Reasons to Stay Alive (HC) (9 page)

Lower-back pain.

Having a blackboard fall on me.

Irritable bowel syndrome.

Being a street away from a terrorist attack.

Eczema.

Living in Hull in January.

Relationship break-ups.

Working in a cabbage-packing warehouse.

Working in media sales (okay, that came close).

Consuming a poisoned prawn.

Three-day migraines.

Life on Earth to an alien

IT’S HARD TO
explain depression to people who haven’t suffered from it.

It is like explaining life on Earth to an alien. The reference points just aren’t there. You have to resort to metaphors.

You are trapped in a tunnel.

You are at the bottom of the ocean.

You are on fire.

The main thing is the intensity of it. It does not fit within the normal spectrum of emotions. When you are in it, you are really in it. You can’t step outside it without stepping outside of life, because it
is
life. It is your life. Every single thing you experience is filtered through it. Consequently, it magnifies everything. At its most extreme, things that an everyday normal person would hardly notice have overwhelming effects. The sun sinks behind a cloud, and you feel that slight change in weather as if a friend
has died. You feel the difference between inside and outside as a baby feels the difference between womb and world. You swallow an ibuprofen and your neurotic brain acts like it has taken an overdose of methamphetamine.

Depression, for me, wasn’t a dulling but a sharpening, an intensifying, as though I had been living my life in a shell and now the shell wasn’t there. It was total exposure. A red-raw, naked mind. A skinned personality. A brain in a jar full of the acid that is experience. What I didn’t realise, at the time, what would have seemed incomprehensible to me, was that this state of mind would end up having positive effects as well as negative effects.

I’m not talking about all that What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger stuff. No. That’s simply not true. What doesn’t kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn’t kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn’t kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a window pane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn’t kill you.

No.

This isn’t a question of strength. Not the stoic, get-on-with-stuff-without-thinking-too-much
kind of strength, anyway. It’s more of a zooming-in. That sharpening. That switch from the prosaic to the poetic. You know, before the age of twenty-four I hadn’t known how bad things could feel, but I hadn’t realised how good they could feel either. That shell might be protecting you, but it’s also stopping you feeling the full force of that good stuff. Depression might be a hell of a price to pay for waking up to life, and while it is on top of you it is one that could never seem worth paying. Clouds with silver linings are still clouds. But it is quite therapeutic to know that pleasure doesn’t just help compensate for pain, it can actually grow out of it.

White space

WE SPENT THREE
long months at my parents’ house, then spent the rest of that winter in a cheap flat in a student area of Leeds while Andrea did freelance PR work and I tried not to go mad.

But from, I suppose, April 2000, that good stuff started to become available. The bad stuff was still there. At the start, the bad stuff was there most of the time. The good stuff probably amounted to about 0.0001 per cent of that April. The good stuff was just warm sunshine on my face as Andrea and I walked from our flat in the suburbs to the city centre. It lasted as long as the sunshine was there and then it disappeared. But from that point on I knew it could be accessed. I knew life was available to me again. And so in May 0.0001 per cent became about 0.1 per cent.

I was rising.

Then, at the start of June, we moved to a flat in the city centre.

The thing I liked about it was the light. I liked that the walls were white and that the unnatural laminated floor mimicked the blondest wood and that the square modern windows made up most of the walls and that the low-grade sofa the landlord had put in was turquoise.

Of course, it was still England. It was still Yorkshire. Light was severely rationed. But this was as good as it got on our budget, or just above our budget, and it was certainly better than the student flat with its burgundy carpets and its brown kitchen. Turquoise sofa beat turquoise mould.

Light was everything. Sunshine, windows with the blinds open. Pages with short chapters and lots of white space and

Short.

Paragraphs.

Light was everything.

But so, increasingly, were books. I read and read and read with an intensity I’d never really known before. I
mean, I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I
needed
books. They weren’t a luxury good during that time in my life. They were a Class A addictive substance. I’d have gladly got into serious debt to read (indeed, I did). I think I read more books in those six months than I had done during five years of university education, and I’d certainly fallen deeper into the worlds conjured on the page.

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don’t really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping. It is not where we are, but where we want to go, and all that. ‘Is there no way out of the mind?’ Sylvia Path famously asked. I had been interested in this question (what it meant, what the answers might be) ever since I had come across it as a teenager in a book of quotations. If there is a way out, a way that isn’t death itself, then the exit route is through words. But rather than leave
the
mind entirely, words help us leave
a
mind, and give us the building blocks to build another one, similar but better, nearby to the old one but with firmer foundations, and very often a better view.

‘The object of art is to give life a shape,’ said Shakespeare.
And my life – and my mess of a mind – needed shape. I had ‘lost the plot’. There was no linear narrative of me. There was just mess and chaos. So yes, I loved external narratives for the hope they offered. Films. TV dramas. And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself. But each map was incomplete, and I would only locate the treasure if I read all the books, and so the process of finding my best self was an endless quest. And books themselves seemed to me to reflect this idea. Which is why the plot of every book ever can be boiled down to ‘someone is looking for something’.

One cliché attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely. If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.

In my deepest state of depression, I had felt stuck. I felt trapped in quicksand (as a kid that had been my most
common nightmare). Books were about movement. They were about quests and journeys. Beginnings and middles and ends, even if not in that order. They were about new chapters. And leaving old ones behind.

And because it was only a few months before that I had lost the point of words, and stories, and even language, I was determined never to feel like that again. I fed and I fed and I fed.

I used to sit with the bedside lamp on, reading for about two hours after Andrea had gone to sleep, until my eyes were dry and sore, always seeking and never quite finding, but with that feeling of being tantalisingly close.

The Power and the Glory

ONE OF THE
books I remember (re-)reading was
The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene.

Graham Greene was an interesting choice. I had studied the writer while doing an MA at Leeds University. I don’t know why I took that module. I didn’t really know anything about Graham Greene. I knew about
Brighton Rock
but I’d never read it. I’d also heard once that he’d lived in Nottinghamshire and hated it. I had lived in Nottinghamshire and – at that time – had often hated it too. Maybe that was the reason.

For the first few weeks I’d thought it was a major mistake. I was the only person who’d taken the module. And the tutor hated me. I don’t know if ‘hate’ is the word, but he certainly didn’t
like
me. He was a Catholic, always dressed formally, and spoke to me with delicate disdain.

Those hours were long, and had all the relaxed and
casual joy of a trip to the doctor’s for a testicular inspection. Often I must have stank of beer, as I would always drink a can or two on the train journey to Leeds (from Hull, where Andrea and I were still living). At the end of the module I wrote the best essay I had ever written, and was given a 69 per cent. One shy of a distinction. I took it as a personal insult.

Anyway, I loved Graham Greene. His works were filled with a discomfort I related to. There were all kinds of discomforts on offer. Discomforts of guilt, sex, Catholicism, unrequited love, forbidden lust, tropical heat, politics, war. Everything was uncomfortable, except the prose.

I loved the way he wrote. I loved the way he’d compare a solid thing to something abstract. ‘He drank the brandy down like damnation.’ I loved this technique even more now, because the divide between the material and non-material worlds seemed to have blurred. With depression. Even my own physical body seemed unreal and abstract and partly fictional.

The Power and the Glory
is about a ‘whisky priest’ travelling through Mexico in the 1930s, at a time when Catholicism is outlawed. Throughout the novel he is pursued by a police lieutenant tasked with tracking him down.

I had liked this story when I first read it at university, but I loved it now. Having been a borderline alcoholic in Ibiza, empathising with a borderline alcoholic in Mexico wasn’t too hard.

It is a dark, intense book. But when you are feeling dark and intense these are the only kind of books that can speak to you. Yet there was an optimism too. The possibility of redemption. It is a book about the healing power of love.

‘Hate is a lack of imagination,’ we are told.

But also: ‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’ Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost. The book is about – like many of his books – Catholic guilt. But for me it was about depression. Greene was a depressive. Had been since a child, being bullied at the school where his unpopular father was headmaster. He’d semi-attempted suicide with a solitary game of Russian roulette. The guilt was – for me – not the spiritual guilt of Catholicism but the psychological guilt that depression brings. And it helped relieve the isolation that the illness brings.

*

Other books I read at this time:

Invisible Cities
, Italo Calvino – The most beautiful book. Imaginary cities, each kind of like Venice but not at all like Venice. Dreams on a page. So unreal they could almost dislodge my strange mind-visions.

The Outsiders
, S.E. Hinton – The book that got me properly into reading as a ten-year-old. Has always been my favourite ‘escape’ read. It drips with America and has gorgeously sentimental dialogue. (Like: ‘Stay gold, Ponyboy’, said by Johnny, on his death bed, after reading Robert Frost’s ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’.)

The Outsider
, Albert Camus – I had a thing about outsiders. And existential despair. The numbness of the prose was strangely soothing.

The Concise Collins Dictionary of Quotations
– Quotations are easy to read.

Letters of Keats
– I had studied Keats at university. The archetypal young poet was thin-skinned and doomed and intense, and I felt these things.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
, Jeanette Winterson – I loved Jeanette’s writing. Every word contained strength or wisdom. I picked it up at random pages to see sentences that could speak to me. ‘I seem to have
run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.’

Vox
, Nicholson Baker – A novel that consists entirely of an episode of phone sex, that had titillated and enthralled me when I was sixteen. Pure dialogue. Again, easy to read, and full of sex, or the idea of sex, and for a young, anxiety-riddled mind, thinking of sex can be a positive distraction.

Money
, Martin Amis –
Money
was a book I knew inside out. I’d done essays on it. It was full of ballsy, swaggering, sharp, funny, macho (though sometimes rather hateful) prose. There was an intensity to it. And sad beauty amid the comedy. (‘Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.’)

The Diary of Samuel Pepys
– In particular, I’d read the bit about the Great Fire and the plague. There was something about the way Pepys jollied on through the more apocalyptic events of seventeenth-century life that was very therapeutic to read about.

The Catcher in the Rye
, J.D. Salinger – Because Holden was an old friend.

The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
– Poems like Ivor Gurney’s ‘Strange Hells’ (‘The heart burns – but has to keep out of face how heart burns’) and Wilfred Owen’s ‘Mental Cases’ (describing the shell-shocked patients of a mental hospital) fascinated me but troubled me. I had been through no war and yet I related to that feeling of pain contained in every new day, as ‘Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh’. It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn’t know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn’t see?