Finding happiness in my happy place

Recently, I was so concerned about being a plagiarizer and also protecting myself from being discouraged in reading ideas or themes or symbolism in another person's work that I've been thinking about, that I cut myself off from reading. Since reading is basically half of my "living" I succussfully cut myself off from living a full life. Or, better stated, I began to live a half life. In doing so, I also cut in half my resources for creativity.

Really, this is all so silly, because it's not that I'm even afraid of plagiarism, as I'm not even tempted to splice huge passages of novels and claim them as my own. It's more like I feel the need to have an original and unique story, that despite what other writers have said about how a writer's life experiences and perspectives automatically create a unique perspective on a theme or story, I still feel that mine should be utterly unique. That my terms and worlds need to stand alone, and cannot be referential in any way. Stupid, I know, but that's just my crazy brain thinking crazy things.

I know that themes have been done before. Heck, look at the plethora of vampire/werewolf/faerie tales that have been created, each with their own particular twist of the respective lore. And, as a reader, I never feel like I'm being gypped rereading a similar experience because the stories are always different. (Kind of like work gossip, which usually involves the same people and circumstances, but never gets boring.)

I realize that I'm being hard on myself but what I stupid thing to punish myself over. If reading makes me happy, I ought to be reading. That is my first love (in the literary sense). The writing is just an extension of that, and the one in which most people would recognize as a "paying" occupation. But, oh what I wouldn't give for a world that recognized worth in paying citizens to read. What a wonderful world that would be.