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.

You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalise everything,

bottom of the valley never provides the clearest view.

MINDS ARE UNIQUE. They go wrong in unique ways.

Depression looks different to everyone. Pain is felt in different ways, to different degrees, and provokes different responses.

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

The weirdest thing about a mind is that you can have the most intense things going on in there but no one else can see them. The world shrugs.

I didn’t want to be dead, I just didn’t want to be alive.

(The poet Melissa Broder once tweeted: ‘what idiot called it “depression” and not “there are bats living in my chest and they take up a lot of room,

You can be a depressive and be happy, just as you can be a sober alcoholic.

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. To escape a mind on fire, where thoughts blaze and smoke like old possessions lost to arson. To be normal. Or, as normal is impossible, to be empty.

‘You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.’

One lesson learned from treating chronic pain is that it is tough to override responses that are hardwired into the body and mind.

But depression is a kind of quantum physics of thought and emotion. It reveals what is normally hidden. It unravels you, and everything you have known.

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.

I felt it. The weight of Mum. The weight of being a son that had gone wrong. The weight of being loved. The weight of being a disappointment. The weight of being a hope that hadn’t happened the way it should have.

To say how I was feeling would lead to feeling more of what I was feeling. To act normal would be to feel a bit more normal. I acted normal.

People describe depression as a weight, and it can be. It can be a real physical weight, as well as a metaphorical, emotional one.

You don’t have a second. You don’t have a single waking second outside of the fear.

with depression and anxiety the pain isn’t something you think about because it is thought.

‘ . . . 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

I worried about things. Nuclear war. Ethiopia. The prospect of going on a ferry. I worried all the time.

People say ‘take it one day at a time’. But, I used to think to myself, that is all right for them to say. Days were mountains. A week was a trek across the Himalayas. You see, people say that time is relative, but it really bloody is.

I stacked the days up like Jenga blocks, imagining I was making progress, and then – crash – along would come a five-hour panic attack or a day of total apocalyptic darkness, and those Jenga days would topple back down again.

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

‘That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.’

WE ARE ESSENTIALLY alone. There is no getting around this fact, even if we try and forget it a lot of the time.

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.

‘Is there no way out of the mind?’ Sylvia Plath famously asked.

Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity.

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.

Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.’)

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.

‘Travel makes one modest,’ said Gustave Flaubert. ‘You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.’ Such perspective can be strangely liberating. Especially when you have an illness that may on the one hand lower self-esteem, but on the other intensifies the trivial.

anything that lessens that extreme sense of self, that makes me feel me but at a lower volume, is very welcome.

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

Weapons for the war that subsides but that can always ignite again. And so writing, reading, talking, travelling, yoga, meditation and running were some of mine.

It is said that insanity is a logical response to an insane world. Maybe depression is in part simply a response to a life we don’t really understand.

Even if depression is not totally overcome, we can learn to use what the poet Byron called a ‘fearful gift’.

‘And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on’ —Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.

I hate depression. I am scared of it. Terrified, in fact. But at the same time, it has made me who I am. And if – for me – it is the price of feeling life, it’s a price always worth paying.

The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don’t become them.

There is absolutely nothing in the past that you can change. That’s basic physics.

‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’

Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.