4
Living
‘And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on’
—Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
The world
THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind.
To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.
Yet we have no other world to live in. And actually, when we really look closely, the world of stuff and advertising is not really life. Life is the other stuff. Life is what is left when you take all that crap away, or at least ignore it for a while.
Life is the people who love you. No one will ever choose to stay alive for an iPhone. It’s the people we reach via the iPhone that matter.
And once we begin to recover, and to live again, we do so with new eyes. Things become clearer, and we are aware of things we weren’t aware of before.
Mushroom clouds
I NEVER SAW the double-whammy of anxiety and depression coming before it knocked me out when I was twenty-four. But I should have done. The warning signs were all there. The moments of despair as a teenager. The continual worrying about everything. In particular, I believe there were also a lot warning signs while I was a student at Hull University. The trouble with warning signs, though, is that we only have the past to go on, not the future, and if something hasn’t actually happened it is hard to know that it will.
The advantage of having had depression is that you know what to look for, and there was plenty to spot while I was at uni, but I never noticed it.
I used to stare into space, while sitting on the fifth floor of the university library, imagining, with a kind of bleak terror, mushroom clouds on the horizon. I used to feel slightly strange sometimes. Blurred around the edges, as if I was a walking watercolour. And I did need to drink a lot of alcohol, now I think about it.
I also had what was a panic attack, though not on the scale of the later ones. Here is what happened.
As part of my joint English–History degree I took a module on Art History. Though I didn’t realise it at the time, that meant that at some point in the term I would have to do a presentation on a modern art movement (I chose Cubism).
It sounds like nothing, but I was dreading it as much as you could dread anything. I had always been scared of performing and public speaking. But this was something else. I simply could not come to terms with the idea that I would have to stand in front of an entire seminar room full of – ooh – twelve, maybe thirteen people, and talk to them for twenty minutes. People who would be actively thinking about me and concentrating on me and listening to the words coming out of my mouth.
‘Everyone gets nervous,’ my mum told me, on the phone. ‘It’s nothing. And the closer you get to it, the closer it is to being over.’
But what did she know?
I mean, what if I got a nosebleed? What if I couldn’t speak at all? What if I pissed myself? There were other doubts too. How do you say Picabia? Should I use a French accent for the name of Georges Braque’s painting Nature morte?
For about five weeks I couldn’t really enjoy anything because this was coming up, and I couldn’t do a no-show because it was assessed, as part of course work. The thing that I was particularly worried about was the fact that I had to co-ordinate reading my words with the presenting of slides. What if I put the slides in upside down? What if I spoke about Juan Gris’ Portrait of Picasso while actually showing a Picasso? There were a seemingly infinite number of nightmare possibilities.
Fittingly, given the subject of the talk was an art movement that involved abandoning perspective, I was losing perspective.
The day came. Tuesday, 17 March 1997. It looked like so many other drab Hull days. But it wasn’t. Looks were deceptive. There was threat in the air. Everything – even the furniture in our student house – looked like secret weapons in an invisible war against me. Reading Dracula for my Gothic Literature module wasn’t helping either. (‘I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.’)
‘You could always pretend to be ill,’ my new girlfriend and future wife Andrea said.
‘No, I can’t. It’s assessed. It’s assessed!’
‘Jesus, Matt, calm down. You have turned this into something it’s not.’
And then I went to the chemist and bought a pack of Natracalm and swallowed as many of the twenty-four tablets as I could manage. (I think about sixteen. Two sheets’ worth. They tasted of grass and chalk.) I waited to feel the calm that was promised.
But it didn’t happen. Itching happened. And then a rash happened.
The rash was all over my neck and hands. Angry red blotches. My skin felt not only immensely itchy but also hot. The seminar wasn’t until quarter past two. Maybe the rash was a stress response. Maybe I needed something else to calm me down. I went to the union bar and had a pint of lager and two vodka and limes. I had a cigarette. With ten minutes to go before the presentation was due to begin I was in the toilets in the History Department, staring at a swastika some idiot had biro’d onto the shining blonde wood of the door.
My neck was getting worse. I stayed in the toilets. Silently briefing myself in the mirror.
I felt the power of time. The power of it as something unmoving.
‘Stop,’ I whispered. But time doesn’t stop. Not even when you ask it nicely.
Then I did it. I did the presentation. I stuttered and sounded frail as an autumn leaf in my head and messed up the slides a couple of times and failed to say anything at all that I didn’t have written down in front of me in my best handwriting. People didn’t giggle at my rash. They just looked deeply, deeply uncomfortable.
But halfway through I became detached from myself. I derealised. The string that holds on to that feeling of selfhood, the feeling of being me, was cut, and it floated away like a helium balloon. I suppose it was your standard out-of-body experience. I was there, not exactly above myself, but above and beside and everywhere all at once, watching and hearing myself in a state of such heightened self-consciousness I’d actually burst right out of myself altogether.
It was, I suppose, a panic attack. My first actual proper one, though nowhere near the scale of those I’d know later in Ibiza, or back living at home with my parents. It should have been a warning sign, but it wasn’t, because I had been panicking for a reason. Okay, so it wasn’t much of one, but in my head it was. And if you are having a panic attack for a reason – a lion is chasing you, the lift door won’t open, you don’t know how to pronounce ‘chiaroscuro’ – then it is not really a panic attack, but a logical response to a fearful situation.
To panic without a reason, that’s madness. To panic with a reason, that’s sanity. I was still on the right side of the line.
Just.
But it is always hard for us to see the future inside the present, even when it is right there in front of us.
The Big A
ANXIETY IS THE partner of depression. It accompanies half the cases of depression. Sometimes it triggers depression. Sometimes depression triggers anxiety. Sometimes they simply co-exist, like a nightmare marriage. Though of course it is perfectly possible to have anxiety minus depression, and vice versa.
Anxiety and depression are an interesting mix. In many ways they are opposite experiences, and yet mix them together and you don’t get a happy medium. Quite the opposite. Anxiety, which often bubbles up into panic, is a nightmare in fast-forward. Anxiety, even more than depression, can be exacerbated by the way we live in the twenty-first century. By the things that surround us.
Smartphones. Advertising (I think of a great David Foster Wallace line – ‘It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.’) Twitter followers. Facebook likes. Instagram. Information overload. Unanswered emails. Dating apps. War. The rapid evolution of technology. Urban planning. The changing climate. Overcrowded public transport. Articles on the ‘post-anti-biotic age’. Photoshopped cover models. Google-induced hypochondria. Infinite choice (‘anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’ – Søren Kierkegaard). Online shopping. The should-we-eat-butter? debate. Atomised living. All those American TV dramas we should have watched. All those prize-winning books we should have read. All those pop stars we haven’t heard of. All that lacking we are made to feel. Instant gratification. Constant distraction. Work work work. Twenty-four-hour everything.
Maybe to be truly in tune with the modern world means anxiety is inevitable. But here we must again distinguish between anxiety and ‘Anxiety’. For instance, I was always an anxious person. As a child I used to worry about death a lot. Certainly more than a child should. I also used to climb into my parents’ bed as a ten-year-old and tell them I was too scared to go to sleep in case I woke up without the ability to see or hear. I used to worry about meeting new people, I’d get stomach aches on Sunday nights about Monday mornings, I even cried once – when I was fourteen – about the fact that music wasn’t as good as it had been when I was little. I was a sensitive child, it’s fair to say.
But Anxiety proper – generalised anxiety disorder and the related panic disorder that I was diagnosed with too – can be (but isn’t always) a desperate thing. It can be a full-time occupation of gale-force worry.
That said, from my personal experience, anxiety – even more than depression – is very treatable.
Slow down
IF YOU SUFFER from anxiety on its own, or the fast-speed kind of depression that comes when it is fused with anxiety, there are things you can do. Some people take pills. For some they are a literal lifesaver. But as we’ve seen, finding the right pill is a tricky science because, in truth, the science of the brain is itself not quite there.
The tools used to analyse the processes of living human brains – things like CAT (computed axial tomography) scans and, later, MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans have only been in existence a few decades. Of course, these things are very good at providing pretty, multi-coloured pictures of the brain, and telling us which parts of the brain are most active. They can point to things like the part of the brain responsible for the pleasurable feeling we get when we eat a chocolate bar, or for the distress when we hear a baby cry. Clever stuff. But there are weaknesses.
‘Most parts of the brain do different things at different times,’ says Dr David Adam, author of The Man Who Couldn’t Stop. ‘The amygdala, for example, plays a role in both sexual arousal and terror – but an MRI scan cannot differentiate between passion and panic . . . So what should we think when the amygdala lights up on an MRI scan when we are shown a picture of Cameron Diaz or Brad Pitt – that we are afraid of them?’
So, the tools aren’t perfect. And neuroscience isn’t perfect.
Some things are known, but more isn’t. Maybe this lack of true understanding explains why there is still stigma about mental health. Where there is mystery, there will be fear.
Ultimately, there remains no sure-fire cure. There are pills, but only a liar would say they work every time or that they are always an ideal solution. It is also rare that they cure someone without additional help. But when it comes to the anxiety side at least, there does seem to be one thing that works across the board, to a greater or lesser degree.
Namely: slowing down. Anxiety runs your mind at fast-forward rather than normal ‘play’ speed, so addressing that issue of mental ‘pace’ might not be easy. But it works. Anxiety takes away all the commas and full stops we need to make sense of ourselves.
Here are some ways to add back that mental punctuation:
Yoga. I was a yogaphobe, but am now a convert. It’s great, because unlike other therapies, it treats the mind and the body as part of the same whole.
Slow your breathing. Not crazy deep breaths. Just gentle. In for five, out for five. It’s hard to stick to, but it is very hard for panic to happen if your breathing is relaxed. So many anxiety symptoms – dizziness, pins and needles, tingling – are directly related to shallow breathing.
Meditate. You don’t have to chant. Just sit down for five minutes and try and think of a single calming thing. A boat moored in a glittering sea. The face of someone you love. Or just focus on your breathing.
Accept. Don’t fight things, feel them. Tension is about opposition, relaxation is about letting go.
Live in the present. Here is meditation master Amit Ray: ‘If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment. Live in the breath.’
Love. Anaïs Nin called anxiety ‘love’s greatest killer’. But fortunately, the reverse is also true. Love is anxiety’s greatest killer. Love is an outward force. It is our road out of our own terrors, because anxiety is an illness that wraps us up in our own nightmares. This is not selfishness, even though people read it as such. If your leg is on fire, it is not selfish to concentrate on the pain, or the fear of the flames. So it is with anxiety. People with mental illnesses aren’t wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can’t be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward. But having people who love you and who you love is such a help. This doesn’t have to be romantic, or even familial love. Forcing yourself to see the world through love’s gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.
Peaks and troughs
AS I HAVE said, whenever I panicked I wished for a real danger. If you are having a panic attack for a reason then it is not really a panic attack, but a logical response to a fearful situation. Likewise, whenever I felt that downward gearshift towards that heavy and infinite sadness, I wished it had an external cause.
But, as time grew on, I knew something I hadn’t known earlier. I knew that down wasn’t the only direction. If you hung in there, if you stuck it out, then things got better. They get better and then they get worse and then they get better.
Peaks and troughs, peaks and troughs, as a homeopath had told me, while I was living at my parents’ house (the homeopath’s words had worked better than her tinctures).
Parenthesis
(IT’S A WEIRD thing, depression. Even now, writing this with a good distance of fourteen years from my lowest point, I haven’t fully escaped. You get over it, but at the same time you never get over it. It comes back in flashes, when you are tired or anxious or have been eating the wrong stuff, and catches you off guard. I woke up with it a few days ago, in fact. I felt its dark wisps around my head, that ominous life-is-fear feeling. But then, after a morning with the best five- and six-year-olds in the world, it subsided. It is now an aside. Something to put brackets around. Life lesson: the way out is never through yourself.)
Parties
FOR TEN YEARS of my life I could not go to a party without being terrified. Yes, here was me, who had worked in Ibiza for the largest and wildest weekly party in Europe, unable to step into a room full of happy people holding wine glasses without having a panic attack.
Shortly after I became published, and was worried that I would soon be dropped, I felt obliged to attend a literary Christmas party. I was sober, as I was still petrified of alcohol, and I headed into a room and instantly felt out of my depth as famous brainy people (Zadie Smith, David Baddiel, Graham Swift) seemed to be everywhere, with their famous brainy faces, totally in their element.
Of course, it is never easy walking into a room full of people. There is that awkward moment of hovering around, like a serious lonely molecule, while everyone else is in their tight little circles, all laughter and conversation.
I stood in the middle of the room, looking for someone I knew for reasons other than that they were famous, and couldn’t see anyone. I held my glass of sparkling mineral water (I was too scared of caffeine and sugar to have anything else) and tried to think my discomfort made me a genius. After all, Keats and Beethoven and Charlotte Brontë hated parties. But then I realised there were probably millions of historical non-geniuses who also hated them too.
For a couple of seconds, I kind of accidentally locked eyes with Zadie Smith. She turned away. She was clearly thinking I was a weirdo. The Queen of Literature thinks I am a weirdo!
One hundred and ninety-one years before this party, and only a couple of miles away, Keats had sat down to write a letter to his friend Richard Woodhouse.
‘When I am in a room with People,’ he wrote, ‘if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me so that I am in a very little time annihilated.’
As I stood there, and those bubbles of carbon dioxide rose in my glass, I felt a kind of annihilation. I began to be not entirely sure I was there at all, and I felt floaty. This was it. A relapse. Weeks, maybe months, of depression awaited me.
Breathe, I told myself. Just breathe.
I needed Andrea. The air was getting thinner. I was in the zone. I had passed the event horizon. It was no good. I was lost in a black hole of my own making.
I put my glass down on a table and got out of there. I left a coat in the cloakroom that could still be there for all I know. I stepped into the London night and ran back the short distance to the café where Andrea, my eternal saviour, waited for me.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘I thought you were going to be an hour?’
‘I couldn’t. I needed to get out of there.’
‘Well, you are out. How do you feel?’
I thought about this. How did I feel? Like an idiot, obviously. But also, my panic attack had gone. In the old days, my panic attacks didn’t just go. They simply morphed into more panic attacks, breaking me down, like an army, until depression could come in and colonise my head. But no. I was feeling quite normal again. A normal person who was allergic to parties. I had wanted to die in the party, but not literally. Really, I had just wanted to escape the room. But I at least had walked into the room in the first place. That itself was progress. A year later I would be better enough to not only go to the party, but to travel there on my own. Sometimes on the rocky, windy path of recovery, what feels like failure can be a step forward.
#reasonstostayalive
I asked some people online who have experience of depression, anxiety or suicidal thoughts, ‘What keeps you going?’ These were their reasons to stay alive:
@Matineegirl
Friends, family, acceptance, sharing, knowing the black dog will leave eventually. #reasonstostayalive
@mannyliz
Very simply my children. They didn’t ask to be born to a mum who at times struggles to keep it together.
@groznez
#reasonstostayalive Yoga. Couldn’t be without it.
@Ginny_Bradwell
#reasonstostayalive Realising it was ok to be ill and that there were no quick fixes.
@AlRedboots
The hole you’d leave is bigger than the pain you suffer by being. #reasonstostayalive
@LeeJamesHarrison
To spite yourself for those intermittent spiteless days and moments that are HD quality wonderful as a result.
@H3llInHighH33ls
There are moments and days when the fog lifts. Those times are glorious. #reasonstostayalive
@simone_mc
My #reasonstostayalive? The future. The undiscovered country. To find and meet other people who appreciate corny Star Trek references.
@Erastes
#reasonstostayalive The days start lengthening after December 21. Something to cling to in the dark times.
@PixleTVPi
My only reason to stay alive is my best friend. #reasonstostayalive
@paperbookmarks
because even though I’m in constant pain, I have the most supportive people around me, and the best books to read. #reasonstostayalive
@ameliasnelling
#reasonstostayalive I still haven’t seen Iceland where my ashes will be scattered.
@debecca
#reasonstostayalive To spite cancer, Bipolar and all the other things trying to kill me young.
@vivatrampv
The surgeons worked so hard to give me the future that I deserve to have. #reasonstostayalive
@lillianharpl
#reasonstostayalive Since the other option isn’t flexible.
@NickiDaviesbr/>I’m weird, an optimistic depressive! Even when it’s really bad I still believe it can be better. #reasonstostayalive
@Leilah_Makes
I’m comforted by maintaining habits. It allows me a little control. #reasonstostayalive
@Doc_Megz_to_be
The uncertain future. It may cause anxiety but it is also like a book that is really hard to predict. #reasonstostayalive
@ilonacatherine
Not everyone thinks you’re as much of a waste of space as you do when in the depths of depression. Trust others. #reasonstostayalive
@stueygod
Music. #reasonstostayalive
@ameliasward
Sunny mornings. #reasonstostayalive
@DolinaMunro
Bacon rolls. #reasonstostayalive
@mirandafay
Fresh air. The uncompromising love of a good dog. #reasonstostayalive
@jeebreslin
Because inside there is a golden you who loves you and wants you to win and prevail and be happy. #reasonstostayalive
@ylovesgok
The realisation I can get help. #reasonstostayalive
@wilsonxox
Sunsets. And that particularly unspecific musical genre with access to your spine. #reasonstostayalive
@MagsTheObscure
The brother I look after. This is one of the main reasons I remain a carer. He’s my lighthouse in the storm. #reasonstostayalive
@jaras76
Possibilities. Overcoming the next challenge. Soccer. #reasonstostayalive
@HHDreamWolf
Suicide may lead to my friends and family becoming depressed, I would never wish depression on anyone. #reasonstostayalive
@DebWonda
Everything passes – joy follows pain, warmth melts the ice. #reasonstostayalive
@legallyogi
My last depression was a severe post-natal. It was an awful time. My #reasonstostayalive were my family and knowing it would pass.
@ayaanidilsays
#reasonstostayalive I’d say best friends. The Great Perhaps.
@lordof1
The dogs always need walking in the morning. #reasonstostayalive
@UTBookblog
The experience to know that tomorrow will be a better day. My family, boyfriend, friends . . . and my TBR pile! #reasonstostayalive
@GoodWithoutGods
#reasonstostayalive Because 7 x 10^49 atoms won’t arrange themselves this way ever again. It’s a one-off privilege.
@Book_Geek_Says
The support of my mum and now my boyfriend who got together with me at one of my lowest points three years ago. #reasonstostayalive
@Teens22
#reasonstostayalive Love is the best reason to stay alive. Self-love, love for other people, love of life and noticing the good. #reasonstostayalive
@ZODIDOG
#reasonstostayalive Some days it’s as simple as blue skies & sunshine. Or the cuteness and reward from my pet chinchilla.
@Halftongue
Sometimes my #reasonstostayalive amount to no more than ‘people would be sad and angry if I didn’t.’ Those are bad days.
@tara818
#reasonstostayalive I had to feed my baby. I had crippling anxiety & post-natal depression, only here because of having to nurse him.
@BeverlyBambury
Don’t always know why I kept moving, but it never – for long – felt like an option not to. Grim determination? #reasonstostayalive
@wolri
#reasonstostayalive Simple things – husband’s support, not crowding me when I’m having a bad time, mainly my family & my little dog.
@Lyssa_1234
Not wanting to hurt parents/sibling/partner. No matter how low I get, I know that these people would miss me. #reasonstostayalive
@BlondeBookGirl
My #reasonstostayalive include ‘picturing my cat’s little face if I wasn’t here’, ‘my mum/sister’ and ‘all the books I really want to read.’
@gourenina
Knowing my depression has never lasted forever, and there has always been a way out. #reasonstostayalive
@Despard
It’s been better before and it will be again. #reasonstostayalive
Things that make me worse
Coffee.
Lack of sleep.
The dark.
The cold.
September.
October.
Mid-afternoons.
Tight muscles.
The pace of contemporary existence.
Bad posture.
Being away from the people I love.
Sitting for too long.
Advertising.
Feeling ignored.
Waking up at three in the morning.
TV.
Bananas (I am not sure about this one, it is probably a coincidence).
Alcohol.
Facebook (sometimes).
Twitter (sometimes).
Deadlines.
Editing.
Difficult decisions (you know, which socks to wear).
Getting physically ill.
Thinking I am feeling depressed (the most vicious of circles).
Not drinking enough water.
Checking my Amazon ranking.
Checking other writers’ Amazon rankings.
Walking into a social function on my own.
Train travel.
Hotel rooms.
Being alone.
Things that (sometimes) make me better
Mindfulness.
Running.
Yoga.
Summer.
Sleep.
Slow breathing.
Being around people I love.
Reading Emily Dickinson poems.
Reading some of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.
Writing.
Eating well.
Long baths/showers.
Eighties movies.
Listening to music.
Facebook (sometimes).
Twitter (sometimes).
Going for a long walk.
‘Noble deeds and hot baths’ (Dodie Smith).
Making burritos.
Light skies and walls.
Reading Keats’ letters. (‘Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?’)
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.