Anna Lembke

But it was all about getting to that moment and getting a certain very specific feeling.

And I became the possessor of the knowledge that if you take any romance novel and you open it up to two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through, you'll get right to the point.

Which is to say, these romance novels are engineered.

They're written according to a recipe.

Soon to be no longer.

First of all, I didn't really see what was happening as it was happening.

I would occasionally joke to friends, oh, I'm so addicted to vampire romance novels or romance novels in general.

But just by being able to joke about it, I felt that that must mean I'm really not addicted to it or it's not really a problem.

The other thing was that because of the technology in large part, I could do the behavior secretly.

Once I got the Kindle, you know, I could be reading something on that Kindle that nobody else knew what I was reading.

Whereas before, I wouldn't want to be seen reading that anywhere.

That would just be really embarrassing.

But on a Kindle, like it was anonymous.

Right.

As it was happening, I didn't really see it happening and I didn't relate it as being similar to what my patients were going through.

That I really only saw in retrospect.

But I started to be less interested in my work.

Like again, the work that had given me meaning and purpose and joy started to be dull and gray and boring.

And I found myself less engaged and more just wanting to rush through the work so that I could go home and read romance novels.

Well, there was one day, and this was sort of near the sort of culmination of this behavior.