How this seemingly generic self-help book helped me confront my depression

It’s common to witness your average fiction reader at a more than safe distance from the non-fiction aisles of a bookstore.

“They’re too boring, too generic, too straightforward.” Self-help quickly got labelled unimaginative and is blamed for not tickling our brains enough.

I’d often catch myself engaging in heated debates in favor of fiction, quoting their qualities at length while looking down upon those who found these information-laden, step-by-step guides to becoming better versions of ourselves “boring”.

But I take my job seriously (even though it is a self-assigned job that doesn’t pay in money). And so, for Bookstagram and in the pursuit of developing a wider worldview of reading, I turned to self-help books. Most of them conformed to my above-mentioned notions until I read Mindset by Dr. Carol S Dweck.

Róbert Berény, Girl reading on sofa, 1906

Before you proceed, please understand that I am not vouching for this book here. In fact, in words of my elder sister who trusts every book I remotely mention in our conversations - this book was “dull, boring, useless”.

Reading self-help/non-fiction is highly subjective of your life experiences. Either they will click or feel like they didn’t need to be 300 pages long. I think it’s time we move forward the bias: keep what you like, DNF (Do Not Finish) what you don’t.

Mindset opened my mind to the idea that a basic characteristic that we assign so much weight to – our “intelligence”, is ever shifting. It isn’t that you are born either smart or dumb, it is an ever-changing quality you can develop.

This seemingly straight forward and obvious revelation challenged me in my early twenties: you see, I was the child that was always academically aligned. In no time, I started associating my entire worth to my grades, to external validation, to the job I land, the college I get into, to the promotion I get, to my salary.

I developed a massive fear of failure to a point that I would rather not do something than doing it wrong at the first go.

And as you might have guessed, that went very badly.

This seemingly common and urban problem of attaching your self-worth to external validation can only be helpful in a healthy dose but years of badgering the same thoughts in my head rendered me motionless in life.

Not only did I view everything through a view of being evaluated (in college, in relationships, in social settings) but failing to meet these expectations that I set for myself led me into deep pits of depression for years.

Crying girl on sofa, Peder Knudsen, 1919

It manifested into being exhausted with unlearning such a deep rooted belief system and took away my energy for doing things that are important in your early twenties - focusing on your intellectual, emotional and personal growth. If I took one step towards healing, the guilt of wasting my potential took me ten steps back.

It led me to discover this epidemic of mental health problems amongst the formerly supposedly gifted children.

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It has been a few years since I consider myself to be a regularly functioning human but the years I spent healing have given me a lot to reflect on. And most of all, this seemingly generic book that isn’t remotely about depression helped me connect some dots along with other things that I plan to cover in a different post.

So, maybe read that non-fiction book occasionally, it surely doesn’t seem that deep and might take away some of your aura points but they might occasionally bring a piece of yourself back to you.

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If you enjoyed this piece and want to see more of my reading & writing journey, find me on my Instagram @yourshonestly_