A Flash-Review of Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig
What can I say about his book? It was a like a hug for my mind.
I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book and felt like it was listening to me, but I really felt this way reading Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig.
It was the type of book I didn’t know I needed — didn’t know existed — until it came to me and I read it.
When I first started reading it, what struck me right away was the format. And, honestly, I didn’t love it at first. It came off a bit disjointed, kind of like an unpolished personal blog. I wasn’t sure if I was reading creative nonfiction, some kind of micro-nonfiction, poetry, or a combination of all of these. It felt uncomfortable. And, that was the point. I came to realize this somewhere in the middle of the book, around chapter 6. Then, I began to settle in. I liked being in this brainspace. It was messy and real, it was familiar, it felt like home.
At this point I really began to absorb the truths the author was expressing. I empathized with his mental health struggles and related to his inner voice that was coming through so naturally in the text. He wasn’t presenting anything groundbreaking — in fact, it was all information that we know all too well. Our reliance on (and addiction to) technology throws gasoline on the fire of our anxiety (a normal…
