Most of the men, women and children at the Parker Library look at me with intense disgust each day when I schlep my unshowered ass, barely covered by my running shorts, up the stairs to settle into my nook of sadness where I will frantically send out job applications for several hours. And then when I have finally reached my emotional limit for the day after applying to Target and the local gas station I pick my things up and wander over to the aisle of self-help books. This aisle is conveniently located right behind the row of librarians at their desks and as I peruse the various titles claiming to grant me an instantaneously enchanting life I can feel them saying to themselves with sick satisfaction “Oh so this is why she looks like a sewer rat with a great, perky can.”
Many of these books are truly, truly terrible. If books like The Joy of Solo Sex or Liquor Store Robbery for Dummies can get published and successfully find their way onto the shelves of a suburban library then I probably have a shot at becoming Henry David Thoreau.
Normally I do a lot of Googling about a book before actually reading said book and while some might argue that this ruins the surprise or that it is a waste of time to read a books worth of material about a book before even reading the book, I believe that there is no action worth taking in life that should not be extensively Googled beforehand. So far I have managed to avoid a lot of shitty books this way. Sometimes a book that is particularly shitty and sneaky will make its way into my reading pile but I have no problem dismissing a book as a piece of crap less than five pages in, much like I have dismissed this blog as another outlet for a white female Millennial to use cat GIFs to talk about how hard life is.
So now that I’ve slowly plowed my way through most of the good bits of the library’s self-help section I feel that I can make some recommendations for anyone else out there who feels so starved for advice that taking 48 hours to plow through The Joy of Solo Sex seems like a super fun weekend plan. The following post summarizes several of my forays into the joy of solo self-help and I truly hope you will have more epiphanies from these various works than did or at least that you will forego the self-help section completely and instead peruse whatever section contains Fifty Shades of Gray and Virgin River. (For the record, all book titles used in this post are actual titles of actual books).
The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Douglas Abrams (one of these things is not like the other…..)
This book is not to be confused with The Joy of Solo Sex, which leads me to my first critique: why isn’t anyone asking the Dalai Lama more questions about masturbation? Isn’t that the purpose of these books where we get to go inside the mind of great religious and political leaders? Shame on you Douglas Abrams, you’ve let the people down.
Anyway, I went into this book a little wary since I don’t typically trust the self-help books that have anything to do with happiness in the title–maybe this is why nothing I read seems to actually help?? Also I read this book while working in a hospital on a unit for patients with traumatic brain injuries and most of the time I was going from a room where a dude was missing a third of his skull to the nurses desk where I could read about cultivating a joyful existence. I don’t know if the juxtaposition is sickening or perfect. I also remember reading the book and seeing how a person in any other situation except for my own could read this and find a way to live joyfully.
The premise of the book is that the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu are having a get together to chat about life and they are both super old and they might never see each other again. I felt hopeful that one day I would be able to actually use some of the words of wisdom from Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. I felt really unhopeful because I think I would be setting my expectations way to high if I aimed to ever be even a third as happy, cute or wise as the Dalai Lama. Also this book says that the Dalai Lama only eats two meals a day and frankly it just seems stupid to call it quits after lunch. I don’t care if you are the one and only spiritual leader of the people of Tibet. I’m the one and only spiritual leader of my putrid, decaying soul and I’ll eat dinner and as much ice cream as I damn well please. But I digress.
At the end of the day, a person is only going to use help if they want to be helped and I was not ready to be helped by this book and I am still not ready to be helped by this book! Maybe in ten years when I’m a millionaire and Leonardo Dicaprio is my husband I will be more prepared to absorb the contents of this fine piece of literature. It has a lot to offer but honestly when the Dalai Lama launched into this lovely monologue on how he considers being exiled from his own country a great gift because he was able to help and interact with so many people outside of Tibet, I sat there and thought “Oh please, being exiled from your spiritual homeland is child’s play. Try living in my parents house for six months pal!”
I highly recommend The Book of Joy but I also highly recommend that you not be as much of a whiny boob as I was while reading it. At least this book taught me that I should be accepting and loving of the fact that I’m being a boob, as long as I’m working towards not being a boob. And so far I have half of that totally down.
Reasons To Stay Alive by Matt Haig
One of Matt’s reasons to stay alive is being able to choose a pair of socks without crying. It’s a kind of disturbing thing to be thankful for but I guess you have to start somewhere. And so Matt provides some more legitimate reasons for anyone who can’t simply get by on the joy of choosing to wear your novelty wool socks that say things like “Duchess of Sassytown!” in neon pink around the ankle instead of the purple and orange pair emblazoned with pictures of tacos and hamburgers. Matt has had some pretty dark times and almost waltzed off the edge of a cliff at age 24 but at the last minute he chickened out (although that isn’t exactly the phrasing he used) and now he’s glad he didn’t waltz off the cliff! And then he wrote a book about it! The important message here, kids, is that if life gets really shitty you simply need to hang on long enough to write about 70,000 words about it.
It seems that there are more and more books these days where people open up about their depression or anxiety or OCD (highly recommend The Man Who Couldn’t Stop) or trichotillomania or whatever other bizarre mental health issues we have these days. (Sadly none of the schizophrenics seem to be producing large bodies of literature and that’s a pity because those are the people whose inner workings would actually be fun to hear about.) I respect that Matt doesn’t treat his depression and anxiety as goofy novelty items in his book the way that some authors seem to do. He isn’t wildly hilarious and there aren’t any cringe worthy moments of horror where he recounts some heinous thing he did in an addled state of mind and as a result the book is very honest in a way that is clean and weirdly soothing.
This isn’t a self-help book, per se, but it helps oodles more than something titled The Power of Positive Thinking or The Untethered Soul because while all of these books may be written by authors who claim to have lived with the power of negative thinking and battled their way through highly tethered souls Matt doesn’t seem like he is selling something and he doesn’t lay down a cute seven step plan to get yourself out of a deep, dark hole, though he has likely been in a hole much deeper than the dude that wrote Awaken The Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical, and Financial Destiny!. (Again, this is a real book).
Mainly the reader just gets to sit with Matt and his pain as he shares big and little things that have helped him out over the years. Some of his reasons to stay alive are very confusing to me, namely the claim that listening to the Beach Boys is a reason to not off yourself. But a lot of his reasons are quite sound and to the point and Matt encourages the reader to find his or her own reasons to stay alive. I do question the mental faculties of someone who is that much of a Beach Boys enthusiast but maybe it says more about me than it does Matt that I’m more concerned about his music taste than I am his wildly fragile mental health.
Ultimately, the reader is the lucky recipient of wisdom gained over the culmination of years and years of intense therapy. Which is excellent for me because I don’t have health insurance right now but I do have a library card.
Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte
I will be honest, I didn’t finish this book. I returned this thing to the library not because it sucked but in fact because it was a little too good at capturing the feeling of stress and panic over time and money and family and work and laundry and paper mache homework projects and sudden veterinarian visits and PTA meetings and other shit I don’t even have to worry about yet. This book was like looking at myself ten years in the future and it was fucking horrific. I’m under enough stress without any of that bullshit, the last thing I need is 250 pages detailing just how exasperated I’m going to feel for the rest of my life. I’m sure that the author eventually got to the part where she tells you how to organize everything and convinces you that life really is simple and delightful and you truly do have time for all that matters. But I didn’t have the strength to hold on until she presented me with that solution.
How To Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric
If there is one thing I learned from this book, it is that I never deserved to win the school spelling bee in eighth grade because even after picking this book up fifty times, I had to flip back and forth between a Google tab and the tab containing my writing for this blog post fifty times just to spell “Krznaric” right now. Although the reader can only guess that the early school days of Roman’s life were challenging due to the impossibly large burden of his last name, he has come out on the other side and produced a really excellent book. He argues that a fulfilling career can mean many different things to many different people and presents several strategies for creating one or more fulfilling careers.
I enjoyed the down to earth practicality of this book. There isn’t anything wildly flowery going on here, just concrete strategies for approaching your career amalgamated with some delightful forays into philosophy and psychology. Roman argues that a fulfilling job is made up of meaning, flow, and freedom. For those who do not know about “flow”: it is a state of being so immersed in an activity that one loses track of time and other silly pressing matters. Much of this book is dedicated to tackling the fear that keeps individuals from switching careers and seeking out better circumstances and Roman manages to give the reader a solid nudge to take the leap without digressing into inspirational diatribes about potential.
One big takeaway from Mr. Knzlanaricksdkzzz: you aren’t going to have a sudden epiphany about your calling in life. More likely, you will find an interest and it will slowly grow and evolve into a job and a career. I have an epiphany every other night about my true calling in life so thank god I can stop taking those seriously. It was getting exhausting. Roman includes several activities and a lot of thought provoking questions designed to make the reader parse out what they actually want in a career. One activity asks the reader to list five parallel universe scenarios where in each universe they have a different career they might like. I did this very late at night and when I looked at my list the next morning one bullet point just said “Hawaii.”
Perhaps the largest insight that Roman provides is that we so often look to introspection to find the perfect career path when in reality humans are terrible at predicting what they will like and it is only through experience that we can put together the elements of a fulfilling career. So now that I’ve accepted a job in a lab when I know for a fact I fucking hate labs I can employ one of Roman’s strategies here and utilize every free moment of my week to shadow doctors and volunteer at cantaloupe stands and dance naked for money because who knows I might love it! (The strategy included in the book does not explicitly call for becoming a stripper but I think that Roman would appreciate my willingness to let loose and try anything for the sake of my blossoming career.)
What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson
Truthfully, I was wandering around my favorite section of the library–honest to God I should just install a kitchenette and a tiny bed between the two shelves–when I saw Po’s giant beautiful, tan face framed by his care-free locks of blonde hair on the back of a book and said “That man is hot.” And then I picked up the book and realized it was actually exactly what I had been looking for. Suck on that, Margaret: I did get something out of judging a book solely on the author’s deliciously good looks. (Side note: do NOT Google Po Bronson now. The book was written many years ago and while time has been good to Po it has not been as good to him as it has to George Clooney.)
Po begins the book by asking a lot of incredibly perceptive questions about careers, the book he aimed to create, and life. I’m sorry if my description sounds too vague but he really does dive right into asking the hard questions about what it means to have the opportunity to do something with your life. I loved this book because it gave me pages and pages of exactly what I am craving right now: stories from real fucking people. I want to hear how someone else once lived with their parents for a year. I want to know that a man who worked in landscaping for a year after college ended up being a successful entrepreneur later in life. I want to read the fears and anxieties of other human beings exploring their careers and their lives and recognize these terrors within myself. I think successful books make the reader feel less alone by saying “Look, here is another person with the same experiences and views you didn’t believe anyone else had.”
So reading 30 plus stories about people trying to navigate the world was basically like watching 30 plus pornos. (People this is where I’m at, I’d rather be reading about career advice than thinking about sex. Someone should write a book about that so I can feel less freakish.) But here is the kicker: very, very few of the people Po spoke with were at the conclusion of their journey and many of them were smack in the middle of their career crises. But Po’s refusal to give the reader more than a handful of neat and tidy endings actually enhances the experience. You are forced to sit with these individuals in their pain and confusion and compare it and contrast it with your own. And all the while Po is dropping tiny pieces of wisdom throughout each chapter.
Since he interviewed hundreds of people I trust that whatever he is sharing with us is good stuff. I also know it’s good stuff because at no point does he launch into the “Follow your passion!” bullshit. He provides tangible nuggets of insight that are applicable to any career situation and he is so perceptive in the way he explores all the different facets of work and life and love. Did I emerge from this book with an epiphany about my true calling? No. But I actually consider that a success.
Maybe you will read all of these books, maybe you will read none of these books. But if you read just a single title mentioned in this post I sincerely hope and pray that it is The Joy of Solo Sex. Also, if you are the author of The Joy of Solo Sex and you are reading this, you can feel free to forward a couple thousand dollars my way as a small payment for the droves of people that will be flocking to Amazon to get their sticky hands on a copy.
May your day be filled with dreams of hot Po,
Julia
Going Nowhere Fast 