Book Review: How to Be You by Jeffrey Marsh

How to Be You: Stop Trying to Be Someone Else and Start Living Your Life by Jeffrey Marsh

I have followed Jeffrey Marsh on Twitter for years. Before I found a therapist, before I got on medication for my anxiety and depression, their videos helped me to be able to take a breath and center myself so I could get through the day. I’m sure I’m not the only person whose life has been impacted by them in this way, but I will forever be grateful for their calm voice affirming my place in the world over and over again until I started to believe it for myself.

How to Be You is the self-love manifesto that everyone in the world needs to read, but it is especially essential for those of us in the LGBTQ+ community. We live in a world that is often hostile to us, a world that bullies, beats, threatens, harasses, disenfranchises, and belittles us to the point of fracture, to the point where our very existence is seen as a threat to the standing order. Jeffrey’s assertion throughout their book is that it is our choice whether or not we are going to capitulate to the people who would make us smaller. We can be expansive or we can shrink. We can grow and learn and change and accept ourselves in all of our glorious complexity or we can draw lines of demarcation around ourselves and always exist as less than our true selves.

We can be expansive or we can shrink. We can grow and learn and change and accept ourselves in all of our glorious complexity or we can draw lines of demarcation around ourselves and always exist as less than our true selves.

I’m not going to lie, a lot of the self-help material circulating in the world today is worthless pablum at best and an avaricious money-grabbing scheme at worst, but Jeffrey Marsh is the real deal. Their work comes from a deep place of understanding what it feels like to be marginalized and maligned for being queer, and I am so grateful for their existence. I am grateful for this book’s existence. Thank you, Jeffrey. A thousand times, thank you.

Favorite Quotes from How to Be You

Confidence comes naturally if trust is present.

Aren’t you lucky that you get this life, this chance, to learn to set aside the yuck and muck of other people’s sometimes nasty words and do your best to live your life as fully as you know how?

Even if it seems like the whole world is against you, you’ve got to trust yourself. Even if no one else will honor you, you must honor what your truth is in any given moment.

Beginning to see yourself as worthy and trustworthy is the start of something beautiful. Why? Because you can finally let go. You don’t need to spend all your time trying not to be too much. You can relax. You can feel safe. You deserve that. Everyone deserves that.

Trusting yourself is the way to claim the life you’ve always been waiting for.

Trust your own self-examination more than you automatically believe someone else’s pronouncement.

Worry and hate are habits, and so are love and forgiveness.

Whatever your imagined crimes were in the past, they are not worth ruining your today for. You deserve to feel free. You deserve to be let off the hook.

The above quotes are © 2016 Jeffrey Marsh. All rights reserved.

Bonus: Jeffrey Marsh’s TedTalk

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Haiku VI

Haiku VI by Fred Slusher 

Dreams never show the 
correct path to a broken 
heart, you die alone

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

© 2021 Fred Slusher. All rights reserved.

Poem for the Day: August 30th, 2021

Reconnaissance: Poems by Carl Phillips

The Strong By Their Stillness by Carl Phillips 

Most mornings here, mist is the first thing to go —first
the mist, then the fog, though hardly anyone seems to 
     know
the difference, or even care, the way for some a dead buck 
is a dead buck: the road, the body, a little light, the usual 
dark, light’s 
          unshakeable escort...You can love a man
more than he’ll ever love back or be able to, you can 
     confuse
your understanding of that 
                                            with a thing like acceptance or,
worse, all you’ve ever deserved. I’ve driven hard into 
the gorgeousness of spring before; it fell hard behind me:
the turning away, I mean, the finding of clothes,
the maneuvering 
                                awkwardly back into them...why not drive
forever? Respect or shame, it’s pretty much your 
own choice, is how it once got explained to me. I’ve already
said—I’m not sorry. Magnolia. Wild pear. So what if one
wish begets a next one, 
                                   only to be conquered by it, if the blooms
break open nevertheless like hope?

Bonus Graphic

So, some of you probably remember those batches of graphics I dropped on here a few weeks ago. Most of the ones I made at the time were lyrics from Taylor Swift’s folklore, but I also made some using snippets from my favorite poems, and it just so happens that I found one containing lines from today’s poem. I hope you like it. Disclaimer: I am not nor do I claim to be a professional graphic designer.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Album Review: If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power by Halsey

If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power by Halsey

Release Date: August 26th, 2021

Label: Capitol Records; ℗ 2021 UMG Recordings, Inc.

She was sweet like honey / And all I can taste is the blood in my mouth / And the bitterness in goodbye

honey by Halsey

Mother. Warrior. Killer. Queen.

Just when I think Halsey is finished surprising me, she releases an album like If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power. Produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails fame, Halsey’s senior effort showcases the work of an artist who has come fully into their own. If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is lush, cinematic, and crackling with electricity. Its shifting tonality is also quite pleasing, going from the heavy industrial sounds crafted by Reznor and Ross on songs like “Bells in Santa Fe” to the tender guitar-driven lyricism of songs like “Darling”—like chasing salty fries with greedy gulps of ice-cold Coca-Cola.

If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is lush, cinematic, and crackling with electricity.

Everything in the album from the artwork on the cover to the lyrics speaking of the beauty and heartbreak involved in childbirth and motherhood, invokes religious iconography of the Holy Madonna.

I am not a woman, I’m a god / I am not a martyr, I’m a problem / I am not a legend, I’m a fraud

I am not a woman, I’m a god by Halsey

All in all, H4 is a powerhouse of a record, shattering expectations and assumptions while asserting a confidence borne of both pain and pleasure. Honestly, I’m kicking myself for not preordering the limited edition vinyl. If you know where I can get one, email me. 😭😭😭

Favorite Tracks

“You asked for this”, “honey”, and “I am not a woman, I’m a god”.

If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is available to order or purchase wherever music is sold.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Haiku V

Haiku V by Fred Slusher

Forest of pixel
-ated ash, doom me with your 
fire prophecy

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

© 2021 Fred Slusher. All rights reserved.

Poem for the Day: August 29th, 2021

Good Bones by Maggie Smith

This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful. 

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine 
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways 
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least 
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative 
estimate, though I keep this from my children. 
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. 
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, 
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world 
is at least half terrible, and for every kind 
stranger, there is one who would break you, 
though I keep this from my children. I am trying 
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, 
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on 
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Haiku IV

Haiku IV by Fred Slusher

Sweat and tears taste the 
same if you know what to do
with another tongue

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

© 2021 Fred Slusher. All rights reserved.

Poem for the Day: August 28th, 2021

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. 

You do not have to be good. 
You do not have to walk on your knees 
For a hundred miles through the desert repenting. 
You only have to let the soft animal of your body 
love what it loves. 
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. 
Meanwhile the world goes on. 
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain 
are moving across the landscapes, 
over the prairies and the deep trees, 
the mountains and the rivers. 
Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, 
are heading home again. 
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place 
in the family of things.