Become Bulletproof
I bought this because I thought I could use some tough women books to pull myself together. Actually, pull my recently messed up brain together. Instagram pushed me the review without highlighting the cover, and I clicked the link without paying too much attention.
Then DANG!! It was like agreeing to a blind date because your parents said the guy is dependable and you thought, fine, maybe I should listen to my parents for once. Then you show up and he’s already so deep into the billion dollar M&A deal he just closed and you’re already planning your exit before your drink arrives.
The cover alone should have been the sign. A woman in a black turtleneck, arms crossed, pores magically smoothed out of existence, staring at you like she has personally never second-guessed a single decision in her life. After Bad Blood and Elizabeth Holmes, I’m sorry, but the black turtleneck is a joke to me now. Yes, black turtleneck to me is a costume!
I forced myself through one third before landing on this sentence: “shift your mindset away from the problem and toward the solution. Look at the situation from a bird’s eye view.”’ Bird’s eye view. What the heck?! My eyes are already destroyed from staring at a laptop for 10+ hours every single work day. Now I have to strain them further to locate some bird’s eye view. I can barely get a full view of my own forehead!!
This author is almost certainly an extraordinary, high achieving, self-sustained, supremely confident, immaculately poised role model of a woman, and the book absolutely deserves every bit of its bestseller status. It’s just a me problem. I cannot stare back at the glare of such women. I would be so intimidated by her bird’s eye view that I’d want to cover my scalp and disappear entirely.
It’s absolutely not about the book. It’s about my low self esteem. The therapy to afford her bird’s eye view will definitely cost me more. No way I can afford it.
The Post about Yiyun Li
My Rednote post about Yiyun Li winning the Pulitzer Prize got 120,000 views in two days. I was blown away. As I mentioned in the post, my reading journal entries about her have always pulled the highest traffic, and the comments are, again, overwhelmingly hostile. Every single time.
And I thought, imagine if each of these 120,000 people who hate her just gave me ten dollars for writing conspiracy posts and attack journals about Yiyun Li every single day for 6 months. I would be retired by Christmas. Pettiness and grudges, monetized. I’d be so good at this.
But I know exactly where this is coming from.
During Covid I read Where Crawdads Sing. This was the same window of time when Asian hate was everywhere, when Chinese were being pushed onto subway tracks in NYC, when old people were being knocked down in Chinatown, when my hometown was locked down and people were jumping from buildings. I had also just finished The Color of Law, one of the most important non-fictions about housing in American history, a devastating account of how the U.S. government deliberately engineered segregation. And then I picked up Where Crawdads Sing, where the most urgent story in America turned out to be about a stunningly beautiful, impossibly brilliant girl and her loneliness. Great. Glad we sorted out our priorities during one of the hardest periods.
I finished it, closed it, couldn’t believe I wasted my money, and poured tea on it. Crinkled the pages with dark stains. Then I left it in the donation box outside my regional library. I guess I was trying to make whoever picked it up next associate it with something gross. I am not proud of this. That was silly and I’m sorry.
But I very soon realized that every violent feeling we have toward a book is actually just a feeling we have toward ourselves, redirected.
I don’t like Becoming Bulletproof because the woman on the cover is everything my low self esteem tells me I will never be. I was furious at Where Crawdads Sing because I was furious at a world that kept choosing certain stories over others. The 120,000 people flooding my Rednote post aren’t really angry at Yiyun Li or me. They’re angry at something she reflects back at them. We are all just out here attacking books, authors, and random strangers because we cannot afford therapy.
Emotion regulation needed. Insurance not accepted.
Stranger in a Strange Land 