Reasons to Stay Alive. Matt Haig

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СКАЧАТЬ of diazepam and we went to the airport. The party was over.

      While on diazepam or the sleeping pills, I never felt any closer to being ‘fixed’. I stayed exactly as ill as ever. The most pills could do, I supposed, was place a distance there. The sleeping pills forced my brain to slow down a bit, but I knew nothing had really changed. Just as, years later, when I was back to drinking alcohol again, I would often cope with lower-level anxiety by getting drunk, all the time knowing that it would be there waiting for me with a hangover on top.

      I am reluctant to come out and be anti all pills because I know for some people some pills work. In some cases they seem to numb the pain enough for the good, real work of getting better to happen. In others, they provide a partial long-term solution. Many people can’t do without them. In my case, after my disorientating diazepam panic attacks I had been so scared to take pills that I never actually took anything directly for my depression (as opposed to panic and anxiety).

      Personally, for me, I am happy that I largely mended myself without the aid of medication, and feel that having to experience the pain minus any ‘anaesthetic’ meant I got to know my pain very well, and become alert to the subtle upward or downward shifts in my mind. Though I do wonder whether, if I’d had the courage to battle those pill-fearing panic attacks, it could have lessened the pain. It was such relentless, continuous pain that just to think about it now affects my breathing, and my heart can go. I think of being in the passenger seat of a car, as leaden terror swamped me. I had to rise in my seat, my head touching the roof of the car, my body trying to climb out of itself, skin crawling, mind whirring faster than the dark landscape. It would have been good not to have known that kind of terror, and if a pill could have helped, then I should have taken it. If I’d had something to lessen that mental agony (and really that is the word) then maybe it would have been easier to recover from. But by not taking it, I became very in tune with myself. This helped me know what exactly made me feel better (exercise, sunshine, sleep, intense conversation, etc.) and this alertness, an alertness I know from myself and others can be lost via pills, eventually helped me build myself back up from scratch. If I had been dulled or felt that otherness meds can make you feel, things might have been harder.

      Here is Professor Jonathan Rottenberg, an evolutionary psychologist and author of The Depths, writing in 2014 words that are strangely comforting:

      How will we better contain depression? Expect no magic pill. One lesson learned from treating chronic pain is that it is tough to override responses that are hardwired into the body and mind. Instead, we must follow the economy of mood where it leads, attending to the sources that bring so many into low mood states – think routines that feature too much work and too little sleep. We need broader mood literacy and an awareness of tools that interrupt low mood states before they morph into longer and more severe ones. These tools include altering how we think, the events around us, our relationships, and conditions in our bodies (by exercise, medication, or diet).

Life

      SEVEN MONTHS BEFORE I first swallowed a diazepam tablet I had been in the office of a recruitment agency in central London.

      ‘So what do you want to do with your life?’ the recruitment agent asked. She had a long solemn face, like a sculpture on Easter Island.

      ‘I don’t know.’

      ‘Do you see yourself as a sales person?’

      ‘Maybe,’ I lied. I was mildly hungover. (We were living next to a pub. Three pints of lager and a Black Russian or two was my nightly routine.) I had very little idea of what I wanted to do with my life but I was pretty sure it didn’t involve being a sales person.

      ‘To be honest, your CV presents something of a foggy image. But it’s April. Not graduate season. So we should be able to find you something.’

      And she was right. After a series of disastrous interviews, I got a job selling advertising space for journalist trade paper the Press Gazette in Croydon. I was placed under the supervision of an Australian called Iain, who explained to me the fundamentals of selling.

      ‘Have you heard of Aida?’ he asked me.

      ‘The opera?’

      ‘What? No. AIDA. Attention. Interest. Desire. Action. The four stages of a sales call. You get their attention, then their interest, then their desire to do something, before they want to commit to an action.’

      ‘Right.’

      Then he told me, from nowhere. ‘I’ve got an enormous penis.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘See? I’ve got your attention.’

      ‘So, I should talk about my penis.’

      ‘No. It was an example.’

      ‘Got it,’ I said, staring out of the window at a bleak grey Croydon sky.

      I didn’t really get on with Iain. True, he asked me to ‘join the boys’ at lunch, and have a pint and a game of pool. It was all dirty jokes and football and slagging off their girlfriends. I hated it. I hadn’t felt this out of place since I was thirteen. The plan – mine and Andrea’s – had been to sort our lives out so we didn’t have to go back to Ibiza that summer. But one lunch break I felt this intense bleakness inside me as if a cloud had passed over my soul. I literally couldn’t stomach another hour phoning people who didn’t want to be phoned. So I left the job. Just walked out. I was a failure. A quitter. I had nothing at all on the horizon. I was sliding down, becoming vulnerable to an illness that was waiting in the wings. But I didn’t realise it. Or didn’t care. I was just thinking of escape.

Infinity

      A HUMAN BODY is bigger than it looks. Advances in science and technology have shown that, really, a physical body is a universe in itself. Each of us is made up of roughly a hundred trillion cells. In each of those cells is roughly that same number again of atoms. That is a lot of separate components. Our brains alone have a hundred billion brain cells, give or take a few billion.

      Yet most of the time we do not feel the near-infinite nature of our physical selves. We simplify by thinking about ourselves in terms of our larger pieces. Arms, legs, feet, hands, torso, head. Flesh, bones.

      A similar thing happens with our minds. In order to cope with living they simplify themselves. They concentrate on one thing at a time. But depression is a kind of quantum physics of thought and emotion. It reveals what is normally hidden. It unravels you, and everything you have known. It turns out that we are not only made of the universe, of ‘star-stuff’ to borrow Carl Sagan’s phrase, but we are as vast and complicated as it too. The evolutionary psychologists might be right. We humans might have evolved too far. The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe’s worth of darkness.

The hope that hadn’t happened

      MY MUM AND dad were at the airport. They stood there looking tired and happy and worried all at once. We hugged. We drove back.

      I was better. I was better. I had left my demons behind in the Mediterranean and now I was fine. I was still on sleeping pills and diazepam but I didn’t need them. I just needed home. I just needed Mum and Dad. Yes. I was better. I was still a little bit edgy, but I was better. I was better.

      ‘We were so worried,’ Mum said, and eighty-seven other variations of that theme.

      Mum turned around in СКАЧАТЬ