Author Matt Haig writes in Reasons to Stay Alive that, among people who have suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same as those without depressive symptoms – but the pain of life has rapidly increased.Supplied
The following is an excerpt from Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig.
The sun was beating hard. The air smelt of pine and the sea. The sea was right there, just below the cliff. And the cliff edge was only a few steps away. No more than 20, I would say. The only plan I had was to take 21 steps in that direction.
"I want to die."
There was a lizard near my feet. A real lizard. I felt a kind of judgment. The thing with lizards is that they don't kill themselves. Lizards are survivors. You take off their tail and another grows back. They aren't mopers. They don't get depressed. They just get on with it, however harsh and inhospitable the landscape. I wanted, more than anything, to be that lizard.
The villa was behind me. The nicest place I had ever lived. In front of me, the most glorious view I had 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. It fit almost everyone's definition of beautiful. And yet, the most beautiful view in the world could not stop me from wanting to kill myself.
A little over a year before, I had read a lot of Michel Foucault for my MA. Much of Madness and Civilization. The idea that madness should be allowed to be madness. That a fearful, repressive society brands anyone different as ill. But this was illness. This wasn't having a crazy thought. This wasn't being a bit wacky. This wasn't reading Borges or listening to Captain Beefheart or smoking a pipe or hallucinating a giant Mars bar. This was pain. I had been okay and now, suddenly, I wasn't. I wasn't well. So I was ill. It didn't matter if it was society or science's fault. I simply did not – could not – feel like this a second longer. I had to end myself.
I was going to do it as well. While my girlfriend was in the villa, oblivious, thinking that I had 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. Or I think I told myself. "Don't chicken out." I made it to the edge of the cliff. I could stop feeling this way simply by taking another step. It was so preposterously easy – a single step – versus the pain of being alive.
Now, listen. 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.
But actually, it wasn't easy. The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have more suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same. The only difference is that the pain 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 wasn't a "choice" in the moral sense. To be moralistic about it is to misunderstand.
I stood there for a while. Summoning the courage to die, and then summoning the courage to live. To be. Not to be. Right there, death was so close. An ounce more terror, and the scales would have tipped. There may be a universe in which I took that step, but it isn't this one.
I had a mother and a father and a sister and a girlfriend. That was four people right there who loved me. I wished like mad, in that moment, that I had no one at all. Not a single soul. Love was trapping me here. And they didn't know what it was like, what my head was like. Maybe if they were in my head for 10 minutes they'd be like, "Oh, okay, yes, actually. You should jump. There is no way you should feel this amount of pain. Run and jump and close your eyes and just do it. I mean, if you were on fire I could put a blanket around you, but the flames are invisible. There is nothing we can do. So jump. Or give me a gun and I'll shoot you. Euthanasia." But that was not how it worked. If you are depressed, your pain is invisible.
Also, if I'm honest, I was scared. What if I didn't die? What if I was just paralyzed, and I was trapped, motionless, in that state, for ever?
I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough. Those reasons can stem from the past – the people who raised us, maybe, or friends or lovers – or from the future – the possibilities we would be switching off.
And so I kept living. I turned back toward the villa and ended up throwing up from the stress of it all.
From Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig ©2015, 2016. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.