![]() ![]() Despite bi-monthly psychotherapy that continued throughout, the pandemic had taken toll after toll after toll until I couldn’t bear the everyday trauma of it all anymore. Suffice to say that, by the fall of 2021, this description adequately illustrated yours truly. The ability to function breaks down as the person becomes psychologically overloaded.” In their book One Sunny Afternoon: A Memoir of Trauma and Healing, forthcoming this August, Amanda Jetté Knox notes that terms like “emotional breakdown” or “mental health breakdown” have been used to “sum up a state of distress so severe as to make everyday life impossible. If anything, I avoided them almost as much as the plague we were living through, because no book of advice was going to have tips on how to implement said advice during some of human history’s most unprecedented times. I stopped pursuing self-help options throughout the pandemic’s first year. It sucks that a raging global pandemic prevented me from applying its principles beyond my bedroom walls, though. But this one was genuine and is still something I recommend to people struggling or being weighed down by the absurdities of everyday life, because so much of Schuster’s advice is helpful and applicable to the maladjusted millennial. I know what you’re thinking: another trendy self-help collection with a censored expletive in the title. One of the last “self-help” book of essays that I read before the onset of COVID-19 was Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies: And Other Rituals to Fix Your Life, From Someone Who’s Been Thereby Tara Schuster. But still I believed this was all in my power and therefore my fault. Laid out in plain black-and-white English, it’s no wonder I was always burning out. I’d started a podcast with my best friend as a passion project while also juggling multiple freelance writing jobs in order to fuel another passion and hopefully career. I’d changed part-time jobs to something I thought was less stressful while juggling an almost full-time university course load. By signing up you agree to our terms of useĬut to the beginning of 2020, when I felt that I had done everything in my power to control my life, my narrative, and my emotions, so therefore I should have no reason to still be feeling ugly feelings. Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. It’s why I’m weary of people who boast about how many books they read online. But this was several years before I’d received a chronic anxiety disorder diagnosis, so I still believed that all mental health issues big or small could be solved by throwing yourself into what you love at full speed, even if it starts contributing to your breakdown. I clung to the concept of “you are what you read” in the worst possible way, having foolishly fallen for the capitalistic belief that if only I could find the perfect book, the perfect movie, or the perfect TV show that would perfectly explain everything I was feeling and going through, then I could finally feel and move past them. I read Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinkingand Lily Bailey’s Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thoughtthinking they would help me make sense of myself and therefore clear the road to healing. There’s a certain blending of genres that’s occurred in the digital age whereby a memoir or essay collection can overlap with that of a book of advice or a self-help book, and this was precisely the sub-genre I started reading so fervently. This was when I first started reading books about mental health, thinking that if I could better understand my anxiety, then I would know how to better control it. I was still anxious all the time, and I coped with those emotions in ways both healthy and otherwise, one of which being compelling myself to finish piles of books from the library as fast as possible just to feel something. Of course, this sounds all well and good on paper, but my life, at least inwardly, was still not hunky dory. As Cady famously put it in Mean Girls, “All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you.” By the next year, I’d realized that I didn’t have to hold onto anxious rituals I’d kept since childhood in order to ensure my success both academic and otherwise - the universe was going to do what it was going to do, and I could only control myself. The year was 2018, and life was very different: I had just stumbled through my first year of university, doing completely fine in retrospect but feeling like I had no idea which way was up throughout pretty much all of it. I read anything from contemporary adult fiction, to thrillers, to YA, to essay collections and memoirs and, every now and then, a self-help book that I was secretly convinced would solve all my problems. Five years ago, my feed of recently read books was a bit more diverse in terms of genres. ![]()
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