*RuPaul voice* CATEGORY IS: Contemporary Young Adult Fiction Literature This was my second fiction book for adults. It was the first one that had a schmucky grin on plastered on my face during most of the read. There was a lot of cuteness in it. However, cuteness aside, the book centers around a young individual who is going through the process of grief and dealing with her internalized feelings of loneliness.
It helped to feed into and support my world-view of mental health patients needing to be met where they are and not demand them to be somewhere else in order to connect with the compassion and support they need to feel secure enough to take the next steps in their recovery process. Though coming into her life in a digital medium by an alias of SN, she was met with her grief in where she was. Three things at a time, helped to refocus and heal where she was in her life, and allowed her to let go of feeling abandoned in not processing her experience faster than she could. Someone took her for who she was and the patience to fully shine again. It was inspiring to pocket this imagery in the reading while allowing it to see where to find it in a nonfiction, real-world, life-type of way. The truth is we have a mainstreamed expectation of what our culture demands of how people process grief, which can tack on to a plethora of experiences outside of death. Those demands actually can be counterproductive to forward progression in healing. Some people need to sit a little longer. Some people need emotional hand-holding. Some people need a friendly ear to listen to. Some people don’t know what they need beyond what they know they do not need. Grief is confusing, fluid, and can intersect in ways that lead to baid-aiding a problem worth mending more intensively.
Grief is one of the lesser factors I deal with in therapy. The grief of past traumas, missed life experiences in recent years, the grief of seeing the potential and lack of forward motion in where you want to be are certainly interwoven in my mental health. In family therapy, there is also talk about how to trust and support Caleb while also teaching him how to listen to the communication I am sharing in this process. It feels, at times, like a lot, but this area of mental health is also laced with elements of hope...which doesn’t make the work seem at all like an impossible permanent burden.
Probably an over-related to, but just-fully so, quote from the book stuck out to me:
“Perfect days are for people with small, realizable dreams. Or maybe for all of us, they just happen in retrospect; they’re only now perfect because they contain something irrevocably and irretrievably lost.” - Julie Buxman, Tell Me Three Things
This is one of the reasons I use to be so active with photo-capturing life. They are still moments. They serve as a ticket back in time, to revisit those experiences otherwise lost to the present. They are time travel, reflecting on seeing a second type of lived experience on that moment IN the moment. Photos are a means to create a memories within a memory, wrapping them as gifts to yourself, and seen as a collection of dreams. Nothing can be lost this way, just momentarily out of view.
Ultimately, life is a collection of views. View from your outlooks, but when you find your tribe and you meet each other where you are and walk together in life, you are blessed with viewing from their outlooks as well. Blah blah blah If you are looking for an overall cute story, with universal elements of mental health struggles in an unreal, but relatable, character processing with great supports in her life, pick this book up. I read it over the course of the weekend.
#53booksin52weeks #grief #reflection #meetpeoplewheretheyare #findyourtribe #lovethemhard #yourjourneyisthedestination #tellmethreethings