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Driving Question: Why do people hide their identities?

In Paper Towns by John Green, Quentin sets off on a journey to track down Margo, the girl who captured his heart and made him feel genuinely alive. Ben and Radar, Quentin’s friends, also come together to help figure out the clues that Margo left for them to figure out. Margo's journey allowed her to find her identity. On the surface, there are many different reasons why one may hide their identity. It could be because of past trauma, or being afraid of how others may perceive them. Identity can be who you are on the inside and the outside. Often, it is easier to hide who you are to avoid judgement from others, but not only does that lead to confusion of yourself, but also leads to people who care about you to worry about you. It can be a long journey to truly be happy with your life but it is definitely achievable with the right mindset.

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Change can be uncomfortable, but when you accept it, a new sense of self can be discovered, which could change your views on your life. Since the main characters are all teenagers, when Margo ran away, this lead to a big change that she and everyone around her would have to overcome. When Quentin went on the hunt to find Margo, he had to get out of his comfort zone of being friends with the band kids and make friends with some of the popular kids to get more insight. On top of this, Quentin had an extreme amount of pressure on him to find Margo. This was a huge accomplishment for him since the police could not even find her.

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Human beings have a complicated relationship with change. While it is both inevitable and essential for growth, change can also be deeply uncomfortable - especially if it feels involuntary, or out of our control.

As researchers focused on social change, we've spent the last ten years studying how people react to drastic changes in their lives. We've conducted hundreds of interviews with people who lost a desired identity, such as former white collar professionals forced to move into lower-status careers, as well as with people trying to shed an undesirable or stigmatized identity, such as former prisoners working to reintegrate themselves in their communities. Interestingly, regardless of whether the changes were ostensibly positive or negative, many of the people we talked to struggled to move on from their past identities and embrace their new selves. This feeling of stuck-ness - a phenomenon we call identity paralysis - often left people feeling angry, frustrated, and hopeless about their current situations.

However, we also found that some people were able to avoid identity paralysis, taking these major life changes in stride and embracing their new roles with positivity. Through our interviews, we identified five strategies that can help anyone come to terms with a new identity (whether you're happy about the change or not) and move forward on a path of identity growth rather than identity paralysis:

Mark a Distinct Break with the Past

Even if we know, logically, that our situation has changed, it can be difficult to get that change to really sink in. Many of our interviewees described a key event that "flipped a switch" for them: a tipping point that empowered them to make (and truly accept) a change. For example, some participants who were trying to leave behind stigmatized pasts spoke about the significance of a specific milestone, such as a birthday or the birth of a child, in helping them to embrace their new identities. One person told us how after two days in the hospital, he decided that the moment he woke up would be his rebirth, explaining that the experience marked the end of his past in a symbolically meaningfully way.

To be clear, the actual event that marks the break is not what is important. Rather, the people we interviewed expressed a strong need for something that symbolically represented the end of a chapter in their life. This is consistent with prior work on the power of symbolic shifts: For example, in her influential books Out of the Cloister and Becoming an Ex, Catholic nun-turned-sociologist Helen Ebaugh found that even after making the decision to leave the convent, it was the moment of physically taking off of the habit and donning "women's" clothes that marked the transition for many ex-nuns and allowed them to leave their old identities behind.

So, if you're struggling to disentangle your past and present selves, see if you can define a moment that can be imbued with significance, and articulate that to yourself and those around you. Simply recognizing a specific moment as a divider between the past and the present can help you extricate yourself from an identity that is no longer relevant to your life.

Craft a Story to Tie the Past and Present Together

Of course, marking a distinct break with the past doesn't make the past disappear - nor should it. Your past is a part of you, and a new identity can only take hold if it's connected to your prior identities. As such, it is important to link your present to your past by crafting a narrative that's compelling, believable, and easy to share with others.

For example, we spoke with an immigrant who was forced to give up his career as a civil engineer and become a taxi driver. When he told the story to himself and to others, he framed it around a narrative of parental sacrifice, explaining that he took on the new role for his children. He described how happy he was for his kids, and that setting up their lives at the expense of his own was a trade he was more than willing to make. A former banker took a similar approach to framing his story, expressing confidence that immigrating was "a very good decision, believe me. Not for myself, [but for] my family, my sons and daughter. They're very happy. Everybody is married. They have a happy life. Everybody has their children. They are going to school. They're happy."

Conversely, many of the interviewees we spoke with who came from troubled or stigmatized pasts embraced the narrative of the prodigal son, or a fallen angel. In different ways, they explained how darkness led them to light, how their new and promising paths forward would have been impossible without starting from their prior identities. We found that those who were able to tell their own stories in a way that aligned with a widely-recognizable narrative were better able to make peace with their transitions and leave behind their old identities, expressing more positive sentiment about their currents situations than those who did not craft such stories.

Acknowledge and Work Through Challenging Emotions

Part of what makes identity paralysis so difficult to overcome is that it isn't just your idea of who you are that gets stuck in the past. It can also cause you to get stuck in the emotions associated with that past. Whether you're ashamed of a prior role or decision, angry about the circumstances that led to your current situation, or feeling hopeless, scared, or any other challenging negative emotion, getting stuck in these feelings can block your transition (even if you are ready for it cognitively).

To be sure, working on how you think about yourself is certainly an important component of making an identity transition. But this emphasis on the cognitive aspect can often leave the emotional side undervalued. Even if you have decided rationally that you want to move on, emotions can linger - and getting stuck in powerful negative emotions such as shame or anger can be paralyzing. Our identities are shaped by how we feel about them, so to make a successful transition, we have to acknowledge and actively work on our emotions. As one interviewee explained:

"No one is going to break the cycle until they accept who they are, and what they are, and what they've done, and they forgive themselves. You can't move forward unless you forgive yourself. A lot of people don't know that. So they live in guilt and shame for so long."

Across our interviews, we found that the people who were best able to embrace their new identities were those who recognized the emotions holding them back and proactively worked through those feelings. There are many strategies that can help when it comes to transforming negative emotions, but we found that one of the most effective ones was to intentionally activate an opposing, positive emotion. For example, one worker who was forced to change careers due to an injury described how she was able to move past her shame by focusing on taking pride in how she had established and was running her own business. Importantly, it's not about pushing negative emotions away - rather, moving forward necessitates truly acknowledging these difficult feelings, and then refocusing on more-helpful ones.

Focus on Meaningful, Non-Work Identities

It's easy to feel like your job is your whole identity - especially when you just lost a great one or when it feels like it's the only thing anyone sees when they look at you. But research has shown that it's very possible to have multiple, coexisting identities at the same time. As such, if you're uncomfortable with your current identity at work, focusing on other aspects of your identity can be an effective strategy to help you get through a difficult transition.

For example, a woman who had left sex work explained that it was important to her that she was "able to be a mum now and spend time with my kids." Some of the immigrant professionals we interviewed who were struggling with downward occupational transitions also described how they felt better after leaning into their parental roles. Instead of focusing on their discontentment with their current jobs, or on their resentment at having to give up their past careers, they were able to find meaning in defining themselves by their roles as providers.

Similarly, a former prisoner described how the simple act being a "good uncle" by playing soccer with his nephew helped him move past his negative self-image and envision a better version of himself. Others focused more on their roles within their communities, on volunteer positions, or on activism. Reminding yourself of your full range of identities can help you focus on the positive, realize that you're more than what you do (or used to do), and keep moving forward.

Don't Be Afraid to Fantasize

While focusing on the concrete positives in your life can be helpful, our research also revealed that there is great power in the imaginary. This is in line with prior research on the concept of " postalgia," which refers to a yearning not for an idealized version of the past, but for a similarly utopic future. In our interviews, we found that some of the people who were most comfortable in their new identities were those who imagined that their current circumstances were only a stepping stone on the path to their ultimate (if objectively unrealistic) future.

The surprising element of this strategy is that it still seemed to work even if the world they imagined was truly a fantasy: an abstract future they could daydream about, often without much basis in reality. Rather than detailing specific plans or tactics to realize these dreams, the participants who took this approach fantasized about an alternative future as if it would definitely happen, despite seeming to have no intention of actually pursuing it.

For example, one interviewee who was forced to shift from his job as network engineer to being a taxi driver explained why he felt good about his situation, saying, "In the future, I have plans to get a computer job. Not now, maybe after 10 years, 20 years, then I'll definitely go for my own business." He was in his third year of driving a taxi and had no tangible plans to move into tech - and yet the vague possibility of a brighter future made the present more palatable. Similarly, many people enjoy window shopping or browsing vacation spots online, wistfully imagining an experience that they're unlikely to ever have. It may seem counterintuitive, but our research suggests that in moderation, this can actually be an effective means of coping with a challenging situation and getting mentally un-stuck.

Of course, this should not be misconstrued as an argument against working to improve a bad situation. But the practical work of planning and implementing positive change can be draining, time-consuming, and if overdone, paralyzing. Balancing the difficult tasks of accepting and improving reality with a healthy dose of fantasy can be critical in ensuring you stay motivated.

. . .

Whether you're taking on a new role, shifting careers, or going through a major life change like those experienced by the people in our interviews, it's never easy to let go of a past identity. But left unchecked, identity paralysis can threaten both your career prospects and your mental health. To avoid getting stuck and truly move forward in our lives, we must acknowledge and embrace our current identities, our past selves, and everything in between.

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When a Major Life Change Upends Your Sense of Self

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Human beings have a complicated relationship with change. While it is both inevitable and essential for growth, change can also be deeply uncomfortable - especially if it feels involuntary, or out of our control. As researchers focused on social change, we've spent the last ten years studying how people react to drastic changes in their lives.

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This Ted Talk examines why you should not hide your true self. It is often very easy to do so, but when you do this, you could feel trapped and stuck in a messy situation. Ruth Clare conveys her story about how her ex boyfriend wanted to move to New York City but on the inside she knew this was not going to make her happy but decided to go with him just to make him happy. After many realizations, she decided to move back home to Australia and live by herself. Not only does this show that following your gut is important but pushing through the hard times just like Quentin did when he could not solve the clues can have a very rewarding impact. This time of uncertainty can allow you to try new things and find your true values, just as Quentin did everything he could for Margo. For example, he went out of his way to go on a road trip from Florida to New York to find his true soulmate.

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The pain of hiding your true self | Ruth Clare | TEDxYouth@LGS

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Running Away by Lauren Joy captures the emotions that Margo was feeling as she left her hometown and everything she knew. At the end of the book, when Quentin finally finds Margo in Algoe, New York, she finally opens up and talks about her struggles. Margo even ends up inviting Quentin to live in New York City with her and leave Orlando for good, to start a new beginning and leave the past behind her. By being able to reflect on your life, you can often get more clarity on your true goals and values, showing that it is okay to take time for yourself. Finding what you like and who you like can feel like a tremendously long time but when you take the time to go back and reflect on how far you have come, it makes all of the hard times worth it.

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Not only does this piece of art capture the journey that Margo embarks but also highlights the spark that drives her journey as illuminated in her eyes. She went on a journey to hide her identity and sense of self. If Margo did not have her friends to help solve her clues that she left out, Margo would have not been able to find who she was or find the love of her life, which teaches us that everything happens for a reason, even if times can get hard and confusing. For example, one of the clues that Quentin fixated on was the book Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, that Margo highlighted specific passages to reveal where she was located.

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This fiction book was published in 2008 and is a continuation of this time. This novel takes place in Florida but Margo's adventure takes her across the world. John Green grew up in Orlando, and wanted to resemble part of his childhood by having Orlando be the main setting of Paper Towns. However, the movie of this book was filmed in North Carolina for budget reasons. Nevertheless, this is a contemporary novel and movie that displays parts of the world during the 2000's, as before the pandemic, and new technological advances. During this time period, identity crisis' were not as common as they are today, which displays how the more something occurs, the less stigma there is around it. As well as this, the constant changes in the setting resembles how John Green also moved a various amount of times to finally find a place to settle down and make home.

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Author John Green may ridicule hometown Orlando in his 2008 mystery "Paper Towns" as "fake," but the movie version of his young-adult best-seller steers clear of mocking the City Beautiful.

"There is no making fun of Orlando," Green says. "There are far more zingers in the book, but in the book I was just trying to capture the way most of us feel about our hometowns when we're young."

"Paper Towns" - an Orlando-set drama opening July 24 - focuses on high-school senior Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, who obsesses over neighbor and fellow student Margo Roth Spiegelman. He shares a memorable, all-night adventure with her and searches for her after she disappears.

Margo knocks Orlando when looking out from the 25th floor of the downtown SunTrust building: "You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town."

In the book, Central Florida provides a vivid backdrop. Yet filmmakers had to fake Orlando, because the movie mostly shot in North Carolina for budget reasons.

"Paper Towns" filmed locally for just three days to gain establishing shots of the downtown skyline and Baldwin Park, said Sheena Fowler of the Orlando Film Commission.

"We were out of incentive dollars, and North Carolina had incentives," Fowler said, citing tax credits that states give to encourage film production locally.

"I was pretty bummed out that they couldn't shoot in Orlando," Green says, adding that director Jake Schreier spent a lot of time in the area before filming began. "In fact, he visited Orlando before he even got the job and tracked down places similar to the ones depicted in the novel," Green says.

The movie follows last year's successful film of Green's "The Fault in Our Stars," which the author promoted with enthusiasm. He is doing the same as an executive producer on "Paper Towns."

" 'Executive producer' is kind of a made-up title," Green said. "Some executive producers do a lot; some do very little. I was the second kind."

What exactly did he do? "I don't think I did much more than I did on the set of 'The Fault in Our Stars' set. I was there a lot and happy to answer any questions," he said. "But mostly I was just excited to watch it all come to life."

Green has been a major force on the best-seller list. The New York Times recently noted that Green has four of the Top 10 titles with young adults and said, "Green rules the field." Those books on the July 19 list are "Paper Towns" at No. 1, "Looking for Alaska" at No. 2, "An Abundance of Katherines" at No. 7 and "The Fault in Our Stars" at No. 8.

"Orlando was certainly crucial to me when writing 'Paper Towns,'" said Green, who now lives in Indianapolis. "I grew up there, so it's a place I know well, and I could empathize both with how Quentin sees Orlando and how Margo sees it. Growing up, I felt like Orlando was a place people visit, not a place they live, and it all felt very temporary. I think the city is different now and much more established."

The setting is vital to a central theme in the book. "Everything is temporary, and this was one of the dawning revelations of my adolescence, and one of the things I wanted to write about in 'Paper Towns,'" Green adds.

Mom Sydney Green says the road trip in the book is a takeoff on a favorite family pastime.

"There's not a member of our family who doesn't love a good road trip," she says.

She summarizes the mystery as a growing-up story about a boy having a big crush on someone he doesn't know.

"You start to grow up, you realize if you're going to have relationships, you have to look at people more complexly," she says.

Her son "went through a phase where he struggled with Orlando," Sydney Green says. "He wasn't born there, but it is his hometown, and he feels that way about it."

John Green has acknowledged that he was resentful of Orlando for much of his adolescence but that the city originally supplied the social disconnection he needed to be a writer.

"I think places are ultimately made out of people, and there are a lot of lovely people in Orlando," he says. "When I was writing 'Paper Towns,' I mostly looked at Orlando as a metaphor for the way we inhabit and populate space in the U.S. Orlando was sort of built around the idea of escaping your real life, but then finally you cannot escape reality. That's something both Margo and Q have to learn in 'Paper Towns.'"

And now they will learn it on the big screen.

"I really love the movie and think it captures the themes and feelings of the book really well, and I'm so grateful to everyone who made it," Green says.
hboedeker@orlandosentinel.com

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Author John Green may ridicule hometown Orlando in his 2008 mystery "Paper Towns" as "fake," but the movie version of his young-adult best-seller steers clear of mocking the City Beautiful. "There is no making fun of Orlando," Green says.

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Throughout John Green's life, he has struggled with OCD but has found a unique way to incorporate it into the characters of his novels despite how difficult it could be at times. He hid this part of himself as he did not want people to judge him for this characteristic. For example, Quentin can be most closely related to Green, as after their prom night, Quentin is obsessed with the idea of finding Margo whereas his other friends are more focused on celebrating after prom. Not only does this show that some people hide their identity because they are afraid of what others will think about them, but also shows that your friends can help unveil your true identity by showing you that they care. This can make you feel more comfortable about who you are.

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There is a scene late in US author John Green's new novel, Turtles All the Way Down, where his protagonist, Aza Holmes - a bright, troubled teenager, as Green's heroines generally are - goes through an ordeal so distressing it is difficult to read. Aza has obsessive compulsive disorder, and the "tightening gyre" of her thoughts has taken over. Green catapults his reader right into the middle of Aza's desperate mental state as she becomes increasingly panicky over the possibility of being infected with the bacterium C. diff - "do you want to die of this do you want to die of this because you will you will you will you will" - eventually scooping handfuls of hand sanitiser into her mouth, gagging and vomiting as her mother tries to stop her.

Green, who has OCD himself, says it was "very hard to write". "I wrote it right at the last, in the last revision. That's as close to my experience as I could get."

Turtles All the Way Down, Green's seventh novel and one that is long awaited by his massed armies of fans - he has more than 5 million followers on Twitter - is his "most personal", says the young adult writer, "in the sense that it's not entirely confined to the past for me. Having OCD is something that is an ongoing part of my life and I assume will probably be a part of my life for the rest of it."

Green has "had this obsessive thinking problem" since childhood. For a long time it was hard "to talk directly about it, and I felt a lot of embarrassment"; part of writing it into his fiction was a desire "to find some kind of form or expression that would shake it out from within me and allow me to look at it".

Aza - or Holmesy, as she is known to her best friend, Daisy - is Green's narrator. The novel opens as the girls hear on the radio about the $100,000 reward which has been offered for a fugitive billionaire, Russell Pickett. Aza, it turns out, used to know his son Davis because they'd "gone to Sad Camp together ... this place down in Brown County for kids with dead parents". Daisy convinces Aza that they'll be able to find Pickett and claim the reward, and the wannabe detectives hop into Aza's old canoe and paddle down the river to the Pickett mansion.

While the novel is filtered through Aza's perspective, OCD is only one theme. There's also Daisy's burgeoning fame as a Star Wars fan fiction writer, Pickett's decision to leave his fortune to his pet tuatara (a kind of large reptile) and, of course, romance, friendship and high school.

It has been nearly six years since Green topped the charts with his sharp, funny, moving story of the romance between two teenagers with cancer, The Fault in Our Stars. That novel was inspired by the time Green spent working as a chaplain in a children's hospital after university; it has now sold more than 23m copies, been adapted into a hugely successful film, and seen Green named one of the 100 most influential people by Time magazine.

When writing my second book, I was like, 'I have no idea how to write a book.' I have to figure it out anew each time

No pressure, then, for the follow-up. "In one way it gave me the luxury of time, the ability to take as long as I wanted," says Green. There were "a few abandoned novels along the way that got kind of scrapped for parts". But "it's also true that I felt very scared of writing, because I was in the shadow of this success", he says, admitting to being "super nervous" about the next novel's reception. "I remember thinking when I was writing my first book, 'The great thing if I get the opportunity to do this again will be that I will then know how to write a book.' Then when it came time to write my second book, I was like, 'I have no idea how to write a book,' and each time that was the case. I think that's part of the reason my books have come out relatively slowly. I seem to have to figure it out anew each time."

His first novel, 2005's Looking for Alaska, was written while he was working as a publishing assistant and production editor at the book review journal Booklist, entering data and reviewing books and slowly realising this might be something he could do himself. He'd write at night and at the weekend, labouring for three years with his editor at Booklist, a children's author herself, to turn it into something that was ready to send out to publishers. Drawing on his experiences at boarding school, the book is narrated by Miles Halter, who sets out to "seek a Great Perhaps", in the words of Rabelais, at Culver Creek boarding school. There, he meets the beautiful, unsettled Alaska.

It didn't make the bestseller list - that wouldn't happen until 2012, seven years after it came out, once The Fault in Our Stars had boosted all Green's backlist - but it did win him one of the US's biggest young adult prizes, the Printz award. Green would go on to write novels including Paper Towns, about a boy's quest to find the vanished Margo Roth Spiegelman, "the most fantastically gorgeous creature that God had ever created".

His teenagers, whatever they're dealing with, are bright, nerdy, articulate and funny, much like Green himself. He has no desire, at the moment, to write an adult novel - it's clearly that period of flux, of burgeoning adulthood, which draws him in. "I was never very in touch with teenage culture ... what I'm interested in, or most interested in, is the emotional experience of being a teenager," he says - how teens "approach those experiences without irony".

Now 40, married with two children and living in Indianapolis, Green has memories "of really intense emotional experiences from high school that I draw on a lot. I focus on that and hope I will be forgiven for not understanding Snapchat."

He also began, in 2007, a project that would end up bringing him one of the biggest followings among writers today. He and his brother Hank started sending each other video blogs on YouTube, talking about everything from haircuts to books to world affairs. One begins: "Good morning, Hank. It's Friday, October 26th. Today I'm going to discuss the political situation in Nepal while eating five sheets of toilet paper." They have made more than 1,000 videos, which have been viewed more than 600m times. The community call themselves the Nerdfighters - the name comes from Green's misreading of an arcade game, Aero Fighters, as Nerdfighters - and take as their motto "DFTBA" ("Don't forget to be awesome"). Through side ventures including Project for Awesome, which sees thousands of people posting videos advocating for charities, they have raised millions for charity.Green has always had "some kind of other job" while he writes, whether it was on Booklist, or writing for the trivia magazine Mental Floss, or more recently working on the educational video series Crash Course, which he launched with his brother in 2012. "I like not having to think of myself as only a writer because that's sort of stressful," he says. "I still don't usually say when I meet people and they ask me what I do that I'm an author ... I'd say that I make educational videos, that would be true, and also ends the conversation 99% of the time."

Despite this, when it comes to the world of young adult fiction, it doesn't get bigger than Green. With great success comes great scrutiny, and Green seems more aware of criticism than most authors. "I never think of myself as being very good," he says. It's hard, given his success, not to see this as disingenuous. But the way he picks over the issues in his books gives it the ring of truth: he knows perfectly well what critics dislike about his novels, and Turtles All the Way Down is, in some ways, an answer to them.

So what about the accusation that his teenagers are preternaturally smart? "First, I do think teenagers are smart, and we miss out by failing to listen to them or take them seriously," he says. "I'm much more interested in how we sound to ourselves than how we technically sound." And anyway, "in this book I try very hard not to [do this]. Aza hardly says anything. Her thoughts are very carefully articulated, but she can't really articulate them in speech."

He gives short shrift to those who accuse him of populating his books with a series of beautiful troubled girls. Paper Towns was, he says, written "very aggressively against" the trope of the manic pixie dream girl, while "I hope that Aza does not come across as a manic pixie dream girl - I don't think she exists to solve Davis's problems." Her OCD, meanwhile, means it's almost impossible for her to have a normal romantic relationship.

Green has addressed critics online, acknowledging what he sees as his weaknesses - "I tell too much and show too little. My plots are thin. I'm too fond of turning phrases" - while taking on those criticisms he sees as unfair: "all this crap about how I fetishise brokenness and lift up misogynistic constructions of young women and romanticise suicide is just, I think, totally unfair".

And he has been very careful, he says now, not to romanticise Aza's OCD. "I do think we stigmatise mental illness a lot in our culture ... we don't devote nearly enough resources to its treatment so people who can't afford or access high-quality mental healthcare are doubly disadvantaged. I also think that we at times romanticise mental illness - the reason I wanted Aza to be nicknamed Holmesy is that, while I love Sherlock Holmes, my experience has been that my OCD would make me a terrible detective. In the first chapter, Aza doesn't notice that her best friend has dyed her hair, she's so deep inside herself. I do not feel my obsessiveness has come with a secret power ... It comes with a complete inability to apprehend the world outside of myself unless I treat my mental health problems consistently and with care. So I really wanted to try and write against those stigmas and romanticisations."

Aza's core problem is one Green understands intimately. "She is forced to think thoughts that she doesn't want to think and she's unable to choose what she thinks about for extended periods of time. That can be really destabilising ... If I am beholden to these thoughts, then what are the implications of that for me being a sovereign creature of free will, or at least enough of an illusion of free will that I can make my way through the day without having to feel this constant onslaught of fear that I'm just a passenger in this skin-encased bacterial colony that is my body?

"Aza's problem is not only the obsessive thought spirals or the compulsive behaviour she uses to manage them," he continues. "The problem is also that these thoughts really undermine her entire sense of self. That's something I am pretty familiar with ... I find it profoundly scary not to feel like I'm able to choose my thoughts, and it's also just exhausting and infuriating: when it's happening you feel like it'll never end. I'm also really lucky that this is mostly treatable in my case and there are things I can do to make it better."

"There have been periods when this has been a disabling part of my life and there have been periods when this has been a pretty small part of my life," he says. Turtles All the Way Down is intended to show how "most people with chronic mental illnesses also live long, fulfilling lives".

* Turtles All the Way Down is published by Puffin. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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John Green: 'Having OCD is an ongoing part of my life'

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There is a scene late in US author John Green's new novel, Turtles All the Way Down, where his protagonist, Aza Holmes - a bright, troubled teenager, as Green's heroines generally are - goes through an ordeal so distressing it is difficult to read.

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"You Say" by Lauren Diagle captures what it is like for your mind to belittle you, but others help pick you up and reassure you that you are enough. This also displays the importance of friendship and how important it is to be there for your friends when they need it the most, just as Quentin was on a hunt for Margo. Throughout this hunt, Margo was not in a good headspace but since she knew that her friends were looking for her, she continued ton leave clues for them to find. This displayed that she was physically hiding her identity, but not so much that it was impossible to find her.