Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy and Connection

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We’re supposed to mold ourselves into other people’s lives, and walk alongside them in their life journey. Zhu has found a way to lift the veil on the feelings and phenomena we experience but haven’t figured out a way to articulate to ourselves—let alone to the world—and uses their writing as both a mirror and a doorway: reflecting these parts back to us and inviting us in to process them together. While sorrow and death are difficult and scary experiences, instead of being taught how to feel and navigate them, we fear them so much that we strive to completely avoid them.

I think the telling can feel less immersive than the showing, however, I did agree with pretty much everything they told. Haines closely studies the iterations of each reaction, explaining that “these protective responses are well beyond our conscious capacity to control them. Twenty scattered pieces of paper surrounded me in a circle, and I read each of them out loud, burning them one by one. A necessary, brutal, optimistic, loving, intense book I want to shove into the hands of people I love.A lot of my work has been seen through Instagram, which is such a blessing, and I love using that tool. Being gentle with myself, reparenting myself, and romancing myself strengthened all my relationships. I first just want to say that books like this usually don’t appeal to me, but I’ve followed Mimi’s page on Instagram for some time now, and their words have always resonated in a very deep way for me. Because sometimes the grief is about planet earth, and it’s about watching global warming or the trees dying, et cetera. Mimi Zhu is that one stranger who you woke up to in your living room from the party the night before.

Your posts seem to stand out more because of the platform they’re on — a really deep thought about insecurity will be sandwiched between posts of people being a little more fake. not bad by any means but with these kinds of books it’s ofcourse going to be a very subjective experience and most of the insights here were things i had already come across in other books. They allowed a vital energy to be released from my soul, an energy that had long been constricted in my chest. Be Not Afraid of Love is both a question and an answer, beckoning the reader to interrogate the power of love, the utility of love. I often find that most self-help falls into categories that help you improve your material wealth - update your mindset SO that you can make more money, start that business, network more effectively, be less afraid of professional judgement.With over 6 million of the world’s best eBooks to choose from, Kobo offers you a whole world of reading. So not only finding people to build family with but completely re-imagining what family is, is such a beautiful life-changing lesson that I've learned. They’re afraid that the inevitable criticism will affect their self-esteem, which they’ve worked hard to maintain. I think we're here to be in relation with each other and every relationship is circumstantial to how you want to continue, how you want to nourish, or how you want to separate and detach.

Zhu has access to therapy and a stable network of supportive friends; many of their marginalized peers do not. The book is part memoir, part essay collection, and part spiritual guide, a rumination on healing and Zhu’s journey to rediscover what it means to give and receive love. In a universe where we are taught to be hard and numb pain, this is a declaration to lean in and be soft as the cure.And then we’re given contradictions in the form of childhood movies or romantic comedies, in the form of words vs. What makes Zhu’s work so special is that they learned to stop fearing love, not by following constructs and norms, but by destroying them.