Audiobooks Saved Me When I Couldn’t Save Myself

I’ve always loved reading. Getting lost in a book is one of the greatest things about being human. Our imaginations are these infinite machines that allow us to read a sentence and create universes in our mind’s eye.

If that’s not amazing, I don’t know what is.

Four years ago, my husband and I opened a sandwich shop called the Hot Wire Panini. As the name suggests, we specialized in hot-pressed sandwiches. We were busy right off the bat, but our startup funds were small, and we couldn’t afford staff. We were a mom and pop shop in the truest sense of the phrase.

I’ve never been afraid of hard work, but honestly, this was by far the most challenging job I had ever done. And I’ve raised two children!

We were putting in 10 to 13 hour days at the business. It was the kind of gruelling work that made you wonder, at the end of the day when your feet feel like they might very well fall off if it was all worth it.

I took the morning shift, which meant baking all the fresh bread and pastries for the lunchtime rush. I was not a cook at the time, so I was learning as I went. Some mornings I’d burn three loaves of bread and underbake a batch of 2 dozen cookies all before 7 AM. My confidence was flagging by the day.

My husband, who is a red seal chef, told me that I just needed to get into the groove. I had my doubts.

I missed curling up on the couch on rainy days and snuggling into a book. I couldn’t let go of the life I had lived only a few months before opening the business.

Maybe it was depression or anxiety or sleep deprivation, but I was beginning to act like a very different person.

I was short with my kids when they’d try to joke around with me — something we used to do regularly.

I was no longer affectionate with my husband.

I was distancing myself from friends and family — avoiding phone calls and outright ignoring text messages and emails.

I wanted my old life back. This entrepreneurship thing, wasn’t for me I had decided. The problem was this decision came too late. We had sunk our life savings into the business, and there was no turning back.

Feeling stuck in life is difficult. Add a pile of mounting debt and the lingering sense that you are worthless because you can’t bake a cupcake to save your life (or business in this case), and that’s just downright depressing.

I needed to make a change because changing my career wasn’t in my near future. So I sat down with myself and thought hard about what I could do to bring some of my previous creature comforts back into my life.

That’s when I thought of my books.

An entire wall of my living room is dedicated to the books I’ve read and relished. I love to read a book twice. There are always hidden messages in stories that we never catch the first time around. I can fall in love with the same characters again and again if given a chance.

Reading is a love language between our rational and irrational mind.

I needed to get stories back in my life. However, working the kind of hours I was working, I realized that traditional reading wouldn’t be realistic.

That’s when Stephen King reminded me about audiobooks.

I’d like to tell you that Stephen and I are great pals, and he is one person whom I never ignore the texts of, except that would make me a dirty rotten liar. I always ignore Stephen’s messages, just like I do all my messages.

No. Again, I’m lying. I regrettably do not know Stephen King except for when I have that recurring dream of him dressing up in a clown suit every time I read It.

While mindlessly flipping through internet pages one evening, waiting for sleep to take me, I found an article written by the King of Horror himself on why audiobooks are terrific.

“But man, when these things are good, they are really good. A Charles Dickens novel read by the late David Case is something you can almost bathe in.” -Stephen King, an excerpt from Stephen King on why he loves a good audiobook in Entertainment Weekly

Before reading this article, I sort of snubbed the audiobook. “That’s not real reading!” I’d tell people who told me they listened to their books.

But hey, if books on tape were good enough for Mr. King, then I guess I could give one a try. So I downloaded the app and got to work.

My first book? The Stand, by, you guessed it, ole Steve himself.

I fell in love almost immediately. What?! I can knead dough, do a sink full of dishes and listen to one of my all-time favourite stories all at the same time? Yes, please!

After The Stand, I started delving deeper into the audiobook world and purchased pretty much every book that Margaret Atwood and David Sedaris has ever written (and recorded for audio). I took on tomes like Moby Dick and A Game of Thrones that I had been too intimidated to try when reading by eyes and brain alone.

After a few weeks of listening nonstop to books while prepping in the early hours of the morning in a lonely sandwich shop, I realized that my attitude towards owning a business had shifted. I was looking forward to waking up at 4 AM if only to listen to my books for a few hours while working.

I started walking to work before the sun had even popped out from beneath the horizon. This, so I could get a few extra chapters in before opening up the shop. I put more effort into the business because I was happier and beginning to feel content in the life we, as new business owners, were carving out for ourselves.

I didn’t stay this obsessive with my audiobook consumption, but I still do listen to my books daily. I read now, too, since my life is a bit more relaxed than it was back then, but audiobooks will always hold a special place in my heart.

During a pivotal time in my life, when I thought that I had taken on far more than I could chew, it was audiobooks that got me through and helped me discover what I am capable of achieving.