Reasons to Stay Alive. Matt Haig
he told me, from nowhere. ‘I’ve got an enormous penis.’
‘What?’
‘See? I’ve got your attention.’
‘So, I should talk about my penis.’
‘No. It was an example.’
‘Got it,’ I said, staring out of the window at a bleak grey Croydon sky.
I didn’t really get on with Iain. True, he asked me to ‘join the boys’ at lunch, and have a pint and a game of pool. It was all dirty jokes and football and slagging off their girlfriends. I hated it. I hadn’t felt this out of place since I was thirteen. The plan – mine and Andrea’s – had been to sort our lives out so we didn’t have to go back to Ibiza that summer. But one lunch break I felt this intense bleakness inside me as if a cloud had passed over my soul. I literally couldn’t stomach another hour phoning people who didn’t want to be phoned. So I left the job. Just walked out. I was a failure. A quitter. I had nothing at all on the horizon. I was sliding down, becoming vulnerable to an illness that was waiting in the wings. But I didn’t realise it. Or didn’t care. I was just thinking of escape.
Infinity
A HUMAN BODY is bigger than it looks. 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. That is a lot of separate components. Our brains alone have a hundred billion brain cells, give or take a few billion.
Yet most of the time we do not feel the near-infinite nature of our physical selves. We simplify by thinking about ourselves in terms of our larger pieces. Arms, legs, feet, hands, torso, head. Flesh, bones.
A similar thing happens with our minds. In order to cope with living they simplify themselves. They concentrate on one thing at a time. 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. It turns out that we are not only made of the universe, of ‘star-stuff’ to borrow Carl Sagan’s phrase, but we are as vast and complicated as it too. The evolutionary psychologists might be right. We humans might have evolved too far. 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.
The hope that hadn’t happened
MY MUM AND dad were at the airport. They stood there looking tired and happy and worried all at once. We hugged. We drove back.
I was better. I was better. I had left my demons behind in the Mediterranean and now I was fine. I was still on sleeping pills and diazepam but I didn’t need them. I just needed home. I just needed Mum and Dad. Yes. I was better. I was still a little bit edgy, but I was better. I was better.
‘We were so worried,’ Mum said, and eighty-seven other variations of that theme.
Mum turned around in the passenger seat and looked at me and smiled and the smile had a slightly crumpled quality, her eyes glazed with tears. 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.
But.
I was better. A little bit frayed. But that was understandable. I was better, essentially. I could still be the hope. I might end up living until I am ninety-seven. I could be a lawyer or a brain surgeon or a mountaineer or a theatre director yet. It was early days. Early days. Early days.
It was night outside the window. Newark 24. Newark was where I had grown up and where I was going back to. A market town of 40,000 people. It was a place I had only ever wanted to escape, but now I was going back. But that was fine. I thought of my childhood. I thought of happy and unhappy days at school, and the continual battle for self-esteem. 24. I was twenty-four. The road sign seemed to be a statement from fate. Newark 24. We knew this would happen. All that was missing was my name.
I remember we had a meal around the kitchen table and I didn’t say much, but just enough to prove I was okay and not crazy or depressed. I was okay. I was not crazy or depressed.
I think it was a fish pie. I think they had made it especially. Comfort food. It made me feel good. I was sitting around the table eating fish pie. It was half past ten. I went to the downstairs toilet, and pulled the light on with a string. The downstairs bathroom was a kind of dark pink. I pissed, I flushed, and I began to notice my mind was changing. There was a kind of clouding, a shifting of psychological light.
I was better. I was better. But it only takes a doubt. A drop of ink falls into a clear glass of water and clouds the whole thing. So the moment after I realised I wasn’t perfectly well was the moment I realised I was still very ill indeed.
The cyclone
DOUBTS ARE LIKE swallows. They follow each other and swarm together. I stared at myself in the mirror. I stared at my face until it was not my face. I went back to the table and sat down and I did not say how I was feeling to anyone. 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.
‘Oh, look at the time,’ Mum said, with dramatic urgency. ‘I have to get up for school tomorrow.’ (She was a head teacher at an infant school.)
‘You go to bed,’ I said.
‘Yes, you go up, Mary,’ Andrea said. ‘We can sort out the beds and stuff.’
‘There’s a bed and there’s a mattress on the floor in his room, but you are welcome to have our bed if you like for tonight,’ said Dad.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘We’ll be fine.’
Dad squeezed my shoulder before he went to bed. ‘It’s good to have you here.’
‘Yes. It’s good to be here.’
I didn’t want to cry. Because a) I didn’t want him to see me cry, and b) if I cried I would feel worse. So, I didn’t cry. I went to bed.
And the next day I woke up, and it was there. The depression and anxiety, both together. People describe depression as a weight, and it can be. It can be a real physical weight, as well as a metaphorical, emotional one. But I don’t think weight is the best way to describe what I felt. As I lay there, on the mattress on the floor – I had insisted Andrea sleep on the bed, not out of straightforward chivalry but because that is what I would have done if I was normal – I felt like I was trapped in a cyclone. Outwardly, to others, I would over the next few months look a bit slower than normal, a bit more lethargic, but the experience going on in my mind was always relentlessly and oppressively fast.
My symptoms
THESE WERE SOME of the other things I also felt:
Like my reflection showed another person.
A kind of near-aching tingling sensation in my arms, hands, chest, throat and at the back of my head.
An inability to even contemplate the future. (The future was not going to happen, for me anyway.)
Scared of going mad, of being sectioned, of being put in a padded cell in a straitjacket.
Hypochondria.
Separation anxiety.
Agoraphobia.
A continual sense of heavy dread.
Mental exhaustion.
Physical exhaustion.
Like I was useless.
Chest tightness and occasional pain.
Like I was falling even while I was standing still.
Aching limbs.
The occasional inability to speak.
Lost.