Aza Holmes Turtle's All The Way Down Analysis

Aza Holmes is a 16 year old girl who is living with a anxiety disorder. Not just anxiety over a test or going to school or going on a date. Anxiety that rules her entire life and every aspect of it. Anxiety that is inescapable in her mind. Anxiety that, in essence, ruins everything that she tries to do. She is obsessed with human microbiota, which encompasses over half of every human body. Most people at one time think about it unknowingly. It’s when you touch something in a public restroom or an escalator at a mall and then think about all the other people who have touched the same thing. One might be grossed out by it, however, the majority of people move on. Aza cannot stop thinking about illness and death which may be related to the loss of her father. The story “Turtles All the Way Down” portrays how Aza is unable to move on from that thought and it in turn monopolizes all of her thoughts and actions throughout the story. Most everyone has a form of anxiety over something in their life and they can move on from it; however, some people have the inability to overcome that anxiety to let life move on. The reader immediately knows about Aza’s disorder in Chapter 1 when she is at lunch with her best friend,

“I sat up, turned away from him, pulled out my phone, and searched, ‘do bacteria of people you kiss stay inside your body’...” (Page 153) This is when she starts to do the unimaginable and because her anxiety disorder is so bad she starts to put hand sanitizer in her mouth in hopes of cleaning it. It happens more than once and becomes an obsession, even when she is in the car accident in the hospital room. She was putting by the scoop into her mouth. (Page 229) This is so difficult for me to understand let alone relate too. I can’t imagine having a disorder of that magnitude and it saddens me to think that other teenages do. It is a real disorder that people try to live