I accept the lifelong battle and its limitations now. Even though I must always carry the weight of grief on my back, I have become strong. My legs and shoulders are long, hard bundles of muscle. The burden is lighter than it was. I no longer cower and crawl my way through this world. Now, I hitch my pack up. And as I wait for the beast to come, I dance.

My therapist always says to me, "Your mental illness is not your fault, but it is your responsibility." This had never felt fair to me, because if something isn't my fault, why is it my responsibility? But cPTSD doesn't care about fault. The only way through it is by putting in the work, and that is what Stephanie Foo does in this achingly gorgeous memoir filled with insight and truths on her journey to come to terms with and process her childhood abuse and her cPTSD diagnosis.

I could talk at length about the number of times that I was like "OMG SAME" at multiple things that she wrote about in her book. There were so many symptoms that she talked about that don't initially seem like symptoms—the inappropriate anger, the need for control, the constant need for reassurance—that I still struggle with regularly. I could talk about the way that I cried when she said that she just wanted to have a family to love her unconditionally. I could talk about how I would take pictures and highlight lines to share with my therapist because they were things that she had been telling me all along, like how I have a punishment complex and how my parents behaved the way they did because of their own shit, not because of something that was inherently in me.

I could talk about how I'm feeling particularly irritable as I'm writing this right now and I think it's because this book threatened how I see and understand myself in the context of my parents and past and current cPTSD symptoms. (Clearly it's something to bring to therapy—my therapist has already said she would read this book, and I've ordered my own copy so that I can highlight the lines and sections that most resonated with me.)

But I think what I found most helpful and inspiring in reading this book is twofold. First, the focus on Asian abuse and intergenerational trauma specifically was very appreciated. Obviously, intergenerational trauma exists everywhere and within every race, but I have never read a take on it that specifically focused on the Asian experience. It really made me think about my parents' own trauma, especially my dad's. My dad is the one who has always struggled with anger and has always been the verbally and emotionally abusive one in the family, especially to me and my mom. But he has his own childhood traumas and abusive siblings and parents that he lived through, and he never learned to do the work. It doesn't excuse what he did, but it helps with understanding. These are things I've definitely thought about before reading this book, but this book really brought that to the forefront.

The other was the hope that Foo imparts on readers, especially for someone like me who does struggle with similar difficulties in our own lives. She doesn't say that everything will be okay and it will be easy, but she shows that it's possible to find your own path and what works for you through the fog of cPTSD and difficulty with emotion regulation. She shows that it's okay to find your own peace. You can get away from that fear of abandonment and spiraling punishment complex that abusive parents leave you with.

Throughout my own therapy work (and even in being a psychologist myself), I've always been a little bit skeptical of everything that isn't a direct first do this, then do that, then you're cured. It's no wonder that I took so well to something like DBT, where you apply Skill A in Situation X and then everything's great. DBT worked for me for a while, until I found myself not wanting the apply a skill when I was feeling particularly angry. My DBT therapist would have called it willfulness, but I was like, "But then what? I can talk about what is getting in the way all day, but it doesn't change that it's getting in the way." I was always more skeptical of nebulous techniques that aren't inherently logical, including reparenting and meditation and gratefulness. This book highlights a lived experience of someone who it worked for. I'm not saying that all of these things will also work for me necessarily, but it shows that they do work.

I feel like this book not only gave me a fresh starting point and fresh motivation for therapy with my current therapist (who I do really like and has been really good about working with my mix of autism, cPTSD, and BPD symptoms, to be clear), but when I can't find the words to explain how I'm feeling, I can find it in this text, because Foo puts some of it into words so well. I am excited to use this as a springboard to look at my own emotions, reactions, and irrationalities with fresh eyes and a clearer understanding.

This book is emotional and real and messy at times, because it's about the pain of survival and the difficulty of letting go of that anger and resentment that helped you survive when you needed it. Going through life without getting angry at random small irritations can feel scary. For me, the idea of letting go of my anger makes me feel like I'm letting go of power that I'd been denied for so long growing up. But anger and resentment cloud the joy and beauty of life, and what once felt like power and control is perhaps not so much that as a smokescreen masquerading as such. This book, at its heart, reminds us that being able to see that joy and beauty is what power really is. It is what makes life truly worth living.

[tw: Abandonment, child abuse (emotional, physical, verbal), drug use, mental illness, pandemic, panic attacks, racism, suicidal thoughts, war]

This is a gay tragedy and you can't convince me otherwise.

WARNING: Do not read this review if you love this book because I know I'm very much in the minority with how I felt about it. Don't @ me if you love this book and still read this review because I have a lot of feelings lol.

This book made me so angry. That was my first reaction when I finished the book. I just sat there and seethed because what in the ever-loving bloated, pretentious, purple prose that said nothing at all did I just read? If this wasn't a book that someone lent to me, I would have set it on fire. (Not really because book burning is bad, but I might have considered flinging it out a window!)

I truly could not really tell you very much about what this book was about. I got the general jist - two enemies from opposite sides of some sort of war writing letters to each other and falling in love, but that was...about as far as I got. I couldn't tell you anything about this war or why it was happening, the setting/world-building, the way that things work in this setting, what the characters were really like, or tbh, why they even fell in love. It seemed like one of the characters suddenly decided she was in love with the other one and it just went from there. There was no believable development or buildup to it at all. I didn't care about either of the characters in any way because the authors never gave me a path to care about them. Basically, I have nothing I can really write about in review because the authors gave me nothing except for pretty words that barely made sense.

This book basically just ran on vibes rather than anything solid and I feel like the authors should have just written a poem if that's what they wanted to do rather than put this out as a story, because it barely felt like a finished novel. The last...maybe 25% of the book got a little better (which isn't saying much given how I felt about the whole thing) just because stuff actually was happening rather than just vibes. tbf, all that stuff was still written in the most pretentious way possible, but at least something happened.

As I'm writing this review, I think that maybe this book made me this angry because of how pretentious it felt. It felt like the authors were flaunting how clever and lyrical their writing was rather than focusing on writing a readable or engaging book. Clearly, most people do not agree with me on this, given the largely high ratings this book has, but I really do not get the hype at all. Overall, I was mostly confused, bored, and so ready for it to be over.