Turtles All The Way Down · 8:13am Sep 4th, 2019
Today, I got the John Green Novel Turtles All The Way Down.
Today, I finished it.
Today, I felt the need to make a blog post about how this book affected me and inspired my story Hidden.
When people think of OCD, they think of the stuff they see. Like hand washing or turning things a number of times or checking and rechecking things. They don't see the methods of Counting things over and over to try and make things okay, or that all of the compulsions are done to try and get rid of whatever bad thought lies in your head.
I, personally, am not quite sure if I meet the full diagnostic criteria for OCD. I have the intrusive thoughts (and man are they intense- sometimes I can't tell what's real and not real because they're so vivid and I dream about them a lot), and I have some compulsions, like checking that doors are shut and checking my phone three times in less than a minute because I'm certain the time changed, Checking an alarm to make sure it's set or waking up hours before I need to to make sure it's still on, feeling uneasy if I add a new song to my phone and the order of the cover art changes- and needing to add a song from the other album to put it on top again, and needing to have my Apple Products arranged a certain way because I think all the cords will catch fire and I'll burn alive in my bed if they don't. I sent an email to one of the people at my clinic to see if my psychiatrist may have that in my diagnoses without my knowledge, but I'm doubtful. And if it isn't, I'll have to talk to him about it and see what he says.
It wasn't so much the compulsions in this book that interested me. It was the idea of a "thought spiral" where you get so caught up in your thoughts that you can't get out and you're going deeper into your thoughts as the spiral tightens it's grip on you. I feel like that every day. I tried to express a bit of that in Hidden, about how one criticism can take you down under those waters and nothing can get you back up. And even when you're just floating on the surface, the water is waiting for you to go back down.
My thought spirals are made in webs, more. One thought will be in the center, the thought of, say, I should have taken my dog out to pee before I left the house but I didn't have time. But my brain will conjure up good and bad alternatives like a web. One strand will be like If you did that you might have woken someone up when the door creaked, while another will be like but because you didn't he'll probably pee on your bed and then you'll have to do laundry. And when I remind myself that I have those puppy training pads in my room, my brain scoffs and says, with your luck even if you did put it out he wouldn't use it. On and on and on.
And I really want to get out of my head and focus on other people out there but I get so caught up in my own shit that I feel like I'm drowning. I can't escape me. I talked about in Hidden how Pinkie felt that she could change everything about herself and shed her skin like a snake, and sometimes I feel like that. I can adapt myself to whomever I'm around to try and lessen the impact of criticisms that come my way (and I always assume they will, it's just programmed in my brain)- but it doesn't change the fact that those criticisms are dragging me down. I feel like I'm losing my mind most of the time. I want to escape my life and just make it all stop for a while, and it's why I went into the hospital at least six times last year in as many months. It's as close to being out of your life as you can get. Your family isn't around and you don't have the internet to distract you. There's just you, and yourself, and even if you don't like what you see, you know who you are without the outside world influencing you. And even when we change our hair or our makeup or our clothes, it's still that us underneath it all. And a lot of us want to kill the me underneath, because we don't like them for whatever reason. But we have to live with us the rest of our lives, and we have to get comfortable with that me.
Our perceptions are influenced by our experiences, the words people say to us impacting us as if leaving an imprint on our skin. The me underneath is, in my view, rather selfish and manipulative. When you are told your whole life you aren't worth shit, you learn to take whatever you can for yourself, and you learn how to get it. It doesn't matter that you spend your life giving so much of yourself to others to try and atone for the sins of the you underneath, you still see that person and just wish they were gone.
But they can't be, because you cannot escape you.
That was the most powerful message Turtles gave me. As somebody with multiple mental illnesses (possibly including OCD), I pretty much do everything I can to escape the me underneath. I do commissions against my morals, I try and be kind and forgiving to people to a fault, even when they've hurt me many times, I try and be a helpful person to those who have spent years being cruel to me, because I don't want to be that me.
So, with Hidden, I tried to show how I cope with being in that water. Feelings stay with us longer if we don't acknowledge them. I'm lucky in a way, that every day is that blank slate where I start that day neutral. Some people carry emotional baggage for decades. I get to hit the reset button daily. I'll never be able to make my own way out of the water in other ways, but I have to try. I cannot kill the me underneath. I can only try and make peace with her.
So, I'm trying to get out of my house still to try and give that me a little peace where she knows that someday, those who pushed carts on her to drag her down will be over a thousand miles away. And she'll have the comfort of knowing that while some demons cannot be defeated, they can be dealt with in a way that gives her no harm. I hope that for the me underneath.
If any of you guys still wanna help me get to Florida (because god only knows the hell that will break loose in my house in the time between me getting a job and having the money to go) you can donate here
John Green, Turtles All The Way Down was an utter masterpiece. I thank you for giving words for the thought spiral I get myself into- even when I couldn't do It myself. Thank you for the realistic portrayal of mental illness in that it doesn't just go away- you have to make peace with it. And thank you for giving me a good read.
Glad to hear it helped you