Free Reasons to Stay Alive (HC) by Matt Haig

instance – might be an impossible challenge for a depressive.
  6.
Don’t take anything personally, any more than you would take someone suffering with the flu or chronic fatigue syndrome or arthritis personally. None of this is your fault.
  7.
Be patient. Understand it isn’t going to be easy. Depression ebbs and flows and moves up and down. It doesn’t stay still. Do not take one happy/bad moment as proof of recovery/relapse. Play the long game.
  8.
Meet them where they are. Ask what you can do. The main thing you can do is just be there.
  9.
Relieve any work/life pressure if that is doable.
10.  
Where possible, don’t make the depressive feel weirder than they already feel. Three days on the sofa? Haven’t opened the curtains? Crying over difficult decisions like which pair of socks to wear? So what. No biggie. There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.

An inconsequential moment
    IT CAME. THE moment I was waiting for. Some time in April 2000. It was totally inconsequential. In fact, there is not much to write about. That was the whole point. It was a moment of nothingness, of absent-mindedness, of spending almost ten seconds awake but not actively thinking of my depression or anxiety. I was thinking about work. About trying to get an article published in a newspaper. It wasn’t a happy thought, but a neutral one. But it was a break in the clouds, a sign that the sun was still there, somewhere. It was over not much after it began, but when those clouds came back there was hope. There would be a time when those painless seconds would become minutes and hours and maybe even days.

Things that have happened to me that have generated more sympathy than depression
    Having tinnitus.
    Scalding my hand on an oven, and having to have my hand in a strange ointment-filled glove for a week.
    Accidentally setting my leg on fire.
    Losing a job.
    Breaking a toe.
    Being in debt.
    Having a river flood our nice new house, causing ten thousand pounds’ worth of damage.
    Bad Amazon reviews.
    Getting the norovirus.
    Having to be circumcised when I was eleven.
    Lower-back pain.
    Having a blackboard fall on me.
    Irritable bowel syndrome.

    Being a street away from a terrorist attack.
    Eczema.
    Living in Hull in January.
    Relationship break-ups.
    Working in a cabbage-packing warehouse.
    Working in media sales (okay, that came close).
    Consuming a poisoned prawn.
    Three-day migraines.

Life on Earth to an alien
    IT’S HARD TO explain depression to people who haven’t suffered from it.
    It is like explaining life on Earth to an alien. The reference points just aren’t there. You have to resort to metaphors.
    You are trapped in a tunnel.
    You are at the bottom of the ocean.
    You are on fire.
    The main thing is the intensity of it. It does not fit within the normal spectrum of emotions. When you are in it, you are really in it. You can’t step outside it without stepping outside of life, because it is life. It is your life. Every single thing you experience is filtered through it. Consequently, it magnifies everything. At its most extreme, things that an everyday normal person would hardly notice have overwhelming effects. The sun sinks behind a cloud, and you feel that slight change in weather as if a friendhas died. You feel the difference between inside and outside as a baby feels the difference between womb and world. You swallow an ibuprofen and your neurotic brain acts like it has taken an overdose of methamphetamine.
    Depression, for me, wasn’t a dulling but a sharpening, an intensifying, as though I had been living my life in a shell and now the shell wasn’t there. It was total exposure. A red-raw, naked mind. A skinned personality. A brain in a jar full of the acid that is experience. What I didn’t realise, at the time, what would have seemed incomprehensible to me, was that this state of mind would end up having positive effects as well as