From a young age, I was a voracious reader. My love of reading would manifest itself through my refusal to go to bed until my parents would read me a bedtime story or through my attempts at pretending to read by tracing my finger along words as I recited The Cat in the Hat or my other favorite books. I eventually graduated to doing actual reading of my own, completing series like The Magic Treehouse and Harry Potter. This all seemed like a natural progression for my life; I come from a family of English majors and my sister is a published poet with a PhD in creative writing. However, as I sat in my sophomore year English class staring down at Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, I realized that somewhere along the road I had begun to see reading as a chore rather than a hobby.
In seventh grade, as my English teacher passed out copies of our class book And Then There Were None she also gave each of us a paper. On it were instructions on how to annotate a story for her class, an assortment of characters and symbols each with a corresponding place to be used. As a twelve year old, I was unfamiliar with the concept of annotating a story but was open to the idea after it was 
explained to me. Over the next several days, I read the book and gave annotating a try. As a question or revelation came to my mind, I jotted it down in the margins. Quickly, I found her system cumbersome and began to just write my thoughts as they crossed my mind, ignoring her system and weekly quotas for different thoughts. At the end of the week, as the teacher walked around to look through our annotations, she paused at my desk as she flicked through the pages of my novel. Ultimately, she returned my book to me and told me that I had not followed her guidelines and would lose points on the assignment. This was the first time that I understood that reading was a graded responsibility, even though the annotation system was rather rudimentary. Up until this point, I had always thought of reading as something that I did voluntarily but now I began to see it as just another part of school.
In psychology, an idea known as the over justification effect states that offering extrinsic rewards for a task that an individual has intrinsic motivation to do 
ultimately leads to decreased interest or pleasure in an activity. While previously I had always been glued to a book, the over justification effect proved to be a powerful solvent, gnawing away at my bond with reading over the next several years of my life. This only grew worse as I entered high school. With increased commitments and responsibilities came more work to be done and an end to leisure reading all together. The reading I did came in the form of textbooks and texts for English all in the pursuit of a grade.
While my relationship with reading has not and may never fully recover, I have managed to reverse this course. A silver lining I found from the isolation of quarantine during the spring and early summer months was that, with internships cancelled and social gatherings limited, I once more had time to read. In the pages of The Great Gatsby I found memories of my younger self, distracted from the book only by the excitement of discovering the contents on the next page. This trend appears to be continuing, online school has left me with plenty of time to read, both for classes and leisure. While recent events have raised many questions about my immediate future, I know that, in one way or another, reading will be a part of the current and following chapters of my life.