Read, Shake, Appreciate #5
Welcome to Read, Shake, Appreciate! This is your weekly round-up of words that made me feel inspired, songs that made me shake my ass, and people who I think deserve some spotlight.
This week I’m reading:
Honeybee by Trista Mateer
A few years ago after a big break up, I decided that I was going to become the type of person who woke up in the morning and read poetry with their breakfast. This collection by Trista Mateer is one the first I picked up, and have come back to multiple times, because it holds falling in love and heartbreak and putting yourself back together again like nothing else I’ve read. It’s so vulnerable it feels like being invited into someone else’s skin, and it’s incredibly reassuring if you’re someone who’s always believed that they feel *too much* when it comes to relationships.
Here’s a poem titled It’s All So Light, about realising that the world goes on:
Nobody is in love with me and everything is still warm. Still soft. Still rosewater and a typewriter ribbon. Still cookbooks and salt air and sheer black lingerie. Still red lipstick. Still mostly kind. Still often uncomplicated. Still mints at the bottom of my purse, hair held back, pulse thumping through skin. Still sweet tea in a pitcher on the kitchen counter, a cold glass with three lemon slices, a full ice cube tray.
This week I’m shaking to:
I Love Me Too by Kirby
Not entirely unproblematic lyrically, but with a beat this soulful and a chorus filled with affirmations, you’ll be shouting out “baby I love me too!” after a few listens. Biiiiig dancing in the kitchen energy.
This week I’m appreciating:
Mindset coach, writer, speaker, podcaster, and slayer of social media fuckery, Africa Brooke is the freshest breath of air to enter my online space in years. She specialises in helping her clients overcome self-sabotage, and has more recently been taking on the toxic side of online social justice culture, and the parts of it she believes are leading us to a collective sabotage of our own movements and selves. Follow her for take-no-shit exploration of call-out culture, binary thinking, online mob mentality, identity, moral perfectionism and more.
You can find Africa’s podcasts here:
(I also especially loved listening to Africa on this episode of Fucking Cancelled):
Thanks for reading this far friends! Please remember if you’re ever overwhelmed by the number of things we’re supposed to be reading, listening to, learning & unlearning all the time - you’re also allowed to just take a breath and take care of yourself. 💜