Reasons to Stay Alive (HC) (7 page)

The licking got a bit more annoying. I tried to switch the demon off, or the idea of the demon, but of course that made it worse. Lick, lick, lick, lick. I couldn’t really feel the tongue on my skin, but the idea of the demon licking my face was real enough for my brain to tingle, as if I was being tickled.

The demon laughed. We went into the theatre. Swans danced. I felt my heart speed up. The dark, the confinement, my mother holding my hand, it was all too much. This was it. Everything was over. Except, of course, it wasn’t. I stayed in my seat.

Anxiety and depression, that most common mental health cocktail, fuse together in weird ways. I would often close my eyes and see strange things, but now I feel like sometimes
those things were only there because one of the things I was scared of was going mad. And if you are mad, then seeing things that aren’t there is probably a symptom.

If you are scared when there is nothing to be scared of, eventually your brain has to give you things. And so that classic expression – ‘the only thing to fear is fear itself’ – becomes a kind of meaningless taunt. Because fear is enough. It is a monster, in fact.

And, of course –

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

It was dark. The house was silent so we tried to be too.

‘I love you,’ she whispered.

‘I love you,’ I whispered back.

We kissed. I felt demons watching us, gathering around us, as we kissed and held each other. And slowly, in my mind, the demons retreated for a while.

Existence

LIFE IS HARD.
It may be beautiful and wonderful but it is also hard. The way people seem to cope is by not thinking about it too much. But some people are not going to be able to do that. And besides, it is the human condition. We think therefore we are. We know we are going to grow old, get ill and die. We know that is going to happen to everyone we know, everyone we love. But also, we have to remember, the only reason we have love in the first place is because of this. Humans might well be the only species to feel depression as we do, but that is simply because we are a remarkable species, one that has created remarkable things – civilisation, language, stories, love songs.
Chiaroscuro
means a contrast of light and shade. In Renaissance paintings of Jesus, for instance, dark shadow was used to accentuate the light bathing Christ. 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.’

3

Rising

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

—Steven Spielberg,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Things you think during your first panic attack

Things you think during your 1,000th panic attack

The art of walking on your own

WHEN I WAS
most severely depressed I had quite a vast collection of related mental illnesses. We humans love to compartmentalise things. We love to divide our education system into separate subjects, just as we love to divide our shared planet into nations, and our books into separate genres. But the reality is that things are blurred. Just as being good at mathematics often means someone is good at physics, so having depression means it probably comes with other things. Anxieties, maybe some phobias, a pinch of OCD. (Compulsive swallowing was a big thing with me.)

I also had agoraphobia and separation anxiety for a while.

A measure of progress I had was how far I could walk on my own.

If I was outside, and I wasn’t with Andrea or one of my parents, I wasn’t able to cope. But rather than avoid these situations, I forced myself into them.

I think this helped. It is quite gruelling, always facing fear and heading into it, but it seemed to work.

On the days when I was feeling very brave, I would say something – ahem – impossibly heroic like ‘I am going to go to the shop to get some milk. And Marmite.’

And Andrea would look at me, and say ‘On your
own
?’

‘Yes. On my own. I’ll be fine.’

It was 1999. Lots of people didn’t have mobile phones. So on your own still meant on your own. And so I would hurriedly put on my coat and grab some money and leave the house as quickly as I could, trying to outpace the panic.

And by the time I reached the end of Wellington Road, my parents’ street, it would be there, the darkness, whispering at me, and I would turn the corner onto Sleaford Road. Orange-bricked terraces with net curtains. And I would feel a deep level of insecurity, like I was in a shuttle that was leaving the Earth’s orbit. It wasn’t simply a walk to the shop. It was
Apollo 13.

‘It’s okay,’ I whispered to myself.

And I would pass a fellow human walking a dog and they would ignore me, or they would frown or – worse – smile, and so I would smile back, and then my head would quickly punish me.

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.

The weirdness. That feeling of being outside alone, it was as unnatural as being a roof without walls. I would see the shop up ahead. The letters ‘Londis’ still looking small and far away. So much sadness and fear to walk through.

There is no way I can do this.

There is no way I can walk to the shop. On my own. And find milk. And Marmite.

If you go back home you will be weaker still. What are you going to do? Go back and be lost and go mad? If you go back the chances of living for ever in a padded cell with white walls is higher than it is already. Do it. Just walk to the shop. It’s a shop. You’ve been walking to the corner shop on your own since you were ten. One foot in front of the other, shoulders back. Breathe.

Then my heart kicked in.

Ignore it.

But listen – boomboomboomboomboom.

Ignore it.

But listen, but listen, but fucking listen.

And the other things.

The mind images, straight out of unmade horror films. The pins-and-needles sensation at the back of my head, then all through my brain. The numb hands and arms. The sense of being physically empty, of dissolving, of being a ghost whose existence was sourced by electric anxiety. And it became hard to breathe. The air thinned. It took massive concentration just to keep control of my breathing.

Just go to the shop, just carry on, just get there.

I got to the shop.

Shops, by the way, were the places I would panic in most, with or without Andrea. Shops caused me intense anxiety. I was never really sure what it was.

Was it the lighting?

Was it the geometric layout of the aisles?

Was it the CCTV cameras?

Was it that the point of brands was to scream for attention, and when you were deeply in tune with your surroundings maybe those screams got to you? A kind of death by Unilever. This was only Londis, hardly a hypermarket. And the door was open, the street was right there, and that street joined on to my parents’ street, which contained my parents’ house, which contained Andrea, who contained everything. If I was running, I could probably get back there in little over a minute.

I tried to focus.
Coco Pops.
It was hard
. Frosties.
Really hard.
Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. Sugar Puffs.
The honey monster had never looked like an actual monster before. What was I in here for, other than to prove a point to myself?

This is crazy. This is the craziest thing I have ever done.

It’s just a shop.

It’s just a shop you have been in, on your own, five hundred times before. Get a grip. Get a grip. But on what? There is nothing to grip onto. Everything is slippy. Life is so infinitely hard. It involves a thousand tasks all at once. And I am a thousand different people, all fleeing away from the centre.

The thing I hadn’t realised, before I became mentally ill, is the
physical
aspect of it. I mean, even the stuff that happens inside your head is all sensation. My brain tingled, whirred, fluttered and pumped. Much of this action seemed to happen near the rear of my skull, in my occipital lobe, though there was also some fuzzy, TV-static, white-noise feelings going on in my frontal lobe. If you thought too much, maybe you could feel those thoughts happening.

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

Get the fuck out of this shop. It’s too much. You can’t take this any more. Your brain is going to explode.

Brains don’t explode. Life isn’t a David Cronenberg movie.

But maybe I could fall the same distance again. Maybe the fall that happened in Ibiza had only landed me halfway. Maybe the actual Underworld was much further down in the basement and I was heading there, and I’d end up like a shell-shocked soldier from a poem, dribbling and howling and lost, unable even to kill myself. And maybe being in this shop was going to send me there.

There was a woman behind the counter. I can still picture her. She was about my age. Maybe she had gone to my school, but I didn’t recognise her. She had that kind of dyed red hair that was a bit half-hearted. She was large and pale skinned and was reading a celebrity magazine. She looked calmer than calm. I wanted to jump ship. I wanted to be her. I wanted to be her so much. Does that sound silly? Of course it does. This whole thing sounds silly.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Marmite.

I found the Marmite. I grabbed it as an old rap from Eric B. & Rakim played at high speed in my head. ‘I’m also a sculpture, born with structure . . .’ I was a sculpture with no structure. A structureless sculpture who still had to get the milk. Rows of milk bottles in a fridge can be as terrifying and unnatural as anything, with the right (wrong) perspective. My parents got semi-skimmed, but the only semi-skimmed here was in pints, not the two-pint
ones that they normally got, so I picked up two of the one-pinters, hooking my index finger through the handles and taking them, and the Marmite, to the counter.

Boomboomboomboomboom.

The woman I wanted to be was not particularly fast at her job. I think she was the slowest person there had ever been at her job. I think she may well have been the incentive for the later move towards self-service checkouts in many shops. Even as I wanted to be her, I hated her slowness.

Hurry up,
I didn’t say.
Do you have any idea of what you are doing?

I wanted to go back and start my life again at her pace, and then I would not be feeling like this. I needed a slower run-up.

‘Do you need a bag?’

I sort of did need a bag, but I couldn’t risk slowing her down any more. Standing still was very hard. When every
bit of you is panicking, then walking is better than standing.

Something flooded my brain. I closed my eyes. I saw dwarf demons having fun, laughing at me as if my madness was an act at a carnival.

‘No. It’s okay. I only live around the corner.’

Around the bend.

I paid with a five-pound note. ‘Keep the change.’

And she started to realise I was a bit weird and I left the shop and I was out, back into the vast and open world, and I kept walking as fast as I could walk (to break into a run would be a kind of defeat), feeling like a fish on the deck of a boat, needing the water again.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay . . .’

I turned the corner and I prayed more than anything not to see someone I knew on Wellington Road. No one. Just emptiness and suburban, semi-detached, late Victorian houses, lined up and staring at each other.

And I got back to number 33, my parents’ house, and I rang the bell and Andrea answered and I was inside and there was no relief, because my mind was quick to point out that being relieved about surviving a trip to the corner shop was another confirmation of sickness, not wellness.
But maybe, mind, there would come a day when you could be as slow as the girl in the shop at pointing out such things.

‘You’re getting there,’ said Andrea.

‘Yeah,’ I said, and tried so hard to believe it.