Book meme!

Because my medium smallcousin asked nicely and because she included a book I gave her on her list, Ten Influential Books (in no particular order)...

1. Karen Armstrong, The Bible: The Biography (as a consequence of which I stopped feeling guilty about religion)
2. CS Lewis, the Narnia series (a gift from my godmother, who is into feminist SF, and my first speculative fiction)
3. Lewis Wolpert, Malignant Sadness -- An Anatomy of Depression/ (because it provides a very useful way for me to think about my mental illnesses, and it's written charmingly and beautifully from the perspective of a professor of biology who has a history of depression, which means there's no defence/perfect enough to keep it from coming back -- I picked it up from the bookshelf of a counsellor several years back)
4. Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice (despite having only come out last year! I had to read it three times in a row because I couldn't settle to anything else, and I can't remember the last time I had to reread a book immediately at all; it's about identity and selfhood and mental illness and loyalty and trust and love and choice and it took the insides of my head apart and buffed out some dents and shaved down some edges that were catching and oiled them and replaced a couple of broken springs and then put me back together, running more smoothly)
5. JK Rowling, the Harry Potter series (yes, really -- I was 7 when Philosopher's Stone came out and 18 when the series ended; in a very real sense I grew up with Harry & Hermione & Ron, and Hermione made me feel more like there was space in the world for me and I still cry at the drop of a hat thinking about Dumbledore saying, in OotP, "there will come times when you have to choose between what is right and what is easy", and HP fandom was an enormous part of my teens)
6. The poetry anthology Staying Alive (which doesn't actually include Carol Ann Duffy's We Remember Your Childhood Well but does have plenty of the rest of her stuff that I found incredibly formative)
7. Terry Pratchett, particularly the Susan books, but honestly I don't particularly feel like picking one (Susan Sto Helit is another person I felt I could model myself after or aspire to; if I ever achieve that level of gently-exasperated getting-things-done I think I'll be quite pleased; and if I need comfort-reading and grounding I go to either Howl's Moving Castle [I read pretty much everything by Diana Wynne Jones in the year I took out of uni to go mad] or the Tiffany Aching books)
8. Paula Boock, Dare, Truth or Promise (teenage social justice lesbians, 'nuff said, though these days I wince at Everyone Is White in a way that I didn't when I was 12)
9. Oddly, given my current reading patterns, Victoria Routledge Friends Like These (another thing I imprinted on pretty hard in my secondary-school library, which made me feel like maybe I could be a grown-up and maybe I could have friends and probably I would make it)
10. Another recent one: Janet Mock's Redefining Realness (which is unflinchingly honest and open, and is absolutely unyielding on claiming that we are what we make of ourselves)

And one(s) for luck: Julia Serano's Whipping Girl, in the wake of reading which I decided I could be out and a scientist; and Kate Bornstein various, who has been a liferaft more than once.

A quick note on medical anxiety

Content note: weight-shaming, medical consent, disordered eating.

I tend to be very nervous when I get my blood pressure taken, because medical appointments are stressful even when they're with people I know: I'm a complex patient, I ask for things doctors aren't always comfortable with, and people can't always (or even often) tell me what's wrong with me. Being an expert patient can get very lonely. Better even than that, usually the person who's checking my blood pressure is someone new, doing intake, with whom I have no trust and no rapport and no pattern for how the appointment is likely to go.

I am always congratulated on my blood pressure being slap bang normal to low normal, even after I've told them I'm anxious. The only time I've ever had a plausible reading is after an outpatient medical procedure: I was sleep-deprived, I'd been nil-by-mouth for somewhere in the vicinity of six hours, and I'd been given IV sedatives without anyone checking in with me about the idea first. I was sufficiently far into "low blood pressure" that the nurses insisted on keeping me in for observation. It was eminently avoidable, if they had only thought to seek appropriate consent.

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