Teaser – Be Kind To Yourself

Now that I have published my first novella, “The Map in the Fortune Cookie”, I have started work on my next book!

This time, it is a non-fiction book called “Be Kind To Yourself,” based on my writings from over a four year period that I published as articles on my blog.  At that time, I was going through some difficult times in my life, and writing was very cathartic for me. I wrote about some of the strategies I used myself for dealing with the challenges before me.

I have compiled and extended these articles into a single book.  It is intentionally short as the content is meant to be accessible more than detailed.  The concepts are simple and obvious once I realized that they were simple and obvious.  But sometimes we can miss what is in front of us, and a nudge in the right direction can set us back on course.

While there are other books that have been written on this topic, the simple fact is that while many write with great wisdom, their text is impenetrable.  Others have insights, but we simply cannot relate to the words.  This is far from a failing of these books; we each have different ways of conceptualizing and accessing our feelings, and sometimes the words resonate with us, but often they do not. 

In this book, I am not writing from “what ifs”.  In the low parts of my life, I have had to either deal with each of these stresses, sometimes individually but usually with some or all of them at once, or let them overwhelm me.  I had times when I couldn’t see any way out and dark thoughts and possibilities became scarily attractive. 

Instead of choosing to be beaten and give up, I wrote.  The act of articulating the problem I was dealing with allowed me to almost separate it from myself.  It became something I could analyze, rather than a faceless, nameless beast tearing me apart from the inside.

So this book takes the base ideas from those articles that I wrote when I needed to think and to cope with very difficult situations in my own life.  My hope is that the insights I gathered in my own darkest hours can help others to see a way out of their own.