Absolutely I'm Possible!
Lessons Learned from Defying the Odds!
Absolutely I’m Possible! is an enthusiastic and intimate self-help guide to achieving emotional and spiritual health.
Angela MacDonald’s personalized self-help guide Absolutely I’m Possible! draws on a traumatic experience as the foundation for its spiritual recommendations.
MacDonald begins with her own story, asserting that, at ten years old, she was vibrant, mindful, and intuitive. That same year, she was diagnosed with epilepsy. When her initial treatments failed, her doctor began adding new medicines and upping her dosages. The side effects of those drugs, she says, made her miserable, and led to suicidal ideation in her teenage years. A shattered vertebra and a near-death experience added to her trauma. But later, as she sought physical and emotional healing, she began to regard self-love and spiritual recovery as part of her purpose for being.
Drawing on these tough experiences in order to recommend complementary methods of healing for others, and including workbook elements, the book’s explanations of ideas like mindfulness and personal purpose are provocative. It achieves balance between its elements through its thoughtful organization, with four parts that each consist of several chapters. Its anecdotal portions are followed by general lessons; multivaried exercises follow these spiritual and self-help declarations, including appreciative inquiry practices, journaling prompts, and ideas for meditation.
Whimsical and positive, the book moves back and forth between its welcoming personal passages and its weighty self-help concepts and exercises. These fluctuations are mimicked in the book’s internal style, which includes both personal photographs and a recurring wing motif at the start of each chapter.
When the book’s focus is personal, its prose is narrative in style, adopting a hero’s journey sensibility to show how MacDonald lost much, but rose again regardless; its descriptions are detailed, intimate, and orienting. The self-help elements are interjected during pauses in this narrative; cohesion is thus maintained. And MacDonald’s recommendations for others are shared in clear, conversational language, inflected with intermittent ebullience. Despite the difficulties represented in sharing personal traumas, the text as a whole exudes confidence and certainty.
Personal growth is valuable, MacDonald knows, and it requires hard work. Using her own successes as an example, her book spends much time assuring others that such growth can be accomplished, with joyful exercises and words of wisdom shared at the end of each chapter as a useful takeaway.
Drawing on a personal story to make wide recommendations for healing, Absolutely I’m Possible! is an enthusiastic and intimate self-help guide to achieving emotional and spiritual health.
Reviewed by
Katerie Prior
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
