Face your fears and unleash creativity.

You know when you see the title/synopsis of a book and you just KNOW it’s something you’ll enjoy and resonate with? This is that book for me. I’ve been a fan of Felicia Day since her time on Supernatural (although short-lived…) and got excited when I spotted her new book.

Embrace Your Weird

Face Your Fears And Unleash Creativity 

Author: Felicia Day

Release Date: October 1, 2019

—Entertaining and revelatory exercises that empower you to be fearless, so you can rediscover the things that bring you joy, and crack your imagination wide open

—Unique techniques to vanquish enemies of creativity like: anxiety, fear, procrastination, perfectionism, criticism, and jealousy

—Tips to cultivate a creative community

—Space to explore and get your neurons firing

Get Weird

I would describe this book more as motivational and self-expressive rather than “self-help” and it turned out to be different than I expected. If you’re looking for a book about Felicia, well she has an autobiography, but Embrace Your Weird wants you to express your creative and weird side and helps you become more comfortable doing so.

But there is still plenty of Felicia’s personal experiences sprinkled within the motivational tips and stories.

The book is broken up into sections, starting with how you’ll use the book and moving onto why creativity is important, learning more about yourself, and combating the enemies who try to diminish our creative side, including and mostly, ourselves.

There are a lot of exercises to get your creative juices flowing. Felicia says it’s okay to write in her book, she wants you to, and there is no wrong way to do anything, as long as you’re just doing something.

Fighting Self-Doubt

One of my favorite chapters is “Enemies” which is the hardest thing, for me, when it comes to doing anything creative, especially if it’s something I want to do for the rest of my life (i.e. writing.)

She breaks them down into three different categories and dives even further in by starting with the enemies inside us and moving onto the ones in the outside world. I resonated strongly with “Fear of Failure” because next to “Perfectionism,” it’s the biggest thing holding me back from publishing my own book. And she teaches you how to fight against those thoughts. Coming from personal experience, Felicia knows how hard these enemies fight and like the rest of the book, has you dive into personal issues to learn where to start.

Overall

This isn’t just a book for someone who’s looking to “quit their day job and fully dive into a creative field” but for anyone who wants to express themselves more. Whether you want to take up photography or gardening as a hobby, this book helps you start somewhere. It reiterates how important creativity and imagination is and to embrace what you love to do fully (as long as it doesn’t hurt others or animals.)

What a great book to start out the year reading. If you’re looking for a fun read or want to try something new, I highly recommend Embrace Your Weird.

And I’ll end this with one of my favorite quotes in the book at the start of the “Fear of Failure” section:

Underneath the, “Gee this pantry organization is an emergency situation; writing that album of kids’ songs can come later!” is a pulsating fear of not being good enough. Of being mocked. Of having the end result we present to the world not be equal to what we visualize in our hearts and our dreams.

My Rating

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