Reading Notes: Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies (Part 1)

📚 Quotes + Notes from Part I: The Mind Rituals

Burnout is no friend to your reading habits. Chronic stress makes it harder to focus on what we’re reading, harder to absorb new information, harder to think critically about its message, and harder to retain any of it long-term.

That’s where Reading Notes comes in. Think of this as Cliff Notes for burnout — if you’re operating at a deficit of time and energy and can’t process an entire book, here’s a TL;DR version for you.

Did you know? The “Reconnect” section of my Anti-Burnout framework was originally called “Ritual.”

I had this theory that ✨ritual✨ — as I saw it, infusing life with magic and sparkle and greater meaning — might be a key to keeping burnout at bay. I set off on a self-guided study of ritual (I made a syllabus and everything) and things evolved from there.

The whole point of rituals is to connect us with something. At its core,

Tara Schuster

’s Buy Yourself The F*cking Lilies: And Other Rituals to Fix Your Life, from Someone Who's Been There is about connecting with yourself, whether again or for the very first time. The back-of-book blurbs say it is also about reparenting one’s self and the hard work of growing up.

As I’ve written before, it reads like an affirmation, an instruction manual, and a cautionary tale all in one. There are skills here for both burnout recovery and burnout prevention, and the topics are sweeping — from Part 2’s “I Have the Best Bras,” to Part 3’s “Nobody Cares, At All. In Regard to Everything” — but all tie back to the central theme of intentionally choosing your way forward in life and adding sparkle wherever you can.

Keep reading for quotes and notes from Part 1: The Mind Rituals.

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Introduction: The chaos rituals: And the day, I decided to grow myself up

things are decidedly not okay. … I'm exhausted in my guts. I'm worn down from the hate and the drinking and the smoking and the crying and the just living from one crisis to the next crisis and I am SoTiredSoAshamedSoDesperate. This is a life I can no longer live. This is a life that will kill me.

I think there are a lot of us out there. People who didn't have THE WORST CHILDHOODS EVER, people who had it "pretty good" but nevertheless find themselves regularly crying in their cubicles at work. We've achieved the outward markers of a happy, lucky life, but underneath it all, we're terrible at truly living. We walk around with overwhelming anxiety and emotional pain, and then we feel guilt and shame because "I didn't have it that bad I should be fine!" My answer to you is No. You do not have to be fine. If you went through some shit, even if it was "minor," and it's affecting your life, then you deserve to deal with that shit. Period.

I believed my mom that there was something intrinsically wrong with me, and I lived my life on edge that other people would find out and, somehow, I'd be punished for it. Would this be the year I'd be condemned, kicked out of school? Would this be the spelling lesson in which it'd finally be revealed how stupid I was?

• This is absolutely a form of chronic stress, and this kind of stuff is what leads to burnout down the line — even though the World Health Organization only recognizes chronic stress as burnout when it happens in the context of one’s employment! But that’s an argument for a different time …

Even those of us who are all grown up still have room to become the people we want to be.

I decided it was time to stop comparing my pain to others’, time to quit telling myself that I shouldn’t feel this way, and time to start focusing on how I actually did feel, because that was real. I hated my life and wanted a better one.

• As Cait Donovan of Fried. The Burnout Podcast says, “Quit ‘should’-ing all over yourself.”

I went through hell, took notes, learned my lessons, and, now, it is my deepest wish that the tools I developed will work for you. At a minimum I think you will laugh. With me. Hopefully not at me.

I. The Mind Rituals: It’s Not Too Late to Heal Your Thoughts

Writing It Down Saved My Life: Connect to Your Innermost Self

daily writing gave me a broom to poke and lift up the roof I had built over my mind.

• Journaling can sound like tired, cliché advice BUT I think the reminder is especially important for those of us who are burnt out or feeling a trend in that direction … mostly because it’s one of the first things to go when we are overworked and under-rested. But that’s when we need the data we collect and the space to reflect more than ever.