Books read last week:
It’s Not Always Depression by Hilary Jacobs Hendel (hardback, 4 stars)
The Shadow Cabinet by Juno Dawson (audio book with Nicole, 3 stars)
Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens (audio book, 3 stars)
Юра (Yura) by Maryna Grymych (Ukrainian ebook, in progress)
Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward (audio book with Nicole, in progress)
Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A. Snyder (audio book, in progress)
Yes, this is indeed a lot of books, even for me! I happened to finish and start books in each of my three concurrent book categories: reading with my eyes, listening with my ears, and listening together with my spouse Nicole 🙂
Last month I defended my dissertation, closing the grad school chapter of my life. I moved to the US in 2016 for a PhD program, and University of Washington has been my home base and my family for the last seven years. As I’m looking for jobs outside of academia, I find myself in that uncomfortable and exciting in-between space. Uncomfortable, because so many things that structured my life and my identity fell away the moment I graduated. Exciting, because this is an opportunity to build anew according to my values and desires.
Having left behind the things that defined my life—remember, up to this point the entire time I had lived in the US I was in grad school–I am faced with the age old question: “Who even am I?” Both academic culture and late-stage capitalism encourage us to equate ourselves with our work. Now that I’m in between careers, I get to investigate what a purposeful and fulfilled life looks like when I don’t have a word count or faculty feedback to boost my feeling of self-worth. This is all the more important to figure out because so much of job-searching is dealing with rejection.
Questions of identity and life purpose lend themselves well to reading books. They are excellent prompts for self-reflection, yes, but also for me well-rounded characters are the most important part of a book. Nothing disappoints me more than when I can’t get a feel for who the character is and what they want, or if they are one-dimensional. Both Lucky Red and The Shadow Cabinet fell into this category, unfortunately. The stories themselves themselves were decent, but the characters didn’t “come alive” for me, even though both books relay internal monologues. It felt like the character only got as much personality and motivation as was needed to move the plot along.
The three books that I started this week promise to be fruitful to “think with” about identity and purpose (although, as you know, next week I’ll likely be writing about a completely different topic). Let Us Descend is unflinching in its description of how enslavement strips a person of their identity. The protagonist, Annis, resists the soul-crushing experience of being transported and sold by holding on to her memories of her mother and her stories. Elements of magical realism are woven into the story, and I’m curious to see where this leads. Юра is a Ukrainian novel set in 1968 about the son of the Communist Party of Ukraine Central Committee’s secretary (about as high as you can get in Soviet politics) and a literary editor involved in the Sixtiers’ movement. I’ve only started reading it and haven’t even gotten to Yura’s perspective, but the tension between these parts of his identity will be at the center of the book. Nicole recommended Sister, Maiden, Monster to me because they are listening to it now and enjoying it. A virus changes the bodies of some people forever—then now cannot survive without consuming human blood or brains. Unlike most zombie stories, these people more or less preserve their mental capacities, so they have to come to terms with who they are now and how the society perceives them.
Hilary Jacobs’ book It’s Not Always Depression was the most impactful book this week. Let me say upfront that I still believe that depression—including my own—can be caused solely by chemical brain imbalance; Jacobs gives recognition to that in her book as well. Her point, however, is that often we feel depressed and “stuck” because we are not experiencing our feelings as they come up. Instead, we inhibit these feelings with shame or anxiety, or distract ourselves. This most often happens because at some point in our lives we learned that feeling a feeling or expressing it is not safe. When feelings are habitually not processed and released, they become trapped in our minds and bodies. Jacobs’ goal is to teach the reader to get back in tune with themselves, recognize their emotions, and go through them in a healthy way.
My therapist observed months ago that I really struggle not just with expressing, but even with allowing myself to feel anger. Suppressing my anger was an adaptive behavior that is deeply ingrained in me as a consequence of trauma; and I am ambivalent about exploring it because just feeling it—even if I never communicate it or act on it—makes me feel so out of control. I am afraid that I will become just like the people that had hurt me.
But anger has a function, and a crucial one at that. Anger lets us know that we perceive another’s behavior as harmful or disrespectful towards us. It is a warning sign that lets us address the situation—usually through boundary setting but sometimes through soul-searching: “Why did that make me angry even though rationally I understand it’s not a big deal?” For me, not being unable to feel anger was making it so much harder to stand up for my needs and wants, something I already struggle with. So these days, I try to give space to my feelings as they come up, even if it’s uncomfortable.
One of Jacobs’ big lessons is “feelings just are.” Feeling angry does not make me an angry person—hell, feeling angry doesn’t even always mean that I will do or say something angrily. It’s about time I started learning to accept every part of me that comes up without judgement. I started this week deep in the “who am I and what am I doing” existential spiral, and I am ending it by realizing that the more important question for me right now is “how do you learn to accept yourself whoever you are?”
I’m looking forward to what next week’s books bring.
Queer Desire and Kvas 