Turtles All the Way Down

by John Green

But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.

Of course I’d long known that I was playing host to a massive collection of parasitic organisms, but I didn’t much like being reminded of it. By cell count, humans are approximately 50 percent microbial, meaning that about half of the cells that make you up are not yours at all. There are something like a thousand times more microbes living in my particular biome than there are human beings on earth, and it often seems like I can feel them living and breeding and dying in and on me.

Admittedly, I have some anxiety problems, but I would argue it isn’t irrational to be concerned about the fact that you are a skin-encased bacterial colony.

Once I start thinking about splitting the skin apart, I literally cannot not do it. I apologize for the double negative, but it’s a real double negative of a situation, a bind from which negating the negation is truly the only escape.

Sometimes I wondered why she liked me, or at least tolerated me. Why any of them did. Even I found myself annoying.

The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.

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

“Your brain seems like a very intense place,”

“Everyone remembers you, Holmesy,” she said. “That’s not—” “It’s not a value judgment. I’m not saying you’re good or generous or kind or whatever. I’m just saying you’re memorable.”

True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter.

We are about to live the American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else’s misfortune.”

“I honestly can’t even tell if he’s cute.” “He’s in that vast boy middle,” she said. “Like, good-looking enough that I’m willing to be won over. The whole problem with boys is that ninety-nine percent of them are, like, okay. If you could dress and hygiene them properly, and make them stand up straight and listen to you and not be dumbasses, they’d be totally acceptable.”

I have the soul of a private jet owner, and the life of a public transportation rider.

I have these thoughts that Dr. Karen Singh calls “intrusives,” but the first time she said it, I heard “invasives,” which I like better, because, like invasive weeds, these thoughts seem to arrive at my biosphere from some faraway land, and then they spread out of control.

You don’t actually want to do this; it’s just an invasive. Everyone has them. But you can’t shut yours up. Since you’ve had a reasonable amount of cognitive behavioral therapy, you tell yourself, I am not my thoughts, even though deep down you’re not sure what exactly that makes you.

“I don’t mind worriers,” I said. “Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.”

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” —WILLIAM JAMES I don’t know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name.

“You can’t control it, that’s the thing,” I said. “Life is not something you wield, you know?”

For one thing, I wasn’t convinced the circular white pill was doing anything when I did take it, and for another, I was not taking it quite as often as I was technically supposed to. Partly, I kept forgetting, but also there was something else I couldn’t quite identify, some way-down fear that taking a pill to become myself was wrong.

There’s no need to suffer.” Which I’d argue is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the human predicament, but okay.

I was thinking about how part of your self can be in a place while at the same time the most important parts are in a different place, a place that can’t be accessed via your senses. Like, how I’d driven all the way to school without really being inside the car.

“If taking a pill makes you different, like, if it changes the way-down you . . . that’s just a screwed-up idea, you know? Who’s deciding what me means—me or the employees of the factory that makes Lexapro? It’s like I have this demon inside of me, and I want it gone, but the idea of removing it via pill is . . . I don’t know . . . weird. But a lot of days I get over that, because I do really hate the demon.”

She told me she wanted to see me in ten days. You can kind of measure how crazy you are based on how soon they want to see you back.

I think and I think and I think.

Dr. Singh told me once that if you have a perfectly tuned guitar and a perfectly tuned violin in the same room, and you pluck the D string of the guitar, then all the way across the room, the D string on the violin will also vibrate. I could always feel my mother’s vibrating strings.

I’m not sure why, but I’ve always been pretty keen on the male forearm.

and even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.

“I use the internet. I just don’t feel a need to, like, contribute to it.”

tried to smile and shake my head at the right times, but I was always a moment behind the rest of them. They laughed because something was funny; I laughed because they had.

“Right, that’s Cassiopeia. And the crazy thing is, the star on the top, Caph—it’s 55 light-years away. Then there’s Shedar, which is 230 light-years away. And then Navi, which is 550 light-years away. It’s not only that we aren’t close to them; they aren’t close to one another. For all we know, Navi blew up five hundred years ago.” “Wow,” I said. “So, you’re looking at the past.” “Yeah, exactly.”

“You don’t talk much, Aza.” “I’m never sure what to say.”

“What are you thinking?” “I’m thinking it’s too good to be true,” he said. “What is?” “You.”

“The question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.”

I guess she was trying to make me feel better, but I find mental disorders to be vastly overrated. Madness, in my admittedly limited experience, is accompanied by no superpowers; being mentally unwell doesn’t make you loftily intelligent any more than having the flu does.

“You feeling scared?” “Kinda.” “Of what?” “It’s not like that. The sentence doesn’t have, like, an object. I’m just scared.”

“I’m sorry.” “You say that a lot.” “I feel it a lot.”

Him: You really don’t like your body. Me: True. Him: I like it. It’s a good body.

Him: We agree on that. Too much work. All people in relationships ever do is talk about their relationship status. It’s like a Ferris wheel. Me: Huh? Him: When you’re on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that. Nobody who’s doing it ever talks about anything else. I have no interest in dating. Me: Well, what do you have an interest in? Him: You.

“But you give your thoughts too much power, Aza. Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.”

Him: I like the way your shoulders slope down into your collarbone. Him: And I like your legs. I like the curve of your calf. Him: I like your hands. I like your long fingers and the insides of your wrists, the color of the skin there, the veins underneath it.

Every loss is unprecedented. You can’t ever know someone else’s hurt, not really—just like touching someone else’s body isn’t the same as having someone else’s body.

“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.” —ROBERT FROST

The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.

We always say that we are beneath the stars. We aren’t, of course—there is no up or down, and anyway the stars surround us. But we say we are beneath them, which is nice. So often English glorifies the human—we are whos, other animals are thats—but English puts us beneath the stars, at least.

Seeing your past—or a person from your past—can for me at least be physically painful. I’m overwhelmed by a melancholic ache—and I want the past back, no matter the cost. It doesn’t matter that it won’t come back, that it never even actually existed as I remember it—I want it back. I want things to be like they were, or like I remember them having been: Whole. But she doesn’t remind me of the past, for some reason. She feels present tense.

She noted, more than once, that the meteor shower was happening, beyond the overcast sky, even if we could not see it. Who cares if she can kiss? She can see through the clouds.

Our hearts were broken in the same places. That’s something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.

In job interviews they’d ask me, What’s your greatest weakness? and I’d explain that I’ll probably spend a good portion of the workday terrorized by thoughts I’m forced to think, possessed by a nameless and formless demon, so if that’s going to be an issue, you might not want to hire me.

The words used to describe it—despair, fear, anxiety, obsession—do so little to communicate it.

“I feel like a noose is tightening around me and I want out, but struggling only cinches the knot. The spiral just keeps tightening, you know?”