School and stress both mix really well together. These days, students are getting stressed left and right, and they worry about tests or due assignments. This applies to Craig Gilner, an ambitious teen from New York from the novel It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini who worked his way to get into the high school of his dreams, studying nonstop for exams and having no other priority than getting accepted into the school. It all goes downhill from there, though, when he realized that this school really worked him day and night, never letting him have a break. This leads to him getting into a severe depression which makes him think of killing himself, which causes him to check himself in to a hospital. The changes that he undergoes in this hospital caused a real shift in his head.
From the beginning, Craig is shown to not be totally stable. The first lines that he narrates are, "It's so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out." Those are the first lines of the book. It's obvious that he is not okay. He hangs out with people that he believes are friends and goes to school, stressing out even more. His emotions change when he decides to finally kill himself. He thinks to himself, "Yes, I'm okay. I'm okay because I have a plan and a solution: I'm going to kill myself. I'm going to do it tonight. This is such a farce, tho whole thing." He really feels worthless. Before he was just having thoughts and now he had a full plan, which is a scary thought. "It's going to be tough on my parents. So tough. And my little sister. Such a beautiful, smart girl. Not a dud like me, that's for sure." He honestly wants to go along with his plan. He fortunately changes his mind, though, saying to himself, " It's such a silly little thing, the heart. Badoom. It feels good, the way it cleans me. Badoom. Screw it. I want my heart." This shows that he wants to live, but he also wants to die. He calls a suicide hotline and gets ordered to go to the nearest hospital, where he realized and was in shock to be put in a mental ward. In that hospital he undergoes many changes. He meets people that inspire him and make him wonder, he breaks ties with his supposed friends, meets someone that he really likes and decides that he will transfer schools. He does what he deserves. He tries to make his life better, and as he leaves the hospital on the final day of his stay there, he realizes that there is so much that he can do. He really becomes a new person. His brain goes through the Shift that Craig always wondered when it would come.
This book represented and showed the internal struggle of someone with immense pressure put upon them, showing how they broke and needed to heal. The author themselves stayed in adult psychiatric in Methodist Hospital in Park Slope, Brooklyn for five days. This book shows Craig's unexpected road to his happiness, to the Shift he was waiting for. It shows how someone can fight and look at life through the same eyes as before, but see something completely new, different, and better. "So now live for real, Craig. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live."
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