Semi cooking my way through a bad mental health day

Adding a pinch of baking soda can also spark joy

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

It had been a slow but busy workday, one that had begun with me purposefully getting drenched in the rain after a quick morning run. After all, how often do we get to soak ourselves in nature’s bounty? Pretty soon though, a negative thought latched itself onto my frame of reference, my self-worth. For the next 9 hours at work, I was fighting that thought with instant gratification that one receives from fulfilling client expectations.

As the day neared its end, I decided to seek solace in the public library. Under the pretext of dropping off a few books, I made way to the aisles, and my eyes began hovering over titles, familiar and unfamiliar. Fiction. Poetry. Cookbooks. These books cloaked my worries into energy to find something that would act as a healing balm onto this heavy mind. Somewhere buried into those titles lay my answer. Which turned out to be Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? A fun breeze, it did not, however, make me feel better.

I then stumbled upon Cheryl Strayed’s Brave Enough. A small, pocket-sized book of quotes that Cheryl wrote for anyone lost or feeling incomplete in life, and needed a bit of advice that could be summed up in a page. The book offered honest answers to all my thoughts…