Matt Haig

And yet, I was scared of falling asleep, because the moment I fell asleep my wounds would heal and right then I didn__ want that to happen. Right then, I found a strange but real comfort in the pain.

The first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love.

It is another unsolved mystery in a world full of unsolved mysteries.Now stand up and walk out the way you came, and the moment that fresh air caresses your face, you will realize that that is what makes the world so beautiful. All those unsolved mysteries. And you won't ever want to interfere with that beauty again.

A million people a year kill themselves. Between ten and twenty million people a year try to. Worldwide, men are over three times more likely to kill themselves than women.

Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.

(T)here are only two things that are true 100 out of 100 times and that is that you live and also that you die and every other thing is not true or false it is a mix. It is both. It is none.

When you are depressed you feel alone, and that no one is going through quite what you are going through. You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalise everything, and you are so scared that people will alienate you further you clam up and don__ speak about it, which is a shame, as speaking about it helps.

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__ worth of darkness.

Even more staggeringly, depression is a disease so bad that people are killing themselves because of it in a way they do not kill themselves with any other illness. Yet people still don__ really think depression really is that bad. If they did, they wouldn't say the things they say.

We are all echoes of each other. We are all humans and feel both despair and happiness. Our similarities, as a species, are staggering. And our mental fragility is directly tied up with our humanity. We have nothing to be ashamed of in being human, any more than a tree should be ashamed of having branches. Let__ accept our own nature. Let__ be kind to ourselves and to each other. Let__ never add to the pain by blaming ourselves. We are all so weird that, really, none of us are. There are seven billion versions of strange on this freak wonder of a planet. We are all part of that. All freaks. All wonderful.

Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person. You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.That is how we must be with our minds. We must allow ourselves to feel their gales and downpours, but all the time knowing this is just necessary weather.When I sink deep, now, and I still do from time to time, I try and understand that there is another, bigger and stronger part of me that is not sinking. It stands unwavering.

People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward.

It__ a weird thing, depression. Even now, writing this with a good distance of fourteen years from my lowest point, I haven__ fully escaped. You get over it, but at the same time you never get over it. It comes back in flashes, when you are tired or anxious or have been eating the wrong stuff, and catches you off guard. I woke up with it a few days ago, in fact. I felt its dark wisps around my head, that ominous life-is-fear feeling. But then, after a morning with the best five- and six-year-olds in the world, it subsided. it is now an aside. Something to put brackets around. Life lesson: the way out is never through yourself.

I didn't totally fit in. I kind of disintegrated around people and became what they wanted me to be. But paradoxically, I felt an intensity inside me all the time. I didn't know what it was, but it kept building, like water behind a dam. Later, when I was properly depressed and anxious, I saw the illness as an accumulation of all that thwarted intensity. A kind of breaking through. As though, if you find it hard enough to let your self be free, your self breaks in, flooding your mind in an attempt to drown all those failed half-versions of you.

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.

It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn't know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn't see?

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.

One cliche attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely.