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Reviewed by Ruffina Oserio for Readers' Favorite
Jesse Sloane’s Coloring Through the Noise is a memoir that brilliantly documents her unraveling when her high-functioning VP career implodes overnight. She descends into a nervous breakdown accompanied by spiraling thoughts and shaking hands. She describes the experience as one in which her body is basically grabbing her by the shoulders, saying, “We need to talk.” Then her husband hands her a coloring book, which she initially resists as ridiculous. When she starts coloring, she realizes that completing a page per day means she can actually start, stay, and complete something despite the chaos. In this memoir, she describes her journey to healing, clarity, and restoration. This happens in five phases: regulation, understood as calming the panic; return of identity, which is the process of remembering who hides behind the titles; reclaiming joy and power by choosing herself; ownership, which is setting boundaries; and becoming.
Jesse Sloane’s memoir delivers vignettes that include unicorns, abandoned pages, and hawks, which she uses to reconstruct her sense of self. It was fascinating to discover how simple, micro-acts of completion and presence can play an important part in cultivating agency and self-awareness. Coloring Through the Noise taught me that there is grandeur in small things, especially those acts that are accomplished with intention and purpose. In this book, the author treats coloring as a “portable reset button,” and the ritual of coloring is accompanied by manifold lessons, including the fact that softness stops strength from becoming bitterness. She cautions that one doesn’t arrive at healing all at once, and while coloring became her tool, what mattered wasn’t finishing a page, but the desire to come back to it. This is one of the best allegories of healing I have read.