The Mind I Became

I finished this book three months ago, and believe it or not, I still can’t get it out of my head. Certain sentences from it still come back to me at completely random moments, sometimes when I need them the most.

Whenever I feel myself starting to slip back into that dark place again, when those depressive thoughts begin creeping in and I recognize that familiar feeling coming back, somehow I remember at least one thing I read in this book. Sometimes it’s a sentence. Sometimes it’s just an idea. But it’s enough to make me stop and look at what is happening in my mind differently. And somehow, that feeling doesn’t take over me the way it used to.

I honestly still can’t believe a book could have that kind of effect on me.

For a long time, I tried to find something that would help. I went to psychiatrists. I tried talking about what was happening in my head. I tried therapy and medication. I kept hoping that eventually something would click and I would finally feel different. In my own experience, nothing seemed to reach the part of me that I was actually struggling with.

Then I came across The Mind I Became by Cal Hollins.

I didn’t even start reading it expecting it to help me. I certainly didn’t expect that three months later I would still be thinking about it. I thought it would just be another psychology/self-development book that sounds interesting while you’re reading it and then slowly disappears from your mind.

It wasn’t.

There were parts of this book that made me stop reading because I suddenly understood something about myself that I had never been able to put into words before.

For years, I had treated so many things as simply being part of my personality. The overthinking. Expecting something to go wrong. Pulling away. Certain thoughts that seemed to appear automatically. The way I reacted to situations before I even had time to think about them.

I would always tell myself, “That’s just how I am.”

This book made me ask a question I had somehow never seriously asked before:

What if that isn’t simply who I am?

What if some of the things I call my personality are reactions and patterns that became so familiar over the years that I eventually stopped seeing them as patterns?

That question genuinely changed something for me.

It didn’t suddenly make every difficult thought disappear. I still have bad days. I still have moments when my mind tries to return to places I don’t want to be. But now there is something between the thought appearing and me automatically believing it.

I notice it.

And once I notice it, I can question it.

That might sound like a small difference to somebody who has never struggled with their own mind, but for me it has been enormous.

There were times before when one bad thought could turn into an entire bad day. Then several bad days. Before I realized what was happening, I was back inside the same mental state I had desperately wanted to escape.

Now, sometimes a sentence from this book comes back to me and interrupts that process.

That is the part I find almost unreal.

I’ve taken medication for depression before, and I’ve tried getting professional help. I’m not telling anyone to replace either of those things with a book, because I can only speak about what happened to me. But personally, I can say that some of the ideas in this book reached me in a way that the things I had tried before never managed to.

For me, the effect has felt stronger and, more importantly, it has stayed with me.

Three months later, the book is closed, but somehow the conversation it started in my head is still going.

I think that’s why I’m writing this.

Not because I believe one book is going to magically fix everybody. Not because I think everyone will have the same experience I did.

I’m writing this because I almost never found it myself.

And knowing how much my own thinking has changed since reading it, it feels strange to imagine that I could have simply scrolled past it and never known what was inside.

If you’ve spent years fighting with your own mind, wondering why you keep returning to the same thoughts, the same reactions, or the same version of yourself no matter how badly you want things to change, I think you’ll understand why this book affected me so much.

Maybe you’ll read it and have a completely different experience.

But three months later, I’m still carrying parts of it with me.

And considering how many books I’ve forgotten almost immediately after finishing them, I think that says more than anything else I could write.