(Side note: As someone who has been using the German word schadenfreude my whole life to discuss taking pleasure at the expense of others, I was giddy to discover it actually had a positive opposite in freudenfruede, taking joy from someone else’s success. For each emotion, she gives a brief definition and explanation of how it can manifest, the good, the bad, and the ugly, weaving in anecdotes from her research and her own life. For example, in the section “Places We Go When We Compare,” she covers comparison, admiration, reverence, envy, jealousy, resentment, schadenfreude, and freudenfruede. In the book, she outlines 87 (!!!) emotions and identifies the experiences that have us go to those places in our minds and hearts. It’s a good read, great even, but it took me over four months to read by design I would pick it up, read a section, ponder it a little, and put it down for another day. Guess what? That’s exactly what happened! This is not something to read cover to cover but is a manual for understanding and navigating emotions. I was already a big Brene Brown fan before I opened this book, so I knew to steel myself for something that was going to teach me, challenge me, and break my brain a little bit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |