Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation

TRIGGER WARNINGS: SEXUAL ASSAULT, SELF-HARM

So, I threw myself into this reading thinking: this going to be a funny novel... was I wrong? A 100%. This book is not a novel, it's actually a memoir about a woman's experience with mental illness.

Her emotional disturbance started when she was a child due surviving sexual assault. From there she writes about how her mental disorder develops and how it impacts her daily life and her education. And this is the challenging part of the reading: her youth and adulthood. If it was a stressful for me to read it, I can't imagine the author's and her family stress during that period of her family.

Did I like the book? No, but I did enjoy it. The part I enjoyed the most was about the author's experience as a psychiatrist patient and how she was seen as a sexual and self-harm survivor experience, and how confusing and intense the mind can feel when it's disturbed. And some moments with mom were excellent: advocating for her child through the whole appointments, asking what was really wrong with her child when professionals were given her 5 different diagnosis, talking about how the medication is not working for her child, and preparing her child to the mental battle she would experience in her life and that she would have that fight by herself. Been a psychiatrist patient is brutal, specially when the so called "professionals" that are supposed to help you are not empath, and they believe they are the patient's professional, when only the patient can describe the experience of having a mental disorder. The only professional about yourself it's you.

I think the book deceive me into thinking this would be a story of mental health and the journey to heal old and new wounds (which... kind of was), but I started the reading with the idea of fiction, not a memoir. I believe that might have affected my experience with the reading. Also: I wanted to read more about how she was uncovering her feelings, how she was accepting and worked with them, but, since this is a memoir, a personal experience, maybe she didn't felt comfortable sharing it in the book and that was okay.

Side note: I didn't knew dyscalculia was actually a psychiatric disorder!

Content Warnings