Saturday, May 17th 2025: Con Prep! + Book Review

After a week away I'm back prepping for comifuro!!! The event is NEXT WEEK and I'm nervous and excited for it!! My trinkets and beaded jewelry are ready to go, what I'm doing now is prepping freebies like stickers, photocards, and prints. I printed the stickers myself and laminated them using cold laminate sheets! Some of them are holographic! Oh, I also printed my first ever run of my poetry zine!! (I sent them to a print shop because I wanted it to be more polished) It took 3 tries at different vendors but I have something that I'm happy with and I've tried to price it low enough for it to be affordable :) I printed only 5 to sell and hopefully it sells well! I don't know the demand for original poetry zines at at art market but we'll see!

Those are a lot of exclamation marks! I've been on edge recently trying to get everything done in a reasonable time at a reasonable rate orz I'm currently running on caffeine and my chest is tight and stuffy because of it :P I need to lay off the coffee... Anyways! poetry book news: going well. I've formatted my manuscript to be in A5 so I can envision it better. I really can't wait until the finished product is done. I'm experimenting with different poetry styles and recently I've been trying enjambment. Very fun! I want to be able to use it well in my poems, so I'm learning by doing. Hell yeah.

In unrelated news, I recently read a book written by a psychiatrist on self-help and "mental health," the translated title is "the woman who wants to be a watermelon tree in the next life" and I have some thoughts on it

It's regular "self-help" from a psych, it has all the regular CBT talking points you hear during first or second appointments, and it takes time to explain concepts such as "recency bias" and "cognitive dissonance" in a way that lay people could understand it. My problem with the book is that the titular character, which may or may not be based off real patients, is a disabled young woman. And her story is written by an able bodied male psychiatrist. Obviously there's a gap in knowledge and authority already- How does the author approach writing about chronic pain and disability from his point of view? Well, he skips over most of it and focuses on her mental health, framing her journey as positive, the perfect patient who listens to the doctor and does not require tweaking his approach.

She's also the perfect patient because, spoilers, she dies at the end of the book. No chance to get worse, no chance to see long-term effects, she dies heroically as she's reaching the peak mental health state. The author frames her death -writing the moment she's in a near-comatose state- as if he was writing death fanfiction. I say this pejoratively. I did not like the ending chapter at all. It felt like he was painting this poor girl in a light that she did not consent to (if she even exists). He's trying to speak over her instead of conveying HER story. And I guess that's my gripe with a lot of it. With a disabled, chronically ill patient as the "protagonist" of the book you're thinking you might get insights into what it's like being disabled and having mental health problems on top of that- nope! He glosses over most of the things that would have made this self-help book unique and instead pandered to his future clients by giving bog standard CBT.

I guess people will complain about my review saying 'it's a self help book! It can't be too specific or else it's too niche!' Well sometimes niche is good. being specific is sometimes, good. I wish the book dwelled more on her chronic pain and put aside the forced positivity and stoicism it's trying to sell. Since this book claims it's based on real events, just changed, merged, synthesized, and tweaked- The dialogue can be anything the psych wants it to be. And he doesn't seem interested in being critical of his own methods. Which, to me, isn't really compelling psych talk.

Maybe I'm just too deep into psychiatry discourse that I have strong feelings about the state of it, the fact that people don't have enough connections in their life to vent to others and therefore have to hire a healthcare professional; the cookie-cutter approaches to mental health therapies that usually only work for able-bodied, neurotypical, middle-class people; and the fact that they, as doctors, have immense power in being able to send people to a psych ward -usually without prior consent. I'm all for re-evaluating the tools we have to treat mental illness, but how much of that illness is structural and caused by poor public resources? I'm rambling now, but as one of the first self-help books I've read it didn't really make me want to read more self help, especially knowing this is considered "one of the better ones" on the topic. Also because I have chronic illness that spikes whenever my anxiety is bad, I thought I could relate to the patient a bit better, but alas, this is mostly a book about the psych talking about his approaches to life and how this perfect patient definitely improved before she met her tragic end. 2/5 stars. 1 star for effort, another for not being on the "holistic" side of things.