This book is really so much more than its cover suggests>>>I cannot recommend it enough!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The reflection I see is vastly different from what others see- something many doctors have corroborated.  And the hardest part is that people think this is a case of false modesty or   fishing for compliments, when really it comes from a far darker, sadder place." 

"But as it’s said over and over in many ways you can’t love anyone else fully until you love yourself. Despite all my relationship highs and lows, the relationship with myself has been the most tumultuous and continues to be the one I need to work on the most.  I find it easier to tell someone else I love them than tell myself the same, and that needs to change."

Another book with self-image themes, this one focusing exclusively on eating disorders and exercise addition and often very disturbing, is Diary Of An Exercise Addict by Peach Friedman. I find myself not sure what to make of it. On the surface, it feels like the author is rather vain, but the more you get into the book, the more you understand how both her eating disorder and exercise addiction have such power over her and that vanity is not really what Peach is all about. And there are some very painfully familiar passages like this one:

Induratize is a word that is new to me. I don't want to do the below, I don't even know if I could even if I did want to (hearts aren't very good at listening to reason or even to experience) but sometimes I sure wish I could. It would make for a lot less pain and confusion. The pain of trying to harden one's heart aside, it is always useful and kind of nice to learn a new word. :)

Besides taking on some new vocabulary, I also would not mind learning a little bit more about becoming maybe just a tad more emotionally in control:

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Yourself-Emotionally-Numb

I really do think there is a definite cut-off time for taking another sleeping pill when the first one does not work. It is definitely before three a.m. Yikes...the grogginess and inability to function in the morning is just horrible when you take something too late into the night or morning. Another thing I have noticed is that melatonin can and cannot work sometimes. 

This is pretty helpful in relating the good and bad and the myths about melatonin:


http://www.talkaboutsleep.com/how-to-use-melatonin-correctly/

I find dreams both wonderful and horrifying, and sometime both at the same time. I have been having intense dreams since I was a little girl and even during my most intense bouts of insomnia there are still periods where I do sleep long enough to have a dream. 

The funny thing about dreams is that you can be devastated by the good ones as much as the bad ones and the more real and vivid they feel, the worse the damage. This morning I woke up from a dream I have had a few times before, but this time it felt so convincing the hug I experienced was still surrounding me when I woke up. 

Though I always wanted children, it never came to be for me, which I have accepted, but apparently my dreams have not. This most recent dream really messed with my emotions. And the little girl in it (who I do not recall ever meeting in real life, but was just so present it was uncanny) hugged me and called me her mother. It was, in its entirety, actually a lovely dream and not the first time I have had it, but it was the first time we got to hug and the first time I 'found' her after searching everywhere.

It really, really blows my mind the power dreams can have over us...the beautiful ones, the terrifying ones and the ones that are actually based on memory and perhaps the worst of all. It also blows my mind that more people do not talk about their dreams or at least not marvel at them more internally. I started keeping a dream journal years ago and then stopped earlier this year to see if I could "unrecall" my dreams and therefore not wake up scared sometimes. That did not work at all so I decided to go back to recording my dreams and focusing more on trying to change the outcome of them with lucid dreaming. 

Lucid dreaming does not always work (actually, it is rare that it does, for me at least) but when it does work it is truly awesome.

Here are a few links to more information about dream:
  

https://www.google.com/#q=how+to+improve+your+dream+recall

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-processes-in-the-brain-allow-you-to-remember-dreams/

I find this really intriguing since I still feel we can dream about people we have never met (or even seen) in real life. The facts seem to state otherwise (apparently the brain cannot make up faces) but I find reading about dreams to be almost as interesting as having the dreams themselves:

 http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/ask-the-experts-1-invention.html

a very beautiful and sweet cover that I am hoping the story will live up to

An incredibly sincere and often sweet read, _Once_ is definitely good and definitely worth reading, but L.T. Smith's _See Right Through Me_ remains my absolute favorite of hers. Lovable and very endearing and adorable Dudley (a dog who will just melt your soul) is my favorite character in this touching book whose cover truly matches its spirit and heart.

Normally, I love that almost all of L.T. Smith's novels share a common theme in how insecure two people can be about each other's feelings when they are first getting to know each other. I really, really get self doubt so it would seem perfectly natural to me that two people could actually like each other and yet have no clue about it or any confidence in their own appeal. This motif in Ms. Smith's fiction is a big reason why I love her books so much.

But with Once I became physically exhausted by it all, at times. It's not the writer's fault at all...if anything, this time around she's captured the pain of self doubt better than ever before, along with an underlying darkness and deep sadness to both women's relationship histories. I also found myself very, very troubled by an early scene in the novel where the main character punches her ex very, very hard in the face. It made painfully lovely passages lose some of their power because Beth really is not all that likable at times: "It wasn’t that I didn’t believe that Amy was the person I wanted to be with; it was more a case of not being able to trust that anyone would want to be with me. Like Groucho Marx said, he didn’t want to be a member of any club that would accept him as a member."

Perhaps I am being a bit overly sensitive to this part and the main character does believe her ex has been abusing her dog when she punches her. The thing is she does not for sure her ex hurt her dog and when she realizes later she did not there is no real remorse on her and that just disturbs me so very much.