A Culture Therapy Comfort Package
“Curiosity and passion are the enemies of anxiety. Even when I fall deeply into anxiety, if I get curious enough about something outside of me it can help pull me out. Music, art, film, nature, conversation, words.
Find a passion as large as your fear.
The way out of your mind is via the world. ”
We’re having the kind of week where we want to sink into a bubble bath on waking up, turn off the world, and reset our lives and that’s just not possible. We’re tired of apps suggesting that we move, COVID blazing through our communities, and our days not quite aligning with our to-do list. So we compiled this Comfort Care Package, because we need it and thought that there might be moments when you do too.
There’s Matt Haig and Ted Lasso, Unsung Heros and Daily Smiles, poetry and advice columns. Just a range of things that shift our emotions and thoughts, and make our days just that little bit easier even when they don’t appear so.
It starts with Matt Haig’s, The Comfort Book. This is the book we now turn to when in need of reassurance, something shared with many, many readers who made this such a bestseller. Read first, then flick open whenever you need it. We keep this on our bedside table for those moments when we need something and we’re not quite sure what that is.
As with all his books, Haig here is just a human figuring it out too, sharing his wisdom and his lived experience (even his recipes) through compassion and kindness, as he helps others figure it out too. Contained within its pages, is hope - for the day, for something better, for our lives and minds.
Pair with The Midnight Library (we recommend the Audible edition read by Carey Mulligan), or Reasons to Stay Alive, or Notes on a Nervous Planet.
If even Brene Brown gets it, then we feel pretty confident in recommending this show for the courage to be vulnerable (she even interviewed series creators Jason Sudeikis and Brendan Hunt).
We admit to avoiding this one for a while - football??? - but once we did we realized that it had very little to do with the beautiful game and so much more to do with finding our people, our purpose, and our way through, on our own terms.
Coach Ted Lasso’s optimism is often the thing cited as the heart of the series, but for us, it’s the way he reacts in unexpected, read kind, ways with everyone around him again and again that we want to tell you about it, but would spoil the series for you if we did.
"I promise you there is something worse out there than being sad, and that's being alone and being sad. Ain't no one in this room alone." - Ted Lasso
The podcast My Unsung Hero is brought to us by the people behind Culture Therapy favorite The Hidden Brain. Each short episode is designed to be an antidote to the despair of a daily news cycle which shows us the worst of humanity and not our capacity for kindness, generosity, and love. These are the stories we don’t get to hear but the ones we need to. Like the one about an 8-year-old alone at an airport who is helped by a stranger, and a colleague offering comfort unasked.
Can you think back to a time in your life ‘when you were feeling low and a stranger noticed it and helped you’ or when someone ‘reached out when no one else was watching with no expectation of a thank you?’ That is an Unsung Hero.
We love this podcast for reassuring us that people are good (and we all probably need reminders of that). From May 2020 to February 2021 when the news cycle became particularly bleak, Wondery put daily positive messages out there as a different way to start the day. Each episode hosted by Nikki Boyer features a story to make you feel good. And they do, they warm your heart without being too saccharine or without us becoming too cynical. People do amazing, beautiful, smile-inducing, things, and here’s where you get to hear about them. Listen to this to be reminded of the humanity of those around us. Maybe be the person bringing a daily smile into someone’s life in other ways too.
“Sometimes the way you start your day really does affect how the rest of your day goes. If you’re listening to the news right off the bat, you absorb that stuff like a sponge, it gets into you. This is just a nice alternative to that.”
— Nikki Boyer
““Good poems are sharp, bright, and brilliant things that cut right through you. There is something so potent about a poem, these condensed, distilled moments that can take our breath away.””
This book of ‘Poems for when you really need them’ was selected by Cecilia Knapp, poet, playwright, novelist and the Young People’s Laureate for London 2020/2021 (and ambassador for mental health charity CALM). Compiled during the lockdown months of COVID, Everything is going to be alright is a collection of poems designed to bring joy, hope, and solace.
Poems like Kim Addonizio’s To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall (“Listen I love you joy is coming”), Danusha Lameris’ Small Kindnesses (“We have so little of each other, now. So far/ from tribe and fire”) and Travis Alabanza’s For when my body does not feel right (“I wonder all the things I can learn if I try to meet you with love?”)
In situations that cover loss and heartbreak, aging and childhood, love and acceptance, these words might offer a way to get you to a place of understanding.
We first discovered Cheryl Strayed in this compilation of her Dear Sugar columns for The Rumpus (though her voice was anonymous when these were first published). Included with previously unpublished letters and responses, Strayed doesn’t just answer her readers, but she offers compassion and courage in the advice that she gives. Though published in 2012 we still dip into this one when we’re looking for some of Strayed’s ‘radical empathy’ - read very wise words (we aspire to have an emotional vocabulary as dense and nuanced as Strayed’s).
Pair this with Strayed’s NYT’s podcast Sugar Calling - recorded with writer friends during the first lockdown - and past episodes of Dear Sugars with Steve Almond. And of course, there is always Wild for how Strayed approached her own life.
“I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” — Cheryl Strayed
Looking for more resources to turn to when you’re in need of something? Take a look at the rest of our Culture Therapy recommendations for books, podcasts, TV shows, films, magazines, and music to turn to when you’re lost, lonely, anxious, or just curious.
Let us know what you’d include in a Cultural Care Package. Whose voices reassure you? Which books have your back? What words help your days?
