One summer I challenged myself to read 20 books. I thought it was a nice goal. Little did I know that I loved reading, loved the escape from reality, and I soon found myself surpassing that goal before mid-June hit. I finished my books from the library and decided I couldn't wait; I snooped the bookshelf for what to read next. My fingers ran up and down the spines and came across a book, 13 Reasons Why. It was a hardcover and noticed a map on the inside. This intrigued me, so I read the synopsis and began reading.

I ended up loving the book. It wasn't something I typically would have picked off the shelf, but I'm glad I did. When I heard it was to be a Netflix series, I got excited. It came and it, for a lack of a better term, blew up on social media and online sites like The Odyssey. The book nerd in me snarkily wanted to know if people actually read the book or if they heard its executive producer was Selena Gomez, but I pushed past that. For the most part, I saw articles like "'13 Reasons Why' You Need To Watch" and "Why You Should Watch '13 Reasons Why'." Until a couple of days ago that was all I saw, but now I'm seeing articles like "Why You Shouldn't Love '13 Reasons Why'" and "Stop Loving '13 Reasons Why'." To a curious personality, I clicked on it and glanced through one. It wasn't what I thought it was going to be. After watching a couple of episodes, I decided to jump on the bandwagon and write my version of one.

Recently, I started watching it on Netflix, and by recently, I mean just 5 days ago. Now, I'm not very far, but spoiler alert, I already know what happens (perk of reading the book). I'm not here to tell you or try to convince you to watch the series. Nope, I'm here to approach this differently. I'm here to tell you the importance of 13 Reasons Why. You might think those are loosely connected, and you're free to think that. But I am willing to agree to disagree.

You see, there are topics that are taboo in today's society: suicide, mental illness, rape, sexual assault, stalking, and so on. We talk about them yet we don't. I believe that most of the time we talk about it without saying a whole lot. That's not to say we haven't made progress in educating people about mental illness and suicide and ways to prevent rape and sexual assault. Because we have made progress just not much in the grand scheme of things.

Why do I mention those specific taboo topics? Simple. They are all touched on in 13 Reasons Why to some degree. It shows the effects of those topics on teenage girl's life. It's for that reason that this show is important.