Reasons to Stay Alive (HC)
Read Reasons to Stay Alive (HC) Online
Authors: Matt Haig
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LSO BY
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ATT
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AIG
The Last Family in England
The Dead Fathers Club
The Possession of Mr Cave
The Radleys
The Humans
Humans: An A-Z
CANONGATE
Edinburgh · London
Published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2015 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2015, Matt Haig
For permissions credits please see
here
.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material.
The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 508 3
eISBN 978 1 78211 509 0
Typeset in Granjon 12.5/20pt by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire.
For Andrea
Contents
A note, before we get fully under way
The day I died
Why depression is hard to understand
A beautiful view
A conversation across time – part one
Pills
Killer
Things people say to depressives that they don’t say in other life-threatening situations
Negative placebo
Feeling the rain without an umbrella
Life
Infinity
The hope that hadn’t happened
The cyclone
My symptoms
The Bank of Bad Days
Things depression says to you
Facts
The head against the window
Pretty normal childhood
A visit
Boys don’t cry
Cherry blossom
Unknown unknowns
The brain is the body – part one
Psycho
Jenga days
Warning signs
Demons
Existence
Things you think during your first panic attack
Things you think during your 1,000th panic attack
The art of walking on your own
A conversation across time – part two
Reasons to stay alive
Love
How to be there for someone with depression or anxiety
An inconsequential moment
Things that have happened to me that have generated more sympathy than depression
Life on Earth to an alien
White space
The Power and the Glory
Paris
Reasons to be strong
Weapons
Running
The brain is the body – part two
Famous people
Abraham Lincoln and the fearful gift
Depression is . . .
Depression is also . . .
A conversation across time – part three
The world
Mushroom clouds
The Big A
Slow down
Peaks and troughs
Parenthesis
Parties
#reasonstostayalive
Things that make me worse
Things that (sometimes) make me better
In praise of thin skins
How to be a bit happier than Schopenhauer
Self-help
Thoughts on time
Formentera
Images on a screen
Smallness
How to live (forty pieces of advice I feel to be helpful but which I don’t always follow)
Things I have enjoyed since the time I thought I would never enjoy anything again
A note, and some acknowledgements
This book is impossible
THIRTEEN YEARS AGO
I knew this couldn’t happen.
I was going to die, you see. Or go mad.
There was no way I would still be here. Sometimes I doubted I would even make the next ten minutes. And the idea that I would be well enough and confident enough to write about it in this way would have been just far too much to believe.
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. So if I could have only known the future, that there would be one far brighter than anything I’d experienced, then one end of that tunnel would have been blown to pieces, and I could have faced the light. So the fact that this book exists is proof that depression lies. Depression makes you think things that are wrong.
But depression itself isn’t a lie. It is the most real thing I’ve ever experienced. Of course, it is invisible.
To other people, it sometimes seems like nothing at all. You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames. And so – as depression is largely unseen and mysterious – it is easy for stigma to survive. Stigma is particularly cruel for depressives, because stigma affects thoughts and depression is a disease of thoughts.
When you are depressed you feel alone, and that no one is going through quite what you are going through. You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalise everything, and you are so scared that people will alienate you further you clam up and don’t speak about it, which is a shame, as speaking about it helps. Words – spoken or written – are what connect us to the world, and so speaking about it to people, and writing about this stuff, helps connect us to each other, and to our true selves.
I 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. But we’ll grow out of this, and the way we’ll do it is by speaking about it. And maybe even through reading and writing about it.
I believe that. Because it was, in part, through reading and writing that I found a kind of salvation from the dark. Ever since I realised that depression lied about the future I have wanted to write a book about my experience, to tackle depression and anxiety head-on. So this book seeks to do two things. To lessen that stigma, and – the possibly more quixotic ambition – to try and actually convince people that the bottom of the valley never provides the clearest view. I wrote this because the oldest clichés remain the truest. Time heals. The tunnel
does
have light at the end of it, even if we aren’t able to see it. And there’s a two-for-one offer on clouds and silver linings. Words, just sometimes, can set you free.
A note, before we get fully under way
MINDS ARE UNIQUE.
They go wrong in unique ways. My mind went wrong in a slightly different way to how other minds go wrong. Our experience overlaps with other people’s, but it is never exactly the same experience. Umbrella labels like ‘depression’ (and ‘anxiety’ and ‘panic disorder’ and ‘OCD’) are useful, but only if we appreciate that people do not all have the same precise experience of such things.
Depression looks different to everyone. Pain is felt in different ways, to different degrees, and provokes different responses. That said, if books had to replicate our exact experience of the world to be useful, the only books worth reading would be written by ourselves.
There is no right or wrong way to have depression, or to have a panic attack, or to feel suicidal. These things just
are.
Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport. But I have found over the years that by reading about other
people who have suffered, survived and overcome despair I have felt comforted. It has given me hope. I hope this book can do the same.
1
Falling
‘But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.’