what I'm reading: Reckless Steps Toward Sanity
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”
This week, I finished reading Reckless Steps Toward Sanity: A Memoir by Judith Sara Gelt.
Ours is an era when our well-manicured personas are presented to the world under the ironic guise of authenticity. Even the people we know in real life carefully edit the image we have of them. And so, when someone tells you who she really is and how she came to be that person, it’s inspiring and remarkable. In her memoir, Gelt recounts in vivid and emotional language the steps she had to invent to extricate herself from a troubled household when she was still a teen. Her battles ranged from the effort to recover from a violent sexual assault at the hands of a stranger to the near-impossible task of confronting her domineering father while caring for her mother who lived entrapped within bipolar disorder. Gelt’s descriptions of the rich beauty of her mother’s Jewish traditions stand in bright contrast to the grip of her father’s oppressive rule.
As the author reveals her growth into adulthood and maturity, she shows what it is to grapple with rebellion and resentment and love and duty, while working to find the way forward toward careers, complicated marriages, and motherhood; to find self-reliance and self-understanding, to see her own mother in herself and to bring the strength of that relationship into the present day with her own child. Some of her struggles remind me of my own, and I feel less alone for having seen how she triumphed. Her memoir shows resiliency and bravery—and it’s such an inspiration.