Reasons to Stay Alive (HC) (10 page)

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.

Reasons to be strong

IT WAS
2002. I was at that point in my recovery where I was continually feeling well, but only in contrast to the much worse stuff that had gone before. Really, I was still a walking mass of anxiety, too phobic to take medicine of any kind, and convinced my tongue was expanding every time I consumed prawns or peanut butter or any other food it is possible to be allergic to. I also needed to be near Andrea. If I was near Andrea I was infinitely calmer than when I wasn’t.

Most of the time, this didn’t make me feel like a weirdo. Me and Andrea lived together and worked together in the same modest apartment. We did not really know anyone socially. Out of the two of us, I had always been the one with the drive to go out and meet other people, and that drive had gone now.

But in 2002 Andrea’s mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and things understandably changed. We
went and stayed with her parents in County Durham while Freda underwent chemotherapy. Andrea, who had spent the last three years fixing a depressive boyfriend, now had a mother with cancer.

She cried a lot. I felt like the baton was being passed. This was my turn to be the strong one.

When she first found out her mum was ill she sat on the edge of the bed and cried like I had never seen her cry. I put my arm around her and felt that sudden shrinking of language you feel when something terrible happens. Fortunately, Andrea was on hand to help.

‘Just say it’s going to be okay,’ she said.

‘It’s going to be okay.’

Two months later, I was alone in the house of my future in-laws, pleading with Andrea to go with them to the hospital.

‘I’ve got to take Mum to hospital,’ she had said.

‘Okay. I’ll come with you.’

‘They want someone to wait and let David in.’ David was Andrea’s brother, travelling up from London.

‘I can come with you.’

‘Matt, please.’

‘I can’t do this. Separation anxiety. I’ll have a panic attack.’

‘Matt, I’m asking you. My mum’s ill. I don’t want to stress her out. You’re being selfish.’

‘Fuck. Shit. I’m sorry. But you don’t understand.’

‘You can do this.’

‘I won’t make it. Can’t you just tell your mum and dad I’ve got to come too?’

‘Okay. All right. Okay. I will.’

But then it happened. A switch flicked. ‘No.’

‘No what?’

‘I’ll do it. I’ll stay. I’ll stay in the house.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’ll leave the number for the hospital.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said, stupidly imagining these could be my last ever words to her. ‘I could find it.’

‘I’ll leave it anyway.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s okay. You’d better go.’

While waiting for them to come home with Andrea from the hospital I paced from room to room. They had lots of porcelain ornaments. Little Bo Peep. A Pink
Panther sitting cross-legged, his legs hanging down off the windowsill. His wide yellow eyes followed me around the living room.

The first ten minutes my heart was pounding. I could hardly breathe. Andrea was dead. Her parents were dead. I was picturing the car crash too vividly for it not to have happened. Then twenty minutes passed. I was going to die. There was a pain in my chest. Maybe it was lung cancer. I was only twenty-seven, but I had smoked a lot. At thirty minutes, a neighbour came around to see how Freda was. At forty minutes, the adrenaline was starting to settle. I had been forty minutes on my own and I was still alive. By fifty minutes, I actually wanted them to be gone over an hour, so that I could feel even stronger. Fifty minutes! Three years of separation anxiety cured in less than an hour!

Needless to say, they came back.

It was a horrible summer, but the outcome was okay. Andrea’s mother was given terrible odds, but she beat them. We even managed to replace her daily breakfast of a biscuit with a kiwi fruit. I had reasons to force myself to be strong. To put myself in situations I wouldn’t have
put myself in. You need to be uncomfortable. You need to hurt. As the Persian poet Rumi wrote in the twelfth century, ‘The wound is the place where the light enters you.’ (He also wrote: ‘Forget safety. Live where you fear to live.’) Also, I channelled my mind by writing my first proper novel. Not principally for career reasons (the novel was a reworking of Shakespeare’s
Henry IV
, with talking dogs, so hardly bestseller territory), but to occupy myself. Two years later, though, and with Andrea’s encouragement, it would be an actual published book. I dedicated the book to Andrea, obviously, but it wasn’t just a book I owed her. It was a whole life.

Weapons

MY AGENT
. ‘
YOU
’
VE
got a publisher.’

‘What?’

‘Just had the phone call. You are going to be a published author.’

‘What?
Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

This news kept me going for about six months.

For about six months my lack of self-esteem had been artificially addressed. I would lie in bed and go to sleep smiling, thinking
Wow, I’m quite a big deal, I’m going to be published
.

But being published (or getting a great job or whatever) does not permanently alter your brain. And one night I lay awake, feeling less than happy. I started to worry. The worries spiralled. And for three weeks I was trapped in my own mind again. But this time, I had weapons. One of them, maybe the most important, was this knowledge:
I have been ill before, then well again. Wellness is possible.
Another weapon was running. I knew how the body could affect the mind, so I started to run more and more.

Running

RUNNING IS A
commonly cited alleviator of depression and anxiety. It certainly worked for me. When I started running I was still getting very bad panic attacks. The thing I liked about it was that many of the physical symptoms of panic – the racing heart, the problematic breathing, the sweating – are matched by running. So while I was running I wouldn’t be worried about my racing heart because it had a reason to be racing.

Also, it gave me something to think about. I was never exactly the fittest person in the world, so running was quite difficult. It hurt. But that effort and discomfort was a great focuser. And so I convinced myself that through training my body I was also training my mind. It was a kind of active meditation.

It also, of course, gets you fit. And getting fit is pretty much good for everything. When I became ill I had been
drinking and smoking heavily, but now I was trying to undo that damage.

So every day I would go running, or do an equivalent type of cardiovascular exercise. Like Haruki Murakami – whose excellent book
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
I would later read – I found running to be a way of clearing the fog. (‘Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running,’ Murakami also said, which is something I’ve come to believe too, and is one of the reasons I believe it helps the mind.)

I would come back from a run and stretch and have a shower and feel a gentle sense of release, as though depression and anxiety were slowly evaporating from inside me. It was a wonderful feeling. Also, that kind of monotony that running generates – the one soundtracked by heavy breathing and the steady rhythm of feet on pavements – became a kind of metaphor for depression. To go on a run every day is to have a kind of battle with yourself. Just getting out on a cold February morning gives you a sense of achievement. But that voiceless debate you have with yourself –
I want to stop! No, keep going! I can’t, I can hardly breathe! There’s only a mile to go! I just need to lie down! You can’t! –
is the debate of depression, but on a smaller and less serious scale. So for me, each time I forced myself out there in the cold grey damp of a West Yorkshire morning, and pushed myself to run for an hour, it gave me a little bit of depression-beating power. A little bit of that ‘you’d better be careful with who you are messing with’ spirit.