What is the Greatest Human Quality?

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Hank Green, one-half of the famous VlogBrothers duo, recently proposed that he believes that curiosity is the greatest human quality.  You can hear his argument here:

His brother John, the incredible author of The Fault in Our Stars, responded by saying that he thought cooperation might be a better response.

I’d like to submit my own idea, for your consideration and dissection.  Could the greatest human quality possibly be creativity?

We can live without it, yes.  But would anyone want to?  *shudders*

I think of the quote where C.S. Lewis says that friendship, philosophy, and art have no survival value– but that they give value to survival.

Without creativity, life would be dull, boring, dreary, monotonous.  What would we look forward to?

I’d like to hear your thoughts.

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5 Books for the Reluctant [YA Fiction] Reader

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I promise you, young adult fiction is not only vampires and gossip and dystopian landscapes.

For the uninititate, I propose you begin here:

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Related Posts:
How to Offend a Book Lover (by forgetting characters in The Book Thief)
My Review of The Scorpio Races
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Jandy Nelson is an Auto-Buy Author
Spotlight on Melina Marchetta

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Resisting Treatment for a Mental Illness

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Consistently, I …
* talk to people with mental illness who resist beginning treatment.
* hear from those who’ve gone through treatment who wish they’d sought help sooner.

I get frustrated with the first group, but then I remind myself that I used to be a long-time, card-carrying member.  My college mentor encouraged me time and time again to just meet with a therapist at my school’s free counseling services center, and I balked and balked and balked.

I wish I hadn’t.

Today, I want to address four of the excuses I hear most often for avoiding treatment along with my best argument against them.

Too much money.
First of all, if you had a life-threatening disease, I can almost guarantee you that you’d find the means to get treatment.  Mental illness are often life-threatening– not always in the sense of imminent death, but they reduce the quality of your life and deserve your reaction to their severity.  There are prescription assistance programs, such as Partnership for Prescription Assistance or Walmart’s $4 prescriptions.  More and more, I am seeing churches starting free or pay-what-you-can counseling sessions with highly-trained lay therapists.  Obsessive-compulsives are able to do self-guided exposure and response prevention therapy from their own homes with helpful and inexpensive books like Stop Obsessing! or Freedom from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Too much fear.
I can absolutely relate to this.  Some fear vocalizing their anxieties; some fear they will do so and be told there is no hope (in which case, it feels less scary to stay silent and hold onto the tiny thread that there may be a rescue coming).  Some fear the treatment itself (I can very much understand this, as ERP, the preferred treatment for OCD, is a particularly challenging therapy that exposes obsessive-compulsives to their greatest fears).

Therapy for OCD was one of the scariest things I have ever had to do in my life.  It was awful– but not as awful as daily life with OCD with no end in sight.  Short of a miracle, your mental illness will probably not just go away on its own.  Now is the time to declare war.

Too much pride.
A blog reader told me the other day that he was disconnected from reality, could hardly talk to his wife, and felt like the loneliest person on the planet– though too proud to see a therapist and admit there is something wrong.

This is so hard for me to understand– even though this used to be me!  To me, it’s the equivalent of breaking your arm and then being too proud to get it set in a cast.  What are you too proud of?  That you are invincible?  No one is, and you are fooling yourself if you think you are.  Ignoring a real problem is nothing to be proud of.  It’s like when you realize you took a wrong turn and are headed the wrong way.  It makes far more sense to turn around than to continue on in the same wrong direction.

Too much doubt.
I have a friend whose life is crumbling right now, yet he refuses to get help because he doesn’t think therapy works.  I want to shake him a little and say, “Look around you– what you are doing right now doesn’t work!”  I know how easy it is to get trapped by indecision and by the feeling that no direction is a good one (that’s why I took one year off from my medication search), but in the end, you’re probably going to have to take some sort of step toward healing.  Even if you take teensy-tiny baby-steps, that’s okay.  Find a trusted friend and work out the best baby-step possible.

I know it is an expensive, scary, humbling, and doubtful enterprise– but please, please keep reaching out for help.

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Story & Place: How Audiobooks and Locations are Tied Together in My Mind

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stereoIt’s usually smell, isn’t it?  That mighty, mighty memory trigger.  But, interestingly, for me, the biggest connectors I have are audiobooks and locations; that is, a story that I listened to will forever be tied to the location where I heard it.

* If I drive out to my friend Caitlin’s home, there is a place on the road that I can’t help but think of Going Bovine— and not only the book, but even a specific part.

* In the parking lot of the Super8 on 41st in Sioux Falls, I think of Perry and Aria from Under the Never Sky.

* Out by the DMV– not my usual one, but the special one where I have to get an updated MVR for work every year– I think of The Mortal Instruments.

* I think of Saving Francesca any time I drive out to Plymouth to meet my friend Elyse.

* If I even think of Watertown, South Dakota, I think not only of Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, but also a specific part (highlight for spoiler: when Ron comes back and Hermione is so irate that Harry has to cast a shield charm between the two!).

It’s quite fascinating to me, honestly– I won’t even be thinking of a certain story at all, and then, like the flip of a switch, something about the location will trigger the memory of that story.  It’s a little like unwittingly driving right into a story.  And I quite love it.

Of course I do.

Which two things are tied together tightly in your mind?

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Sometimes the audiobooks are better.
Things That Make Life Easier for Readers

Stigma, Part Two: I Don’t CHOOSE to be Unhappy.

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Recently, the following was posted on the Twin Cities OCD Facebook page:

Happiness is a state of mind –

It is important that you understand and appreciate that your happiness lies within. Consider this – no one can make you unhappy if you have decided for sure that you will be happy in every situation. If you have made up your mind to be happy, you can always seek out the positive aspects of a situation and remain happy. Life may throw challenges at you but solutions will come faster and to you if you face them with a smile on your face.
Sounds easy? Its only a challenge at first-then momentum happens. 

And while I don’t think the poster meant to be offensive, I deleted it immediately.

People with mental illnesses are not choosing to be unhappy.  That is such an upsetting suggestion!  It’s like someone has accused me of poisoning myself.  Or being too weak or stupid to choose the right option.  It’s like saying, “Look, you have to understand that if you just choose every day to not have diabetes, it will get easier and easier.”

I don’t choose to have a body that absorbs serontonin too quickly.

I do choose to take pills to slow that process down.  And to seek out therapy that gives me tools to manage my mental illness.  I can choose to treat it, but I can’t just choose to not have OCD or depression.

Please stop insisting that I am responsible for my mental illness.  

This, my friends, this is stigma.

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Spotlight on Melina Marchetta

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I’ve written before about how amazing Melina Marchetta is, giving six reasons why you should read her books:

1) The writing is unbelievable.
2) The characters are people you want to know in real life.
3) The books are laced with wonderful humor.
4) You can’t guess what will happen next.
5) She knows how to write about teen romances without being cliche.
6) She is consistently good. Every. Single. Book.

This time, I thought I’d tell you a little about the books themselves so that you can choose where you’d like to start (since I *REQUIRE* that you read her books).

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Jellicoe Road is my favorite.  It’s a contemporary novel set in Australia, and it’s about a territory war between the boarding school kids, the townies, and the cadets (boys from a military school who camp on their land six weeks each year). It’s really two stories that become one (gosh, I love when that happens), and it’s probably my favorite contemporary YA novel period.  Just saying.  It can be a little confusing at the beginning, but keep reading: it will fit together like a jigsaw puzzle in the end, and then you’ll want to go re-read it immediately.  Also, major swoon factor: Jonah Griggs is one tough cadet with a heart.

Saving Francesca is right up there for me, right alongside Jellicoe Road.  It’s about a girl whose mom is going through a mental breakdown at home while the girl is trying to maneuver her way through her new school– which had been an all-boys school prior to that year.  It’s uh-may-zing.  Seriously.  When I read this one, I just soak in the utter brilliance of Marchetta.  Not to mention that there is a hot Italian-Australian math nerd hottie involved.

The Piper’s Son reunites the Saving Francesca gang, only it’s five years down the road, and this story promotes a secondary character from the first book to being the protagonist.  And, my oh my, he does so well in that role!  This book is about a family that is trying its best– making it sometimes and not making it sometimes.  It’s sheer brilliance.

Looking for Alibrandi is actually Marchetta’s first novel that put her name on the map.  Even though it’s my least favorite book of hers, it is still so, so good.  Now, that’s pretty impressive.  It’s about a girl whose lifelong absent father suddenly re-enters her life.

And then we come to the fantasy stories.  Yes, that’s right– Marchetta is just as comfortable writing fantasies as she is writing contemporaries.  So. Much. Talent.

The Lumatere Chronicles begin with Finnikin of the Rock, an amazing story full of twists and turns about reviving a kingdom that’s been under a curse.  I’m not naturally drawn to fantasy novels (with the glaring exceptions of Narnia, Potter, and The Last Unicorn), so I didn’t immediately purchase this book.  But after I’d read all her contemporaries, I was dying for more Marchetta, so I took the plunge … and am so glad I did!  This book was delicious.

Froi of the Exiles and Quintana of Charyn round out the trilogy, and they are full of politics and intrigue and romance.  I should warn you– Froi ends on a killer cliffhanger, so make sure you have Quintana ready to go afterward!  I read Froi before the third book was out and ended up ordering an Aussie copy of book three so that I could get my hands on it 6+ months before the book was released in the US.  That good.

It’s the characters, I think, that make all her books so good.  When you start with amazing characters, you can toss them into any situation and see what happens.  Melina Marchetta is a masterful storyteller, my favorite YA writer out there, and you’d better believe that is the highest of praise coming from me.

Hop to it!  In my opinion, you should just skip the library and purchase copies of your own to have and to hold from this day forward.

Can’t wait to hear your thoughts!

For those of you who have already read Marchetta’s books, what is your favorite and why?  Leave a comment below!

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