Reasons to Stay Alive (HC) (8 page)

‘We’re going to get you better.’

It’s not easy, being there for a depressive.

A conversation across time – part two

THEN ME
: I can’t do this.

NOW ME
: You think you can’t, but you can. You do. You will.

THEN ME
: This pain, though. You must have forgotten what it was like. I went on an escalator today, in a shop, and I felt myself disintegrating. It was like the whole universe was pulling me apart. Right there, in John Lewis.

NOW ME
: I probably have forgotten, a little bit. But listen, look, I’m here. I’m here now. And I made it. We made it. You just have to hold on.

THEN ME
: I so want to believe that you exist. That I don’t kill you off.

NOW ME
: You didn’t. You don’t. You won’t.

THEN ME
: Why would I stay alive? Wouldn’t it be better to feel nothing than to feel such pain? Isn’t zero worth more than minus one thousand?

NOW ME
: Listen, just listen, just get this through your
head, okay – you make it, and on the other side of this there is life. L-I-F-E. You understand? And there will be stuff you enjoy. And just stop worrying about worrying. Just worry – you can’t help that – but don’t meta-worry.

THEN ME
: You look old. You have crow’s feet. Are you starting to lose your hair?

NOW ME
: Yes. But remember, we’ve always worried about this stuff. Can you remember that holiday to the Dordogne when we were ten? We leaned forward into the mirror and started to worry about the lines in our forehead. We were worrying about the visible effects of ageing back then. Because we have always been scared of dying.

THEN ME
: Are you still scared of dying?

NOW ME
: Yes.

THEN ME
: I need a reason to stay alive. I need something strong that will keep me here.

NOW ME
: Okay, okay, give me a minute . . .

Reasons to stay alive

Love

WE ARE ESSENTIALLY
alone. There is no getting around this fact, even if we try and forget it a lot of the time. When we are ill, there is no escape from this truth. Pain, of any kind, is a very isolating experience. My back is playing up right now. I am writing this with my legs up against a wall, and my back lying flat on a sofa. If I sit up normally, hunched over a notepad or a laptop in the classic writer position, my lower back begins to hurt. It doesn’t really help me to know, when the pain flares up again, that millions of other people also suffer from back problems.

So why do we bother with love? No matter how much we love someone we are never going to make them, or ourselves, free of pain.

Well, let me tell you something. Something that sounds bland and drippy to the untrained eye, but which – I assure you – is something I believe entirely. Love saved me. Andrea. She saved me. Her love for me and my love
for her. Not just once, either. Repeatedly. Over and over.

We had been together five years by the time I fell ill. What had Andrea gained in that time, since the night before her nineteenth birthday? A continued sense of financial insecurity? An inadequate, alcohol-impaired sex life?

At university our friends always considered us to be a happy couple. And we were, except for the other half of the time when we were an unhappy couple.

The interesting thing was that we were fundamentally different people. Andrea liked lie-ins and early nights, while I was a bad sleeper and a night owl. She had a strong work ethic, and I didn’t (not then, though depression strangely has given me one). She liked organisation and I was the most disorganised person she had met. Mixing us together was, in some ways, like mixing chlorine with ammonia. It simply was not a good idea.

But I made her laugh, she said. I was ‘fun’. We liked to talk. Both of us, I suppose, were quite shy and private people in our own way. Andrea, particularly, was a social chameleon. This was a kind of kindness. She never could cope if someone felt awkward, and so always bent to meet them as much as she could. I think – if I offered her anything – it was the chance to be herself.

If, as Schopenhauer said, ‘we forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people’, then love – at its best – is a way to reclaim those lost parts of ourselves. That freedom we lost somewhere quite early in childhood. Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.

I helped her be her, and she helped me be me. We did this through talking. In our first year together we would very often stay up all night talking. The night would start with us going to the wine shop at the bottom of Sharp Street in Hull (the street my student house was on) and buying a bottle of wine we couldn’t afford, and would very often end with us watching breakfast TV on my old Hitachi, which required constant manoeuvring of the aerial to see the picture.

Then a year later we had fun playing grown-ups, buying
The River Café Cookbook
and holding dinner parties at which we would serve up panzanella salads and expensive wines in our damp-infested student flat.

Please do not think this was a perfect relationship. It wasn’t. It still isn’t. The time we spent living in Ibiza, particularly, now seems to be one long argument.

Just listen to this:

‘Matt, wake up.’

‘What?’

‘Wake up. It’s half-nine.’

‘So?’

‘I’ve got to be at the office at ten. It’s a forty-five-minute drive.’

‘So, no one will know. It’s Ibiza.’

‘You’re being selfish.’

‘I’m being tired.’

‘You’re hungover. You were drinking vodka lemon all night.’

‘Sorry for having a good time. You should try it.’

‘Fuck off. I’m getting in the car.’

‘What? You can’t leave me in the villa all day. I’ll be stranded in the middle of nowhere. There’s no food. Just wait ten minutes!’

‘I’m going. I’m just so fed up with you.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re the one who wants to be here. My job is what keeps us here. It’s why we’re in this villa.’

‘You work six days a week. Twelve hours a day. They’re exploiting you. They’re still out clubbing. And no one’s in the office till after twelve. They value you because you
are a maniac. You bend over backwards for them and treat me like crap.’

‘Bye, Matt.’

‘Oh fuck off, you’re not really going, are you?’

‘You selfish cunt.’

‘Okay, I’m getting ready . . .
fuck
.’

But the arguments were surface stuff. If you go deep enough under a tidal wave the water is still. That is what we were like. In a way we argued because we knew it would have no fundamental impact. When you can be yourself around someone, you project your dissatisfied self outwards. And in Ibiza, I was that. I was not happy. And part of my personality was this: when I was unhappy, I tried to drown myself in pleasure.

I was – to use the most therapy of terms – in denial. I was denying my unhappiness, even as I was being a tetchy, hungover boyfriend.

There was never a single moment, though, where I would have said – or felt – that I didn’t love her. I loved her totally. Friendship-love and love-love.
Philia
and
eros
. I always had done. Though, of the two, that deep and total friendship-love turns out to be the most important. When the depression hit, Andrea was there for me.
She’d be kind to me and cross with me in all the right ways.

She was someone I could talk to, someone I could say anything to. Being with her was basically being with an outer version of myself.

The force and fury she’d once only displayed in arguments she now used to steer me better. She accompanied me on trips to doctors. She encouraged me to ring the right helplines. She got us to move into our own place. She encouraged me to read, to write. She earned us money. She gave us time. She handled all the organisational side of my life, the stuff you need to do to tick over.

She filled in the blanks that worry and darkness had left in its wake. She was my mind-double. My life-sitter. My literal other half when half of me had gone. She covered for me, waiting patiently like a war wife, during my absence from myself.

How to be there for someone with depression or anxiety

An inconsequential moment

IT CAME. THE
moment I was waiting for. Some time in April 2000. It was totally inconsequential. In fact, there is not much to write about. That was the whole point. It was a moment of nothingness, of absent-mindedness, of spending almost ten seconds awake but not actively thinking of my depression or anxiety. I was thinking about work. About trying to get an article published in a newspaper. It wasn’t a happy thought, but a neutral one. But it was a break in the clouds, a sign that the sun was still there, somewhere. It was over not much after it began, but when those clouds came back there was hope. There would be a time when those painless seconds would become minutes and hours and maybe even days.

Things that have happened to me that have generated more sympathy than depression

Having tinnitus.

Scalding my hand on an oven, and having to have my hand in a strange ointment-filled glove for a week.

Accidentally setting my leg on fire.

Losing a job.

Breaking a toe.

Being in debt.

Having a river flood our nice new house, causing ten thousand pounds’ worth of damage.

Bad Amazon reviews.

Getting the norovirus.

Having to be circumcised when I was eleven.