Suffering from depression: ‘It was touch and go, but I didn’t jump’ – my interview with bestselling author Matt Haig
The author of A Boy Called Christmas, The Midnight Library, The Humans, Reasons To Stay Alive, How To Stop Time and many more brilliant bestsellers spoke to me about how the darkness descended on him and what he did to stay alive.
“I can remember the day the old me died.
It started with a thought. Something was going wrong. That was the start. And then, a second later, my brain started to have something pumped into it from the inside. And then my heart started to go. And then I started to go. And it would be over a year before I would feel anything like even half-normal again.
Up until that point I’d had no real understanding or awareness of depression, except that I knew my mum had suffered from it for a little while after I was born, and that my great grandmother on my father’s side had committed suicide. So there had been a family history, but it hadn’t been a history I’d thought about much.
When depression reached me I was in the nicest place I’d ever lived. I was in Ibiza where I worked for the Manumission club and hotel empire from 1997 to 1999. A villa we shared with the owners of the club was behind me and in front was the most glorious view I’d ever seen. A sparkling Mediterranean, looking like a turquoise tablecloth scattered with tiny diamonds, fringed by a dramatic coastline of limestone cliffs and small near-white forbidden beaches.
And yet, the most beautiful view in the world could not stop me from wanting to kill myself. I was going to do it as well. While my girlfriend Andrea was in the villa, oblivious, thinking that I just needed some air.
I walked, counting my steps, then losing count, my mind all over the place.
‘Don’t chicken out,’ I told myself.
I made it to the cliff edge. I could stop feeling this terrible way simply by taking another step. It was so preposterously easy – a single step – versus the pain of being alive.
But actually, it wasn’t easy.
The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have suicidal thoughts, the terror of death remains the same. The difference is that the terror of life has rapidly increased. So when you hear about someone killing themselves it’s important to know that death wasn’t any less scary for them. It’s just that life had become so painful, that death was the lesser of two extremely bad evils.
I stood there for a while. Summoning the courage to die, then summoning the courage to live.
It was touch and go, but I didn’t jump. I had my parents, sister Phoebe and Andrea. Four people who loved me. I wished like mad, in that moment, that I had no one at all. Also, if I’m honest, I was scared. What if I didn’t die? What if I was paralysed, and I was trapped, motionless, in this state, forever?
And so I kept living. I turned back towards the villa and was sick from the stress of it all.
A doctor put me on diazepam, a medicine to help control my anxiety. I moved back to my hometown of Newark in Nottinghamshire to live with Andrea and my parents.
When you’re depressed – unable to leave the house, or the sofa, or to think of anything but the depression – it can be unbearably hard. The thing is though, bad days are not all equally bad. The really bad ones, though horrible to live through, are useful for later. You store them up. A bank of bad days. The day you had to run out of the supermarket. The day you were so depressed your tongue wouldn’t move. The day you made your parents cry. The day you nearly threw yourself off a cliff.
So if you’re having another bad day you can say: this feels bad, but there have been worse. And even when you can think of no worse day, you at least know the bank exists and that you’ve made a deposit.
Depression’s an illness. Sometimes it just happens. There may be triggers, but we can’t see them. It acts like an intense fear of happiness, even as you consciously want that happiness more than anything.
My parents would leave for work, so then Andrea and I would have long days in the house. It was, from the outside, the least eventful phase of my life. From the outside, it was just me talking with Andrea.
Occasionally we’d venture outside for a short walk in the afternoon. We’d go to the nearest shop, about 250 metres away, or – on more adventurous days – walk by the River Trent. That was about it. Talking and sitting and walking. It was hardly Lawrence of Arabia. Life at the lowest possible volume that two 24-year-olds could manage.
And yet, those days were the most intense I’ve lived. Those days contained thousands of tiny battles. They’re filled with memories so painful I can only now, with the distance of 14 years, look at them head-on. I was a nervous wreck.
People say ‘take it one day at a time’. But days were mountains. A week was a trek across the Himalayas.
We spent three long months at my parent’s house, then the rest of that winter in a cheap flat in Leeds. Andrea did freelance PR work and I tried not to go mad.
But from April 2000, that good stuff started to become available. The bad stuff was still there. At the start, the bad stuff was still 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 we walked from our flat 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. By May, 0.0001 per cent became 0.1 per cent.
In 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 square modern windows made up most of the walls. Light was everything.
But so, increasingly, were books. I read with an intensity I’d never really known. I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there’s a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books.
They weren’t a luxury during that time in my life. I read more books in those six months than I had during five years of university education, and I’d certainly fallen deeper into the worlds conjured on the page.
There’s this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don’t 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 of that.
‘Is there no way out of the mind?’ writer Sylvia Plath once asked. I’d been interested in this question ever since I’d come across it as a teenager. If there is a way out, that isn’t death itself, the exit route is through words themselves. 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.
My life – and my mess of a mind – needed shape. I’d ‘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 would only be complete 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.
(Plot of every book ever:Someone is looking for something.)
One cliché attached to bookish people is that they’re lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely. In my deepest state of depression, 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. They were about new chapters. And leaving old ones behind. And because it was only a few months before that I’d 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 hours after Andrea had gone to sleep, until my eyes were dry and sore, always seeking but never quite finding, but with that feeling of being tantalisingly close.
Then Andrea forced me to start writing. She sat me down in front of an old PC and told me to start writing. Just to write what I felt. So I started.
Writing became a kind of therapy. A way of externalising things. It helped.
I wrote a story called The Last Family In England, written from the point of view of a family’s dog about the disintegration of the family and the dog’s attempts to stop it. It got published in 2004, became a bestseller and the film rights were sold to Hollywood’s Brad Pitt. It felt surreal, but in a good way for once.
More novels have followed. The process of writing, combined with an increase in self-esteem that being published gave me has helped a lot. It gave me purpose.
It might have even saved my life.”
Matt’s T-shirt and other great clothes are available from anti-suicide charity https://twloha.com
