Why ‘Reasons To Stay Alive’ is an important book: 64 quotes from Matt Haig’ memoir

Book Review for Matt Haig’ Reasons To Stay Alive

For someone who is finding it really hard to concentrate on anything other than one’s own survival at the moment, Matt Haig’s memoir Reasons to Stay Alive comes as a gush of much-needed oxygen. With immense strength, the Englishman takes out the most painful struggling times of his life and pens down a pure honest description in this 273-page paperback.

It might relate at different levels to different people, but there is definitely something for everyone to keep their minds to wander around the words of the 44-year-old writer. I, for one, found it relatively relevant as I did have had a character in my life who took care of me as Andrea did it of her partner, but unfortunately, my problems turned out to be bigger than those of Mr Haig. Maybe being in a country that is yet years away from understanding and taking mental health seriously, was a factor in causing that.

Haig’s book if read by policymakers, doctors, teachers has the potential to pave way in the right direction. If not school, the book (or a toned-down version) could at least be included in the college curriculum with discussion groups forming around.

Below I have listed around 64 of my favourite quotes from the book. I hope you find at least some, if not all, as useful as I did!

Stigma is particularly cruel for depressives, because stigma affects thoughts and depression is a disease of thoughts.

You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalise 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.

The thing with lizards is that they don’t kill themselves. Lizards are survivors. You take off their tail and another grows back.

If you have ever believed a depressive wants to be happy, you are wrong. They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel an absence of pain. To escape a mind on fire, where thoughts blaze and smoke like old possessions lost to arson. To be normal. Or, as normal is impossible, to be empty. And the only way I could be empty was to stop living. One minus one is zero.

I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough.

But the thing I was most scared of was drugs or anything (alcohol, lack of sleep, sudden news, even a massage) that would change my state of mind.

After important meetings I would find myself in bars alone, drinking through the afternoon and nearly missing the last train home.

MEDICATION IS AN incredibly attractive concept. Not just for the person with depression, or the person running a pharmaceutical firm, but for society as a whole.

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.

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).

‘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.’

I did not say how I was feeling to anyone. To say how I was feeling would lead to feeling more of what I was feeling. To act normal would be to feel a bit more normal.

Scared of going mad, of being sectioned, of being put in a padded cell in a straitjacket. Hypochondria. Separation anxiety. Agoraphobia. A continual sense of heavy dread. Mental exhaustion. Physical exhaustion. Like I was useless. Chest tightness and occasional pain. Like I was falling even while I was standing still. Aching limbs. The occasional inability to speak. Lost. Clammy. An infinite sadness. An increased sexual imagination. (Fear of death often seems to counterbalance itself with thoughts of sex.) A sense of being disconnected, of being a cut-out from another reality. An urge to be someone else/anyone else. Loss of appetite (I lost two stone in six months).

If you have depression on its own your mind sinks into a swamp and loses momentum, but with anxiety in the cocktail, the swamp is still a swamp but the swamp now has whirlpools in it.

In a world where possibility is endless, the possibilities for pain and loss and permanent separation are also endless. So fear breeds imagination, and vice versa, on and on and on, until there is nothing left to do except go mad.

I was thinking of that other universe where I was dead. And where the girl would hear I was dead and the guilt would make her cry. A suicidal thought, I suppose. But a comforting one.

Act like a man, I told myself. Though I had never really been good at that.

Why do so many men still kill themselves? What is going wrong? The common answer is that men, traditionally, see mental illness as a sign of weakness and are reluctant to seek help.

A brain is not a toaster. It is complex. It may only weigh a little over a kilo, but it is a kilo that contains a whole lifetime of memories.

People say ‘take it one day at a time’. But, I used to think to myself, that is all right for them to say. Days were mountains. A week was a trek across the Himalayas. You see, people say that time is relative, but it really bloody is.

Einstein said the way to understand relativity was to imagine the difference between love and pain. ‘When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.’

Anhedonia — I first knew of this word as Woody Allen’s original title for the film Annie Hall. It means, as I’ve said, the inability to experience pleasure in anything. Even the pleasurable things, like sunsets and nice food, and watching dubious Chevy Chase comedies from the eighties. That sort of stuff.

‘Monsters are real,’ Stephen King said. ‘And ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.’

It is a hard thing to accept, that death and decay and everything bad leads to everything good, but I for one believe it. As Emily Dickinson, eternally great poet and occasionally anxious agoraphobe, said: ‘That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.’

ROY NEARY: Just close your eyes and hold your breath and everything will turn real pretty.

That’s the odd thing about depression and anxiety. It acts like an intense fear of happiness, even as you yourself consciously want that happiness more than anything. So if it catches you smiling, even fake smiling, then — well, that stuff’s just not allowed and you know it, so here comes ten tons of counterbalance.

‘An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute,’ wrote Flaubert, ‘like a crowd in a small space.’

Nothing lasts for ever. This pain won’t last. The pain tells you it will last. Pain lies. Ignore it. Pain is a debt paid off with time.

Minds move. Personalities shift. To quote myself, from The Humans: ‘Your mind is a galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile. Which is to say, don’t kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.’

If, as Schopenhauer said, ‘we forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people’, then love — at its best — is a way to reclaim those lost parts of ourselves. That freedom we lost somewhere quite early in childhood. Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.

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.

Thinking of sex can be a positive distraction.

I was starting to find that, sometimes, simply doing something that I had dreaded — and surviving — was the best kind of therapy. If you start to dread being outside, go outside. If you fear confined spaces, spend some time in a lift. If you have separation anxiety, force yourself to be alone a while. When you are depressed and anxious your comfort zone tends to shrink from the size of a world to the size of a bed. Or right down to nothing at all.

One of the things depression often does is make you feel guilt. Depression says ‘Look at you, with your nice life, with your nice boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/ wife/kids/dog/sofa/Twitter followers, with your good job, with your lack of physical health problems, with your holiday in Rome to look forward to, with your mortgage nearly paid off, with your non-divorced parents, with your whatever,’ on and on and on.

It is said that insanity is a logical response to an insane world. Maybe depression is in part simply a response to a life we don’t really understand. Of course, no one understands their life completely if they think about it. An annoying thing about depression is that thinking about life is inevitable. Depression makes thinkers out of all of us.

‘And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on’ — Lord Byron

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.

@AlRedboots The hole you’d leave is bigger than the pain you suffer by being. #reasonstostayalive

@simone_mc My #reasonstostayalive? The future. The undiscovered country. To find and meet other people who appreciate corny Star Trek references.

@ameliasnelling #reasonstostayalive I still haven’t seen Iceland where my ashes will be scattered.

@lillianharpl #reasonstostayalive Since the other option isn’t flexible.

@HHDreamWolf Suicide may lead to my friends and family becoming depressed, I would never wish depression on anyone. #reasonstostayalive

‘Put your ear down next to your soul and listen hard.’ — Anne Sexton

If the stone falls hard enough the ripples last a lifetime.

I feel the sheer unfathomable marvel that is this strange life we have, here on earth, the seven billion of us, clustered in our towns and cities on this pale blue dot of a planet, spending our allotted 30,000 days as best we can, in glorious insignificance.

I hate depression. I am scared of it. Terrified, in fact. But at the same time, it has made me who I am. And if — for me — it is the price of feeling life, it’s a price always worth paying. I am satisfied just to be.

To be selfless, while being mindful, seems to be a good solution, when the self intensifies and causes us to suffer.

How to stop time: kiss. How to travel in time: read. How to escape time: music. How to feel time: write. How to release time: breathe.

TIME TROUBLES US. It is because of time that we grow old, and because of time we die. These are worrying things. As Aristotle put it, ‘time crumbles things’. And we are scared of our own crumbling, and the crumbling of others.

Imagine all the time we had was bottled up, like wine, and handed over to us. How would we make that bottle last? By sipping slowly, appreciating the taste, or by gulping?

When I sink deep, now, and I still do from time to time, I try and understand that there is another, bigger and stronger part of me that is not sinking. It stands unwavering. It is, I suppose, the part that would have been once called my soul.

If we are tired or hungry or hungover, we are likely to be in a bad mood. That bad mood is therefore not really us. To believe in the things we feel at that point is wrong, because those feelings would disappear with food or sleep.

Just as the ground below New York and, say, Lagos, becomes identical if you go down far enough beneath the earth’s surface, so every human inhabitant on this freak wonder of a planet shares the same core.

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.

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.

Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.

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.

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.

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.

Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.

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.

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.

Just when you feel you have no time to relax, know that this is the moment you most need to make time to relax.

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.

Which of these quotes you liked the most and why?