by Matt Haig
No.
This isn’t a question of strength. Not the stoic, get-on-with-stuff-without-thinking-too-much kind of strength, anyway. It’s more of a zooming-in. That sharpening. That switch from the prosaic to the poetic. You know, before the age of twenty-four I hadn’t known how bad things could feel, but I hadn’t realised how good they could feel either. That shell might be protecting you, but it’s also stopping you feeling the full force of that good stuff. Depression might be a hell of a price to pay for waking up to life, and while it is on top of you it is one that could never seem worth paying. Clouds with silver linings are still clouds. But it is quite therapeutic to know that pleasure doesn’t just help compensate for pain, it can actually grow out of it.
White space
WE SPENT THREE long months at my parents’ house, then spent the rest of that winter in a cheap flat in a student area of Leeds while Andrea did freelance PR work and I tried not to go mad.
But from, I suppose, April 2000, that good stuff started to become available. The bad stuff was still there. At the start, the bad stuff was there most of the time. The good stuff probably amounted to about 0.0001 per cent of that April. The good stuff was just warm sunshine on my face as Andrea and I walked from our flat in the suburbs to the city centre. It lasted as long as the sunshine was there and then it disappeared. But from that point on I knew it could be accessed. I knew life was available to me again. And so in May 0.0001 per cent became about 0.1 per cent.
I was rising.
Then, at the start of June, we moved to a flat in the city centre.
The thing I liked about it was the light. I liked that the walls were white and that the unnatural laminated floor mimicked the blondest wood and that the square modern windows made up most of the walls and that the low-grade sofa the landlord had put in was turquoise.
Of course, it was still England. It was still Yorkshire. Light was severely rationed. But this was as good as it got on our budget, or just above our budget, and it was certainly better than the student flat with its burgundy carpets and its brown kitchen. Turquoise sofa beat turquoise mould.
Light was everything. Sunshine, windows with the blinds open. Pages with short chapters and lots of white space and
Short.
Paragraphs.
Light was everything.
But so, increasingly, were books. I read and read and read with an intensity I’d never really known before. I mean, I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books. They weren’t a luxury good during that time in my life. They were a Class A addictive substance. I’d have gladly got into serious debt to read (indeed, I did). I think I read more books in those six months than I had done during five years of university education, and I’d certainly fallen deeper into the worlds conjured on the page.
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. It is not where we are, but where we want to go, and all that. ‘Is there no way out of the mind?’ Sylvia Path famously asked. I had been interested in this question (what it meant, what the answers might be) ever since I had come across it as a teenager in a book of quotations. If there is a way out, a way that isn’t death itself, then the exit route is through words. But rather than leave the mind entirely, words help us leave a mind, and give us the building blocks to build another one, similar but better, nearby to the old one but with firmer foundations, and very often a better view.
‘The object of art is to give life a shape,’ said Shakespeare. And my life – and my mess of a mind – needed shape. I had ‘lost the plot’. There was no linear narrative of me. There was just mess and chaos. So yes, I loved external narratives for the hope they offered. Films. TV dramas. And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. 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. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself. But each map was incomplete, and I would only locate the treasure if I read all the books, and so the process of finding my best self was an endless quest. And books themselves seemed to me to reflect this idea. Which is why the plot of every book ever can be boiled down to ‘someone is looking for something’.
One cliché attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely. 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.
In my deepest state of depression, I had felt stuck. I felt trapped in quicksand (as a kid that had been my most common nightmare). Books were about movement. They were about quests and journeys. Beginnings and middles and ends, even if not in that order. They were about new chapters. And leaving old ones behind.
And because it was only a few months before that I had lost the point of words, and stories, and even language, I was determined never to feel like that again. I fed and I fed and I fed.
I used to sit with the bedside lamp on, reading for about two hours after Andrea had gone to sleep, until my eyes were dry and sore, always seeking and never quite finding, but with that feeling of being tantalisingly close.
The Power and the Glory
ONE OF THE books I remember (re-)reading was The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.
Graham Greene was an interesting choice. I had studied the writer while doing an MA at Leeds University. I don’t know why I took that module. I didn’t really know anything about Graham Greene. I knew about Brighton Rock but I’d never read it. I’d also heard once that he’d lived in Nottinghamshire and hated it. I had lived in Nottinghamshire and – at that time – had often hated it too. Maybe that was the reason.
For the first few weeks I’d thought it was a major mistake. I was the only person who’d taken the module. And the tutor hated me. I don’t know if ‘hate’ is the word, but he certainly didn’t like me. He was a Catholic, always dressed formally, and spoke to me with delicate disdain.
Those hours were long, and had all the relaxed and casual joy of a trip to the doctor’s for a testicular inspection. Often I must have stank of beer, as I would always drink a can or two on the train journey to Leeds (from Hull, where Andrea and I were still living). At the end of the module I wrote the best essay I had ever written, and was given a 69 per cent. One shy of a distinction. I took it as a personal insult.
Anyway, I loved Graham Greene. His works were filled with a discomfort I related to. There were all kinds of discomforts on offer. Discomforts of guilt, sex, Catholicism, unrequited love, forbidden lust, tropical heat, politics, war. Everything was uncomfortable, except the prose.
I loved the way he wrote. I loved the way he’d compare a solid thing to something abstract. ‘He drank the brandy down like damnation.’ I loved this technique even more now, because the divide between the material and non-material worlds seemed to have blurred. With depression. Even my own physical body seemed unreal and abstract and partly fictional.
The Power and the Glory is about a ‘whisky priest’ travelling through Mexico in the 1930s, at a time when Catholicism is outlawed. Throughout the novel he is pursued by a police lieutenant tasked with tracking him down.
I had liked this story when I first read it at university, but I loved it now. Having been a borderline alcoholic in Ibiza, empathising with a borderline alcoholic in Mexico wasn’t too hard.
It is a dark, intense book. But when you are feeling dark and intense these are the only kind of books that can speak to you. Yet there was an optimism too. The possibility of redemption. It is a book about the healing power of love.
‘Hate is a lack of imagination,’ we are told.
But also: ‘There is always one moment in childhood when the
door opens and lets the future in.’ Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost. The book is about – like many of his books – Catholic guilt. But for me it was about depression. Greene was a depressive. Had been since a child, being bullied at the school where his unpopular father was headmaster. He’d semi-attempted suicide with a solitary game of Russian roulette. The guilt was – for me – not the spiritual guilt of Catholicism but the psychological guilt that depression brings. And it helped relieve the isolation that the illness brings.
*
Other books I read at this time:
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino – The most beautiful book. Imaginary cities, each kind of like Venice but not at all like Venice. Dreams on a page. So unreal they could almost dislodge my strange mind-visions.
The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton – The book that got me properly into reading as a ten-year-old. Has always been my favourite ‘escape’ read. It drips with America and has gorgeously sentimental dialogue. (Like: ‘Stay gold, Ponyboy’, said by Johnny, on his death bed, after reading Robert Frost’s ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’.)
The Outsider, Albert Camus – I had a thing about outsiders. And existential despair. The numbness of the prose was strangely soothing.
The Concise Collins Dictionary of Quotations – Quotations are easy to read.
Letters of Keats – I had studied Keats at university. The archetypal young poet was thin-skinned and doomed and intense, and I felt these things.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson – I loved Jeanette’s writing. Every word contained strength or wisdom. I picked it up at random pages to see sentences that could speak to me. ‘I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.’
Vox, Nicholson Baker – A novel that consists entirely of an episode of phone sex, that had titillated and enthralled me when I was sixteen. Pure dialogue. Again, easy to read, and full of sex, or the idea of sex, and for a young, anxiety-riddled mind, thinking of sex can be a positive distraction.
Money, Martin Amis – Money was a book I knew inside out. I’d done essays on it. It was full of ballsy, swaggering, sharp, funny, macho (though sometimes rather hateful) prose. There was an intensity to it. And sad beauty amid the comedy. (‘Every hour you get weaker. 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.’)
The Diary of Samuel Pepys – In particular, I’d read the bit about the Great Fire and the plague. There was something about the way Pepys jollied on through the more apocalyptic events of seventeenth-century life that was very therapeutic to read about.
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger – Because Holden was an old friend.
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry – Poems like Ivor Gurney’s ‘Strange Hells’ (‘The heart burns – but has to keep out of face how heart burns’) and Wilfred Owen’s ‘Mental Cases’ (describing the shell-shocked patients of a mental hospital) fascinated me but troubled me. I had been through no war and yet I related to that feeling of pain contained in every new day, as ‘Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh’. It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn’t know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn’t see?
A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters, Julian Barnes – Just because it was a book I had read and loved before and which was funny and strange and I knew it inside out.
Wilderness Tips, Margaret Atwood – Short stories. Smaller hills to climb. A story called ‘True Trash’ was my favourite. About teenage boys perving at waitresses.
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys – A prequel to Jane Eyre. About the ‘madwoman in the attic’ and her descent into madness. It is mainly set in the Caribbean. The despair and isolation felt in paradise was what I related to most, to feeling terrible ‘in the most beautiful place in the world’, which reminded me of that last week in Spain.
Paris
SHE WAS ABOUT to tell me my birthday surprise.
‘We’re going to Paris. Tomorrow. We’re going to Paris tomorrow! We’re going to get the Eurostar.’
I was shell-shocked. I couldn’t imagine anyone saying anything more terrifying. ‘I can’t. I can’t go to Paris.’
It was happening. A panic attack. I was starting to feel it in my chest. I was starting to feel like I was back in 2000 mode. Back in that feeling of being trapped inside my self, like a desperate fly in a jar.
‘Well, we’re going. We’re staying in the sixth. It’s going to be great. We’re staying in the hotel Oscar Wilde died in. L’Hotel, it’s called.’
Going to the place where Oscar Wilde died wasn’t making it any better. It just guaranteed I was going to die there. To die in Paris, just like Oscar Wilde. I also imagined the air would kill me. I hadn’t been abroad for four years.
‘I don’t think I’ll be able to breathe the air.’ I knew this sounded stupid. I wasn’t mad! And yet, the fact remained: I didn’t think I’d be able to breathe the air.
At some point after that I was curled tight in a foetal ball behind the door. I was trembling. I don’t know if anyone had been this scared of Paris since Marie Antoinette. But Andrea knew what to do. She had a PhD in this kind of thing by now. She said: ‘Okay, we won’t go. I can cancel the hotel. We might lose a bit of money, but if it’s such a big deal . . .’
Such a big deal.
I could still hardly walk twenty metres on my own without having a panic attack. It was the biggest deal imaginable. It was like, I suppose, a normal person being told they had to walk naked around Tehran or something.
But.
If I said ‘no’, then I would be a person who couldn’t travel abroad because he was scared. And that would make me like a mad person, and my biggest fear – bigger even than death – was of being totally mad. Of losing myself completely to the demons. So, as was so often the case, a big fear was beaten by a bigger fear.
The best way to beat a monster is to find a scarier one.
And I went to Paris. The Channel tunnel held together and the sea didn’t fall on our heads. The air in Paris worked okay with my lungs. Though I could hardly speak in the taxi. The journey from Gare du Nord to the hotel was intense. There was some kind of march going on by the banks of the Seine, with a large red flag swooping like the Tricolore in Les Miserables.
When I closed my eyes that night I couldn’t sleep for hours because I kept seeing Paris moving at the speed it had moved by in the taxi. But I calmed. I didn’t actually have a proper panic attack at any point during the next four days. Just a generalised high anxiety that I felt walking around the Left Bank and along the Rue de Rivoli and in the restaurant on the roof of the Pompidou Centre. I was starting to find that, sometimes, simply doing something that I had dreaded – and surviving – was the best kind of therapy. 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.
Another thing. Stimulation. Excitement. The kinds found in new places. Sometimes this can be terrifying, but it can also be liberating. In a familiar place, your mind focuses solely on itself. There is nothing new it needs to notice about your bedroom. No potential external threats, just internal ones. By forcing yourself into a new physical space, preferably in a different country, you end up inevitably focusing a bit more on the world outside your head.
Well, that’s how it worked for me. Those few days in Paris.
In fact, I felt more normal than I did at home, because here my general anxious awkwardness could pass quite easily for general awkward Britishness.
A lot of depressed people turn to
travel as an antidote to their symptoms. The great American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, like the many other artists that fit the cliché, was a life-long depressive. In 1933, at the age of forty-six, she was hospitalised following symptoms of uncontrollable crying, a seeming inability to eat or sleep, and other symptoms of depression and anxiety.
O’Keeffe’s biographer Roxana Robinson says that the hospital stay did little for her. What worked instead was travel. She went to Bermuda and Lake George in New York and Maine and Hawaii. ‘Warmth, languor, and solitude were just what Georgia needed,’ wrote Robinson.
Of course, travel isn’t always a solution. Or even an option. But it certainly helps me, when I get the chance to go away. I think, more than anything, it helps give a sense of perspective. We might be stuck in our minds, but we aren’t physically stuck. And unsticking ourselves from our physical location can help dislodge our unhappy mental state. Movement is the antidote to fixedness, after all. And it helps. Sometimes. Just sometimes.
‘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.
I can remember during a short depressive episode watching Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator. There is a point in it where Katharine Hepburn, played rather brilliantly by Cate Blanchett, turns to Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) and says: ‘There’s too much Howard Hughes in Howard Hughes.’ It was this intensity of the self that, in the film version of his life at least, was shown to contribute to the obsessive-compulsive disorder that would eventually imprison Hughes in a hotel room in Las Vegas.
Andrea told me after that film that there was too much Matt Haig in Matt Haig. She was kind of joking, but also kind of on to something. So for me, anything that lessens that extreme sense of self, that makes me feel me but at a lower volume, is very welcome. And ever since that Paris trip, travel has been one of those things.