3 minute read
You smile at people. You say you are okay. You show up to work, to family events, to the obligations of daily life. But underneath the performance, you are exhausted. You are tired of pretending that everything is fine when it is not. You are tired of carrying something heavy and acting like it is light.
You have forgotten how to play because life has become serious. So serious. You have been carrying weights that were never meant to be carried. You have been performing a version of yourself that is competent, responsible, reliable. And somewhere along the way, you lost the person who used to laugh without thinking, who used to find wonder in small things, who used to believe that joy was not a luxury but a necessity.
Joy is not the denial of pain, it is the companion to it.
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But joy is not frivolous. Joy is survival. Joy is resistance. Joy is the thing that keeps you going when everything else says stop. Joy is not the denial of pain, it is the companion to it. It is the light that proves that darkness is not all there is.
These books will remind you of that.
Finding the sacred in the ordinary is not naïve it is necessary.
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They will make you laugh. They will make you cry. They will make you feel seen in ways you did not know you needed. They will prove that your weird family is a gift, that friendship is salvation, that finding the sacred in the ordinary is not naïve it is necessary.
These books will give you permission to let go, by reminding you that even in the midst of difficulty, joy is still possible. That laughter is a way of staying human and you deserve to laugh.
1. A Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
You haven’t read anything like this. Brosh’s simple drawings and brutally honest essays about depression, motivation, and her terrible dog will make you laugh until you cry and cry until you laugh. It validates experiences you couldn’t name. When Brosh draws depression as a pile of blankets she can’t escape, you will finally feel seen. Laughter becomes medicine.
2. Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
The poet’s memoir of moving back in with her parents including her father, a Catholic priest who converted after marriage is the funniest book you will read all year. Lockwood’s sentences are electric, her observations savage and tender. It proves that your weird family is a gift. Lockwood finds the sacred in the strange, the holy in the hilarious.
3. Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan
The 1992 classic that still reads like it was written yesterday. Four women in Phoenix navigate friendship, love, work, and the gap between what they were promised and what they have. McMillan writes dialogue that crackles and characters you would die for. It is a masterclass in friendship as salvation. You will text your people afterward and make plans. You will understand that you are not supposed to do life alone.
4. Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen
Quindlen’s meditation on aging is wise, warm, and funny. She writes about getting older not as decline but as liberation; caring less what people think, knowing what matters, finally being yourself. It makes you look forward to every age. Whatever decade you are in, Quindlen shows you what is coming and why it is good. October becomes a month of contentment.
5. Louis and the Winter Circus by Leo Zeilig
A children’s book that belongs on every adult’s shelf. Louis, a young boy in London, builds a winter circus with his friends and discovers that imagination can transform even the greyest days. It reconnects you to play. You will remember that joy doesn’t require an excuse. September gets a little lighter.
