good morning Hank it's Tuesday it's
actually not Tuesday but it will be in
the fullness of time it is however
morning like five o'clock in the morning
and in a stunning turn of events I find
myself in an airport this is gonna be
like an old-school ographers video where
I talk about my feelings a lot I have a
lot of feelings right now not really
good feelings or bad feelings just a lot
of them so I'm on my way to Los Angeles
to promote the Looking for Alaska show
which comes out this Friday or Saturday
in some places and I just got very
anxious that TSA was going to look in my
backpack and ask me about these weird
Pizza John Halloween masks and I kept
imagining these long conversations where
I would try to explain the entire
history of Pizza John and how I came to
have a Halloween mask of my own
mustachioed face inside my backpack but
fortunately I just got through TSA no
problem by the way these are available
at dftba.com if you're looking for a
properly horrifying halloween costume
but I am on a tangent okay hold on I
have to go to Los Angeles greetings from
the floor of a hotel room that is very
near the interstate
right so the Looking for Alaska show
comes out on Friday or Saturday and the
review so far had been really good
vulture called it the rare adaptation
that improves upon the original
hyperbole said that the show's
commitment to the heart of the book
makes for a wonderful experience for
Green's fans and newcomers alike now I
did not make the show but I do remember
just over two years ago waiting for the
reviews of turtles all the way down to
come in with a constant overwhelming
nausea so I am happy and relieved for
the people who did make the show also
I've just seen the Netflix adaptation of
let it snow a book warned miracle
Maureen Johnson and I wrote like 11
years ago and the movie is so sweet and
heartwarming and lovely and the cast is
amazing it comes out on November 8th on
Netflix and the other thing that's
happening right now is the forthcoming
announcement of our big project with
Partners in Health Sierra Leone which
has a lot of moving parts and is very
exciting but also very overwhelming for
the last two years working with partners
in health on this project in Sierra
Leone has really given my life a sense
of purpose and direction which has been
a wonderful gift to me but now it is
about to be announced that I am
definitely feeling a little anxious then
again everything is making me feel
anxious at the moment unlike a piano
that has a lot of different keys but
only plays one note which brings me
belatedly to the point or at least a
point I used to think personality was
stagnant like when I was young I thought
I was in the process of being formed
over time and then
once adulthood hit and the cement of
myself dried I would become this
unchanging thing and it's always this
belief kind of comforted me because I
had so much emotional instability in my
teens and 20s that I really craved that
imagined changelessness of adulthood but
that just hasn't been my experience of
adulthood I mean I see the world very
differently from how I did five or 10 or
15 years ago even though I've been an
adult that whole time there are lots of
examples of this but one is that even
ten years ago I mostly saw my anxiety as
like an embarrassing character weakness
and if I talked about it at all it was
usually to make fun of it and by
extension to make fun of myself but now
I understand my anxiety as part of a
brain disorder that I have which isn't
my fault or at least I usually
understand that maybe in the future I
will understand my anxiety differently I
don't know I know that I'm done growing
up but I hope that I'm not done growing
now better understanding my anxiety is
not really like reducing my anxiety but
uh I mean I really want to have a but at
the end of that sentence except I don't
have one right now all right I got one
but this is temporary and I will be okay
and so will you if there's one thing we
know about the universe it's that this
is temporary Hank I'll see you on Friday