Reasons to Stay Alive. Matt Haig
the eight-year-olds, the women, the men, even their dogs. I craved to exist in their minds. I could not cope with the relentless self-torment any more than I could cope with my hand on a hot stove when I could see buckets of ice all around me. Just the sheer exhaustion of never being able to find mental comfort. Of every positive thought reaching a cul-de-sac before it starts.
I cried.
I had never been one of those males who were scared of tears. I’d been a Cure fan, for God’s sake. I’d been emo before it was a term. Yet weirdly, depression didn’t make me cry that often, considering how bad it was. I think it was the surreal nature of what I was feeling. The distance. Tears were a kind of language and I felt all language was far away from me. I was beneath tears. Tears were what you shed in purgatory. By the time you were in hell it was too late. The tears burnt to nothing before they began.
But now, they came. 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. The dam had burst. And once they came they couldn’t stop, even when my dad walked into the bedroom. He looked at me and he couldn’t understand, even though it was all too familiar. My mum had suffered from post-natal depression. He came over to me, and saw my face, and the tears were contagious. His eyes went pink and watery. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him cry. He said nothing at first but hugged me, and I felt loved, and I tried to gather as much of that love as I could. I needed all of it.
‘I’m sorry,’ I think I said.
‘Come on,’ he said, softly. ‘You can do this. Come on. You can pull yourself together, Mattie. You’re going to have to.’
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.
He was right, of course, and I wouldn’t have wanted him to say much else, but he had no idea as to how hard that sounded.
To pull myself together.
No one did. 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.
‘I’ll try, Dad, I’ll try.’
They were the words he wanted to hear so I gave him them. And I returned to staring out at those ghosts of my childhood.
Pretty normal childhood
DOES MENTAL ILLNESS just happen, or is it there all along? According to the World Health Organization nearly half of all mental disorders are present in some form before the age of fourteen.
When I became ill at twenty-four it felt like something terribly new and sudden. I had a pretty normal, ordinary childhood. But I never really felt very normal. (Does anyone?) I usually felt anxious.
A typical memory would be me as a ten-year-old, standing on the stairs and asking the babysitter if I could stay with her until my parents came back. I was crying.
She was kind. She let me sit with her. I liked her a lot. She smelt of vanilla and wore baggy t-shirts. She was called Jenny. Jenny the Babysitter Who Lived Up the Street. A decade or so later she would have transformed into Jenny Saville, the Britart star famed for her large-scale painted depictions of naked women.
‘Do you think they’ll be home soon?’
‘Yes,’ said Jenny, patiently. ‘Of course they will. They’re only a mile away. That’s not very far, you know?’
I knew.
But I also knew they could have got mugged or killed or eaten by dogs. They weren’t, of course. Very few Newark-on-Trent residents ended their Saturday night being eaten by dogs. They came home. But all my childhood, over and over again, I carried on this way. Always inadvertently teaching myself how to be anxious. In a world where possibility is endless, the possibilities for pain and loss and permanent separation are also endless. So fear breeds imagination, and vice versa, on and on and on, until there is nothing left to do except go mad.
Then something else. A bit less ordinary, but still in the ballpark. I was thirteen. Me and a friend went over to some girls in our year on the school field. Sat down. One of the girls – one I fancied more than anything – looked at me and then made a disgusted face to her friends. Then she spoke words that I would remember twenty-six years later when I came to write them down in a book. She said: ‘Ugh. I don’t want that sitting next to me. With his spider legs on his face.’ She went on to explain, as the ground kept refusing to swallow me up, what she meant. ‘The hair growing out of his moles. It looks like spiders.’
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