Oh my sweet baby j, was this a great book!!! Ahhh, like...so good. I want to be Sarah Wilson’s friend after reading this. If I was to put together a book on living with mental health- it would be constructed like this is. I am often writing random thoughts in the margins from the text body, and on napkins, and includes random tangents, and scientific sources, and and and random thoughts which are loosely connected.
Her book begins with The Worm’s Waking (Rumi)
This is how a human being can change.
There is a worm
addicted to eating grape leaves.
Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.
He is the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that does not need to devour.
Then what she does best is highlight how it’s okay to be where you are and do what you can. Her anxiety-language comes across in this book and I found myself laughing a few dozen points in this book. Seriously, I got some good chuckles. On more than one occasion, I thought ‘does she know me?!’.
She has ongoing cruel ironies where I thought to myself ‘too real’ such as:
“We cope with strangers better than our own mates when we’re anxious” “The anxious tend to seek solitude, yet we simultaneously crave connection” “The more banal the supposed trigger, the guiltier and more self-indulgent and pathetic we feel, thus adding to the anxious spiral”
In the second half of the book, there is a subsection about ‘smiling with your eyes’ which touched home for me. Mostly in the sense that, I can scroll through my camera or mobile device and notice every year when my period of past trauma really leads me to severe isolation management and agoraphobia eventually takes control. How do I see this? There are large gaps in the photos being taken. The very few that are, tend to see the pain and suffering in my eyes...I Can see just a fraction of who I am in them. The take-over of pain is hard to look at...so I don’t. There are times when I find myself in odd places...like the bathroom at a Home Depot, and I will wash my hands, look in the mirror and realize...I have avoided looking in the mirror for ‘x’ amount of months...’is that what I look like?!’, ‘where did the time go?’, ‘when will I be free from this?’ Maybe selfie culture does have a point in life...
The book is split into two sections. The first could be identified as ‘this is where you could be, and that is okay’ and the second as ‘this is where you could go, and all the options are okay’. Building on a prior book theme of affirmation, I found this was a good pairing. The book narrates the case to give yourself permission to affirm yourself, even if you are broken. ‘Affirm the pieces’...okay maybe she didn’t say that, but that was one of the takeaways I got from reading this book.
If you have a history of living with anxiety...or know a loved one who is anxious. Read this book!!! (I will be offering it to Caleb for some levity in an evening read!)