Let me start off by saying I’m not a huge fan of contemporary novels, and while I enjoy reading John Green’s books, they never rank among my favorites.

Turtles All The Way Down changed that.

I needed to read this book years ago, but maybe if I did I wouldn’t have found it as powerful as it was. To give you a sense of what I mean, I stopped after 3 chapters to go back and flag sentences; something I almost never do in books I read for fun (ie. non-academic). Some of the sentences I marked because they were humorous or cleverly written, but most I marked because I related to them, or because they were powerful enough that I wanted to be able to reference them again.

I don’t have anxiety in the way that Aza does (and I don’t have her OCD), but I understand it and relate to it, and it’s taken me years to come to this point - to be able to understand what I am dealing with and form it into words.

In high school, I realized that I overly stressed about things that no one else was, but I did not know enough to call it anxiety. I remember being told to quite overthinking and overreacting, like anxiety was just a switch that I could effortlessly turn on and off. I remember being ashamed that someone was having to tell me this, but also confused - I knew whatever I was reacting to was trivial in the grand scheme of things, but did they honestly think I chose to have those experiences? In college, when I was finally exposed to a much wider range of people and resources, I still attributed most everything to stress, although my conversation about anxiety had just begun. It wasn’t until the last two years that I realized everything that I was feeling - what other people had also been feeling in many of the same situations - was actually anxiety. This is a conversation that for me is still almost exclusively private, and one that I am continually working to better understand and work through (in fact, this review took me a month to post).

But then, how do you go about letting others know? How do you let them join your conversation? How do you let others into what you perceive as a weakness, as a failure, because it is a deviation from the “normal” image you’ve worked so hard to project? I have to applaud John Green for letting us experience his versions and his struggles with mental health (granted, it’s not exactly the same, as explained in this Time interview if you can get through all the ads: http://time.com/4976944/john-green-turtles-all-the-way-down-mental-illness/). Writing a book is opening a vulnerability to the world in itself; writing a book about sensitive and personal issues is even more so.

I’m very glad that I read this book, even more so because I picked it up on a whim in the bookstore. This is the kind of book that we need more of. Anxiety - as well as mental health issues in general - are not a one size fits all diagnosis, which is part of the problem. Mental health issues are so diverse in their causes, severities, and manifestations that it can be extremely difficult for those not affected to understand.

I know the following quote has already been used a lot in other reviews, but really, I think John Green hit the nail on the head:

“Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you do.”