Read This for Inspiration: Simple Sparks to Ignite Your Life

Product Description

From former BuzzFeed personality Ashly Perez comes a funny, honest, and unabashedly feminist book of inspiration and wisdom to help you plant some roots, live in the process, and accept you for you.

Take a break from mindless phone scrolling and empower yourself to live intentionally and find meaning all around you every single day.
Read This for Inspiration, filled with short bursts of encouragement and enlightenment, is your staring place. Look inward and also way beyond your arm’s length—these entries are inspiring not only for the wisdom they impart but also for the way they lift you up.
 
Virtual BuzzFeed start turned television writer Ashley Perez has compiled all of the inspirations that have enriched her own life—influenced by history, literature, music, and her mom—to help you discover what motivates you. We all have to start somewhere.

Review

“The perfect balance of personal and researched, philosophical and accessible, and great for reading in bits and pieces.”
—BuzzFeed  
 
“Former BuzzFeed sensation turned TV writer Ashly Perez offers short missives to living a more fulfilling life in this highly gift-able, multicolored, small book with a huge heart.”
—Good Morning America
 
“Perfect for when you want an easy picker-upper, bite-sized inspiring stories, and just something to make your day.”
—Cosmopolitan

About the Author

Ashly Perez is a writer, producer, director, and actor. During her five-year career at BuzzFeed, she was one of the co-creators and a producer of BuzzFeed Violet, BuzzFeed’s first scripted character universe, and starred in over 250 videos. Her writing has been published in BuzzFeed
, HelloGiggles,
The Conversation, and
Darling magazine, and she has been featured on NPR’s
Take Two and
Call Your Girlfriend, among others. Now she writes for the hit Freeform show
Good Trouble.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Hello, and thank you for picking up my book!

Maybe you’re in a bookstore, browsing, and wondering who I am and why you should buy this book. Or perhaps you’ve already brought it home and you’re wondering how to use said book. Well, let’s start with who I am. My name is Ashly Perez. You may recognize me as that girl from BuzzFeed. I worked there for five-and-a-half years, producing, writing, acting, and directing short-form internet content. Some of my most popular videos included “I Learned How to Dance in 30 Days,” in which I mastered a dance routine in order to confront my long-standing body-confidence issues, and “Coming Out,” which is a short film about my personal experience coming out as queer. I actually got my start at BuzzFeed as a writer, where I published some of BuzzFeed’s earliest viral posts and quizzes. I’ve been writing my whole life—personally in blogs and journals since I was a kid, and professionally for the past decade. These days, I’m a television writer and artist.

I wrote this book as a response to one of my own issues—something I like to call “phone fatigue.” Most mornings I wake up and find myself immediately reaching for my phone. Even before my eyes fully open, its blue-light glare is in my face, and the endless scrolling begins, usually through Instagram (for updates on my friends) and Twitter (for updates on the world). It’s good to be informed, but my scrolling isn’t really satisfying, fulfilling, or inspiring. In fact, most days it leaves me exhausted, sad, or comparing myself to everyone whose life is clearly better than mine—or at least is so in my perception. That’s no way to start your day . . . or end your day, or spend any of your day, for that matter. During every break from work, I scroll. In the line at the grocery store, I scroll. When I’m stopped at particularly long red lights, I scroll. I scroll all day until I scroll myself to sleep.

It’s not very enriching, but what’s the alternative? Enter:
Read This for Inspiration.

I wrote this book as a remedy for my phone fatigue. I wanted a