"Write toward the thing that terrifies you Green, whose OCD centers on fears of illness, deliberately chose tuberculosis — the very subject of his anxious spirals — as the topic of his most recent book, citing Virginia Woolf's observation that given how profoundly illness shapes lives and communities, "you would think that great epics would be written about it alongside love and war." Rather than avoiding the feared subject, he used writing to understand it: "I want to understand it because I want to understand myself, but I also want to understand my community and my social order." Turning toward a fear in creative or intellectual work can transform obsessive dread into genuine curiosity and even expertise. Source: John Green, Happiness Lab / Ten Percent Happier (with Dan Harris), Everything Is Tuberculosis Episode"