“I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.“
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath,Sylvia Plath
I’ve been in a reading frenzy this past month, here’s what I’ve actually finished.
Piranesi is the most recent book I’ve read, and I’ve got the biggest book hangover now. Review coming soon, cannot recommended it enough. Drop you current reads and recommendations, cozy book season has officially begun.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I did a book review. I do know that there have been several books I have read between my last entry and now, but this…this is the book I just had to post about.
This last year had been a doozy, not just myself but for the entire world. As a health care professional, I’ve struggled mentally, emotionally, and physically with the stress of working during a pandemic. As such, I’ve been grappling with what I want out of life and what direction it’s taking. And in doing so, certain regrets have surfaced and forced me to confront them.
Haig’s writing is mesmerizing, combining amazing story telling with philosophy without becoming overly weighed down. In a world where there has been so much sadness, I am so grateful to have had the chance to read a book that exudes hope and the promise of life itself.
I finished this book in a day, partially because it’s only 288 pages, but mostly because it’s just that good. I can’t recommend it enough, and am so happy to give it a place on my favorites shelf.
Wie weit geht ein Vater, um seine Tochter vor der Welt zu schützen? Beklemmend, bewegend und zutiefst zu Herzen gehend: Matt Haigs psychologischer Roman über die zerstörerische Kraft von Angst und Liebe.
Wann wird Liebe zu Besessenheit?
Drei Mal schon musste Antiquitätenhändler Terence Cave den Verlust eines geliebten Menschen verkraften: erst den Selbstmord seiner Mutter, dann den Mord an…
A friend recommended the book ‘Reasons To Stay Alive’ by Matt Haig to me and I am honestly so thankful they did.
I’m not an avid reader and I hardly ever read to fill my spare time, but something about this book has resonated with me and I haven’t been able to put it down since I bought it.
I don’t recall a time when reading something has produced such a strong emotion from me, but by the time I finished this paragraph, I was crying uncontrollably. This book, for those who don’t know about it, is a real life account of one man’s journey through mental illness and although everyone’s experience of mental illness is different, there is something in his writing that is absolutely relatable. Perhaps it’s his way of being able to express confusing and often, alien emotions in words which is something I always struggled to do, but reading this book I realised I was not alone. Suffering from depression and experiencing self harm and suicidal thoughts always made me feel so alone, even though I was lucky to have the support of some amazing people, I still felt isolated because I didn’t want to be labelled by my mental illness and this book made me realise I’m not the only person going through this.
There was a time in my life I will never be able to forget because I came so close to ending my life. During that time I remember thinking the pain was never going to end and despite the efforts of the people around me, I didn’t see a point in continuing. However, I was wrong. Since then I’ve learnt to appreciate the smaller accomplishes in life and to celebrate the small and seemingly insignificant things because nothing is insignificant anymore. At the end of my day, I try to think of just one good thing that happened to me and more often than not there’s more than one thing to think about. Life is worth living even when you believe it’s not.
If any of my followers are struggling through difficult times, please remember you are not alone in this life. Help and support is available wherever you choose to look for it and I understand the courage and strength it takes to ask for that help, but please believe me that things get better.
My ask box is always open if anyone wants to chat, vent their problems, needs help or simply wants to ask questions about my personal experience. I am more than happy to talk to any of you
“Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.”
“That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.”
“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.”
Sleepy Readathon April1st - started the month (and two weeks break) off lightly by reading some passages of the comfort book by Matt Haig. Planning on starting a book off my TBR tonight.
How I love my books. Not all are pictured. I bought more again. Reading more books of authors I don’t know is so fascinating! Reading different books by one author is just as interesting too!
Liebe Bücherfreunde,heute ist wieder Mittendrin-Mittwoch, gerne möchte ich euch das Buch vorstellen, welches mich momentan beschäftigt. Es ist The Comfort Book von Matt Haig. Zugegeben, ich habe bisher noch nichts von diesem Autor gelesen, aber einige Passagen in diesem Sammelsurium an Texten inspirieren mich, geben einen Einblick in grosse Klassiker der Weltliteratur und versprühen eine innere…
I just finished reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, and it left me pondering about my life. The book tells a story about a woman getting a second chance and making different decisions that affected the outcome of her life.
I know we all spend time thinking about the “what ifs” of our lives. It’s something we can’t help. There’s the small decisions like: what if I had gotten the iced chai instead of the iced coffee, but then there’s the big decisions of: what if I moved to Phoenix instead of Germany?
When i think about the major decisions that have affected my life a few that come to mind are: choosing the college I went to, choosing to join the sorority I did, choosing my major, moving to a foreign country instead of to the big city I promised my friends after college, then working at a national park.
I’ll even go further back to think about if certain events that I had no control over didn’t happen. What if my dad didn’t die? What if my nana and papa never got divorced? What if the pandemic never happened?
Younger me would dwell on some of these questions and be really upset about this. But the older and present me is aware of what might have happened and the things I would have missed out on if my life didn’t turn out the way it had.
Going to my college and joining my sorority led me to meeting my best friends. I truly believe I am the reason they all became the friends they are now. Two of them might have been friends without my help or other paths would have led them to all meet, but I know I helped make it happen. Then when it comes to what i decided to major in. It all started because I wanted to take the intro level class to learn more about what it offered but I couldn’t take the class unless that was my major, so i switched it then and there and stuck with it ever since. Then because of that my uncle told me about a program working at a hotel abroad. Moving to the foreign country allowed me to live the dream i wanted and meet friends that I was able to go through such new and important life events with. I would have regretted moving to the big city because I now know the pandemic would have happened and my dream of being abroad would have been pushed off even more. If I had moved there, it never would have never led me to working at this national park because the reason I’m here is because one of my friends that I worked abroad with told me about it and another one pushed us into applying here.
Then theres the deeper ones that I had no control over and happened because of the decisions of others: If my dad did not die, my youngest sister would probably have never been born (considering we have different dads). My parents would have probably split up due to the differences they both wanted in life and how my mom described their relationship, then that would have led me to being raised in a broken home, moving back and forth, potentially never having lived the life that has made me appreciate the world around me and caused me to have a wandering soul. If my nana and papa never got divorced, I think I would still have a good relationship with them. But if they had stayed together, I know they would not have been happy and that could have made it even worse than it already is. Then theres the one we all feel because we all had to experience it: the pandemic. I’ll post an excerpt from my insta post that describes my feeling on the year of 2020: “This year sucked in more ways than one and so many tears were shed. I think we all hoped for 2020 to be our year. I had planned to see all of Europe & I had been considering staying in Germany until December of 2021. But it was cut short. I lost my job and was sent back to so much unknown. But I didn’t think it was fair to say that everything went wrong. So I wanted to use this time to reflect and share some genuine moments of me in my happiest form. This year was saved by the people I shared this time with. How blessed are you to be able to meet so many people that make a place so hard to leave? Someone play Happiest Year by Jaymes Young & How It Ends by DeVotchKa bc I’d like to dedicate it to them.” I found my love for reading again. I found worlds and characters that changed me for the better. I dream of stranger worlds now. I want to be a better person. I found comfort in being by myself. I no longer want to find pleasure in a moment only to be filled with regret after and live that constant loop. I am happy. This is what the book really made me think about: This is my life and any other life would be a fraud. This is everything I’ve worked towards and even though I could imagine it another way, I know I wouldn’t want it any other way.
I’ve had this book on my TBR for a while now and here are the quotes that really stood out to me in this book:
And though she’d studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.
‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,’ Thoreau had said. ‘Live the life you imagined’.
‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’
It was hard to remember what he had sounded like before. What he had been like, precisely. But that was the nature of memory… Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.
This was the life she had been mourning for. This was the life she had beaten herself up for not living. This was the timeline she thought she had regretted not existing in.
The only way to learn is to live.
‘If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace your you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise..’
For Sylvia Plath, existence was a fig tree and each possible life she could live- the happily-married one, the successful poet one - was this sweet juicy fig, but she couldn’t get to taste the sweet juicy figs, so they just rotted right in front of her. It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don’t live.
Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.
The life of a human, according to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, was of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.
‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.’
I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.
All good things are wild and free.
You can have everything and feel nothing.
‘I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths,’ she said, realising something for the first time. ‘But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths… Who knows? Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.’
‘…It seems impossible to live without hurting people.’ ‘Thats because it is.’
‘I am saying that the thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory. You have to keep going.’
It was as though she had reached some state of acceptance about life - that if there was a bad experience, there would only be bad experiences. She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.
‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’
A fear of what she was feeling. Love. You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.
What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind.
