#daisy ramirez

Just finished the Turtles All The Way Down movie, and that ending really got me. Something about the hope in it was just so needed and uplifting. It's funny- I've criticised films in the past for always ending with them getting married and having kids, because of the way those things are pushed as the only way of living a good life. But in this case I do feel something very strongly positive for seeing it with Aza.

The whole film she's affected by her OCD and how it 'possesses' her and she's not sure what she controls, if she even can control her thoughts and behaviours. So this final ending sequence seeing her get those things, seeing her at college, holding someone's hand, kissing someone, having a baby- those are things Aza didn't think she could have because of her mental health and the way her brain works.

But she did get to have them. This film is supposed to give hope to those with thought spirals. By the end of college, Aza still has that Raymond Pettibon painting of the spiral. It's still there, it's still in the background of her work and life. And yet, she lives with it. Sort of a metaphor for the OCD, she lives with it.

Round 1 Part 6

Chapter 1

At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time—between 12:37 p.m. and 1:14 p.m.—by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn’t even begin to identify them. If those forces had given me a different lunch period, or if the tablemates who helped author my fate had chosen a different topic of conversation that September day, I would’ve met a different end—or at least a different middle. But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.

Of course, you pretend to be the author. You have to. You think, I now choose to go to lunch, when that monotone beep rings from on high at 12:37. But really, the bell decides. You think you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas.