EMILY KWONG, HOST:
John Green is prolific. He has written best-selling young adult novels like "The Fault In Our Stars," "Turtles All The Way Down," and built a YouTube empire with his brother, Hank Green, through the Vlogbrothers channel, which pretty much got me through high school. John Green's newest project is a nonfiction book called "Everything Is Tuberculosis: An Account Of Why TB Remains Such A Deadly Disease." And you can see a common thread in all of these projects. They are all designed to help people engage with the broader world and to care for each other. Green spoke with my colleague Rachel Martin on the Wild Card podcast, where guests answer big questions about their life drawn from a deck of cards.
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RACHEL MARTIN: OK, three cards in my hand - one, two or three?
JOHN GREEN: Let's go one.
MARTIN: One - do you spend more time in your head or in the world?
GREEN: It's not a particularly close competition there, Rachel.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
GREEN: I spend more time in my head by a very wide margin (laughter).
MARTIN: What's it like in there?
GREEN: Pretty intense, to be honest with you, a little overwhelming sometimes - but I almost can't say what it's like in there. It's like trying to describe the ocean to somebody who's never seen it, you know? Like, it's - what did Kafka say, that a book can be the axe that breaks the frozen sea within? I'm always trying to break that frozen sea within. There's always rooms inside of my mind that I've never visited or I don't know how to get to. And that's a lot of why I make creative work is because it's a chance to visit those rooms somehow, a chance to feel my understanding of my own self expand in some ways. But I spend a lot of time in my head, and not all of it is healthy, if I'm honest with you. Like...
MARTIN: No, you've been open about that - about talking about your OCD.
GREEN: Yeah, I have pretty severe OCD. And so it's well treated, and I work really hard to treat my chronic illness like a chronic illness. But it is a chronic illness, and it is something I live with every day. And so sometimes what's in my head is just, like, a flurry of worries. There's this great Edna St. Vincent Millay poem I think about all the time, where she says - I think she's writing about depression more than obsessive thoughts, but I think it's the perfect summary of obsessive thoughts. She says - she's writing about a snowstorm, and she says three flakes, then four appear, then many more.
And it's like that with my worries sometimes where it's like, you just have a worry that kind of crosses across your bow and then another one and then another one and then many more. And it becomes like a snowstorm - just absolutely blinding, impossible to see anything other than the fear. And that's a really difficult, really scary experience because then it feels like you're not in control of your own thoughts. Like, you're not the captain of the ship of yourself. You're just along for the ride, and somebody else is steering the ship. And that's quite a scary thing to think about your own self.
MARTIN: Is there anything positive about it? Is there anything beneficial about it, besides the fact that it is who you are? But...
GREEN: Yeah. Yeah, it is who I am. I mean, I find it to be mostly downsides...
MARTIN: OK (laughter).
GREEN: ...To be honest with you, mostly bummers. And so it's hard to - of course, I don't know what I would be like without...
MARTIN: Yeah.
GREEN: ...OCD. And so I can't imagine what it would be, but I'm sure I would be different in ways I can't imagine now.
MARTIN: Yeah. It is who you are.
GREEN: Yeah, I like that way of saying about that - that, like, there is an upside, but the upside is that it is who I am.
MARTIN: Yeah.
GREEN: I've never thought of that before. This is like a therapy session.
MARTIN: I have a person dear in my life who suffers from OCD, and it has been instrumental. It has been helpful to learn more about it and to learn how, yes, it is debilitating. It can be debilitating, but it is who this person is.
GREEN: Yeah.
MARTIN: And this person is wonderful.
GREEN: And you're worthy of love.
MARTIN: Yeah.
GREEN: You know, like, it's maybe the only thing we're worthy of, but, like, you're worthy of love is - exactly as who you are. And so the fact that this is who you are and this is part of who you are means that this is also worthy of love.
MARTIN: Right. Yeah.
GREEN: Yeah. Oh, that's so beautiful. I've never had that before. That's such a gift to me. Thank you.
MARTIN: Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for talking about it. OK, three more - one, two or three?
GREEN: How about two?
MARTIN: What's a lesson you keep learning again and again?
GREEN: Oh, what a great question. I keep learning again and again that hope is the right response to the human condition. And I have to learn this over and over again because despair is an incredibly powerful force in my life and something that I have to battle on an almost daily basis. So much of my brain tells me that there's no reason to get out of bed or do anything because nothing matters because the oceans are going to boil in a billion years because the world is going to end long before that for me and for everyone I love and probably for humanity itself, and people are so monstrous and capable of such horrific behavior toward each other and toward the world. And that despair is so powerful because it tells this complete holistic story. It explains everything. Everything is the way it is because everything and everyone sucks.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
GREEN: What an incredibly powerful way to look at the world.
MARTIN: Yeah.
GREEN: It just happens to not be true, right? Like, it happens to be a lot more complicated than that. The truth is much more complex than that. And so I have to remind myself of that almost every day. I have to relearn that lesson that, like, there is cause for hope. I actually - I keep in my wallet a little note that says, the year you graduated from high school, 12 million children died under the age of 5. Last year, fewer than 5 million did. That progress, which is real and which is felt in the lives of millions of human beings and the tens of millions who love them - that progress was not natural. It was not inevitable. It did not happen because it was always going to happen. It happened because millions and millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, maybe billions of people came together to make it happen, to make the world safer for children. We decided that we were going to prioritize that, and when we prioritized it, we had tremendous success.
And I keep that because I want to remind myself that this is the truth. Like, that is an inalienable truth - that we can make the world better for the most vulnerable among us. We just have to decide it's a priority. And so there is cause for hope. There's always reason for hope because we have this incredible capacity to collaborate together, to make the world better together. And yet at the same time, we also have the capacity to make the world worse together, and it is so much easier to destroy progress than it is to build it. As we have lately found out, it is so much easier to destroy institutions than it is to build or maintain them. And I have to hold those competing ideas in my mind at the same time, which is the hardest thing in the world for me but also kind of the most important.
MARTIN: John Green - his newest book is called "Everything Is Tuberculosis." It was such a pleasure. Thank you.
GREEN: Thank you.
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KWONG: You can watch a video of Rachel's full conversation with John Green by searching for Wild Card With Rachel Martin on Spotify or YouTube. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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