A deeply personal Make It Make Sense review exploring courage, chaos, and connection through raw stories and gentle reminders that you’re not alone.
There are books that entertain, books that educate, and then there are books that hold you. “Make It Make Sense” by Lucy Blakiston and Bel Hawkins, the duo behind the globally loved platform Sh*t You Should Care About (SYSCA), falls squarely into the third category.
It is not your conventional self-help manual or a rigid guidebook for living better. Rather, it is a raw, poetic, and fiercely honest collection of thoughts, personal essays, and emotional reckonings that resonates deeply – especially when you stumble upon it at a vulnerable time in your life.
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CONTENTS:
Make It Make Sense review: An honest look at healing and growing up
This isn’t just a book review, it’s a conversation about how Make It Make Sense quietly restores your sense of self when everything else falls apart.
A book that finds you when you’re lost
I discovered Make It Make Sense during one of the hardest transitions of my life. I was unemployed, sitting in a room that felt too quiet for comfort, when I saw a post on Instagram by SYSCA. It was about being brave and minutes later, I had ordered the book.
Let me say this upfront: this book isn’t for everyone. It’s not designed to be a one-size-fits-all life coach. If you’re looking for bullet-pointed life strategies or neatly packaged “rules for success,” this might frustrate you. But if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the world’s noise, disoriented by adulthood, or paralyzed by the pressure to be “on” all the time, then this book will feel like a deep breath you didn’t know you needed.
Honest, unpolished, and deeply relatable
Each page in Make It Make Sense feels like sitting across from a close friend who’s telling you the truth you’ve been avoiding. It’s not sugar-coated. It’s not performative. It’s the real, unfiltered messiness of being human in a hyperconnected, hyper-anxious, hypercompetitive world.
Blakiston and Hawkins structure the book around a collection of short essays, journal entries, poems, and lists, making it perfect for dipping into whenever you need a nudge of honesty or hope. There’s a beautiful rhythm to it, one minute you’re laughing at a painfully relatable meme about being “chronically online,” and the next, you’re reading a line so raw it forces you to pause and breathe.
Not just for gen Z, a surprise companion in my 30s
The authors themselves are in their twenties, and much of their writing is clearly aimed at a younger audience navigating the chaos of early adulthood. But even at 30+, I found myself nodding furiously at so many passages.
What Make It Make Sense captures so powerfully is that anxiety, imposter syndrome, heartbreak, burnout, and existential dread don’t magically disappear with age. In fact, they often intensify. The honesty in this book reminded me that courage doesn’t always look like action. Sometimes, it’s just getting through the day without giving up on yourself.
One passage that hit me particularly hard was:
When phoenixing happens, you can do anything you want. You can turn into a morning person. You can leave the party before it gets good. You can rebrand as someone who experiments with microdosing or joining a noise band. You can get a pixie crop. Sell all your clothes. Give live tarot readings on the internet. Start experimenting with parkour.
You can do anything you need in the months that follow, and no one can judge you because your life has turned to ash and, until it increases in value, nothing is off-limits. Despite being incredibly bleak, this is an incredibly freeing feeling.
But it’s difficult to see it that way when you’re down at the bottom of a well. It’s dark down there and, often, what you’re turning to in those sharp, alone moments is a screen filled with people who’re busy doing life perfectly. Or if they are admitting to being in a mess, it’s often to the tune of a rediscovered Velvet Underground song, wrapped in a sage-coloured woven-bamboo duvet with a stick of Japanese incense burning in the background. Life has lost its ability to be a mess because that’s difficult to film and make cute. We need to let it be ugly and offline for a while so it can come full force again.
If only we had known from the beginning that everything terrible eventually turns into something good, but only if we learn how to make sense of it. It seems as though the moments in life that are so dizzyingly good never last long enough, and the ones that crush you into someone unrecognisable feel as though they’ll last forever. But through it all and out the other end? You take flight. You phoenix.
But first, you have to break.
Reading this felt like watching my own internal chaos put into words: raw, unfiltered, and strangely comforting. It doesn’t sugarcoat the pain or pretend that transformation is beautiful in the moment. Instead, it names the ugliness, the absurdity, the freedom that comes with losing everything and having nothing left to protect.
During my own season of unraveling, this passage reminded me that destruction isn’t the end – it’s the beginning of reinvention. That before you can rise, you have to break, and there’s something fiercely human in that truth.
Cultural commentary meets quiet therapy
A unique strength of this book is how it balances pop culture dissection with emotional healing. As a media brand, SYSCA is known for discussing everything from politics to reality TV with a smart, compassionate lens. That same energy pulses through the pages of Make It Make Sense.
You’ll find reflections on why it’s so hard to log off in a world that profits from your attention. Why we’re exhausted from “curating ourselves.” Why burnout is the background noise of an entire generation. And why, despite it all, choosing softness is a radical act.
In one of my favorite chapters, the author writes:
“Making small mistakes in public is humbling, but every time I do it, I’m glad. Not only does it remind people that you’re human, but being in a constant feedback loop means you really learn to put your pride aside and admit when you’ve got something wrong.”
That line struck a deep chord with me. During a time when I felt fragile and exposed – especially while navigating unemployment and the uncertainty that came with it. This reminder gave me the space to breathe.
I didn’t have to perform perfection. I didn’t have to pretend I had it all figured out. The real strength, it turns out, lies in embracing the discomfort of being wrong, of learning publicly, and of staying open to growth. It’s messy, yes, but it’s also profoundly liberating.
Style and structure – Fragmented yet intentional
Stylistically, the book feels like a Pinterest board of emotions, deliberately fragmented but deeply intentional. Some pages are just a few sentences. Others span several pages. This format isn’t just aesthetic – it reflects the way many of us experience life today: in fragments, in scrolls, in emotional bursts.
And yet, it never feels disjointed. There’s a clear emotional arc – a rhythm that builds from sadness to acceptance to empowerment. It mirrors the cycles we all go through when we’re trying to make sense of our own chaos.
Goodreads, Amazon, and Beyond: What other readers say?
On Goodreads, Make It Make Sense holds a strong average rating, with many users praising it as “the perfect book for women in their twenties navigating adulthood,” or “a warm hug for the emotionally exhausted.” One reader described it as:
“A chaotic but comforting diary that makes you feel seen in all your weirdness and worries.”
Amazon reviewers echo the same sentiment. The tone is often emotional—some admit they cried, others say they laughed out loud. Almost all agree: this book feels like a friend.
Even blogs and review sites like ArtsHub praise the book’s format and voice. One review called it:
“But that said, like a good piece of anthropology, it offers a window into a particular cultural moment – a snapshot of how a generation is trying to navigate unprecedented challenges with a mixture of anxiety and hope..”
Powerful Quotes from Make It Make Sense
Some lines stay with you long after you’ve closed the book. Below are just a few of the most resonant quotes that held me together when I needed it most:
“The realisation that you can do everything in your control and things will still not work out is one of the hardest lessons to fully arrive at and accept while you lie awake at night grieving a future you thought you were promised but never got to have. It’s very levelling to learn that not even you, no matter how hard you try and how many carbon credits you offset, are protected from change.”
“When I think back on that life-burning-to-the-ground heartbreak, which I hope will be my last but who’s to ever truly know or say, I want to kneel down on the floor next to that one-winged pigeon who was once me and promise her with every bone in my body that the unthinkable will happen: things will change. Life will put itself back together. You will fly again.”
“Living well is the best revenge. Whenever things get hard, or your plans feel like they’re running away from you, you must always remember this.”
“You will change. The world will get hotter, and wetter, and smaller, and bigger, and more disappointing, and more boring, and more ALIVE. To judge yourself on past decisions is to miss the point, which is to wake up every day as curious as possible and as forgiving as you can without relinquishing your self-respect. Accept that bad times are inevitable, but with them come times that are the total opposite.”
Final thoughts: Not a solution, but a shelter
Make It Make Sense won’t fix your problems. It won’t give you a 10-step plan for reinvention or success. But it will remind you that you’re not alone. That feeling lost doesn’t make you a failure, and that courage sometimes looks like softness, not strength.
Reading it while unemployed, unsure of my direction, and quietly panicking about the future, I didn’t find all the answers. But I found something better: permission to feel without guilt. And a reminder that feeling is, in itself, an act of resilience.
If you’re standing at a crossroads, stuck between the life you had and the one you haven’t found yet, Make It Make Sense might just be the compass you didn’t know you needed.
Final verdict: Who should read this book?
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Those in their 20s and early 30s navigating the messy in-betweens of life.
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Anyone feeling burned out, directionless, or emotionally overloaded.
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Lovers of poetic, essay-driven writing with a soul.
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Fans of Instagram-era vulnerability with substance.
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People looking for affirmation, not just advice.
And most importantly:
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Those who need a reminder that they matter, even when life doesn’t make sense.
If life currently feels too loud, too fast, or too confusing, then take a moment. Breathe. And let this book speak to the version of you that just wants to be okay.
