The Beautiful Risk of Being Different.

Books We Love: The danger to be Sane. 

Some books stay with us because of their story.

Others because they put words to something we have felt for years, without quite knowing how to name it.

O Perigo de Estar Lúcida, by Rosa Montero, did the latter for me.

The title caught me first.

The danger of being lucid.

There is something wonderfully contradictory about it. We spend so much of our lives being encouraged to understand ourselves. To know who we are. To see things clearly.

But what happens when we do?

Rosa Montero writes about creativity, the mind, instability and the strange territory between what we call normal and what we call different. She moves between her own experiences and those of writers and artists, between science and literature, without trying to make everything fit neatly into one explanation.

And perhaps that is what I loved most.

The refusal to make everything neat.

Because people aren't.

We contradict ourselves. We feel too much and sometimes not enough. We can be certain and doubtful in the same afternoon. We can be strong in one part of our lives and completely vulnerable in another.

And still, somehow, we are expected to fit.

Into roles.

Into ages.

Into ideas of how a woman should behave, dress, love, work, create, grow older.

There is comfort in belonging.

But there can also be something quietly liberating about realising that perhaps we were never supposed to fit perfectly in the first place.

I thought about this often while reading Montero.

About the parts of ourselves we learn to soften because they are considered too much.

Too sensitive.

Too intense.

Too curious.

Too unconventional.

And about what might happen if, instead of correcting those parts, we became curious about them.

Not every difference needs fixing.

Not every contradiction needs resolving.

Not everything about ourselves needs to become easier for other people to understand.

Perhaps lucidity is not having ourselves completely figured out.

Perhaps it is simply seeing ourselves a little more clearly — and deciding not to look away.

That thought stayed with me long after I closed the book.

And that is usually how I know I have found a book I love.