The book Turtles All the Way Down by John Green was recommended to me a few years back by someone without anxiety. She said it really helped her better understand what people with anxiety were going through. I agree with her. For people without anxiety, this book does a fantastic job depicting that we struggle with. John Green captures the back and forth with logic versus illogic, actively knowing the difference between the two, and the inability to to fight the illogical thoughts, perfectly. In the book, the main character’s trigger is disease. one specific one, but all leading to it. The book takes you on the journey of the struggle she faces every day to work through this anxiety. It takes you through the rituals she has to cope with the anxiety. It shows the reader the internal battle that a person with anxiety deals with. To be fair, the book makes it more of an extreme case, yet, it shows the spiral a person goes through perfectly.
I use the word spiral here purposefully. Even before reading this book, I have always used the term "downward spiral" to try to describe what was happening. I found it interesting that the author uses it as well. Maybe it's how everyone with anxiety describes it. I really don't know. Most of us completely hide and don't talk about our panic attacks. We don't talk about the battles that take place in our heads every day over the simplest of tasks. When we get sucked too far into the spiral, there is little you can do to pull ourselves out.
This book, for a person with anxiety, is hard to read. It's more than that; it hurts to read. It doesn't matter what your triggers are, you can feel her anxiety. Worse yet, you can anticipate it. That's what a good author does. In this case, John Green suffers from anxiety himself, so he fully understands his character, making it all the more real to the reader. To a person with anxiety, this book is very uncomfortable. Sickness is a trigger of mine, but in a completely different way. I don’t have the obsession about becoming sick, but I could clearly see how she went from A to B to Z in a matter of seconds. Being caught in that spiral, knowing you have to hit the very bottom before you can get back out, is hard to “watch”. You know that so many people can’t understand why you can’t just stop and move on, so it makes you hurt for the main character knowing it’s not going to get better. Because it doesn’t get better. It can get under control, but it never goes away. I won't even delve into how hard it is to read about her friendships and relationships with others. Those of us with anxiety understand we’re burdens to others and this book just shows how taxing we are.
To be completely honest, though I think this book really helps people without anxiety better understand what it’s like to live with anxiety, it’s also something I would not let my children read. Sunshine is going on 12 and already showing signs of anxiety. We are working with her to give her coping mechanisms. The last thing a young person who is trying to figure out anxiety needs is more things to be anxious about. I do not want my child going into her first kiss thinking of all the things Aza, the main character, thought about. I don’t want her to worry every time she gets a cut or a scrape because C Diff is something she never knew about before. There is no need to add a list of new worries to an already anxious child who does not yet understand what is happening in their own mind. For Monster, my reasoning for him not reading the book is different. He knows my struggles with anxiety. He has seen me go all the way down to the bottom of the spiral. He is an amazing kid for how he has handled it. I was ready to let him read the book until the end. Not to give anything away, but it doesn’t have a happy ending. There is no reason for a child to have to worry that his parent may suffer the same fate of hospitalizations for the rest of their life.
I like books with happy endings. Since being a parent, it’s really the only type of book I care to read. I want happy endings because life is hard. Every day is a struggle to just keep going. We all fight our own demons. This book just happens to include mine. In an interview Green said anxiety is, “...not a mountain that you climb or a hurdle that you jump, it’s something that you live with in an ongoing way. People want that narrative of illness being in the past tense. But a lot of the time, it isn’t.” While true, when reading a book, I do want it all to work out. I wanted him to tell me that she went on to have a totally normal life. It wouldn’t be reality then, but that’s what I want out of a book. I want to escape all of my worries and fears while immersed in a book. I know, all too well, that with anxiety, life is never normal. I will never be free from my worries.
If you want to know what it’s like living with anxiety, then read this book. You’ll probably think that there is no way this is real. You’ll think people can’t really be thinking these things. I assure you, they can. If you want your books to end happily, this isn’t for you. Or, maybe that’s just the anxiety talking. Maybe, for people without anxiety, they see the ending as being more positive than negative. I view it as too realistic for what I want out of a book. I want to read to escape my day to day life. This book wasn’t that for me, but it might be for you. It could be the book that makes you think, “Thank God, I’m not that crazy.” Just remember, some of us are.