I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.
Smallness
I WENT BACK to visit my parents in Newark about a month ago. They don’t live in the same house, but the street they are on is parallel to the street where we used to live. It is a five-minute walk.
The corner shop is still there. I walked there on my own and bought a newspaper and could happily wait for the shopkeeper to give me my change. The houses I passed were the same orange brick houses. Nothing much had changed. Nothing makes you feel smaller, more trivial, than such a vast transformation inside your own mind while the world carries on, oblivious. Yet nothing is more freeing. To accept your smallness in the world.
How to live (forty pieces of advice I feel to be helpful but which I don’t always follow)
1. Appreciate happiness when it is there.
2. Sip, don’t gulp.
3. Be gentle with yourself. Work less. Sleep more.
4. There is absolutely nothing in the past that you can change. That’s basic physics.
5. Beware of Tuesdays. And Octobers.
6. Kurt Vonnegut was right. ‘Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.’
7. Listen more than you talk.
8. Don’t feel guilty about being idle. More harm is probably done to the world through work than idleness. But perfect your idleness. Make it mindful.
9. Be aware that you are breathing.
10. Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.
11. Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.
12. Go for a run. Then do some yoga.
13. Shower before noon.
14. Look at the sky. Remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity, in order to see the smallness of yourself.
15. Be kind.
16. Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.
17. Do not watch TV aimlessly. Do not go on social media aimlessly. Always be aware of what you are doing, and why you are doing it. Don’t value TV less. Value it more. Then you will watch it less. Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction.
18. Sit down. Lie down. Be still. Do nothing. Observe. Listen to your mind. Let it do what it does without judging it. Let it go, like the Snow Queen in Frozen.
19. Don’t worry about things that probably won’t happen.
20. Look at trees. Be near trees. Plant trees. (Trees are great.)
21. Listen to that yoga instructor on YouTube, and ‘walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet’.
22. Live. Love. Let go. The three Ls.
23. Alcohol maths. Wine multiplies itself by itself. The more you have, the more you are likely to have. And if it’s hard to stop at one glass, it will be impossible at three. Addition is multiplication.
24. Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up falling through.
25. Read a book without thinking about finishing it. Just read it. Enjoy every word, sentence, and paragraph. Don’t wish for it to end, or for it to never end.
26. No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people.
27. Listen to what Hamlet – literature’s most famous depressive – told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’
28. If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point.
29. You don’t need the world to understand you. It’s fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven’t experienced. Some will. Be grateful.
30. Jules Verne wrote of the ‘Living Infinite’. This is the world of love and emotion that is like a ‘sea’. If we can submerge ourselves in it, we find infinity in ourselves, and the space we need to survive.
31. Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.
32. Remember that there is nothing weird about you. You are just a human, and everything you do and feel is a natural thing, because we are natural animals. You are nature. You are a hominid ape. You are in the world and the world is in you. Everything connects.
33. Don’t believe in good or bad, or winning and losing, or victory and defeat, or up and down. At your lowest and at your highest, whether you are happy or despairing or calm or angry, there is a kernel of you that stays the same. That is the you that matters.
34. Don’t worry about the time you lose to despair. The time you will have afterwards has just doubled its value.
35. Be transparent to yourself. Make a greenhouse for your mind. Observe.
36. Read Emily Dickinson. Read Graham Greene. Read Italo Calvino. Read Maya Angelou. Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are escape routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.
37. If the sun is shining, and you can be outside, be outside.
38. Remember that the key thing about life on earth is change. Cars rust. Paper yellows. Technology dates. Caterpillars become butterflies. Nights morph into days. Depression lifts.
39. Just when you feel you have no time to relax, know that this is the moment you most need to make time to relax.
40. Be brave. Be strong. Breathe, and keep going. You will thank yourself later.
Things I have enjoyed since the time I thought I would never enjoy anything again
SUNRISES, SUNSETS, THE thousand suns and worlds that aren’t ours but shine in the night sky. Books. Cold beer. Fresh air. Dogs. Horses. Yellowing paperbacks. Skin against skin at one in the morning. Long, deep, meaningful kisses. Short, shallow, polite kisses. (All kisses.) Cold swimming pools. Oceans. Seas. Rivers. Lakes. Fjords. Ponds. Puddles. Roaring fires. Pub meals. Sitting outside and eating olives. The lights fading in the cinema, with a bucket of warm popcorn in your lap. Music. Love. Unabashed emotion. Rock pools. Swimming pools. Peanut butter sandwiches. The scent of pine on a warm evening in Italy. Drinking water after a long run. Getting the all-clear after a health scare. Getting the phone call. Will Ferrell in Elf. Talking to the person who knows me best. Pigeon pose. Picnics. Boat rides. Watching my son being born. Catching my daughter in the water during her first three seconds. Reading The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and doing the tiger’s voice. Talking politics with my parents. Roman Holiday (and a Roman holiday). Talking Heads. Talking online about depression for the first time, and getting a good response. Kanye West’s first album (I know, I know). Country music (country music!). The Beach Boys. Watching old soul singers on YouTube. Lists. Sitting on a bench in the park on a sunny day. Meeting writers I love. Foreign roads. Rum cocktails. Jumping up and down (they’re publishing my book, they’re publishing my book, Jesus Christ, they’re publishing my book). Watching every Hitchcock movie. Cities twinkling at night as you drive past them, as if they are fallen constellations of stars. Laughing. Yes. Laughing so hard it hurts. Laughing as you bend forward and as your abdomen actually starts to hurt from so much pleasure, so much release, and then as you sit back and audibly groan and inhale deeply, staring at the person next to you, mopping up the joy. Reading a new Geoff Dyer book. Reading an old Graham Greene book. Running down hills. Christmas trees. Painting the walls of a new house. White wine. Dancing at three in the morning. Vanilla fudge. Wasabi peas. My children’s terrible jokes. Watching geese and goslings on the river. Reaching an age – thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine – I never thought I’d reach. Talking to friends. Talking to strangers. Talking to you. Writing this book.
Thank you.
F
urther Reading
Bad Pharma: How medicine is broken, and how we can fix it, Ben Goldacre (Fourth Estate, 2012)
An eye-opening look at the pharmaceutical industry and the vested interests at play.
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Styron (Vintage, 2001)
This classic memoir from 1989, which references Paradise Lost in the title, is beautifully written and – given the author’s experience on the sleeping pill Halcion – serves as a reminder of the dangers of taking the wrong medication.
The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic, Jonathan Rottenberg (Basic Books, 2014)
The best look at depression from an evolutionary perspective that I’ve come across.
Madness and Civilzation, Michel Foucault (Routledge Classics, 2006)
A controversial, eccentric work, more interested in society than the mind, but still a thought-provoking read.
The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: OCD and the true story of a life lost in thought, Dr David Adam (Picador, 2014)
A brilliant and at times highly personal study of OCD, full of insights into the mind.
Making Friends with Anxiety: A warm, supportive little book to ease worry and panic, Sarah Rayner (CreateSpace, 2014)
Simple, lucid advice on how to accept your anxiety.
Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world, Professor Mark Williams and Dr Danny Penman (Piatkus, 2011)
Mindfulness has its fair share of sceptics, but as a way of adding punctuation into the breathless sentence of your life, I find it can be very useful. This is a solid guide.
The Noonday Demon: An anatomy of depression, Andrew Solomon (Chatto & Windus, 2001)
An astonishing (occasionally terrifying) account of Solomon’s experience of depression. It is particularly good on diagnosis and treatment.
Sane New World: Taming the Mind, Ruby Wax (Hodder, 2014)
A clear and instructive book, with a strong emphasis on mindfulness as a way through and as funny as you’d expect from Ruby Wax.
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping, Dr Robert M. Sapolsky (Henry Holt, 2004)
A very interesting take on stress, and how it builds up, and the physical body.
A note, and some acknowledgements
Willie Nelson once said that sometimes you have to either write a song or you kick your foot through a window. The third option, I suppose, is that you write a book.
And I have felt the need to write this book for a long time. But I have also been worried about writing it because it is obviously quite personal and I worried that writing it would make me relive some of those bad times. So for a long time I have been writing about it indirectly, in fiction.
Two years ago I wrote a book called The Humans. It was in that novel, more than in any of my others, in which I addressed my own breakdown. The story was technically traditional science fiction – an alien arrives on Earth in human form and slowly changes his view of humanity – but I was really writing about the alienation of depression and how you get over that and how you can end up loving the world again.
In a note in the end of that book, the equivalent of right here, I publically ‘came out’ and talked very briefly of my own experience of panic disorder and depression. Just that little bit of openness met with a warm response, and I realised I’d been worrying over nothing. Rather than make me feel like a weirdo, being open had made me realise how many people suffer similar experiences at some time or other. Just as none of us are 100% physically healthy no one is 100% mentally healthy. We are all on a scale.
I then had the confidence to write a bit more about my experience online. But I still didn’t know if I would ever write this book. The person who told me to was the great Cathy Rentzenbrink. Cathy is one of the most dynamic and, frankly, brilliant advocates of books, championing their cause and – in this case – causing them to exist. She was the person, who, over some Wasabi-flavoured popcorn at a branch of Itsu, told me to write a book about depression. So, here it is, Cathy. Hope you like it.
This book would not have been this book without an editor. (The main advantage of books over life is that they can be redrafted and redrafted, whereas life, alas, is always a first draft.) It is the obligatory thing to acknowledge your editor in the acknowledgements but even if it wasn’t, ethics and logic would demand I mention Francis Bickmore’s role in shaping this book. There are numerous suggestions he made that helped me work out how to write it. Mainly though, I was grateful to have an editor who would be fine with the genre-straddling nature of this book, who wouldn’t ask, ‘is it a memoir or a self-help book or an overview?’ And who would be fine about it being a bit of all those things.
And for me, this makes Canongate the perfect publishers. I feel like I can do something different and, if they like it, they’ll go with it. So I’m blessed to be with them. They turned my career around, and I am thankful to the legendary Jamie Byng and everyone who works there (Jenny Todd, Andrea Joyce, Katie Moffat, Jaz Lacey-Campbell, Anna Frame, Vicki Rutherford, Siân Gibson, Jo Dingley and the whole gang) for taking that chance on me and getting behind my stuff the way they have.
Okay, this spirit of stifling gushiness must continue, while I thank Clare Conville, my agent, who totally got the book and reassured me when I was still very nervous about it. She is a formidable person to have on your side, and was vital in helping steer Reasons to Stay Alive on the right course.
Also thanks to everyone who has helped and supported me and my writing in various ways over the years. Tanya Seghatchian, Jeanette Winterson, Stephen Fry, SJ Watson, Joanne Harris, Julia Kingsford, Natalie Doherty, Annie Eaton, Amanda Craig, Caradoc King, Amanda Ross, and many, many more. Also thanks to all those booksellers that I have met and who have gone the extra mile. An obvious mention here for Leilah Skelton, from Waterstones Doncaster, who made jars of peanut butter and special badges in honour of The Humans. Also to everyone on Facebook and Twitter who has helped spread the word, especially those tweeters who contributed to the #reasonstostayalive chapter.
I’ve always had an open and loving family and I thank them for helping me stay afloat, but also for being totally okay about me writing this book. So infinite thanks and love as always to Mum, Dad and Phoebe, as well as Freda, Albert, David and Katherine too. Thank you for being my net. I love all of you.
Thanks to Lucas and Pearl, for giving me a thousand reasons every day.
And of course, Andrea. For everything.
Permissions credits
EVERY EFFORT HAS been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
Extracts from Kafka on the Shore and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and Curtis Brown Literary and Talent Agency.
Anne Sexton quotation reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by Anne Sexton.
‘Don’t Sweat The Technique’ Words and Music by Eric Barrier and William Griffin © 1991, Reproduced by permission of EMI Blackwood Music Inc, London W1F 9LD.
Lyrics from ‘Once in a Lifetime’ by David Byrne courtesy Index Music Inc.
Extract from Close Encounters of the Third Kind © 1977, renewed 2000 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.
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