#BookishThoughts-#BookBlogBirthday ! You Kept Your WordPress alive for a year!

Things I have killed, a comprehensive list-

• Tamagotchis
• Any house plants
• Cacti(allegedly unkillable)
• A parrot (not intentionally, but this happened!)

Things I have NOT Killed, a not comprehensive list-

• My love for books
• My blog

So it’s a whole year later since my first post, who’d have thought it? 232 published posts later, some of them not entirely nonsense, and here we are!

I have met some wonderful authors in the flesh, so to speak as well as publicists whose passion for books shines out of them, tour organisers who want to whip the bookworld into a frenzy over the most amazing reads and joined a real life blogger group, the SBCollective, hosted by Waterstones in Swansea!

Since beginning this journey, I have had the undeniably GINORMOUS pleasure to be welcomed into the book blogger/reviewer community and found an abundance of bookish love there!

As with most of life, there are always going to be those who use you as a stepping stone, those who try and copy you,dismiss you and/or put you and what you do, down, and that’s fine, as long as you keep a healthy mindset and try to keep to your own path and not wander onto someone else’s and get distracted and oh, hey what’s that over there…..

Let others do them, and for my first blog birthday ,the book I would like to recommend is ‘You Do You’ by Sarah Knight.

It has been an invaluable book, as was her previous one ‘The Life Changing Art Of Not Giving A F**k‘, currently included along with her other books in the WH Smith ‘Buy One Get One Half Price’ offer. I don’t how long it will go for so get your skates on and fly because honestly this book is the bollocks.

Whilst we are caught up in  a game of ‘am I as good as the next person?‘ and trapped in a cycle of anxiety which eats away at your confidence, we are wasting time, opportunities and damaging self esteem. And that way, ladies and gentlemen, depression lies…

What this book doesn’t do is promise you answers. It gives you the chance to make real changes and raise self awareness. It is like pressing a great big ‘MUTE’ button on all the annoyances that distracts you and gives you a mahoosive time out.

Published by Quercus, ‘You Do You’ uses exercises and prompts to get you back to basics, to reconnect with yourself and find out all the things that make you the super amazing person you are. It’s a journey of recognition and forgiveness and allows you the space to stop letting other people define you, stop looking for validation where it doesn’t exist .

You don’t need to hold yourself to anyone else’s standards and I think, in a world where to be successful you feel you ‘should‘ hit box x,y and z, the essentialness of you can get lost in the process.

It’s like a chat with your best mate who puts up with none of your bullshit, and will tell the truth that yes, your bum looks big but maybe if we do a little fancying up, it can look a bit smaller.

Anti-guru, yes, but 100% authentic, her books are golden in this here bookblogger’s thoughts.

So, go buy it -or if you want to- or borrow it from a library,you won’t look back!

Here’s to year 2 of bookish musings, watch out later for my next review which, as luck would have it, is a FABULOUS Orenda Books Title!!!

Twitter @MCSnugz

@QuercusBooks

Here is Sarah’s TED Talk on not give a flying f***….such a great talk!