This week I finished:

The Choice: Embrace the Possible, by Dr. Edith Eger: At one point listening to this book, I started feeling choked up. Tears started welling up in my eyes. I asked myself, “When has a book made me cry?”

“Has a book ever led me to cry?” I continued to ask myself.

As the book continued, I started full-on bawling at the experience of the author, how she made her greatest struggles useful for herself, and how she is sharing them to help all of us use our struggles to reach the greatest pinnacles, to reach our potentials.

Note: this is not a self-help book, though you can use it that way. When I talk about her struggles, they include being imprisoned and tortured in Auschwitz, bombs going off around her, being possibly within a few breaths of death, family members killed, Josef Mengele doing to her what led him to be called the angel of death, and more.

I’ve told several people about this experience. I haven’t been able to identify the emotions the book evoked, only the intensity. It’s awe and appreciation, but much more. Recognition of a human reaching a potential beyond anything I would have expected, but coming from someone with no special preparation, no more or less human than anyone. She reveals what anyone can do.

She clarifies that she can’t do anything for you. She shows that you can liberate yourself from your most confining prisons, which are those of your own making. Anyone can. She doesn’t preach. In the end, she doesn’t blame, accuse, or feel sorry for herself. She clarifies that Hitler and Mengele couldn’t confine her spirit. Only she could, but she can also not allow it to be confined.

I don’t think I can do it justice in a daily blog post. I can recommend it as highly as I recommend any books, and I recommend listening to it. I also found many quotes from it, so I’ll copy some that resonated:

I want to make one thing perfectly clear. When I talk about victims and survivors, I am not blaming victims—so many of whom never had a chance.

and

Suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is a difference between victimization and victimhood. We are all likely to victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life. And this is victimization. It comes from outside. It’s the neighborhood bully, the boss who rages, the spouse who hits, the lover who cheats, the discriminatory law, the accident that lands you in the hospital.

In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim’s mind — a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries. We become our own jailors when we choose the confines of the victim’s mind.

and

I also want to say that there is no hierarchy of suffering. There’s nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours, no graph on which we can plot the relative importance of one sorrow versus another. People say to me, “Things in my life are pretty hard right now, but I have no right to complain — it’s not Auschwitz.” This kind of comparison can lead us to minimize or diminish our own suffering. Being a survivor, being a “thriver” requires absolute acceptance of what was and what is. If we discount our pain, or punish ourselves for feeling lost or isolated or scared about the challenges in our lives, however insignificant these challenges may seem to someone else, then we’re still choosing to be victims. We’re not seeing our choices. We’re judging ourselves.

and

What happened can never be forgotten and can never be changed. But over time I learned that I can choose how to respond to the past. I can be miserable, or I can be hopeful—I can be depressed, or I can be happy. We always have that choice, that opportunity for control. I’m here, this is now, I have learned to tell myself, over and over, until the panicky feeling begins to ease.

and

Freedom is a lifetime practice—a choice we get to make again and again each day. Ultimately, freedom requires hope, which I define in two ways: the awareness that suffering, however terrible, is temporary; and the curiosity to discover what happens next. Hope allows us to live in the present instead of the past, and to unlock the doors of our mental prisons.

and

Now, on the eve of my return to prison, I remind myself that each of us has an Adolf Hitler and a Corrie ten Boom within us. We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for—our inner Hitler or inner ten Boom—is up to us.

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The Wrestler, directed by Darren Aronofsky, starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei: I remember this movie blowing me away the first time I saw it, which may have been in a theater, I forget, but it was soon after it came out in 2008. I’d never seen anything like it in its style, its quality, its innovation.

I remember being unable to believe I was watching a movie. It felt so honest and true I couldn’t believe it was fiction, that it was a movie and not a documentary, that someone could show that amount of vulnerability.

Rewatching it decades later didn’t take anything from it. Rourke was raw beyond what nearly any other actor can achieve. Who else? Brando? Day-Lewis? Streep?

Aronofsky’s directing matched Rourke’s performance. I watched interviews later in which Aronofsky mentioned his background in cinema verite, which revealed some of where the grit and reality came from.

Having lived more myself, I can appreciate more the struggles the character faced as well as Rourke in what he showed. Tomei too, but not quite at his level. I see things the movie reveals about our culture, fame, masculinity, status, and more.

Two great works this week that I recommend.

• ← When they say “transition fuel,” they mean “more polluting and depleting,” not less pollution or depletion
• I increasingly feel like I’m in Monticello listening to Thomas Jefferson →