Reasons to Stay Alive

by Matt Haig

One of the key symptoms of depression is to see no hope. No future. Far from the tunnel having light at the end of it, it seems like it is blocked at both ends, and you are inside it.

know, I know, we are humans. We are a clandestine species. Unlike other animals we wear clothes and do our procreating behind closed doors. And we are ashamed when things go wrong with us.

MINDS ARE UNIQUE. They go wrong in unique ways.

Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport.

‘But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.’ —Albert Camus, A Happy Death

I wanted to be dead. No. That’s not quite right. I didn’t want to be dead, I just didn’t want to be alive.

The thing with lizards is that they don’t kill themselves. Lizards are survivors.

And yet, the most beautiful view in the world could not stop me from wanting to kill myself.

Now, listen. If you have ever believed a depressive wants to be happy, you are wrong. They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel an absence of pain.

I stood there for a while. Summoning the courage to die, and then summoning the courage to live.

I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough.

depression is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet.

But anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication still fill me with fear. It doesn’t help that the names – Fluoxetine, Venlafaxine, Propranolol, Zopiclone – sound like sci-fi villains.

I was back to drinking alcohol again, I would often cope with lower-level anxiety by getting drunk, all the time knowing that it would be there waiting for me with a hangover on top.

Advances in science and technology have shown that, really, a physical body is a universe in itself. Each of us is made up of roughly a hundred trillion cells. In each of those cells is roughly that same number again of atoms.

The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe’s worth of darkness.

It was a place I had only ever wanted to escape, but now I was going back. But that was fine. I

Everyone you have ever met will be dead this time next century. Yep. Everyone you know is just a collection of slowly deteriorating cells.

was October. The saddest of months.

And not normal tears either. Not the kind that start behind the eyes. No. These came from the deep. They seemed to come from my gut, my stomach was trembling so much.

My dad wasn’t a tough dad. He was a gentle, caring, intelligent dad, but he still didn’t have the magical ability to see inside my head.

From the outside a person sees your physical form, sees that you are a unified mass of atoms and cells. Yet inside you feel like a Big Bang has happened. You feel lost, disintegrated, spread across the universe amid infinite dark space.

According to the World Health Organization nearly half of all mental disorders are present in some form before the age of fourteen.

You are no less or more of a man or a woman or a human for having depression than you would be for having cancer or cardiovascular disease or a car accident.

. . once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.’ —Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

ferry. I worried all the time. The only thing that didn’t worry me was the thing that probably should have: worry itself. It would be eleven years before I had to address that one.

the only real thing I wished for, beyond feeling better, was for time to move quicker. I would want 9 a.m. to be 10 a.m.

‘Monsters are real,’ Stephen King said. ‘And ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.’

We humans love to compartmentalise things. We love to divide our education system into separate subjects, just as we love to divide our shared planet into nations, and our books into separate genres.

That’s the odd thing about depression and anxiety. It acts like an intense fear of happiness, even as you yourself consciously want that happiness more than anything.

‘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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.’

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.

I think – if I offered her anything – it was the chance to be herself.

Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.

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. No.

I mean, I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books. They weren’t a luxury good during that time in my life.

conjured on the page. There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don’t really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping. It

If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.

I was starting to find that, sometimes, simply doing something that I had dreaded – and surviving – was the best kind of therapy. If you start to dread being outside, go outside. If you fear confined spaces, spend some time in a lift. If you have separation anxiety, force yourself to be alone a while. When you are depressed and anxious your comfort zone tends to shrink from the size of a world to the size of a bed. Or right down to nothing at all.

In a familiar place, your mind focuses solely on itself. There is nothing new it needs to notice about your bedroom. No potential external threats, just internal ones. By forcing yourself into a new physical space, preferably in a different country, you end up inevitably focusing a bit more on the world outside your head.

‘Travel makes one modest,’ said Gustave Flaubert. ‘You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.’

I was near Andrea I was infinitely calmer than when I wasn’t.

‘The wound is the place where the light enters you.’ (He also wrote: ‘Forget safety. Live where you fear to live.’) Also,

Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running,’ Murakami also said,

To go on a run every day is to have a kind of battle with yourself.