Praise for Reasons to Stay Alive

Full of wisdoms and warmth.

—Nathan Filer

Marvelous . . . For everyone who has ever felt the snap of the black dog’s teeth, this book is wise, funny, affirming, and redemptive. Sometimes depression can be like falling into a wordless pit. Matt Haig finds the words. And he says them for all of us.

—Joanne Harris

"Reasons to Stay Alive is wonderful. I read it in one sitting. Touching, funny, thought-provoking, with a huge heart. It should be read by anyone who has suffered, or known someone who has suffered (i.e., everyone)."

—S. J. Watson

Maybe the most important book I’ve read this year.

—Simon Mayo

Brilliant and salutary . . . Should be on prescription.

—Reverend Richard Coles

Thoughtful, honest, and incredibly insightful.

—Jenny Colgan

For anyone who has faced the black dog, or felt despair, this marvelous book is a real comfort, dealing sympathetically with depression, written with candor and from first-hand experience. I think it is a small masterpiece. It might even save lives.

—Joanna Lumley

A really great read, and essential to our collective well-being.

—Jo Brand

A wonderful manifesto about surviving life . . . Makes you feel glad to be alive.

—Red (UK)

Matt Haig’s book is both timely and absolutely necessary.

—Daily Express (London)

penguin life

REASONS TO STAY ALIVE

Matt Haig is the author of two memoirs, Notes on a Nervous Planet and the internationally bestselling Reasons to Stay Alive, along with six novels, including How to Stop Time, and several award-winning children’s books. His latest novel is The Midnight Library. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

BY MATT HAIG

The Last Family in England

The Dead Fathers Club

The Labrador Pact

The Possession of Mr. Cave

The Radleys

The Humans

Humans: An A–Z

Reasons to Stay Alive

How to Stop Time

Notes on a Nervous Planet

The Midnight Library

FOR CHILDREN

The Runaway Troll

Shadow Forest

To Be a Cat

Echo Boy

A Boy Called Christmas

The Girl Who Saved Christmas

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in Great Britain by Canongate Books Ltd 2015

Published in Penguin Books 2016

Copyright © 2015 by Matt Haig

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

A Penguin Life Book

This page constitutes an extension to the copyright page.

Ebook ISBN 9780143128731

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: Haig, Matt, 1975– author.

Reasons to stay alive / Matt Haig

pages ; cm

ISBN 9780143128724 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PR6108.A39R43 2016

823’.92—dc23

2015022609

Cover design and art: Jason Ramirez

pid_prh_5.6.1_148331796_c0_r1

Contents

Praise for Reasons to Stay Alive

About the Author

Also by Matt Haig

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

This book is impossible

A note, before we get fully underway

1: Falling

The day I died

Why depression is hard to understand

A beautiful view

A conversation across time—part one

Pills

Killer

Things people say to depressives that they don’t say in other life-threatening situations

Negative placebo

Feeling the rain without an umbrella

Life

Infinity

The hope that hadn’t happened

The cyclone

My symptoms

The bank of bad days

Things depression says to you

Facts

The head against the window

Pretty normal childhood

A visit

Boys don’t cry

2: Landing

Cherry blossom

Unknown unknowns

The brain is the body—part one

Psycho

Jenga days

Warning signs

Demons

Existence

3: Rising

Things you think during your first panic attack

Things you think during your 1,000th panic attack

The art of walking on your own

A conversation across time—part two

Reasons to stay alive

Love

How to be there for someone with depression or anxiety

An inconsequential moment

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

Life on Earth to an alien

White space

The Power and the Glory

Paris

Reasons to be strong

Weapons

Running

The brain is the body—part two

Famous people

Abraham Lincoln and the fearful gift

Depression is . . .

Depression is also . . .

A conversation across time—part three

4: Living

The world

Mushroom clouds

The big A

Slow down

Peaks and troughs

Parenthesis

Parties

#reasonstostayalive

Things that make me worse

Things that (sometimes) make me better

5: Being

In praise of thin skins

How to be a bit happier than Schopenhauer

Self-help

Thoughts on time

Formentera

Images on a screen

Smallness

How to live (forty pieces of advice I feel to be helpful but which I don’t always follow)

Things I have enjoyed since the time I thought I would never enjoy anything again

Further Reading

A note, and some acknowledgments

Permissions credits

For Andrea

This book is impossible

THIRTEEN YEARS AGO I knew this couldn’t happen.

I was going to die, you see. Or go mad.

There was no way I would still be here. Sometimes I doubted I would even make the next ten minutes. And the idea that I would be well enough and confident enough to write about it in this way would have been just far too much to believe.

One of the key symptoms of depression is to see no hope. No future. Far from the tunnel having light at the end of it, it seems like it is blocked at both ends, and you are inside it. So if I could have only known the future, that there would be one far brighter than anything I’d experienced, then one end of that tunnel would have been blown to pieces, and I could have faced the light. So the fact that this book exists is proof that depression lies. Depression makes you think things that are wrong.

But depression itself isn’t a lie. It is the most real thing I’ve ever experienced. Of course, it is invisible.

To other people, it sometimes seems like nothing at all. You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames. And so—as depression is largely unseen and mysterious—it is easy for stigma to survive. Stigma is particularly cruel for depressives, because stigma affects thoughts and depression is a disease of thoughts.

When you are depressed you feel alone, and that no one is going through quite what you are going through. You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalize everything, and you are so scared that people will alienate you further you clam up and don’t speak about it, which is a shame, as speaking about it helps. Words—spoken or written—are what connect us to the world, and so speaking about it to people, and writing about this stuff, helps connect us to each other, and to our true selves.

I know, I know, we are humans. We are a clandestine species. Unlike other animals we wear clothes and do our procreating behind closed doors. And we are ashamed when things go wrong with us. But we’ll grow out of this, and the way we’ll do it is by speaking about it. And maybe even through reading and writing about it.

I believe that. Because it was, in part, through reading and writing that I found a kind of salvation from the dark. Ever since I realized that depression lied about the future I have wanted to write a book about my experience, to tackle depression and anxiety head-on. So this book seeks to do two things. To lessen that stigma, and—the possibly more quixotic ambition—to try and actually convince people that the bottom of the valley never provides the clearest view. I wrote this because the oldest clichés remain the truest. Time heals. The tunnel does have light at the end of it, even if we aren’t able to see it. And there’s a two-for-one offer on clouds and silver linings. Words, just sometimes, can set you free.

A note, before we get fully underway

MINDS ARE UNIQUE. They go wrong in unique ways. My mind went wrong in a slightly different way to how other minds go wrong. Our experience overlaps with other people’s, but it is never exactly the same experience. Umbrella labels like depression (and anxiety and panic disorder and OCD) are useful, but only if we appreciate that people do not all have the same precise experience of such things.

Depression looks different to everyone. Pain is felt in different ways, to different degrees, and provokes different responses. That said, if books had to replicate our exact experience of the world to be useful, the only books worth reading would be written by ourselves.

There is no right or wrong way to have depression, or to have a panic attack, or to feel suicidal. These things just are. Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport. But I have found over the years that by reading about other people who have suffered, survived, and overcome despair, I have felt comforted. It has given me hope. I hope this book can do the same.

1

Falling

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

—Albert Camus, A Happy Death

The day I died

I CAN REMEMBER the day the old me died.

It started with a thought. Something was going wrong. That was the start. Before I realized what it was. And then, a second or so later, there was a strange sensation inside my head. Some biological activity in the rear of my skull, not far above my neck. The cerebellum. A pulsing or intense flickering, as though a butterfly was trapped inside, combined with a tingling sensation. I did not yet know of the strange physical effects depression and anxiety would create. I just thought I was about to die. And then my heart started to go. And then I started to go. I sank, fast, falling into a new claustrophobic and suffocating reality. And it would be way over a year before I would feel anything like even half-normal again.

Up until that point I’d had no real understanding or awareness of depression, except that I knew my mum had suffered from it for a little while after I was born, and that my great-grandmother on my father’s side had ended up committing suicide. So I suppose there had been a family history, but it hadn’t been a history I’d thought about much.

Anyway, I was twenty-four years old. I was living in Spain—in one of the more sedate and beautiful corners of the island of Ibiza. It was September. Within a fortnight, I would have to return to London, and reality. After six years of student life and summer jobs. I had put off being an adult for as long as I could, and it had loomed like a cloud. A cloud that was now breaking and raining down on me.

The weirdest thing about a mind is that you can have the most intense things going on in there but no one else can see them. The world shrugs. Your pupils might dilate. You may sound incoherent. Your skin might