poison. It’s by identifying the difference between healthy food and unhealthy food.
Very few of us are addicted to arsenic. Many, many of us are addicted to chocolate and potato chips.
Recognising that a healthy diet is our aim allows us to evaluate books based on how they are actually impacting us personally.
Does that mean I’m never going to buy another bag of Ruffles?
Of course not!
But it does mean (hopefully) that I’m going to be conscious of whether I’m eating more Ruffles than broccoli—and adjust my diet accordingly.
Stopping for Now Isn’t Stopping Forever
Do you know how many difficult choices I have made more difficult than they needed to be, simply because I told myself my choice had to last forever?
Very, very few books are in the forever class.
I can remember agonizing as a teen over whether or not I needed to give up an author that I ultimately laid on the shelf for about a decade—and then came back to, with a far more mature perspective, at an age when her writing was a lot more helpful than it had been when I was younger.
Too often we add the trauma of the future on top of the pain of the present.
Don’t make reading decisions for twenty years down the road. Make them for today.
Healthy choices in the future can wait until the future actually arrives.
Healthy choices for today need all the strength and courage that you can bring.
Books Take Courage!
There’s no doubt about it. They do!
The good news is, a courageous reader is exactly what you’re growing up to be.
So don’t lose heart. Even when you have to close a book with a sigh.
You are making a choice that turns you into a better reader—and a better person. Most of all, you are a shining picture of God’s light, every time you are brave enough to stop.
Struggling with guilt about the peer pressure of reading? See our previous Dear Reader post:
We’ve all been there sometime or other. They’re all reading it! Is there something wrong with me if I want to read it, too?
