Books That Broke Me Open — Part 1: The Inner World

#263

I read over 80 books in 2025. Some, I tore through in an afternoon. Some took three weeks, a snack break, and a minor existential crisis. And then there were the ones that made me put the book down, stare at the ceiling, and go "...oh wow! What a journey this has been."

These are those books. The ones that didn't just entertain me, but had the audacity to rearrange something in my mind, body, and soul. The books that I opened, that then opened me. Reading, for me, is the quietest and most nourishing form of self-care — borrowing other people's hard-won wisdom, living other people's lives, and somehow making more sense of my own without having to earn every lesson the hard way myself. No spoilers. Just honest reactions, key lessons, and the occasional monologue from yours truly.

(Part 2 — systems, money, leadership, memoirs, and one fantasy series that snuck past my literary pretensions entirely — dropping next week!)

1: The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry I picked this up once when I was a kid. I had thought it was cute, a tad odd, and had fun illustrations. I quickly moved on, not thinking much of it. When I re-read it as an adult, I immediately wanted to call my younger self and say "girl, you completely missed the point." On the surface it's about a small boy hopping between planets. Underneath, it's a meditation on loneliness, love, and how we slowly stop truly seeing each other the older we get. The Fox tells the Little Prince: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." A sentence I've carried around for years like a small, wise pebble in my pocket. A forever book. No notes, because the whole book is the note.

2: The Road Less Traveled — M. Scott Peck My all-time favorite. Full stop. No contest. Dr. Peck opens with "Life is difficult" — that was the moment I knew I'd love the book. And of course I did. Dr. Peck says that ironically, once you truly accept that life is difficult, it no longer is. Because you stop being surprised by it. This book is basically a wise, no-nonsense uncle sitting you down and saying: stop expecting easy, start doing the actual work, and also — here's what love actually means versus what you've been sold. Same for discipline, delayed gratification, and personality types - character disorders versus neuroses. One of my "well, duh" moments (obvious but it really isn't; easy to understand in theory, incredibly hard to apply) from this book is about problems: "Most of us spend enormous energy complaining about, avoiding, or wishing away our problems — and exactly zero of that actually moves the needle. You solve the problem by solving the problem." I had to read that twice.

3: The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk Science-y but deeply personal. Hard-hitting. Not for the faint of heart. Incredibly illuminating and revelatory. Paradigm-shifting. Van der Kolk's argument: your body remembers everything your brain is trying to move on from. That tightness in your shoulders? The exhaustion that doesn't go away with sleep? Yeah. He writes: "Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body." This book gave me vocabulary for things I'd been feeling or seen in others but couldn't name or wonder why — and more importantly, told me that rest, movement, and self-compassion aren't soft options. They're physiological requirements. My e-copy looks like a neon art installation. Highlighted approximately 75% of the book. Whole paragraphs, pages even.

4: Can't Hurt Me — David Goggins I read this book twice in two months. Yes, he's a lot. Yes, it was an intense read. But it gave me rocket-like energy and enthusiasm and determination to get up and run, and lift weights, and just do everything with renewed gusto. The man runs 100-mile races for fun. For fun! I cannot run to catch a bus without requiring a full recovery day. (Yet!) But underneath all the extreme everything is one idea that refuses to leave me alone — the 40% rule: "When you think that you are done, you're only 40% into what your body's capable of doing. That's just the limits that we put on ourselves." I didn't finish this feeling inspired. I finished it feeling caught. Like Goggins personally reached through the pages, looked me in the eye, and said "really though?" Rude. Necessary. 10/10. I was hooked to this page-turner from the title of the first chapter onwards: "I should've been a statistic."

5: The Creative Act: A Way of Being — Rick Rubin Rick Rubin produced albums for everyone from Johnny Cash to Beyoncé, then wrote a book that has nothing to do with music and everything to do with how to be alive. I started noting one quote. Then another. Then another. Three pages later I looked up and went — did I just end up recreating those pages from the book verbatim? Yep! Here's a sampler before I get carried away again: "Art is not a noun. It's a verb. It's something you do, not something you have." And: "You are not the work. The work is the work. Your job is simply to get out of its way." Okay, just one more, I promise: "If you do something and it moves you, that's enough. That's the whole point." For someone who writes poems she doesn't show anyone and plays guitar in the bedroom when no one's watching, this was basically a permission slip delivered directly to my soul. The act of creating, he says, matters more than the audience. Accepted. Gratefully. Which is also exactly why this blog exists. Writing about what I love, what I do, how I live — started out as fun, turned into my most honest form of self-care. Rubin would approve. Probably. I'd like to think so anyway.

6: The War of Art — Steven Pressfield Yet another book where my notes == the whole book. In this book, Steven Pressfield names the villain and calls it Resistance — that sneaky, shapeshifting force that convinces you to reorganise your desk instead of writing, scroll instead of practicing, research instead of starting. He writes: "Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance." He doesn't offer a workaround. He offers a name. And naming it, somehow, makes it smaller. Short, punchy, slightly aggressive in the best way. I finished it and immediately opened a blank document. Pressfield would be pleased.

7: A Man of Two Faces — Viet Thanh Nguyen Emotionally gutting, politically sharp, and elegiac, this 2023 memoir is written in second person, so you don't just read his story: you're pulled so far into his experience of displacement and immigrant identity that for a few pages it becomes yours. Half the book is his story. The other half belongs to his mother — her fractured identity, her uprootedness, her sacrifices. Nguyen writes: "All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." I ugly-cried at least twice, the hiccup-sob kind. Would enthusiastically recommend to anyone who has ever felt like they existed between two worlds and fully belonged to neither. And who enjoys, like me, poetic and literary writing that makes you scratch an itch in your brain you didn't know you had.

8: Things My Son Needs to Know About the World — Fredrik Backman Backman at his most unfiltered — part love letter to his newborn son, part chaotic meditation on what it means to be a halfway decent human being. He ping-pongs between profound and ridiculous in the same paragraph and somehow lands both every single time. "You can become whatever you want to become, but that's nowhere near as important as knowing that you can be exactly who you are." And then two pages later he's writing about IKEA cupboard doors and why they're never really about cupboard doors. "Find someone who doesn't love you for the person you are, but despite the person you are." I laughed out loud on public transport reading this. Sometimes with welled-up tears at the same time. Worth every side-eye I received. Then I immediately binge-read every other Backman book I could get my hands on — A Man Called Ove, Anxious People, Beartown, Britt-Marie Was Here, The Deal of a Lifetime, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer — and enjoyed them all rather equally, which tells you everything about his writing. Equal parts hilarious and transcendent, he taps into the human psyche with such precision and warmth that every page feels like he's been quietly watching all of us and taking very detailed notes.

Touch the Treadmill

#262

I get bored easily. Always have. The same route, the same routine, the same anything for too long and my brain starts looking for an exit. So the fact that I've shown up to the same gym, three times a week, for over tenth months running — that's not discipline. That's a good match.

CrossFit, for the uninitiated, is deliberately, structurally different every single day. The WOD — Workout of the Day — is programmed fresh each session: a different combination of movements, time structures, and intensity levels. One day you're racing to finish a set of rowing and kettlebell swings in under seven minutes. The next, you have twenty minutes to complete as many rounds as possible of pull-ups and box jumps — pacing yourself, managing your effort, finding a rhythm. The day after, you're learning the footwork of a power clean or grinding through wall walks. The programming is intentional — coaches cycle through strength, conditioning, gymnastics, and Olympic lifting across the week so your body never fully adapts and your brain never fully checks out. For someone who finds sameness suffocating, this is basically a cheat code.

And then there's the scaling. Every movement has modifications — lighter weights, resistance bands, shorter distances, scaled progressions. A beginner and a seasoned athlete can do the exact same workout side by side, each working at their own edge. Instead of a full pull-up, you start with a thick resistance band looped under your feet, then graduate to a thinner one, then thinner still, until one day — unassisted. Instead of a barbell, you learn the movement pattern first with a PVC pipe that weighs nothing. You meet the skill where you are, and work your way up. Being called an athlete throughout all of this — by coaches who use the word without irony, for everyone, from day one — it makes you feel like you've always been part of the roster.

My current obsession is pull-ups. I've been working my way toward a strict unassisted pull-up by the end of the year — recently graduated from a horizontal resistance band to a vertical one, and that single progression unlocked enthusiasm and excitement to keep trying harder, to keep moving toward lower and lower resistance bands. Oh, the joy of measurable, visible progress! Gymnastics movements are my happy place in general: wall walks (still mastering moving more than a couple of steps toward the wall), and headstands, where I've only just built enough shoulder stability to balance my knees over my elbows for about a minute. The next milestone? Getting both legs to lift off and balance in the air. I think about it approximately every other day.

Olympic lifting is a whole other universe — complex, dynamic, deeply technical, involving a series of compound movements that have to happen in the right sequence or the whole thing falls apart. It's genuinely hard. Which is exactly the point. My motto this year is to do hard things — and CrossFit delivers on that promise constantly. There's a question I keep coming back to: When's the last time you did something for the first time? Every week at CrossFit, I have a fresh answer.

I've written before about how the community and the people are what first pulled me in and kept me coming back — in Finding Your People (#257). The short version: I go there for the humans. The working out happens in between. I've since found myself a lovely little ladies' group — we grab coffee or catch up outside the gym every now and then, and that warm, easy companionship has quietly become one of my favorite parts of the whole thing.

What I want to talk about here is the starting. Because that's where most good habits go to die. Twyla Tharp, the legendary choreographer, wrote in The Creative Habit about her non-negotiable morning ritual — it wasn't the hours of dancing or rehearsal. It was simply getting into the cab to the studio. Once she was in the cab, the rest took care of itself. James Clear calls a version of this "touching the treadmill" — on the days motivation is nowhere to be found, your only job is to show up and make contact. That's it. Often, you end up staying anyway. My version is pulling out of my garage at 6:15 AM for a ten-minute drive.

And showing up, it turns out, is the most underrated form of self-care there is. Not the most glamorous. Not the most Instagrammable. But the one that quietly compounds — into better sleep, better eating, better energy, better days. The one that makes everything else a little easier to do, and a little harder to quit. Epictetus said it best: "First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do." The 6:15 AM drive is where I do what I have to do. Everything after is just the good part.

"Resting" Guilt

#261

Problem Scenario

Last week, I had a headache and zero motivation. My body was clearly asking for a break, but instead of just taking it, I found myself doing that thing — you know the one. Lying still but mentally running tabs. I should check my messages. I should at least do something useful. My head hurt and there I was, negotiating with myself about whether I'd earned the right to do nothing.

I didn't win the negotiation, by the way. Not immediately. But eventually, I put the phone down and just... rested. No guilt tax attached. And the next morning, I woke up early, did a few sun salutations, and had one of the better days I'd had in a while. The rest wasn't the problem. The guilt was.

Self-care has a branding problem. Somewhere between the scented candles and the morning routine Instagram reels, it got conflated with doing more. More journaling. More cold plunges. More optimizing. And in all that noise, the most basic form of self-care — actual rest — started to feel like something you had to earn first.

Conflict

You know rest is good for you. Physiologically, psychologically, in every way the science agrees. And yet. The moment you stop, there's that low hum: shouldn't I be doing something?

It's not laziness. It's conditioning. We've been trained — by culture, by productivity gurus, by well-meaning people who love us — to equate stillness with stagnation. So the body rests, but the mind keeps running tabs. That's not rest. That's rest with a side of punishment.

The cruelest irony is that the guilt itself prevents the rest from working. You can't fully restore if you're simultaneously berating yourself for needing restoration. The very mechanism designed to "motivate" you ends up exhausting you further. Marcus Aurelius saw this clearly: "You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." Guilt is a mind event. It's not a verdict.

Mindset Shift

My partner has said it to me more times than I can count, in that infuriating-because-it's-true way: "It's okay to just exist." Simple words. Incredibly hard to receive. Because existing — without producing, without a plan, without something to show for your time — feels dangerously close to doing nothing. And doing nothing, apparently, is the one thing none of us are allowed to do.

The shift, when it came, wasn't dramatic. It was small. I noticed the guilt. And I chose not to act on it. I let the afternoon pass without accounting for it. And what I found on the other side wasn't failure — it was a quieter, steadier version of myself.

The Takeaway

Rest isn't a reward. It's maintenance. 

Your phone doesn't get to skip charging because it had a particularly productive day. Neither do you. 

A candle that never stops burning doesn't last longer. It just burns out faster. 

Even the best symphony has rests written into the score. The silence isn't empty — it's part of the music. 

The most radical act of self-care, sometimes, is to stop performing self-care — and just be. You don't need permission. But if you're anything like me and you do — consider this it.