Reasons to Stay Alive (HC) (14 page)

@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.

5

Being

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

—Anne Sexton

In praise of thin skins

I HAVE A
thin skin.

I think this is part and parcel of depression and anxiety, or – to be precise – being a person quite likely to get depression and anxiety. I also think that I will never fully get over my breakdown fourteen years ago. If the stone falls hard enough the ripples last a lifetime.

I have gone from never feeling happy to feeling happy – or at last somewhere in the ballpark – most of the time. So I am lucky. But I have blips. Either blips when I am genuinely depressed/anxious or blips caused by me fighting the onset of depression/anxiety by doing something stupid (getting excessively drunk and coming home at five in the morning after losing my wallet and having to plead with taxi drivers to take me home). But generally, day to day, I don’t fight it. I accept things more. This is who I am. And besides,
fighting
it actually makes it worse. The trick is to befriend depression and anxiety. To be thankful for
them, because then you can deal with them a whole lot better. And the way I have befriended them is by thanking them for my thin skin.

Sure, without a thin skin I would have never known those terrible days of nothingness. Those days of either panic, or intense, bone-scorching lethargy. The days of self-hate, or drowning under invisible waves. I sometimes felt, in my self-pity, too fragile for a world of speed and right angles and noise. (I love Jonathan Rottenberg’s evolutionary theory of depression, that it is to do with being unable to adapt to the present: ‘An ancient mood system has collided with a highly novel operating environment created by a remarkable species.’)

But would I go along to a magical mind spa and ask for a skin-thickening treatment? Probably not. You need to feel life’s terror to feel its wonder.

And I feel it today, actually, right now, on what could seem like quite a grey, overcast afternoon. 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 like to feel the force of that miracle. I like to burrow
deep into this life, and explore it through the magic of words and the magic of human beings (and the magic of peanut butter sandwiches). And I am glad to feel every tumultuous second of it, and glad for the fact that when I walk into the vast room with all the Tintorettos in it in the National Gallery my skin literally tingles, and my heart palpitates, and I am glad for the synesthesia that means when I read Emily Dickinson or Mark Twain my mind feels actual warmth from those old American words.

Feeling.

That is what it is about.

People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don’t even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.

I want life.

I want to read it and write it and feel it and live it.

I want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt.

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.

How to be a bit happier than Schopenhauer

FOR ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
, the depressive’s favourite philosopher (and one who influenced Nietzsche, Freud and Einstein in varying but significant ways), life was the pursuit of futile purposes. ‘We blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst.’ In this view, happiness is impossible, because of all these goals. Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.

In fact, if you really think about it, a life made of goals is going to be disappointing. Yes, it might propel you forward, keep you turning the pages of your own existence, but ultimately it will leave you empty. Because even if you achieve your goals, what then? You may have gained the thing you lacked, but with it, what then? You either set another goal, stress about how you keep
the thing you attained, or you think – along with the millions of people having mid- (or early- or late-) life crises right now –
This is everything I wanted, so why am I not happy?

So what was Schopenhauer’s answer? Well, if wanting things was the problem, the answer had to be in giving things up. In his language, the cause of suffering is intensity of
will
.

Schopenhauer believed that by seeing the bigger picture, by viewing humanity as a whole and its suffering as a whole, a person would turn away from life and deny their instincts. In other words, the Schopenhauer plan involves no sex, very little money, fasting and a fair bit of self-torture.

Only that way – by totally denying human will – can we see the truth that in front of us ‘there is certainly only nothingness’.

Bleak, huh?

Well, yes. Although Schopenhauer didn’t recommend suicide, he recommended a kind of living suicide, in which anything pleasurable had to be scorned.

But Schopenhauer was a major hypocrite. He talked the talk but couldn’t walk the walk. As Bertrand Russell explained in his
History of Western Philosophy
:

He habitually dined well, at a good restaurant, he had many trivial love-affairs, which were sensual but not passionate; he was exceedingly quarrelsome and unusually avaricious. On one occasion he was annoyed by an elderly seamstress who was talking to a friend outside the door of his apartment. He threw her downstairs, causing her permanent injury . . . It is hard to find in his life any virtue except kindness to animals . . . In all other respects he was completely selfish.

Schopenhauer – the ultimate pessimist – actually illustrates how unhappiness works. His work set out anti-goal goals that he couldn’t meet.

Now, I don’t endorse throwing old women down stairs, but I kind of warm to Schopenhauer. I think he recognised the problem – will, or desire of ego or goal-orientated drive or whichever historical term you want to use – but in life he grappled around in the dark (often literally, given his messy love-life).

So, what’s the way out? How do you stop the endless wanting and worrying? How do you get off the treadmill? How do you stop time? How do we stop exhausting ourselves worrying about the future?

The best answers – the answers that have been written and recorded for thousands of years – always seem to resolve around acceptance. Schopenhauer himself was greatly influenced by ancient Eastern philosophy. ‘The truth has been recognised by the sages of India,’ he said. Indeed, his belief that abstinence from worldly pleasures is the answer to life, is something he shares with a lot of Buddhist thinkers.

But Buddhist thought is not as negative or miserable as Schopenhauer. With Schopenhauer all this asceticism is a bit self-punishing, a bit full of self-loathing, which is unhealthy and counter-productive.

A world full of people hating themselves is not a happy world.

Buddhism does not seem to be about self-punishment.

A key Buddhist symbol is that of the lotus flower. The lotus flower grows in mud at the bottom of a pool, but rises above the murky water and blooms in the clear air, pure and beautiful, before eventually dying. This metaphor for spiritual enlightenment also works as a metaphor for hope and change. The mud you could see as depression or anxiety. The flowers in the clear air, the self we know we can be, unclogged by despair.

Indeed, a lot of the
Dhammapada
, chief among the Buddhist sacred texts (being a record of the Gautama Buddha’s teaching), reads like an early self-help book.

‘No one saves us but ourselves, no one can and no one may.’ In Buddhism, salvation is something that is not external. To be happy, and at peace, Buddhism says, we have to be vigilant, aware of ourselves.
Mindful
. ‘As rain breaks through an ill-thatched house, passion in the sense of suffering will break through an unreflecting mind.’

In a world with far more shiny distractions than the world of Himalayan India way over two thousand years ago, our metaphorical mental houses may be harder to thatch than ever before.

Our minds now are less like thatched houses and a bit like computers. Yes, I could in theory get on my computer, open a Word document and just write, but I would probably check Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the Guardian website. I might – if I am going through a neurotic patch – do a quick ego search, or check out any new Goodreads or Amazon reviews of my books or go on Google and type in a list of real or imaginary ailments to see which terminal disease I am currently suffering from.

Even Buddha himself would struggle these days, though
the lack of Wi-Fi in the Himalayan foothills would be a blessing if you wanted to meditate for forty-nine days under a tree.

One thing I do understand, though, is that more is not
better
. I am not a Buddhist. I find all strict and certain guidelines too scary. Life is beautiful in its ambiguity. But I like the idea of being alert to ourselves, of connecting to the universal rather than living life on a see-saw of hope and fear.

For me personally, happiness isn’t about abandoning the world of
stuff
, but in appreciating it for what it is. We cannot save ourselves from suffering by buying an iPhone. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t buy one, it just means we should know such things are not ends in themselves.

And compassion.

That’s another thing I like about Buddhism.

The idea that kindness makes us happier than selfishness. That kindness is a shredding of the self or, in Schopenhauer-speak, will – that releases us from the suffering that is our desires and wants.