For years, I was floating by. I hated this feeling especially when it was combined with my intense moods. Grounding tools felt impossible to use; because I was an independently minded teenager, creating and maintaining healthy habits that people would advise for my success was not something I’d taken seriously.
However, in 2014, after a traumatic event, I was formally diagnosed with bipolar disorder. When I met my then-psychiatrist for the first time, he asked me what I liked to do for fun; when I said that I liked to read but had been in a slump, he recommended Kay Redfield Jamison’s book, An Unquiet Mind.
Before reading this book, I always thought that only people who were highly creative had bipolar disorder. Knowing that Jamison is a psychologist who not only treats patients with bipolar disorder, but also has this illness herself, made me feel less alone in my head and start to see people more as walking stories.
Finding myself in weird stories
After reading An Unquiet Mind, another improvement in my life had to be my interest in finding books which offered some understanding and insight into sad, weird characters or situations. Knowing that other (albeit fictional) characters felt or experienced sad, weird feelings and situations gave me the stability that I had always lacked. Some notable ones I remember are Juliet in Juliet the Maniac and Bunny in Rabbits for Food; they made me realize, in their own confessional-like stories, that sometimes, you look for the drama to self-sabotage. But other times, drama finds you in the people you meet and the situations they put you through—and neither is better or worse than the other.
As I continued to read, I learned that the weirder the plot would get, the more I would find myself easily accepting the weirdness in my own life. Haruki Murakami’s book, Killing Commendatore, although a whooping 704 pages, showed me how inviting more mystery in my life can be a thrilling part of discovering myself
There were some weird books that I didn’t like or understand at first; Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe and Fernando A Flores’s Valleyesque: Stories are two which made me scratch my head.
Etter’s weird ending made me want to throw the book across the room… but after contemplating this visceral reaction, I realized something deeper about myself that I had not bothered to voice out loud before. That, unlike the protagonist, I wouldn’t give up. I started to consider the serious impact of reading fiction as a hobby that would deepen my self-awareness.
Taking a Different Perspective
I was not expecting Flores’s weird book to teach me anything. But it did—just like Rose’s book. All the metaphorical language was strange at first. I also found it hilarious though and would often laugh out loud. It taught me that you can find humor in any situation as long as you look at it from a different perspective.
Combined with therapy, medication, and love & support from the people in my life, reading sad or weird books has taken me on many journeys; in the process of reading these stories, I’ve learned so much about how to surrender, how to connect, how to advocate for myself.
Now, I’m grateful to say that I’ve returned home to myself and accept all the odds and ends of myself. All these books, in fact, made me appreciate my eclectic moods, thoughts, and experiences. That it just means that I’m deeply and uniquely me.
Taylor is a library information associate at OCLS
