Reasons to Stay Alive

by Matt Haig

  Hurry up, I didn’t say. Do you have any idea of what you are doing?

  I wanted to go back and start my life again at her pace, and then I would not be feeling like this. I needed a slower run-up.

  ‘Do you need a bag?’

  I sort of did need a bag, but I couldn’t risk slowing her down any more. Standing still was very hard. When every bit of you is panicking, then walking is better than standing.

  Something flooded my brain. I closed my eyes. I saw dwarf demons having fun, laughing at me as if my madness was an act at a carnival.

  ‘No. It’s okay. I only live around the corner.’

  Around the bend.

  I paid with a five-pound note. ‘Keep the change.’

  And she started to realise I was a bit weird and I left the shop and I was out, back into the vast and open world, and I kept walking as fast as I could walk (to break into a run would be a kind of defeat), feeling like a fish on the deck of a boat, needing the water again.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay . . .’

  I turned the corner and I prayed more than anything not to see someone I knew on Wellington Road. No one. Just emptiness and suburban, semi-detached, late Victorian houses, lined up and staring at each other.

  And I got back to number 33, my parents’ house, and I rang the bell and Andrea answered and I was inside and there was no relief, because my mind was quick to point out that being relieved about surviving a trip to the corner shop was another confirmation of sickness, not wellness. But maybe, mind, there would come a day when you could be as slow as the girl in the shop at pointing out such things.

  ‘You’re getting there,’ said Andrea.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, and tried so hard to believe it.

  ‘We’re going to get you better.’

  It’s not easy, being there for a depressive.

  A conversation across time – part two

  THEN ME: I can’t do this.

  NOW ME: You think you can’t, but you can. You do. You will.

  THEN ME: This pain, though. You must have forgotten what it was like. I went on an escalator today, in a shop, and I felt myself disintegrating. It was like the whole universe was pulling me apart. Right there, in John Lewis.

  NOW ME: I probably have forgotten, a little bit. But listen, look, I’m here. I’m here now. And I made it. We made it. You just have to hold on.

  THEN ME: I so want to believe that you exist. That I don’t kill you off.

  NOW ME: You didn’t. You don’t. You won’t.

  THEN ME: Why would I stay alive? Wouldn’t it be better to feel nothing than to feel such pain? Isn’t zero worth more than minus one thousand?

  NOW ME: Listen, just listen, just get this through your head, okay – you make it, and on the other side of this there is life. L-I-F-E. You understand? And there will be stuff you enjoy. And just stop worrying about worrying. Just worry – you can’t help that – but don’t meta-worry.

  THEN ME: You look old. You have crow’s feet. Are you starting to lose your hair?

  NOW ME: Yes. But remember, we’ve always worried about this stuff. Can you remember that holiday to the Dordogne when we were ten? We leaned forward into the mirror and started to worry about the lines in our forehead. We were worrying about the visible effects of ageing back then. Because we have always been scared of dying.

  THEN ME: Are you still scared of dying?

  NOW ME: Yes.

  THEN ME: I need a reason to stay alive. I need something strong that will keep me here.

  NOW ME: Okay, okay, give me a minute . . .

  Reasons to stay alive

  1.

  You are on another planet. No one understands what you are going through. But actually, they do. You don’t think they do because the only reference point is yourself. You have never felt this way before, and the shock of the descent is traumatising you, but others have been here. You are in a dark, dark land with a population of millions.

  2.

  Things aren’t going to get worse. You want to kill yourself. That is as low as it gets. There is only upwards from here.

  3.

  You hate yourself. That is because you are sensitive. Pretty much every human could find a reason to hate themselves if they thought about it as much as you did. We’re all total bastards, us humans, but also totally wonderful.

  4.

  So what, you have a label? ‘Depressive’. Everyone would have a label if they asked the right professional.

  5.

  That feeling you have, that everything is going to get worse, is just a symptom.

  6.

  Minds have their own weather systems. You are in a hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on.

  7.

  Ignore stigma. Every illness had stigma once. We fear getting ill, and fear tends to lead to prejudice before information. Polio used to be erroneously blamed on poor people, for instance. And depression is often seen as a ‘weakness’ or personality failing.

  8.

  Nothing lasts for ever. This pain won’t last. The pain tells you it will last. Pain lies. Ignore it. Pain is a debt paid off with time.

  9.

  Minds move. Personalities shift. To quote myself, from The Humans: ‘Your mind is a galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile. Which is to say, don’t kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.’

  10.

  You will one day experience joy that matches this pain. You will cry euphoric tears at the Beach Boys, you will stare down at a baby’s face as she lies asleep in your lap, you will make great friends, you will eat delicious foods you haven’t tried yet, you will be able to look at a view from a high place and not assess the likelihood of dying from falling. There are books you haven’t read yet that will enrich you, films you will watch while eating extra-large buckets of popcorn, and you will dance and laugh and have sex and go for runs by the river and have late-night conversations and laugh until it hurts. Life is waiting for you. You might be stuck here for a while, but the world isn’t going anywhere. Hang on in there if you can. Life is always worth it.

  Love

  WE ARE ESSENTIALLY alone. There is no getting around this fact, even if we try and forget it a lot of the time. When we are ill, there is no escape from this truth. Pain, of any kind, is a very isolating experience. My back is playing up right now. I am writing this with my legs up against a wall, and my back lying flat on a sofa. If I sit up normally, hunched over a notepad or a laptop in the classic writer position, my lower back begins to hurt. It doesn’t really help me to know, when the pain flares up again, that millions of other people also suffer from back problems.

  So why do we bother with love? No matter how much we love someone we are never going to make them, or ourselves, free of pain.

  Well, let me tell you something. Something that sounds bland and drippy to the untrained eye, but which – I assure you – is something I believe entirely. Love saved me. Andrea. She saved me. Her love for me and my love for her. Not just once, either. Repeatedly. Over and over.

  We had been together five years by the time I fell ill. What had Andrea gained in that time, since the night before her nineteenth birthday? A continued sense of financial insecurity? An inadequate, alcohol-impaired sex life?

  At university our friends always considered us to be a happy couple. And we were, except for the other half of the time when we were an unhappy couple.

  The interesting thing was that we were fundamentally different people. Andrea liked lie-ins and early nights, while I was a bad sleeper and a night owl. She had a strong work ethic, and I didn’t (not then, though depression strangely has given me one). She liked organisation and I was the most disorganised person she had met. Mixing us together was, in some ways, like mixing chlorine with ammonia. It simply was not a good idea.

  But I made her laugh, she said. I was ‘fun’.
We liked to talk. Both of us, I suppose, were quite shy and private people in our own way. Andrea, particularly, was a social chameleon. This was a kind of kindness. She never could cope if someone felt awkward, and so always bent to meet them as much as she could. I think – if I offered her anything – it was the chance to be herself.

  If, as Schopenhauer said, ‘we forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people’, then love – at its best – is a way to reclaim those lost parts of ourselves. That freedom we lost somewhere quite early in childhood. Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.

  I helped her be her, and she helped me be me. We did this through talking. In our first year together we would very often stay up all night talking. The night would start with us going to the wine shop at the bottom of Sharp Street in Hull (the street my student house was on) and buying a bottle of wine we couldn’t afford, and would very often end with us watching breakfast TV on my old Hitachi, which required constant manoeuvring of the aerial to see the picture.

  Then a year later we had fun playing grown-ups, buying The River Café Cookbook and holding dinner parties at which we would serve up panzanella salads and expensive wines in our damp-infested student flat.

  Please do not think this was a perfect relationship. It wasn’t. It still isn’t. The time we spent living in Ibiza, particularly, now seems to be one long argument.

  Just listen to this:

  ‘Matt, wake up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wake up. It’s half-nine.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I’ve got to be at the office at ten. It’s a forty-five-minute drive.’

  ‘So, no one will know. It’s Ibiza.’

  ‘You’re being selfish.’

  ‘I’m being tired.’

  ‘You’re hungover. You were drinking vodka lemon all night.’

  ‘Sorry for having a good time. You should try it.’

  ‘Fuck off. I’m getting in the car.’

  ‘What? You can’t leave me in the villa all day. I’ll be stranded in the middle of nowhere. There’s no food. Just wait ten minutes!’

  ‘I’m going. I’m just so fed up with you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re the one who wants to be here. My job is what keeps us here. It’s why we’re in this villa.’

  ‘You work six days a week. Twelve hours a day. They’re exploiting you. They’re still out clubbing. And no one’s in the office till after twelve. They value you because you are a maniac. You bend over backwards for them and treat me like crap.’

  ‘Bye, Matt.’

  ‘Oh fuck off, you’re not really going, are you?’

  ‘You selfish cunt.’

  ‘Okay, I’m getting ready . . . fuck.’

  But the arguments were surface stuff. If you go deep enough under a tidal wave the water is still. That is what we were like. In a way we argued because we knew it would have no fundamental impact. When you can be yourself around someone, you project your dissatisfied self outwards. And in Ibiza, I was that. I was not happy. And part of my personality was this: when I was unhappy, I tried to drown myself in pleasure.

  I was – to use the most therapy of terms – in denial. I was denying my unhappiness, even as I was being a tetchy, hungover boyfriend.

  There was never a single moment, though, where I would have said – or felt – that I didn’t love her. I loved her totally. Friendship-love and love-love. Philia and eros. I always had done. Though, of the two, that deep and total friendship-love turns out to be the most important. When the depression hit, Andrea was there for me. She’d be kind to me and cross with me in all the right ways.

  She was someone I could talk to, someone I could say anything to. Being with her was basically being with an outer version of myself.

  The force and fury she’d once only displayed in arguments she now used to steer me better. She accompanied me on trips to doctors. She encouraged me to ring the right helplines. She got us to move into our own place. She encouraged me to read, to write. She earned us money. She gave us time. She handled all the organisational side of my life, the stuff you need to do to tick over.

  She filled in the blanks that worry and darkness had left in its wake. She was my mind-double. My life-sitter. My literal other half when half of me had gone. She covered for me, waiting patiently like a war wife, during my absence from myself.

  How to be there for someone with depression or anxiety

  1.

  Know that you are needed, and appreciated, even if it seems you are not.

  2.

  Listen.

  3.

  Never say ‘pull yourself together’ or ‘cheer up’ unless you’re also going to provide detailed, foolproof instructions. (Tough love doesn’t work. Turns out that just good old ‘love’ is enough.)

  4.

  Appreciate that it is an illness. Things will be said that aren’t meant.

  5.

  Educate yourself. Understand, above all, that what might seem easy to you – going to a shop, for instance – might be an impossible challenge for a depressive.

  6.

  Don’t take anything personally, any more than you would take someone suffering with the flu or chronic fatigue syndrome or arthritis personally. None of this is your fault.

  7.

  Be patient. Understand it isn’t going to be easy. Depression ebbs and flows and moves up and down. It doesn’t stay still. Do not take one happy/bad moment as proof of recovery/relapse. Play the long game.

  8.

  Meet them where they are. Ask what you can do. The main thing you can do is just be there.

  9.

  Relieve any work/life pressure if that is doable.

  10.

  Where possible, don’t make the depressive feel weirder than they already feel. Three days on the sofa? Haven’t opened the curtains? Crying over difficult decisions like which pair of socks to wear? So what. No biggie. There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.

  An inconsequential moment

  IT CAME. THE moment I was waiting for. Some time in April 2000. It was totally inconsequential. In fact, there is not much to write about. That was the whole point. It was a moment of nothingness, of absent-mindedness, of spending almost ten seconds awake but not actively thinking of my depression or anxiety. I was thinking about work. About trying to get an article published in a newspaper. It wasn’t a happy thought, but a neutral one. But it was a break in the clouds, a sign that the sun was still there, somewhere. It was over not much after it began, but when those clouds came back there was hope. There would be a time when those painless seconds would become minutes and hours and maybe even days.

  Things that have happened to me that have generated more sympathy than depression

  Having tinnitus.

  Scalding my hand on an oven, and having to have my hand in a strange ointment-filled glove for a week.

  Accidentally setting my leg on fire.

  Losing a job.

  Breaking a toe.

  Being in debt.

  Having a river flood our nice new house, causing ten thousand pounds’ worth of damage.

  Bad Amazon reviews.

  Getting the norovirus.

  Having to be circumcised when I was eleven.

  Lower-back pain.

  Having a blackboard fall on me.

  Irritable bowel syndrome.

  Being a street away from a terrorist attack.

  Eczema.

  Living in Hull in January.

  Relationship break-ups.

  Working in a cabbage-packing warehouse.

  Working in media sales (okay, that came close).

  Consuming a poisoned prawn.

  Three-day migraines.

  Life on Earth to an alien

  IT’S HARD TO explain depression to people who haven’t suffered from it.

  It is like explaining life on Earth to a
n alien. The reference points just aren’t there. You have to resort to metaphors.

  You are trapped in a tunnel.

  You are at the bottom of the ocean.

  You are on fire.

  The main thing is the intensity of it. It does not fit within the normal spectrum of emotions. When you are in it, you are really in it. You can’t step outside it without stepping outside of life, because it is life. It is your life. Every single thing you experience is filtered through it. Consequently, it magnifies everything. At its most extreme, things that an everyday normal person would hardly notice have overwhelming effects. The sun sinks behind a cloud, and you feel that slight change in weather as if a friend has died. You feel the difference between inside and outside as a baby feels the difference between womb and world. You swallow an ibuprofen and your neurotic brain acts like it has taken an overdose of methamphetamine.

  Depression, for me, wasn’t a dulling but a sharpening, an intensifying, as though I had been living my life in a shell and now the shell wasn’t there. It was total exposure. A red-raw, naked mind. A skinned personality. A brain in a jar full of the acid that is experience. What I didn’t realise, at the time, what would have seemed incomprehensible to me, was that this state of mind would end up having positive effects as well as negative effects.

  I’m not talking about all that What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger stuff. No. That’s simply not true. What doesn’t kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn’t kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn’t kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a window pane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn’t kill you.