One Book *everyone* Should Actually Read

Is The Choice by Edith Eger.

I had a whole script for the video above, but during filming I realised that it just made more sense to read small excerpts from the book. The first few pages alone are so densely packed with wisdom and empathy that they alone are worth more than the price you’ll pay for it.

Edith Eger is a survivor of Auschwitz, first being taken to the camps aged 16. Afterwards, she led an extraordinary life, eventually moving to America to build a new life. She became a psychotherapist who specialised in PTSD, among other things.

The book is just as much about the lives of her patients that she’s treated as it is about hers. It’s about empathy, not just for others but also for yourself. It’s about facing life with courage.

And, perhaps most remarkably, Eger explicitly states that she doesn’t believe that there is a hierarchy of suffering - that one person’s pain is somehow greater or more valid than another’s (you think that given her life experiences, it would be, if anything, expected that she would have such a view). Rather, she states that everyone deserves compassion. That everyone has to reconcile what is with what they think ought to have been. Everyone has real pain. She writes:

I don’t want you to hear my story and say, “My own suffering is less significant.” I want you to hear my story and say, “If she can do it, then so can I!”

I urge you to read it.