A binge person

I am a binge person.

When ​I start reading, I will read for hours and sometimes days. There were long periods in my life when it was the only thing I really did, everything else - school, work, sleep, interacting with people - just annoying clutter. I used to devour book after book. With time, I learned to control the addiction, but my core personality hasn't changed one bit.

I won't start watching a drama series which is not finished. Waiting a week for another episode would drive me crazy. I binge watch, just as I binge read (though never both during the same stretch of time), and then walk around bleary-eyed and cranky from too little sleep because unfortunately, it is impossible to speed up the process and watch faster. Film series are in this aspect much less binge-friendly than books.

And when I started writing The Trouble with Belonging, it was a good few months of writing and hardly anything else. No reading. No watching. No playing. No talking. No surfing the Internet, save the research for the book. I was a writing monk.

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I used to wonder if other people are like that, too. Now I know that most are not, and it's  easy to recognize another binge person. They are those irritating weirdos obsessed with something they are doing at the moment to such a degree that they can hardly pay attention to anything else, and you can see how they struggle and have to make an effort to stay tuned to the normal life around them.
​If you feel sorry for them, don't. There's a big chance they are actually quite happy in their madness.