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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
Float Your Boat by Umar Siddiqui presents a framework for engaging with therapy from the perspective of someone living with schizoaffective bipolar disorder. He organizes his approach around three principles: acceptance, persistence, and resistance, applied at three levels. Siddiqui frames therapy as assessment rather than diagnosis, linked closely to creativity, observation, and questioning. He talks about his experiences, leaning into dual cultural identity, inherited trauma, and the societal need for therapy in toxic environments. Siddiqui shares that fashion and Disney are his stabilizing forces and expressive tools, and distinguishes between coping from compensation, and critiques judgment and bias as obstacles to progress. He examines intelligence through multiple modalities, with emotional intelligence being a focused highlight, and shares his own unique communication framework, guided by his proposed ARC model of articulate, resonate, and cohere.
Float Your Boat: You Have Power and Control by Umar Siddiqui is confident, original, and consistently thoughtful in its delivery. I really like Siddiqui's view on therapy and the impressive range of topics his writing covers. The best of these for me stemmed specifically from very direct ideas that stem from things like the emotional architecture of theme parks like Disney, his experience with Pakistani designer Hasan Sheheryar Yasin, and his views on consumer behavior and impulse. Siddiqui employs a sharp attentiveness to language and structure throughout, and he does well in balancing analysis with personal touches. The style is conversational, akin to having a chat with a knowledgeable friend. Overall, Siddiqui's part memoir, part self-help, part pep-talk is unquestionably a distinctive and consistent reflection of his own voice, perspective, and intellectual framework. Recommended.
