When I was a young girl, I fell in love with stories. Our family was made up of readers and our favorite weekly outing was to the library where we would spend hours, browsing the stacks. I remember the first time I discovered a series. The series was about a farmer’s field and a rabbit and then all of the other animals that lived in the surrounding meadow and waterways.

For the past few months, I've been following Florence Given quote closely on Instagram. Like many social activists, she uses her instagram platform to raise issues of awareness of sexuality, race and gender and has created some pretty incredible artwork embedded with sharp and witty slogans about the above issues, one of which is my desktop background. Florence recently published a book called Women Don't Owe You Pretty, which broke a bunch of records after its publication and is probably one of my favourite reads of 2020. It's definitely my favourite feminist manifesto and opened my eyes to many behavioural, emotional and psychological things that I was subconsciously (or consciously) doing to myself and additionally, what norms living in a patriarchal society inflicts upon women. So I thought I'd share a few points which stood out for me and made me ponder on my own internal and external thoughts, actions, lifestyle and tendencies. I'm thinking that maybe, just maybe, some of them will resonate with you too. They are as follows:

It was in the summer of 2013 when I got hold of The Secret book by Rhonda Byrne. It is a self-help book containing a lot of stories on the workings of the Law of Attraction. The book claims that we can change our circumstances just by changing our thoughts. Be positive, be specific on what you want, and the universe will arrange the events to deliver it to you – that's the basic instruction contained in the book.

“Before modern medicine, one of the worst imaginable skin diseases was syphilis, which would start as itchy boils and then eat its way into the bones until it exposed the skeleton. In Russia, it was called Polish disease, in Germany, the French Disease, in France, the Italian disease.” — Hans Rosling, Factfulness

Everyone goes through a time when they don't know what they are doing. Or at least, the 5000+ people I have met online & offline have been through such a time.

It reminds us that beauty is all around us, yet we do not pay attention rather visually or sound. To hear the beauty is through silence. Yet, if we don't have silence, we can't hear the beauty around us. The noise that we hear in our day to day lives drowns out the beauty around us. In my opinion, this may not be true for all people, but the majority of us live to survive, not living to live. We can not hear beauty, the call of life, or the call of love. As humans, we do not have the time to listen to this during our daily lives in tunnel vision. The easiest thing to hear is all the negative, what you could have done differently, focusing more on our past mistakes or life lessons versus focusing on the present and making our future moves worth something to be proud about.

Black women are the backbone of families everywhere. Like any other racial group, they are also prone to needing a safe space to create positive mental wellness. However many Black women don't acknowledge or allow for appropriate wellness levels in relation to self-discovery, self-esteem and more.

Musk, of course, is the billionaire and brilliant mind behind Tesla and SpaceX. In fact, after meeting Musk, people tend to walk away with the same reaction: ‘He’s the smartest guy I’ve ever met.’

I came across this amazing book, ***"the Seat of the Soul" by Gary Zukav and I was hooked and could not put it down. This book is amazing and contains so much valuable information that we can apply within our daily lives and awaken dormant energies within us. And it only make sense.

“Mastery of communication. How to find a common language with anyone ”, Paul McGee Sometimes, to achieve success, there is not enough pumped knowledge and professionalism. You also need to be able to convey your own ideas to other people and be ready for difficult negotiations. This book shows the main mistakes that people make when communicating. It contains tons of useful and interesting stories about communication and how to improve it.

Having read again, last night when the moon was vibrant, our dear Virginia Woolf’s book-length essay, A Room of One’s Own, I have regained the strength absorbed upon first comprehending her advice to women, specifically women who desire to be writers. As Virginia, living alone in her London flat shortly after women won the right to vote, took book after book from her personal library in her journey to find meaning in the subject of women and fiction, last night I took a paperback copy of Room from my shelf and opened the pages. I sat in my comfortable lounger in a small apartment where I live alone, childless and with an adequate income. I have made it – a room, a home of my own, and money that is mine – I thought, settling in for a few hours to reflect upon why Virginia’s mantra has been with me so deeply all these years. I didn’t get where I am because, as it was with Virginia, an aunt left me a handsome income that freed me from working for someone else to earn a living. Although Virginia did work with publishers and editors and publicists, no doubt, the aim was to enhance her prose. She wrote bravely. She shared her talents wisely. As I read last night, I felt her voice closer to my thoughts, my perspective now having carried her book-length essay around with me from city-to-city and job-to-job and relationship-to-relationship, plodding along and venturing forward all at once. I am not alone in needing to keep my copy of Room always at hand. Virginia’s six-chapter essay would become part of our collective female background, a reference point for how far we have come in the little time we’ve had to express our minds freely. As freely as possible, I must add, because we have a long way to go. But to the question Virginia’s mighty intellect could initially seize upon, in her stream-of-consciousness kind of way, on the subject of today’s female writers, she might ask: Are you incandescent? I had forgotten this part of Room; I had forgotten that Virginia clearly states what it is we must do next, after acquiring our own rooms and money. Last night’s reading refreshed my soul and gave me direction, and that is why I find it compelling to share with my colleagues, my friends and people I don’t even know. Besides an income of five hundred a year “each of us,” the author wrote in 1928, “and rooms of our own,” dear Virginia hoped these essentials would lead more females to “have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think.” “Good writers,” wrote Virginia, “even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings.” She asked us to write “for the good of the world.” And more. To express one’s work completely, the mind must be, and here she brought up the word “incandescent” to describe this state of being. “All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance” must be “fired out” of us and “consumed.” In this state, for a writer, words can flow freely and unimpeded. Incandescent. This is where one aspires after acquiring the room and the income of one’s own. And during the journey, too. Above all, Virginia did write “it is much more important to be oneself than anything else.” So let’s try our best, and keep at it.

In times of stress, there are few things more calming than getting engrossed in a great book. And between the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election, Americans are stressed.