by Matt Haig
The bank of bad days.
Large rooms.
Doing something selfless.
The smell of bread.
Wearing clean clothes (come on, I’m a writer, this is rarer than you’d think).
Thinking I have things that work for me.
Knowing that other things work for other people.
Absorbing myself into something.
Knowing that someone else may read these words and that, just maybe, the pain I felt wasn’t for nothing.
5
Being
‘Put your ear down next to your soul and listen hard.’
—Anne Sexton
In praise of thin skins
I HAVE A thin skin.
I think this is part and parcel of depression and anxiety, or – to be precise – being a person quite likely to get depression and anxiety. I also think that I will never fully get over my breakdown fourteen years ago. If the stone falls hard enough the ripples last a lifetime.
I have gone from never feeling happy to feeling happy – or at last somewhere in the ballpark – most of the time. So I am lucky. But I have blips. Either blips when I am genuinely depressed/anxious or blips caused by me fighting the onset of depression/anxiety by doing something stupid (getting excessively drunk and coming home at five in the morning after losing my wallet and having to plead with taxi drivers to take me home). But generally, day to day, I don’t fight it. I accept things more. This is who I am. And besides, fighting it actually makes it worse. The trick is to befriend depression and anxiety. To be thankful for them, because then you can deal with them a whole lot better. And the way I have befriended them is by thanking them for my thin skin.
Sure, without a thin skin I would have never known those terrible days of nothingness. Those days of either panic, or intense, bone-scorching lethargy. The days of self-hate, or drowning under invisible waves. I sometimes felt, in my self-pity, too fragile for a world of speed and right angles and noise. (I love Jonathan Rottenberg’s evolutionary theory of depression, that it is to do with being unable to adapt to the present: ‘An ancient mood system has collided with a highly novel operating environment created by a remarkable species.’)
But would I go along to a magical mind spa and ask for a skin-thickening treatment? Probably not. You need to feel life’s terror to feel its wonder.
And I feel it today, actually, right now, on what could seem like quite a grey, overcast afternoon. I feel the sheer unfathomable marvel that is this strange life we have, here on earth, the seven billion of us, clustered in our towns and cities on this pale blue dot of a planet, spending our allotted 30,000 days as best we can, in glorious insignificance.
I like to feel the force of that miracle. I like to burrow deep into this life, and explore it through the magic of words and the magic of human beings (and the magic of peanut butter sandwiches). And I am glad to feel every tumultuous second of it, and glad for the fact that when I walk into the vast room with all the Tintorettos in it in the National Gallery my skin literally tingles, and my heart palpitates, and I am glad for the synesthesia that means when I read Emily Dickinson or Mark Twain my mind feels actual warmth from those old American words.
Feeling.
That is what it is about.
People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don’t even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.
I want life.
I want to read it and write it and feel it and live it.
I want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt.
I hate depression. I am scared of it. Terrified, in fact. But at the same time, it has made me who I am. And if – for me – it is the price of feeling life, it’s a price always worth paying.
I am satisfied just to be.
How to be a bit happier than Schopenhauer
FOR ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, the depressive’s favourite philosopher (and one who influenced Nietzsche, Freud and Einstein in varying but significant ways), life was the pursuit of futile purposes. ‘We blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst.’ In this view, happiness is impossible, because of all these goals. Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.
In fact, if you really think about it, a life made of goals is going to be disappointing. Yes, it might propel you forward, keep you turning the pages of your own existence, but ultimately it will leave you empty. Because even if you achieve your goals, what then? You may have gained the thing you lacked, but with it, what then? You either set another goal, stress about how you keep the thing you attained, or you think – along with the millions of people having mid- (or early- or late-) life crises right now – This is everything I wanted, so why am I not happy?
So what was Schopenhauer’s answer? Well, if wanting things was the problem, the answer had to be in giving things up. In his language, the cause of suffering is intensity of will.
Schopenhauer believed that by seeing the bigger picture, by viewing humanity as a whole and its suffering as a whole, a person would turn away from life and deny their instincts. In other words, the Schopenhauer plan involves no sex, very little money, fasting and a fair bit of self-torture.
Only that way – by totally denying human will – can we see the truth that in front of us ‘there is certainly only nothingness’.
Bleak, huh?
Well, yes. Although Schopenhauer didn’t recommend suicide, he recommended a kind of living suicide, in which anything pleasurable had to be scorned.
But Schopenhauer was a major hypocrite. He talked the talk but couldn’t walk the walk. As Bertrand Russell explained in his History of Western Philosophy:
He habitually dined well, at a good restaurant, he had many trivial love-affairs, which were sensual but not passionate; he was exceedingly quarrelsome and unusually avaricious. On one occasion he was annoyed by an elderly seamstress who was talking to a friend outside the door of his apartment. He threw her downstairs, causing her permanent injury . . . It is hard to find in his life any virtue except kindness to animals . . . In all other respects he was completely selfish.
Schopenhauer – the ultimate pessimist – actually illustrates how unhappiness works. His work set out anti-goal goals that he couldn’t meet.
Now, I don’t endorse throwing old women down stairs, but I kind of warm to Schopenhauer. I think he recognised the problem – will, or desire of ego or goal-orientated drive or whichever historical term you want to use – but in life he grappled around in the dark (often literally, given his messy love-life).
So, what’s the way out? How do you stop the endless wanting and worrying? How do you get off the treadmill? How do you stop time? How do we stop exhausting ourselves worrying about the future?
The best answers – the answers that have been written and recorded for thousands of years – always seem to resolve around acceptance. Schopenhauer himself was greatly influenced by ancient Eastern philosophy. ‘The truth has been recognised by the sages of India,’ he said. Indeed, his belief that abstinence from worldly pleasures is the answer to life, is something he shares with a lot of Buddhist thinkers.
But Buddhist thought is not as negative or miserable as Schopenhauer. With Schopenhauer all this asceticism is a bit self-punishing, a bit full of self-loathing, which is unhealthy and counter-productive.
A world full of people hating themselves is not a happy world.
Buddhism does not seem to be about self-punishment.
A key Buddhist symbol is that of the lotus flower. The lotus flower grows in mud at the bottom of a pool, but rises above the murky water and blooms in the clear air, pure and beautiful, before eventually dying. This metaphor for sp
iritual enlightenment also works as a metaphor for hope and change. The mud you could see as depression or anxiety. The flowers in the clear air, the self we know we can be, unclogged by despair.
Indeed, a lot of the Dhammapada, chief among the Buddhist sacred texts (being a record of the Gautama Buddha’s teaching), reads like an early self-help book.
‘No one saves us but ourselves, no one can and no one may.’ In Buddhism, salvation is something that is not external. To be happy, and at peace, Buddhism says, we have to be vigilant, aware of ourselves. Mindful. ‘As rain breaks through an ill-thatched house, passion in the sense of suffering will break through an unreflecting mind.’
In a world with far more shiny distractions than the world of Himalayan India way over two thousand years ago, our metaphorical mental houses may be harder to thatch than ever before.
Our minds now are less like thatched houses and a bit like computers. Yes, I could in theory get on my computer, open a Word document and just write, but I would probably check Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the Guardian website. I might – if I am going through a neurotic patch – do a quick ego search, or check out any new Goodreads or Amazon reviews of my books or go on Google and type in a list of real or imaginary ailments to see which terminal disease I am currently suffering from.
Even Buddha himself would struggle these days, though the lack of Wi-Fi in the Himalayan foothills would be a blessing if you wanted to meditate for forty-nine days under a tree.
One thing I do understand, though, is that more is not better. I am not a Buddhist. I find all strict and certain guidelines too scary. Life is beautiful in its ambiguity. But I like the idea of being alert to ourselves, of connecting to the universal rather than living life on a see-saw of hope and fear.
For me personally, happiness isn’t about abandoning the world of stuff, but in appreciating it for what it is. We cannot save ourselves from suffering by buying an iPhone. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t buy one, it just means we should know such things are not ends in themselves.
And compassion.
That’s another thing I like about Buddhism.
The idea that kindness makes us happier than selfishness. That kindness is a shredding of the self or, in Schopenhauer-speak, will – that releases us from the suffering that is our desires and wants.
To be selfless, while being mindful, seems to be a good solution, when the self intensifies and causes us to suffer.
Being good feels good because it makes us remember that we are not the only person that matters in this world. We all matter because we are all alive. And so kindness is an active way in which we can see and feel the bigger picture. We are ultimately all the same thing. We are life. We are consciousness. And so by feeling part of humanity, rather than an isolated unit, we feel better. We might physically perish, like a cell in a body might perish, but the body of life continues. And so, in the sense that life is a shared experience, we continue.
Self-help
How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.
Thoughts on time
TIME TROUBLES US.
It is because of time that we grow old, and because of time we die. These are worrying things. As Aristotle put it, ‘time crumbles things’. And we are scared of our own crumbling, and the crumbling of others.
We feel an urgency to get on because time is short. To ‘just do it’, as Nike said. But is doing the answer? Or does doing actually speed up time? Wouldn’t it be better just to be, even if less sporty footwear ends up being sold?
Time does go at different speeds. As I’ve said, the few months in 1999 and 2000 when I was deeply ill felt like years. Decades, even. Pain lengthens time. But that is only because pain forces us to be aware of it.
Being aware of other things also helps lengthen time. This is all meditation is. Awareness of ourselves in the ‘amber’ of the moment, to use Kurt Vonnegut’s term. It sounds easy, but how much of our lives are we actually living in the present? How much instead are we either excited or worrying about the future, or regretting or mourning the past? Our response to all this worry about time is to try and achieve things before it is too late. Gain money, improve our status, marry, have children, get a promotion, gain more money, on and on for ever. Or rather, not for ever. If it were for ever, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. But we kind of know that turning life into a desperate race for more stuff is only going to shorten it. Not in years, not in terms of actual time, but in terms of how time feels. Imagine all the time we had was bottled up, like wine, and handed over to us. How would we make that bottle last? By sipping slowly, appreciating the taste, or by gulping?
Formentera
TO THE SOUTH of Ibiza there is the small island of Formentera, fourth-largest of the Balearic Islands. Me and Andrea used to go there sometimes on rare days off. It was a place of white beaches and pristine water – the cleanest in the whole Mediterranean due to UNESCO-protected seagrasses under the water. It was the calming yin to Ibiza’s frenetic yang. Its small population of two thousand people is dotted liberally with artists, hippies and yoga instructors (if you look at it on the map you’ll see it is shaped like an upside down V, as if the island is continually in downward dog pose). It retained a sixties vibe. Bob Dylan spent some time living in the lighthouse at Cap de Barbaria, on the island’s southernmost tip. Formentera was also where Joni Mitchell wrote the album Blue.
I used to have a phobia about the Balearics. Couldn’t face the idea of them, as it was on Ibiza that I began to fall apart. But now when I think of a calm place, I think of here. I picture its landscape of juniper and almond trees. I think of that sea as well. So bright and blue and clear.
I think of the names of its small villages, and harbour, and beaches. Es Pujol, El Pilar de la Mola, La Savina, Cap de Barbaria, Playa Illetes. And, most evocative of all, the name of the island itself.
When I feel the tension rising I sometimes close my eyes and think of it, the word rolling like soft pristine saltwater against sand. Formentera, Formentera, Formentera . . .
Images on a screen
IN THE OLD days, before the breakdown, I used to deal with worry by distracting myself. By going out to clubs, by drinking heavily, by spending summers in Ibiza, by wanting the spiciest food, the brashest movies, the edgiest novels, the loudest music, the latest nights. I was scared of the quiet. I was scared, I suppose, of having to slow down and soften the volume. Scared of having nothing but my own mind to listen to.
But after I became ill, all of this was suddenly out of bounds. I once switched on the radio and heard pounding house music and it gave me a panic attack. If I ate a jalfrezi, I would lie in bed that night hallucinating and palpitating. People talk about using alcohol and drugs to self-medicate, and I would have loved to dull my senses. I would have taken crack if I thought it would help me ignore the hurricane in my head. But from the age of twenty-four to thirty-two I didn’t have so much as a single glass of wine. Not because I was strong (as my teetotal future mother-in-law always thought I was) but because I was petrified of anything that would alter my mind. I went five of those years refusing even to take an ibuprofen. Not because I had been drunk off my head when I first became ill – the day I became ill I hadn’t had so much as a sip of alcohol and was in a (comparatively) healthy patch. I suppose it was just that feeling that my damaged mind lay precariously in the balance, like the bus hanging off the edge of a cliff in The Italian Job, and that the gold/alcohol might look tempting but to reach for it would be to send yourself falling towards a fatal end.
So, this was the problem. Just when I really needed to take my mind off something, I couldn’t. My fear was such that even after smelling a glass of Andrea’s red wine I would imagine those inhaled molecules entering my brain and tilting it further away from me.
But this was a good thing. It meant I had to focus on
my mind. Like in an old horror movie, I was pulling back the curtain and seeing the monster.
Years later, I would read books on mindfulness and meditation, and realise that the key to happiness – or that even more desired thing, calmness – lies not in always thinking happy thoughts. No. That is impossible. No mind on earth with any kind of intelligence could spend a lifetime enjoying only happy thoughts. The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don’t become them.
Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person. You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.
That is how we must be with our minds. We must allow ourselves to feel their gales and downpours, but all the time knowing this is just necessary weather.
When I sink deep, now, and I still do from time to time, I try and understand that there is another, bigger and stronger part of me that is not sinking. It stands unwavering. It is, I suppose, the part that would have been once called my soul.
We don’t have to call it that, if we think it has too many connotations. We can call it simply a self. Let’s just understand this. If we are tired or hungry or hungover, we are likely to be in a bad mood. That bad mood is therefore not really us. To believe in the things we feel at that point is wrong, because those feelings would disappear with food or sleep.
But when I was at my lowest points I touched something solid, something hard and strong at the core of me. Something imperishable, immune to the changeability of thought. The self that is not only I but also we. The self that connects me to you, and human to human. The hard, unbreakable force of survival. Of life. Of the 150,000 generations of us that have gone before, and of those yet to be born. Our human essence. Just as the ground below New York and, say, Lagos, becomes identical if you go down far enough beneath the earth’s surface, so every human inhabitant on this freak wonder of a planet shares the same core.