Why Reading is the Self-Care We All Need Right Now: A Recommendation to Get You Started

When we think of using the summer months for self care, we often think of relaxing by the water, a cool drink in hand, soft breeze gently wisping by our sun-kissed skin. We’ve been taught as a society that summers should be a time of self care spent doing as little as possible before “real life” creeps back in and we return to the daily grind. 

Why then, despite our best efforts of renewal and self-care, are many of us feeling no better than when we started this summer? There are many studies that show that self care (as we currently define and practice it), actually serves to increase our feelings of anxiety and has the opposite effect on our overall well being. Perhaps what our minds really need are opportunities to engage, rather than disengage.

We know this is true for us, so for the next few weeks, we’ll release titles that we’ve been reading this summer and highlight some of the most engaging insights from each.  This week’s recommendation focuses on engaging your growth through an Individual & Personal focus. Join us next week when we focus on Culture & Climate. 

Want to engage through growth at an INDIVIDUAL & PERSONAL level?

SUGGESTED READ: You are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience edited by Tarana Burke and Brene Brown, Penguin Random House: 2021, 228 pages.

WHY IT ENGAGES US: We are a company of change agents that put people at the heart of everything we do. To know self and others deeply is the first step of authentic professional engagements. This anthology of essays from both well-known and unknown Black authors reflects on their current and very personal journeys of shame and healing. Its beauty is in the compelling way it connects a common thread of universal emotions based in trauma and pain while dispelling the monolithic myth that all Black experience in America is the same. The essayists’ varied experiences create community, connection, and understanding through very different paths to healing and joy. You will leave this read validated in your pain and nourished with a hope for healing that, perhaps, you didn’t even know you needed.

COMPELLING QUOTE: “I cling to this wisdom more tightly than ever as I watch the world grow more and more uncertain, with nothing but unprecedented times ahead. I think to myself, I could lose everything all over again: my job, my home, people I love. None of it is promised and all of it feels particularly temporary right now. Yet because of the mirrors, the people around me who constantly work to remind me not only of who I am but that I am this sacred, reverent being, I have found myself resilient in the face of resistance” (Williams, 177).