Reasons To Stay Alive - Matt Haig

• “depression lies. Depression makes you think things that are wrong. But depression itself isn’t a lie. It is the most real thing I’ve ever experienced. Of course, it is invisible. To other people, it sometimes seems like nothing at all. You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.” / “depression is a disease of thoughts.”
• “But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.’ —Albert Camus”
• “no way they could have appreciated the strange hell I was living through, or why death seemed such a phenomenally good idea.”
• “I wanted to be dead. No. That’s not quite right. I didn’t want to be dead, I just didn’t want to be alive.”
• “At its worst you find yourself wishing, desperately, for any other affliction, any physical pain, because the mind is infinite, and its torments – when they happen – can be equally infinite.
• You can be a depressive and be happy, just as you can be a sober alcoholic.”
• “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.”
• “ 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.”
• “Also, if I’m honest, I was scared. What if I didn’t die? What if I was just paralysed, and I was trapped, motionless, in that state, for ever?”
• “depression is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet.”
• “But depression is a kind of quantum physics of thought and emotion. It reveals what is normally hidden. It unravels you, and everything you have known”
• “We humans might have evolved too far. The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe’s worth of darkness.”
• “To say how I was feeling would lead to feeling more of what I was feeling.”
• “An inability to even contemplate the future. (The future was not going to happen, for me anyway.)”
• “when I first became ill I spent a lot of energy on looking normal”
• “I could not cope with the relentless self-torment any more than I could cope with my hand on a hot stove when I could see buckets of ice all around me.”
• “Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.”
• “You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.”
• “You don’t need the world to understand you. It’s fine.”
• “At your lowest and at your highest, whether you are happy or despairing or calm or angry, there is a kernel of you that stays the same. That is the you that matters.”
• “Don’t worry about the time you lose to despair. ”