Under Rose-Tainted Skies: A Daunting and Dauntless Experience of Being Alive

Beauty comes from how you treat people and how you behave. But if a little lipstick makes you smile, then you should wear it and forget what anyone else thinks.

You know that feeling when you see a pen lying on the ground and you feel compelled to pick it up? Or when you see a shoe sprawled upside down in the corridor and you cannot pass it by without setting it right?

That itching and scratching in your brain, that needling sense of impulse that pushes you to do those things and not let you rest peacefully until you do?

Now imagine the intensity of those impulses swollen up hundredfold. They are gigantic, life-size. Crawling in your brain. Crawling out your brain.

That is Norah's life, 24/7.

While you are able to ignore these compulsions somehow, beat them back when need be, Norah most absolutely can't. She has what is commonly known as OCD, or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Now I'd like to point out here the more misconstrued notion of the apparently rife occurrence in the community of OCD - which is an anxiety disorder only 2% of the common populace are affected with, contrary to popular belief. So while all the aforementioned instances might be considered an inflated version of your "pet peeves", the people suffering from this disorder would vehemently protest against misinterpreting their illness and insist on setting the record straight.

So this is me setting the record straight.

Anyway. Moving on.

The teenage protagonist of this novel Under Rose-tainted Skies, Norah, suffers from agoraphobia also.

Medical News Today defines agoraphobia as 'an anxiety disorder that manifests as a fear of situations where escape could be difficult, or in which help would not be available if something bad were to happen.' The word comes from the ancient Greek word “agora,” referring to a place of assembly or market place. So it often leads to a fear of open and/or crowded places, riddled with ambushes of a panic disorder.

The book takes us through the crippled life of Norah, a life crippled by her overworking brain, by her brain's unbridled lust for anxiety and excessive worry, its inexorable inability to shut down its valves. It paints her life in a series of frightening worst-case scenarios in her head, which makes her scared of leaving her house, face the too-big, colossal, disaster-prone outside world. Even stepping out on the front porch of her house is enough to knock the breath out of her windpipe and render her dizzy.

So she doesn't. She has been homeschooled for four long years now by her mother, and except to go to her therapist, Dr. Reeves, Norah is bound in her house, corralled into isolation by its four walls and devoid of social interaction. Though she does have The Hub, which is apparently up another notch from Facebook in terms of obnoxiousness and prying, where teenagers spill their innermost thoughts and sexual fantasies for all the world to witness and take a poll on and revel in.

Until Luke, the newly moved-in, cute neighbor boy, arrives on her front porch, quite literally.

I mean, of course.

Louise Gornall makes an enthralling work of leading us through the tangled and complex maze of agoraphobia and panic attacks and OCD. She is cogent with her description of the abyss of Norah's perpetually bubbling emotions, her endless battles with the onslaughts of her anxiety and panic attacks. She will force you to recognize Norah's pain and helplessness, her excessive dependency on her brain, which she explains as being "trapped in her brain", shackled to her impulses and compulsive behaviors, not knowing how to break out of the chain of repugnant and toxic thoughts.

We can assume the best, but we can't choose how people perceive us. We can, however, choose how those views affect us.

She also highlights the callous and ignorant ways in which mental illnesses are treated and reacted to in the society, often called "not real sickness", how their weight is dismissed or undermined with a "It's in your head" or "Try not to think about it" comment flung here and there, zooming in on the obvious obliviousness of people toward the mental condition of those who suffer even slightly from these illnesses, on their generic invisibility in the society.

How can I expect people to empathize with a sickness they can't see?

And Gornall also digs into as important a subject as self-harm and showcases the little and big ways through which acts of self-harming can be perpetuated, where these vicious and self-maligning thoughts stem from, how they take root in our brains. How they do not come with a big neon sign blinking above a person's head and how we might miss the signs if we are not looking or listening.

The portrayal of Norah's mother and Luke was executed thoughtfully, beautifully too. At first Luke appears to be your average, shallow and petty guy-next-door who comes running to you because he thinks a pretty girl waved at him. But as the story unfolds, his character begins to cull more depth, infused with a compassion and consideration that is usually abject in the teenagers paraded around in YA books and TV series.

When people say "weird", what they really mean is "different". And difference has never been a bad thing.

Though the romantic development here seemed kind of rushed, abrupt, unrealistic in a too-good-to-be-true way. And while I adored Gornall's exquisite penmanship, at times, it did seem she was trying too hard to be imposing. She became verbose in some places, with exaggerated representation of Norah's thoughts and making the pace of the novel stunted, slow-breathing. The dialogues were also sparse, scattered few and far between, and left me wanting, lacking something.

But her undaunted attempt at raising awareness about these mental health issues that are either tacitly ignored and brushed under the proverbial carpet and then snowballed into a profound misconception, or simply just thought of as some twisted myth is, indeed, admirable. The clutches of heightened apprehension and paranoia and agitation that the agoraphobic people cannot shake off, and the jumble of millions of panic-inducing, dreadful thoughts - ranging from being spooked by a faint unknown touch because it might been dipped in several unhygienic places, to socializing with just the air outside, because you never know when an earthquake might hit you - all are laid out bare for us with a crisp clarity and transparency.

Your mind adapts to what worse is. Suddenly, that thing that seemed so terrifying at first is dwarfed by the next challenge that comes your way. But you adapt again and again and again, until you find yourself fearless.

She definitely made an impact with this debut, and for that attempt alone, I'd give it a 4.

#mentalhealth #YAfiction #contemporaryromance