Words by Lia Gutierrez

Since the pandemic, my sense of time has felt permanently warped. I think of 2018 as the year my sister was born. 2020 as the beginning of the lockdown. 2022 as the year I graduated high school. My reality has vastly changed since then, but the particularities are unclear to me. Who have I become in the two years that seemed to have been lost? Who have I become since? The distance of the years of the pandemic from my present self dawns on me in currents. I wake up as though my body has been forcefully removed from rest. It is 2025 and I have yet to reckon with what has elapsed. I have yet to fully make peace with the sharp authority that is time.

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Instead of measuring my life in years, I measure it in words. Reading, writing, and articulating are some of the few things that have helped me keep track. There are particular words I have grappled with that have become emblematic of a certain period of my life. There was a point in my life when the word cycle needed to be interrogated. I spoke of it in class, at home with my mother, my stepdad, my journal. I tired endlessly over what it meant to be stuck in repetition. It meant everything and then nothing. Such is the nature of these kinds of things; you find a means of surpassing it eventually.

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When I entered college, it was the word passion. Followed by the question, what do you want to do with your life? I could not comprehend that question. I had chosen a creative field where passion was supposedly a given, but no longer seemed relevant—not to me nor my peers. The word turned meaningless with every utterance. Now, the word is practicum. I don’t understand it. I’m a little afraid of it. But soon, it will be another unknown thing that will assume its appropriate significance. All the unknowns will assume their appropriate significance. Which is to say, they will pass.

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Much like the words that have come to serve as a history of my mind’s dwellings, I have found a new fixation in my reading habits. This time, it’s not quite as simple as having one particular word as an entry point to further inquiry. My pondering is not just fixed on the word reading, or the word literature, or the word writing, even. This particular problematizing is slippery, in that if I think about reading for long enough, I’m bound to think about my mother, who was the first to instill the value of reading in me and the first to prompt my need for recluse. Or my life in Ateneo, a life made possible through generations worth of sacrifice, of compromise, and of guilt.

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Thinking about reading for too long entails a confrontation with gender, class, and the conversations that sustain us—the very same conversations that fail us. When I think about the role of reading in my life, I think about how it has exercised my imagination. I think about how it teaches me to live in the failure of words to truly encapsulate what these lives consist of. That it is through this persistent failure that I may reach for language, where possibilities break wide open. Nothing worth trusting is infallible.

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In October of last year, The Atlantic published an article titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” It’s the same narrative we are always confronted with—that there are too many things competing for our attention; that TikTok and Instagram are corrupting our ability to sustain interest in reading; that academic institutions are producing less and less insightful readers, reducing the reading list to half and expecting still that students won’t bother to read the full text. This to me is another instance of a central narrative I am learning to move past. I understand it. It has resonated. It no longer does as much. Perhaps what impedes reading is not other forces competing for our attention, but dominating narratives that no longer seek nuance, and instead, diminish that which they depict.

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What remains true is that social conditions reflect the culture of readership and that there is hardly any time to read when there are more immediate concerns at hand. Those dictates not only define our reading habits, but also our ability to determine what means something and what doesn’t. Reading is a means of negotiating authority. I’ve been reading since I was in preschool, but I trace the significance of my reading life to the pandemic, when everything shifted on its axis; when there was no choice but to question, to interrogate, and then to fall flat on your ass. To recognize both futility and urgency. When I think about what’s absent in my reading life, it is not the instilling of values. It is not discipline or attention (though, those are points of stress). It is permission. It is refusal. I refuse to subscribe to narratives that diminish.

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Agency is yet another one of those words I’ve thrown around in my college life. I understand it in theory. Although, how it applies to my actions and choices is determined day by day. What is agency to me? I have barely a clue. Perhaps only to like what I like. To love whom I love. To develop one’s taste; to cultivate an experience of pleasure. Reading is a conviction. It has been an avenue for resolve. But in order to love anything, one must learn to love it among other things. One must know and accept that it is not the only source of conviction. It is not the only avenue for resolve. What concerns me about declining readership is not that we are losing the means of negotiating authority, but that the means are becoming less available to us; our options are slimming.

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Reading is about enacting choices. It expands our possibilities. Reading is among many other things that enable us to decide what’s meaningful amid social conditions that narrow our choices. In 2020, Zadie Smith posited writing as simply something to fill the time. Reading is no different. The hierarchy of reading, writing, baking, or sewing is make-believe. Each endeavor is its own liberation. A dear friend of mine likes to arrange flowers.

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Perhaps most unproductive to the argument for the criticality of reading is condescension. Reading humbles. Reading dissipates the divide between the personal experience and the definitive world. We all know instinctively, but perhaps are slower to truly learn, that an intellectual practice is an emotional one. Too many times, I have called upon the wisdom of Audre Lorde. In her groundbreaking essay “The Uses of the Erotic,” she articulates that the power of anything stems from our deepest emotional capacities. Part of the permission reading grants is the quiet affirmation of the range of our experiences.

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I love to read because it awakens my senses. It enables me to set my own pace. To learn to have faith and also to question my devotion. How distant are the years of the pandemic, the experience of utter confusion and loss, grief, anger, dissatisfaction, distaste? Bitterness and tenderness alike. Only words away.

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Lia Gutierrez is in constant distress. She’s overly sentimental. Her time as the 72nd English Editor of HEIGHTS is coming to an end. She loved (almost) every second of it. She got to know the coolest, warmest, funniest people. Everything she does is unsatisfying to her, but she has people around her who make her feel content and grateful. She’s very lucky.