mental health

Where Has All the Comfort Gone? Tips for When Your Comfort Reads Don’t Work

/ Madeleine James / Leave a comment

 I don’t know about you, but 2025 has required some comfort reading. There have been days when I wanted to crawl between the pages like Peter Rabbit after his mama tucks him in with chamomile tea. That’s when a lot of us re-read favorites, but what if that doesn’t work?

Flying without the emotional safety net of Peter Rabbit’s chamomile? You don’t have to. There are ways to uncover bespoke, new comfort reads, even when you’re stressed.  It starts with two questions.

Question One: What am I reaching for when I reach for a “comfort read”?

Question Two: What would be comforting right now?

Let’s start with the first question. “Comfort” means different things to different people at different times. For example, Dracula always worked for me because it evoked my cozy, perfect first reading at sixteen. Agatha Christie also worked because her mysteries engage my little gray cells in puzzles that has nothing to do with what’s causing my stress. 

Both answers give me places to start. 1. books that evoke a comforting time or experience and 2. Books that distract my stressed-out brain.

Now, for the second question. What would be comforting right now?

This can be a little harder, because if you knew you wouldn’t be asking the question. So, here are a few ways in.

Experiment with books, genres or subjects that are straight out of your left field. Try sifting through a “Best Of…” list. Try a title that you’re a little ambivalent about. I don’t read a lot of political writing, but Abundance by Ezra Klein hijacked my brain with different problems and their possible solutions. Bam. Mental distraction. 

Mine your TBR. Like, go deep. Find that book you bought for a $1 in 2017 and give it a try. You of 2017 may have left a great escape hatch for you of 2025. 

Rampant nostalgia. Go back to books from when you were a kid. Get them Goosebumps. Binge the Baby-sitter’s Club. Revisit A Wrinkle in Time because, let’s face it, It is a dark and stormy night. Go back to your childhood shelves. It’s a PB&J for your feels.

Spoil yourself by reading backwards. Pick a book, flip to the back and read the ending. Then start it from the beginning. Don’t read to find out what happens. Read to see how it gets there. It’s a way to force your brain into different thought patterns. Try it! It’s weirdly engaging. 

Go so far out of the box that you end up in a recycling center. Try webtoons. Try fanfic find what you’re looking for? Try writing it. You won’t be the only one with an Owl House shaped hole in your heart. Regardless of how you choose to engage, spend some time in a familiar fictional world. It might be the chamomile you need.

The main thing is to identify what you really need right now and let your readerly instinct guide you to where it’s hiding. Embrace the process and give yourself as much time and patience as it takes. 

On Depression and the Value of Contentment

/ Madeleine James / 6 Comments

There is a photo of me from when I was about three years old. I wish I knew where the was, but it’s fallen into the void of my mom’s house. In the photo, I am wearing my “polka-dotty dress” which is white with tiny red polka dots and a red ribbon around the waist. It is my favorite dress and I feel extremely sassy in it. I have my dimpled hands on my hips and I’m grinning down at the camera from the top step of a porch. The sun halos me from behind, soft and orange in early eighties Kodachrome, but it’s my smile that Iights the image up. This is the last visual image I have of myself as a fundamentally happy person.

When I say “happy person”, I don’t mean “happy” in a situational or contextual sense. I have been happy many times in my life, and I have many happy memories to go with them. Wide-ranging conversations make me happy.  Reading a book on a rainy day makes me happy. My daughter’s grin makes my heart burst with happy. Infusing honey with lavender before the house wakes up makes me happy. The happiness that I feel in these moments is real, but it’s also contextual, not fundamental to me as a person.

I was happy because something made me happy. Happiness as a result of an external influence, not an integrated state of being. They exist like flashes in the brain pan of my day,  pulling me up out of a naturally neutral state. It’s not that I walk around unhappy – it’s more that  my resting state is  grave, depressed in the literal and clinical sense.

I am a depressive, but I am not anhedonic . I feel pleasure. I feel happiness. But neither are consistent or independent of external influence. Contentment is. I am, if not happy,  profoundly content.

For young me, “contentment” was the opposite of “really living”. It meant that you had settled, and I was not going to settle. I was going to blow out my emotional credit limit and pay the bill in my thirties.  Paying the bill was rough – necessary but rough. Five years of therapy later, I am modulated and mindful and wildly functional. I am also gratefully content. Ironically, contentment is, for me, its own kind of joy. It’s not the champagne of pure happiness. Rather, it’s the mulled wine of a hard won stability, which makes me very happy.

It’s lovely to feel that my life is good and complete. While contentment doesn’t eradicate the need for ongoing effort (some struggles have deep roots), but I feel myself to be in balance. My contentment is as fundamental to me as my gravity and neutrality. The scale still tips one way and the other, but it returns to it’s baseline, which is a strange and happy thing.

*Side Note:  I should explicitly state that what I’m describing isn’t the difference between being depressed or not depressed. Depression isn’t as simple as happy vs. sad, nor is depression synonymous with sadness, as any depressed person can tell you.

Small Fiction: Cold War

/ Madeleine James / 1 Comment

Black and white historical photograph of a woman standing at the Berlin Wall circa 1962 for Flash Fiction: Cold War by Malin James

Berlin Wall, c. 1962

She was prone to overthinking. Aggressive, determined thinking  formed a wall around the process of life, which she could not control. She deployed distractions and analysis with Soviet subtlety, creating, over time, a network of protections. One department no longer knew what the others were doing. Left hand fooling the right.

She did this cloak and dagger for years – years and years and a lifetime – until cuts were made, and a colder, less stable government dismantled the agency of her cognition. Even concrete crumbles with age, but habits are hard to break, especially the girders in a foundation. The woman became a mouse in the concrete wall, sealing the cracks up with crumbs.