My January Reads & Reflections

This January was quite special for me. I had set out to just live life and not to focus too much on goals that always end up not being fulfilled. Maybe the goal is to let things just unfold(I don't know) 

My highlight of the month was def reading one book each week and I loved the books that i randomly chose of course with the help of ChatGPT(what could I do without AI?)

The books are amazing, I loved the stories and the lessons in it. I love the growth that came with reading them and I just love me for being such a consistent girlie. Is reading a hobby?

These are the four books that shaped my January and the lessons they left behind.

1. Tuesdays with Morrie : Learning How to Sit With Mortality

This book felt like being invited into a very gentle classroom.

Morrie doesn’t teach through theory or advice. He teaches through presence, through honesty about dying, loving, forgiving, and letting go. What stayed with me most was how calmly he speaks about death, not as something to fear, but as something that gives life depth.

He talks about how we can only know how to live by knowing how to die(I don't even know what it means:)

It reminded me that grief is not just about loss, it’s about connection. We grieve because we loved. And sometimes the greatest lesson is not how to fix pain, but how to sit with it without rushing it away.

As someone drawn to grief work, this book reaffirmed something important: healing doesn’t always look like solutions. Sometimes it looks like showing up, listening, and staying.

2. Man’s Search for Meaning : When Suffering Demands Meaning

This was a heavy read. The stories from the concentration camps were heartbreaking, but Viktor Frankl writes them with such clarity and dignity that they linger long after you put the book down.

What struck me most was his insistence that even in unimaginable suffering, humans still have one freedom, the freedom to choose their attitude. Not to deny pain, not to romanticize it, but to decide what it means and there after decide how to react.

This shifted how I think about grief and loss. Not as something that must be overcome, but as something that asks a question:
What will you do with this pain?

Frankl doesn’t offer comfort. He offers responsibility. And strangely, that felt empowering.

3. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck*: Choosing Your Struggles

This book challenged my relationship with emotional highs and lows. Actually, I'd rank this book at a 10/10 totally recommend for a beginner who's trying to get back to reading 

Mark Manson talks about how chasing happiness or constant emotional “up” moments actually sets us up for disappointment. Life, he says, is suffering  the real question is which struggles we are willing to choose.

That idea stayed with me. Choose your struggle

Some struggles exhaust us unnecessarily. Others, though hard, are aligned with who we want to become.

This book helped me see that emotional maturity is not about avoiding discomfort, but about choosing discomfort consciously.

4. Conversations with Friends: Emotional Intelligence in Real Life

This book felt uncomfortably close at times.

What I loved most were the conversations, raw, messy, emotionally intelligent, and honest. People being called out. People misunderstanding each other. People reacting instead of responding.

Through this book, I learned something about myself: I deeply struggle with criticism, especially when it comes from people I love. My emotional outbursts during conflict often come from feeling misunderstood or emotionally unsafe, not from the argument itself. Which was a good eye opener 

It reminded me that relationships are mirrors. They show us where we are emotionally immature, where we are defensive, and where we still need to grow.

And growth, I’m learning, is rarely comfortable. 

What January Taught Me

Looking back, these books weren’t random.

Together, they taught me that:

• Suffering is inevitable, but meaning is optional. You can choose to continue living/struggling or give up. You can always choose what struggle you want to endure.
• Grief is relational, not pathological.
• Emotional growth requires self-awareness, not perfection.
• Love, loss, and discomfort are deeply intertwined. David Kessler says that we grief as much as we loved.

💚🍃Thank you for reading to this end.