"The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another."
During the summers of my childhood, I'd often engage myself in things like Vacation Bible School or Accelerated Reader summer programs that took place at the local library. I remember when the sign for the library changed to a minimalist design. The words 'Dexter Public Library' still scrawled across the front of the building, but in a simpler fashion. It didn't hide the rickety floors still inside, or the bookcase of VHS tapes that greeted you as soon as you stepped through the door. The summer reading program took place in the event hall that was a part of the library, not in the actual library itself. There was often dust on the wood furnishings and the air conditioning was almost always on, but the room still held a hint of humidity. Not enough to make book pages feel wet, but enough to make the books feel like they could turn to putty in your hands.
Reading has been a past time of mine, at the very least. I always find myself in a position where I start to become more aware of how I'm sitting and reading than what I'm actually reading, which turns into reading the words without processing them. I've read in cars, on buses, in bed, on a blue blow up chair sitting on a guest bed in our basement, and yet I couldn't tell you exactly what I've read in every single one of these places. Just that the blue chair started sticking to my legs, so instead of reading Junie B Jones, I looked at the words and continued to peel my barely covered thighs from the uncomfortable plastic. Or that my legs fell asleep from the knee down, in correspondence with my arms falling asleep from the elbow down, confined to three fourths of a seat on a bus from Richmond to New York.
What became so enticingly rich about Turtles All The Way Down wasn't the fact that it had remained in my possession for five months, unread. Collecting dust among the Joan Didion books I had blazed through like they were all a page long. It was that when I removed the front cover, it became discrete. Sans the abrasive and bold designed cover, the book itself was all black, with silver writing on the binding. While standing out against the books on my floor under the handmade wooden desk my dad assembled with his own two hands in high school, it managed to blend in with where I kept my own secrets; among journals and sketchbooks painted in neutral tone. Within pages, I anticipated this book to sound like my own diary. Like my own invasive and intrusive thoughts would be brought to light, and my face would turn a shade of scarlet like my darkest, most embarrassing secrets had been revealed. Although the embarrassment wouldn't come from the reveal, it would come from the, now apparent, incessant ticking of my internal clock.
The idea that we've all got invasive thoughts is wildly comforting while also being unsettling. There's nothing normal about having the "I could easily just drive straight into the woods instead of following the curve of the road. But maybe I won't do that. That's not a good idea." conversation with yourself. In the very least, at least some of us are able to talk ourselves out of those invasive thoughts. Like driving your parents' car into the woods, or hopping out of a hospital bed to drink a handful of hand sanitizer because you're terrified of what virus you're going to contract. I once heard that the fear of heights isn't the actual fear of being high up, it's the fear that you're not sure you can trust yourself to not throw your own body off the top of a building. I think about that often. Not because I'm going to throw myself off a building, but because I have a fear of heights, with the knowledge that I do know better than to throw myself off a building. I purchased Turtles All The Way Down the same exact day that I purchased The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, with the intent to finish both books in a weekend. It is now apparent to me that my consistent apprehension, anxiety due to procrastination, and constant lingering-of-a-dark-cloud-over-my-head towards reading this book was nothing but encouragement to read it at the right time. I needed The Year of Magical Thinking in January. I needed to find Joan Didion and be inspired by her craft, to better understand who I'm urging to be at this point in my life. I needed to continue to read Joan Didion and I needed to shelf John Green. I needed to wait, until today, to read this book, for the simple fact that so much of this book is everything I needed to hear, on this day.. I can't tell you the last time I fully processed a whole story like I did with Turtles All The Way Down. The anxiety hushed, the persistent twisting in my stomach due to stress subsided, the tears that have continued to threaten my eyes without dropping dried themselves up, maybe only for 5 hours, but long enough to read a story that I needed today, and that I'll continue to recommend to people. Maybe I'm enticed due to the glaring similarities between me and the main character, not due to being pretentious, but due to having been so purposefully inwardly introspective in order to assess what in my life is going wrong. Maybe I'm enticed because somewhere deep down, I hope that although everyone has something going wrong, there will eventually be someone who loves you for your Aza and your Holmesy, without trying to romanticize your suffering. It isn't that I'm eager for an end, it's that I'm eager for an answer. It truly does lie within the idea that I'm not writing my own story, I'm just living it the way I was meant to live it. Perhaps that's not the answer, but the question to something I have yet to grasp. Despite the desperate reach I have for Davis to be a real person, and someone I so terribly want in my own life, all of the characters in this book somehow resemble so many people I have in my life, and how I look at them. Maybe they're generic enough characteristics to pass as "that one person you know," but maybe it's a whole story line being written repeatedly for those of us like me that need to live it, experience it, and hear it from a different perspective. After all, it is all just turtles all the way down.