Freaks Like Us By Susan Vaught: Personal Analysis

I absolutely love to write. Therefore, I habitually also love to read— it’s my favorite way to understand other people and to help them understand me. When stories get written down, anyone can comprehend them, especially with a miracle like braille. Writing lets both adults and children alike communicate complex ideas and feelings that humans just can’t otherwise show— hence, why I adore words so much. My favorite example of communicating that “complex emotion” part is a book called Freaks Like Us, by Susan Vaught. The Public Library Teen Summer Reading Challenge decreed I read it the summer going into eighth grade, and earned the title of “first book to make me sob uncontrollably”. It’s about a schizophrenic boy everyone calls Freak. He’s suicidal. Readers feel the book, a decisive lack of adjectives form intense backgrounds and long sections omitting punctuation stick out in my memory that explain Freak’s voices and hardships like they’re the simplest concept in the world to understand— and schizophrenia simply isn’t that easy. This compelled me to learn everything I could about mental illness, represented by the DSM 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th edition). Now I obviously haven’t read the whole manual. That’d blow. The book looks incredibly boring and tedious. But the DSM 5 appears on my bookshelf to represent every single article I’ve ever read about mental illness and general psychology— cause there’s quite the stack of papers. This dedication to research and learning fueled a desire to write more than I ever had before, making my life goal to let everyone know how real problems like depression and anxiety are and how they work and how they affect even sufferers extended families— so I read even more. This is where the book Good Companions comes in. …show more content…
The inner cover adds “ a guide to gardening with plants that help each other”, making a truly royal title for yet another book I haven’t read— but this handbook still certainly represents something. My mom gave me a love of words at a young age— she would read stories like Olivia and the Missing Toy to my brother and me, and she made them so terrific with her ability to build cooky worlds for us that the comical “[Wooshee] Wooshee gaga” from page 15 remains highly quotable. Of course, she also read us books like Harry Potter and the Percy Jackson series— but not Good Companions. No, I chose that one because it’s a book about gardening and helping other organisms— and my mom loves to garden (it’s a tradition used to help with sadness on her side of the family) as much as she loves to read, and I love to help strangers understand— to help them communicate. But communicating isn’t all about the sadness— that would make sharing thoughts super depressing. And suck out all of the glamour. Luckily, fairy tales exist— the antithesis of sadness, generally speaking. This is why gardening and reading fairy tales remain some of my mom’s favorite activities. In fact, whenever I tried to argue with her on the greatness of the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen, she’d state a quote by Einstein: “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” So naturally I quickly started to eat