Goodbye, My Rose Garden is a sweet, short (3 volume), sapphic manga series that ticked all the boxes for me. Bibliophile main characters and many accompanying literary references, forbidden love, gardens, tea. I liked the romance arc and my only critique was that I wanted more screen time or maybe a spin off of Susanna and the bookshop proprietor.
⭐️⭐⭐️⭐️⭐️
I read The Prince and the Dressmaker on Valentine's Day. It's an adorable, romantic, and queer graphic novel about a dressmaker who dreams of making beautiful work and a prince who dreams of wearing beautiful dresses. The art style was super cute and was just an overall happy, fluffy read.
⭐️⭐️⭐️️️️️️️️️⭐️⭐️
Gray Area: From the City to the Sea and Gray Area: Our Town are two short graphic novels that to me were more about ambiance, mood, and reflection more than plot and characterization. It's the soft meditations one has on long walks or as one reminisces one's past. Tim Bird uses his locales as a way not only to map geography, but to map the impact our surroundings have on us. I recommend for when one need something quiet and introspective that is low pressure to experience.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️️
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is another excellent novella in Nghi Vo's The Singing Hills Cycle. I am enraptured by her style. Her prose is to me very unique to her in that I am transported to something that I've not experience with other authors. I feel as if each scene were undersatured, with pops of color and surrounded by a dark vignette. Her scenes feel painted and hold a tension between being emotionally charged, yet terse. I feel that there is a wisdom in how the series' tales are told. For this one, I was enthralled on how the fluidity of reality, history and who and how a story is told impacts our perception.
⭐⭐⭐⭐️️️️️⭐
When I wrote my entries about Friday, 4PM and emotional palliative care I hit an emotional breaking point where I felt the need to shift from talk therapy, intellectualizing, and articulating my story to actually addressing the underneath the surface habits that were wired in me due to lifelong trauma. Step 1 was reading Somatic Healing for CPTSD. It's a short book with very high level information about CPTSD and approaches and resources to address issues caused by it. I liked it because it gave me enough info to know what to look for on my journey and assess times in my life where I was able to access the types of relief that comes from somatic approaches. Weird thing, for me it's the Gateway Tapes. No techniques helps me access my nervous system as well as a niche old school program researched by the CIA and from which one is purported to be able to learn how to have out-of-body-experiences. Anyway, this is a nice book, easy to read, and I recommend if you'd like to learn about how to give your body the safety to process life on a nervous system level if that is something you struggle with and have not explored with a professional about.
⭐⭐⭐️️️⭐
While standard talk therapy provides vital opportunities for cognitive comprehension and emotional processing, it typically fails to address the underlying bodily imprint of trauma. The brain’s primal sections, such as the limbic system and brainstem, process overwhelming experiences by avoiding the cognitive, language-based areas of the brain. This means that the body “remembers” the trauma through implicit, nonverbal patterns of defence and sensation, even if the mind has no conscious narrative or memory of it.
– Alicia Reed (Somatic Healing for CPTSD)