Lory Widmer Hess' 3 favorite reads in 2024

Wang unflinchingly brings to our attention the suffering caused by a mental health system that is not about health care in any ongoing sense, but about categorizing people and neutralizing immediate threats. The indignity of losing her autonomy and being involuntarily committed three times, not one of which helped her. The frightening ease with which lies become truth when transmitted by social media, preying on susceptible minds. “For those of us living with severe mental illness, the world is full of cages where we can be locked in,” Wang writes. It’s hard, but necessary, to look at those cages and consider what we are doing to other human beings in order to keep ourselves safe.

Even as her mind has sometimes been her enemy, it’s also been Wang’s greatest strength, and she displays her intelligence, research skills, and artistic gifts to their full extent here. At the same time, she fully acknowledges that “Yale will not save you,” as one of her chapter titles puts it. I also wonder to what extent our high-achieving society that overvalues the intellect and downplays emotional and relational skills contributes to the pain of mental illness. Certainly, institutions of higher education do a poor job of dealing with their mentally ill students — in Wang’s portrayal, their message is “we can’t deal with you, we take no responsibility, please leave.”

That’s a shameful message to be coming from the institutions we most respect, the ones that should be dedicated to exploring and upholding truth, and more is demanded of us if we are to recover our true humanity. As I keep reading more on the topic, I know I’ll remember The Collected Schizophrenias as a uniquely valuable, moving, and confronting piece of work, a voice speaking up for a population that is too often reduced to silence and “incomprehensibility”.

I think this is my favorite of the Moomin books so far. I love Moomintroll's journey of self-discovery. Starts out as a post-apocalyptic nightmare but turns into a regenerative vision of hope. Just what we need these days!

I've read Momo before in English, but it's been a while. As I read through it this time in German -- slowly! -- I thought how timely it remains. And while at one time I thought Momo's gift of listening was a bit dull, I now realize ever more how important it really is. Listening is more than merely hearing, more than letting sensations wash over us. It turns the act of giving attention into a doorway of creation. It's what I started to grasp through the spiritual direction training I recently completed, and what I want to continue to practice in as many ways as possible.