I thought about this title for a long time, and in every way that I try to phrase and rephrase it, it comes back to this one word, unpacking. Unpacking my mind. Unpacking my heart. Unpacking my house. Unpacking my home. Unpacking me.
This is not a book where the marriages break or the characters fall out of love, this is a book that walks the very fine line between a mid-life crisis and a crisis of faith. This is a book that can be entirely summarised by this single line, "[it was] ordinary in every way except for the fact that it happened to have one of the world's finest gothic cathedrals in the middle of it".
All the Beautiful Lies is a harrowing tale of the cycle of intergenerational trauma and how unbreakable it is when you have no knowledge of other realities outside of your own.
The days are dark, and the light seems as though it will never shine upon us, but we’re going to power through anyway and hold on to the most powerful thing we have, hope. The tides will inevitably change, and our paths will too often stray from the linear one we’d hoped for it to stay on, but that isn’t always a bad thing; sometimes what we need is different to what we want and it is in the right timing and situation that all which is right for us will align and make its self apparent.
On the good days and the bad, I reached out for my comfort book and read it cover to cover until my little brain pleaded with me to change it up a bit and read something new. But, my goodness, that book changed me.
And that’s the biggest difference in this new year of life. For so long I have lived for everyone else that I forgot that I’m a person too, and I deserve to be cared for by me.
On some mornings I still stand in front of the mirror for a minute too long and have to fight the urge to knock all of these products off the sink, but I have to take a moment to remind myself that this is for me. It hasn't always been for me, but it is now. I owe it to myself to be kind to my body, mind, and soul.
