Free Reasons to Stay Alive (HC) by Matt Haig Page A

negative effects.
    I’m not talking about all that What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger stuff. No. That’s simply not true. What doesn’t kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn’t kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn’t kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a window pane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn’t kill you.
    No.
    This isn’t a question of strength. Not the stoic, get-on-with-stuff-without-thinking-too-muchkind of strength, anyway. It’s more of a zooming-in. That sharpening. That switch from the prosaic to the poetic. You know, before the age of twenty-four I hadn’t known how bad things could feel, but I hadn’t realised how good they could feel either. That shell might be protecting you, but it’s also stopping you feeling the full force of that good stuff. Depression might be a hell of a price to pay for waking up to life, and while it is on top of you it is one that could never seem worth paying. Clouds with silver linings are still clouds. But it is quite therapeutic to know that pleasure doesn’t just help compensate for pain, it can actually grow out of it.

White space
    WE SPENT THREE long months at my parents’ house, then spent the rest of that winter in a cheap flat in a student area of Leeds while Andrea did freelance PR work and I tried not to go mad.
    But from, I suppose, April 2000, that good stuff started to become available. The bad stuff was still there. At the start, the bad stuff was 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 Andrea and I walked from our flat in the suburbs 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. And so in May 0.0001 per cent became about 0.1 per cent.
    I was rising.
    Then, at the start of 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 unnatural laminated floor mimicked the blondest wood and that the square modern windows made up most of the walls and that the low-grade sofa the landlord had put in was turquoise.
    Of course, it was still England. It was still Yorkshire. Light was severely rationed. But this was as good as it got on our budget, or just above our budget, and it was certainly better than the student flat with its burgundy carpets and its brown kitchen. Turquoise sofa beat turquoise mould.
    Light was everything. Sunshine, windows with the blinds open. Pages with short chapters and lots of white space and
    Short.
    Paragraphs.
    Light was everything.
    But so, increasingly, were books. I read and read and read with an intensity I’d never really known before. Imean, I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books. They weren’t a luxury good during that time in my life. They were a Class A addictive substance. I’d have gladly got into serious debt to read (indeed, I did). I think I read more books in those six months than I had done during five years of university education, and I’d certainly fallen deeper into the worlds conjured on the page.
    There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don’t really 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 that. ‘Is there no way out of the mind?’ Sylvia Path famously asked. I had been interested in this question (what it meant, what the answers might be) ever since I had come across it as a teenager in a book of quotations. If there is a way out, a way that isn’t death itself,