Watch me use my exceptional capacity of being a slacker to my own advantage when I profit off my backlog of 10+ unreviewed books to tick boxes off the CBR Bingo card like it’s nobody’s business. This was not planned, by the way – I’m just a slacker by nature.
And to be honest, this is actually very much in line with the theme for this particular book, which is supposed to be all about managing anxiety.
For those of you who don’t know Matt Haig, he is an extremely prolific author who writes across a plethora of genres, and who famously wrote Reasons to Stay Alive, a memoir about his own struggle with depression and anxiety. I never read it.
But this is the honorary sequel to that particular book (which I got for £3 on Audible), a non-fiction where Matt Haig points out how the entire planet has gone neurotic and how practically impossible it is to live in the world today and not be crippled by generalized anxiety when you stop and think about anything. I am not kidding: anything.
I’m not gonna lie, I live with a stable low-level of anxiety at any given moment. Sometimes it’s less noticeable, sometimes it causes my blood pressure to suddenly drop and for me to pass out in inconvenient places (such as the metro or the middle of an Amsterdam street when getting a call from my boss during a holiday) until I leave the continent and move back home to get rid of some stress in my life in an effort to avoid anxiety medication (I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it now, but at that point in my life I thought depression was not a real thing – don’t ask…).
Most of the time, however, I am a functional human being, so I deal.
And then I listened to this book.
The first half of it is dedicated to pointing out everything in the world one has to be anxious about. And there is one particular chapter where he start listing things I had never thought of being anxious about, but by the time he was done with it you can bet your behind that I was terrified of it all. I almost stopped cold on this book because it was just giving me more anxiety.
But after that he starts going about his personal experience and how he manages and deals with his anxiety and depression. And to be honest, what I took from it is that you need to find out what works for you and make no apologies about taking care of yourself.
For me, at this particular moment, this means using the CBR Bingo as incentive for actually posting my reviews instead of procrastinating so much that I’ll just seize up and abandon CBR altogether for the year as I have been wont to do. So there – another review of a book I read in April. Go me!
This book fulfills the prompt Self-Care in the CBR13 Bingo.