This month, I am carrying Difficult Pleasures by Anjum Hasan into our mentoring circle.
Not as an expert, not with answers, but with open hands.
It feels like the kind of book you don’t really read alone. You sit with it. You breathe with it. You let it rearrange the furniture of your heart.
All through our interactions, I keep thinking about how strange and beautiful it is to guide a room through grief while still learning its language myself.
To hold space for others while quietly holding my own unnamed aches.
We are reading about how grief stays. How it doesn’t always announce itself. How it slips into the everyday, into tea cups, into empty chairs, into the spaces between conversations. Not loud. Not theatrical. Just present.
Hasan writes loss like a shadow at dusk. Stretching and softening to become part of the landscape.
And somewhere between her sentences, we find ourselves in those small heartbreaks, the unfinished goodbyes, and the versions of us we have outgrown.
Each session feels less like a discussion and more like sitting around a small fire where we are passing stories, passing silence, and learning that healing isn’t fixing. It’s witnessing.
Maybe that’s what I am learning most, that leadership can look like listening. Guidance can look like gentleness, and that sometimes all we can offer each other is a page, a pause, a place to feel.
Some books teach you things. Some books hold you while you learn them. This one does both.