I’ve been thinking a lot about self-care and self-improvement this week. My mind has specifically gone to how we describe our life when it’s at its fullest or we’re at our most cared for. Do we call it complacency or do we see fulfillment? Are we constantly drawn by the promise of “more” simply because it’s deemed the antithesis of “settling” or is more actually what we’re after?

We all have different answers to those questions. If you pick up An Ordinary Age by Rainesford Stauffer you’ll be able to read some of them.

I didn’t mean to pull together a starter kit on creativity and artistic development, but I’m glad I did. Whether I was listening to Matthew McConaughey or flipping through Lisa Congdon’s imagination, these books helped spark something inside of me that had been dormant for a long time — my desire to fail. McConaughey has a whole section of his book dedicated to telling tell me all about that one time he had to throw “it” all away in order to get the kind of roles he wasn’t getting naturally asked to play. All of these books help you define what “it” (how you see creativity now vs how you want to see it) is and then offer up a roadmap that challenges you to grow.

Oftentimes being stagnant within our creativity comes at the heels of a some success or major “aha” moments. We’ve found something that works well and we stop trying to understand how to make it work better. I’ve been writing and creating content for 8 years now and I’d forgotten how to study the craft. I’d grown to the point of assuming that I would always be typecast for the kind of writing or content creation I was known for so there was no point in pushing my boundaries, but then this year something shifted for me.

January was a rough month. Apparently I’m not alone because we’re all seemingly hitting the same COVID wall, at the same exact time. In an effort to try to bring myself some joy and comfort, I’ve been working to list out the better habits that have come from a whole year mostly at home. I wrote about my list making habit earlier this week.

At the top of that list is that I’ve been making more and more time to read. I spent so much of the beginning of my career hustling to be as productive as possible and traveling a ton that if I got through one book a month it would be a miracle. Now I’m getting through so many and they’re bringing me joy in different ways.

I was only 11 years old my first holiday season without my mom. As a result of my family and the culture they were raised in, there was no real space made to help guide me through those first holidays. When I was 21 years old and lost my grandma, I had a deeper understanding under my belt of what grief was and what it demanded of me.

During that first holiday season without her in 2014, I tried my best to find solace in places that made sense for me. I’ve always loved to find myself in books. Harry Potter is one of my favorite series for that exact reason - it was life-changing to me to see someone whose grief actually made them both more human and more magical all at once.

While the below reads aren’t necessarily the ones that guided me during my go arounds at the first holidays, it is the list I wish I had.

Recently I realized that I tend to read books in pairs. The habit is helpful in making sure that I don’t get bored halfway through and abandon a book. It also helps lighten the mood if the book I am reading is heavier or more dense.

In the case of my latest pairing I was pretty intentional. Going in to starting The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown, I knew that Brown’s writing style would be story-led but also have a layer of research in it that could feel dense to me if I was only reading that. Enter: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.