by Matt Haig
And yet, those days were the most intense I have lived. Those days contained thousands of tiny battles. They are filled with memories so painful I can only now, with the distance of fourteen and a half years, look at them head-on. I was a nervous wreck. 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.
Einstein said the way to understand relativity was to imagine the difference between love and pain. ‘When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.’ Every moment was red-hot. And 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. I would want the morning to be the afternoon. I would want the 22nd of September to be the 23rd of September. I would want the light to be dark and the dark to be light. I still had the toy globe I’d had as a boy in my room. I sometimes used to stand there and spin it, wishing I was spinning the world deep into the next millennium.
I was as obsessed with time as some people are about money. It was the only weapon I had. I would build up hours and minutes like pounds and pence. In my head, amid all the raging waters of anxiety, this knowledge buoyed like hope. It is October 3rd, twenty-two days since it happened.
The longer that time went on, and I was still a) alive and b) not mistaking anyone for a hat, the more I felt like there was a chance I could get through this. But it didn’t always work like that. 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.
Warning signs
WARNING SIGNS ARE very hard with depression.
It’s especially hard for people with no direct experience of depression to know them when they see them. Partly this is because some people are confused about what depression actually is. We use ‘depressed’ as a synonym for ‘sad’, which is fine, as we use ‘starving’ as a synonym for ‘hungry’, though the difference between depression and sadness is the difference between genuine starvation and feeling a bit peckish.
Depression is an illness. Yet it doesn’t come with a rash or a cough. It is hard to see, as it is generally invisible. Even though it is a serious illness it is also surprisingly hard for many sufferers to recognise it at first. Not because it doesn’t feel bad – it does – but because that bad feeling seems unrecognisable, or can be confused with other things. For instance, if you feel worthless you might think ‘I feel worthless because I am worthless’. It might be hard to see it as a symptom of an illness. Or even if it is seen as that, it’s possible that low self-worth, combined with fatigue, might mean there is little will or ability to vocalise it.
But in any case, these are some of the most frequently cited signs that someone is depressed.
Fatigue – if someone is tired all the time, for no real reason.
Low self-esteem – a hard one for others to spot, especially in those people who aren’t that comfortable talking about their feelings. And low self-esteem isn’t exactly conducive with getting out there in the world.
‘Psychomotor retardation’ – in certain cases of depression, slow movements and slow speech may happen.
Loss of appetite (though massive increase in appetite can sometimes be a symptom too).
Irritability (though, to be fair, that can be a sign of anything).
Frequent crying episodes.
Anhedonia – I first knew of this word as Woody Allen’s original title for the film Annie Hall. It means, as I’ve said, the inability to experience pleasure in anything. Even the pleasurable things, like sunsets and nice food, and watching dubious Chevy Chase comedies from the eighties. That sort of stuff.
Sudden introversion – if someone seems quieter, or more introverted than normal, it could mean they are depressed. (I can remember there were times when I couldn’t speak. It felt like I couldn’t move my tongue, and talking seemed so utterly pointless. Just as the things other people talked about seemed to belong to another world.)
Demons
THE DEMON SAT next to me in the back of the car.
He was real and false all at once. Not a hallucination exactly, and not transparent like a theme park ghost, but there and not there. There when I closed my eyes. There even when I opened them again, a kind of flickering mind-print transferred over reality, but something imagined rather than seen.
He was short. About three foot. Impish and grey, like a gargoyle on a cathedral, and he was looking up at me, smiling. And then he got up on the seat and started licking my face. He had a long, dry tongue. And he kept on. Lick, lick, lick. He didn’t really scare me. I mean, fear was there, obviously. I was living continually inside fear. But the demon didn’t send me deeper into terror. If anything, he was a comfort. The licks were caring licks, as if I was one big wound and he was trying to make me better.
The car was heading to the Nottingham Theatre Royal. We were off to see Swan Lake. It was the production where all the swans were male. My mother was talking. Andrea was in the front passenger seat, listening with polite patience to my mother. I can’t remember what she was saying but I can remember she was talking, because I kept on thinking This is weird. Mum is talking about Matthew Bourne and her friends who have seen this production and there is a happy demon on the back seat licking my face.
The licking got a bit more annoying. I tried to switch the demon off, or the idea of the demon, but of course that made it worse. Lick, lick, lick, lick. I couldn’t really feel the tongue on my skin, but the idea of the demon licking my face was real enough for my brain to tingle, as if I was being tickled.
The demon laughed. We went into the theatre. Swans danced. I felt my heart speed up. The dark, the confinement, my mother holding my hand, it was all too much. This was it. Everything was over. Except, of course, it wasn’t. I stayed in my seat.
Anxiety and depression, that most common mental health cocktail, fuse together in weird ways. I would often close my eyes and see strange things, but now I feel like sometimes those things were only there because one of the things I was scared of was going mad. And if you are mad, then seeing things that aren’t there is probably a symptom.
If you are scared when there is nothing to be scared of, eventually your brain has to give you things. And so that classic expression – ‘the only thing to fear is fear itself’ – becomes a kind of meaningless taunt. Because fear is enough. It is a monster, in fact.
And, of course –
‘Monsters are real,’ Stephen King said. ‘And ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.’
It was dark. The house was silent so we tried to be too.
‘I love you,’ she whispered.
‘I love you,’ I whispered back.
We kissed. I felt demons watching us, gathering around us, as we kissed and held each other. And slowly, in my mind, the demons retreated for a while.
Existence
LIFE IS HARD. It may be beautiful and wonderful but it is also hard. The way people seem to cope is by not thinking about it too much. But some people are not going to be able to do that. And besides, it is the human condition. We think therefore we are. We know we are going to grow old, get ill and die. We know that is going to happen to everyone we know, everyone we love. But also, we have to remember, the only reason we have love in the first place is because of this. Humans might well be the only species to feel depression as we do, but that is simply because we are a remarkable species, one that has created remarkable things – civilisation, language, stories, love songs. Chiaroscuro means a contrast of light and shade. In Renaissance paintings of Jesus, for instance, dark shadow was used to accentuate the light bathing Christ. It is a hard thing to accept, that death and decay and everything bad leads to everything good, but I for one b
elieve it. As Emily Dickinson, eternally great poet and occasionally anxious agoraphobe, said: ‘That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.’
3
Rising
ROY NEARY: Just close your eyes and hold your breath and everything will turn real pretty.
—Steven Spielberg, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Things you think during your first panic attack
1.
I am going to die.
2.
I am going to go so mad there will be no coming back.
3.
This won’t end.
4.
Everything is going to get worse.
5.
No one’s heart is meant to beat this fast.
6.
I am thinking far too fast.
7.
I am trapped.
8.
No one has felt this way before. Ever. In the whole of human history.
9.
Why are my arms numb?
10.
I will never get over this.
Things you think during your 1,000th panic attack
1.
Here it comes.
2.
I’ve been here before.
3.
But wow, it’s still quite bad.
4.
I might die.
5.
I’m not going to die.
6.
I am trapped.
7.
This is the worst ever.
8.
No, it’s not. Remember Spain.
9.
Why are my arms numb?
10.
I will get over this.
The art of walking on your own
WHEN I WAS most severely depressed I had quite a vast collection of related mental illnesses. 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. But the reality is that things are blurred. Just as being good at mathematics often means someone is good at physics, so having depression means it probably comes with other things. Anxieties, maybe some phobias, a pinch of OCD. (Compulsive swallowing was a big thing with me.)
I also had agoraphobia and separation anxiety for a while.
A measure of progress I had was how far I could walk on my own.
If I was outside, and I wasn’t with Andrea or one of my parents, I wasn’t able to cope. But rather than avoid these situations, I forced myself into them.
I think this helped. It is quite gruelling, always facing fear and heading into it, but it seemed to work.
On the days when I was feeling very brave, I would say something – ahem – impossibly heroic like ‘I am going to go to the shop to get some milk. And Marmite.’
And Andrea would look at me, and say ‘On your own?’
‘Yes. On my own. I’ll be fine.’
It was 1999. Lots of people didn’t have mobile phones. So on your own still meant on your own. And so I would hurriedly put on my coat and grab some money and leave the house as quickly as I could, trying to outpace the panic.
And by the time I reached the end of Wellington Road, my parents’ street, it would be there, the darkness, whispering at me, and I would turn the corner onto Sleaford Road. Orange-bricked terraces with net curtains. And I would feel a deep level of insecurity, like I was in a shuttle that was leaving the Earth’s orbit. It wasn’t simply a walk to the shop. It was Apollo 13.
‘It’s okay,’ I whispered to myself.
And I would pass a fellow human walking a dog and they would ignore me, or they would frown or – worse – smile, and so I would smile back, and then my head would quickly punish me.
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. So if it catches you smiling, even fake smiling, then – well, that stuff’s just not allowed and you know it, so here comes ten tons of counterbalance.
The weirdness. That feeling of being outside alone, it was as unnatural as being a roof without walls. I would see the shop up ahead. The letters ‘Londis’ still looking small and far away. So much sadness and fear to walk through.
There is no way I can do this.
There is no way I can walk to the shop. On my own. And find milk. And Marmite.
If you go back home you will be weaker still. What are you going to do? Go back and be lost and go mad? If you go back the chances of living for ever in a padded cell with white walls is higher than it is already. Do it. Just walk to the shop. It’s a shop. You’ve been walking to the corner shop on your own since you were ten. One foot in front of the other, shoulders back. Breathe.
Then my heart kicked in.
Ignore it.
But listen – boomboomboomboomboom.
Ignore it.
But listen, but listen, but fucking listen.
And the other things.
The mind images, straight out of unmade horror films. The pins-and-needles sensation at the back of my head, then all through my brain. The numb hands and arms. The sense of being physically empty, of dissolving, of being a ghost whose existence was sourced by electric anxiety. And it became hard to breathe. The air thinned. It took massive concentration just to keep control of my breathing.
Just go to the shop, just carry on, just get there.
I got to the shop.
Shops, by the way, were the places I would panic in most, with or without Andrea. Shops caused me intense anxiety. I was never really sure what it was.
Was it the lighting?
Was it the geometric layout of the aisles?
Was it the CCTV cameras?
Was it that the point of brands was to scream for attention, and when you were deeply in tune with your surroundings maybe those screams got to you? A kind of death by Unilever. This was only Londis, hardly a hypermarket. And the door was open, the street was right there, and that street joined on to my parents’ street, which contained my parents’ house, which contained Andrea, who contained everything. If I was running, I could probably get back there in little over a minute.
I tried to focus. Coco Pops. It was hard. Frosties. Really hard. Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. Sugar Puffs. The honey monster had never looked like an actual monster before. What was I in here for, other than to prove a point to myself?
This is crazy. This is the craziest thing I have ever done.
It’s just a shop.
It’s just a shop you have been in, on your own, five hundred times before. Get a grip. Get a grip. But on what? There is nothing to grip onto. Everything is slippy. Life is so infinitely hard. It involves a thousand tasks all at once. And I am a thousand different people, all fleeing away from the centre.
The thing I hadn’t realised, before I became mentally ill, is the physical aspect of it. I mean, even the stuff that happens inside your head is all sensation. My brain tingled, whirred, fluttered and pumped. Much of this action seemed to happen near the rear of my skull, in my occipital lobe, though there was also some fuzzy, TV-static, white-noise feelings going on in my frontal lobe. If you thought too much, maybe you could feel those thoughts happening.
‘An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute,’ wrote Flaubert, ‘like a crowd in a small space.’
Get the fuck out of this shop. It’s too much. You can’t take this any more. Your brain is going to explode.
Brains don’t explode. Life isn’t a David Cronenberg movie.
But maybe I could fall the same distance again. Maybe the fall that happened in Ibiza had only landed me halfway. Maybe the actual Underworld was much further down in the basement and I was heading there, and I’d end up like a shell-shocked soldier from a poem, dribbling and howling and lost, unable even to kill myself. And maybe being in this shop was going to send me there.
There was a woman behind the counter. I can still
picture her. She was about my age. Maybe she had gone to my school, but I didn’t recognise her. She had that kind of dyed red hair that was a bit half-hearted. She was large and pale skinned and was reading a celebrity magazine. She looked calmer than calm. I wanted to jump ship. I wanted to be her. I wanted to be her so much. Does that sound silly? Of course it does. This whole thing sounds silly.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Marmite.
I found the Marmite. I grabbed it as an old rap from Eric B. & Rakim played at high speed in my head. ‘I’m also a sculpture, born with structure . . .’ I was a sculpture with no structure. A structureless sculpture who still had to get the milk. Rows of milk bottles in a fridge can be as terrifying and unnatural as anything, with the right (wrong) perspective. My parents got semi-skimmed, but the only semi-skimmed here was in pints, not the two-pint ones that they normally got, so I picked up two of the one-pinters, hooking my index finger through the handles and taking them, and the Marmite, to the counter.
Boomboomboomboomboom.
The woman I wanted to be was not particularly fast at her job. I think she was the slowest person there had ever been at her job. I think she may well have been the incentive for the later move towards self-service checkouts in many shops. Even as I wanted to be her, I hated her slowness.