I recently lost a beloved friend to suicide, and this isn’t my first experience with this singular form of shattering, abrupt, and maddening grief. I’ve been thinking of the ways people carry pain inside of themselves, our worst traumas pinned within our bodies like frantic birds trapped in wire. We can’t know all that another person carries. We only know what we, privately, are concealing, and even this can be baffling and hard to accept. If you are suffering, if you are uncertain of how to process or vocalize or heal, I promise you, you aren’t alone.
I’ve been revisiting passages of Miriam Toews’s exquisite novel All My Puny Sorrows, in which a woman grapples with her sister’s immutable longing to die. Toews, herself, survived the suicide of both her father and sister; her writing treats suicide with more complexity and compassion than most are willing to allow. As I turn 45, sober and battling an autoimmune disease (multiple sclerosis), it’s become agonizingly apparent that whatever pain we try to hide—believing that by stuffing it down we will somehow snuff it out—is pain that must eventually surface, or else it might devour us internally. For the first time in my life, I’m trying to truly prioritize my mental health. The journey is grief-stricken, clumsy, and sometimes vacillates between comic absurdity and throat-gripping terror, but I’m firm about my commitment. We all deserve healthy relationships, healing, and love. How do we get there? How, finally, do we convince ourselves to be self-compassionate, no matter what we’ve been told?
Even in the wreckage, life for me continues to be a glittering, vast, intriguing mystery, as exciting as it is fraught. There is love here, and wonder. There is laughter and friendship and joy. Stories, words, books, have always helped me find hope. Here are several titles on a range of subjects involving mental health that might speak to you wherever you are.
Eat and Flourish: How Food Supports Emotional Well-Being by Mary Beth Albright
Everything Here is Beautiful: A Novel by Mira T. Lee
Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté, MD, with Daniel Maté
Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make us Whole by Susan Cain
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us by Rachel Aviv
Forest Walking: Discovering the Trees and Woodlands of North America by Peter Wohlleben and Jane Billinghurst
Know My Name: A Memoir by Chanel Miller Check It Out
Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health by Thomas Insel, MD
The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang
Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon
Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner
Girls on the Brink: Helping Our Daughters Thrive in an Era of Increased Anxiety, Depression, and Social Media by Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Hill House Living: The Art of Creating a Joyful Life by Paula Sutton
The Comfort Book by Matt Haig
Garden for the Senses: How Your Garden Can Soothe Your Mind and Awaken Your Soul by Kendra Wilson
Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age by Katherine May
Sinkhole: A Legacy of a Suicide by Juliet Patterson
All My Puny Sorrows: A Novel by Miriam Toews
