This 2019 memoir by author, advocate, and storyteller Maia Kobabe (e/em/eir) is a tender journey through childhood to adolescence, exploring gender expression and the anxieties of growing up. It’s a beautiful walk with time and acceptance of oneself—a teacher, a guide, and at times, a friend.

I’ve written before about how university, for me, was quite a lonely experience. The movies and TV shows I watched growing up—depicting college or university as this “straight out of a movie” experience—set me up for a sore disappointment when I found myself unable to adapt to the fast-paced, extroverted lifestyle I expected. I found it hard to make friends, and even harder to keep them.

Whenever I wrap up with a semester, I have a terribly hard time reading. It seems counterproductive given that my entire degree is based around reading novels at an inhumane pace and pumping out 1500 word essays on whatever repeating prompt my professor handed out that week.

It’s been a really long time since I have had such a visceral reaction to a book. Around a month or so ago, a good friend of mine recommended Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows after realizing we shared the same love of books that hold the capacity to destroy their reader. 

What happens if you fall in love with a colour? Bluets by Maggie Nelson has been on my reading list for quite some time. In all honesty, I have been in the worst reading slump arguably in my life. In tandem with entering my final year for my bachelor’s degree, I feel a strange sort of grief following me wherever I go.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much cooler I was as a teenager. I was spunky and rebellious and full of the possibility that my life was on the brink of beginning. 

Life has been weird lately. It has been weird in the sense that sometimes I wake up and forget where I am. For a second each morning, I panic and try to find something familiar in the dark of my room to prove that I am here, and not somewhere else very far away. Growing up in a very small and isolated town, this feeling of displacement makes me who I am. I start to feel homesick when I find peace somewhere bigger than that town.

The end of January where I live in Canada has broken out of the harsh grips of winter to an unexpectedly warm and kind spring. It seems only fitting, then, that I should introduce Mary Oliver for this book review. Mary Oliver is one of my favourite writers that I count myself fortunate enough to have come across. Her writing is whimsical, calming, nurturing, and above all else -- simple.

I have been going through a very weird time in my life. From attempting to navigate friendship, romance, and that weird, unspoken tether between them—the past months have been a time of great transformation.