The Comfort Book - Matt Haig Page 0,29

rather than staying up till one a.m. to watch eleven episodes of a TV show one after the other. Or walking in nature with our dog. Or cooking real food with real ingredients. Or being with loved ones. Or switching from the sofa to physical activity. Or planting some herbs. Or swimming in the sea. Or staring at the sky. Or running in the fresh air rather than on the treadmill.

Of course, I love the pleasurable distractions of modern life. I like that our world is one with podcasts and movies and video calls. But when I am in that state of deep fragility, where I am stripped of my shell, I find the shortest path back seems to be the timeless one. The natural one. The one to do with reconnection to our natural world and our natural selves.

A note on joy

On Madonna’s first trip to New York she is said to have told her taxi driver, “Take me to the center of everything.” For many years before my breakdown that was my approach too. I had trouble with just being. I always wanted to be somewhere else, closer to the center of the excitement. So I escaped into alcohol. Drugs. Raves. I needed the loudest noise, the spiciest food, the most violent movies, the most extreme everything. For me this meant three summers in Ibiza working for the largest nightclub in Europe, being at the center of noise and people and stimulation. The fact that the nightclub was called “Manumission,” which meant “freedom from slavery,” drove the point home for me. To be free was to be in the thick of all the buzz and distraction life could offer.

I was a deeply insecure person. I had low self-worth. In the winters, back in London, I would apply for jobs. Then when I got them, I would be so worried about people seeing through me that I wouldn’t be able to enter the building. I felt like a human mirage. Empty on the inside. So rather than face the void, I tried to escape it.

The only problem is that you can’t run away from yourself. Wherever you go, you’re always there. Even on a dance floor at six in the morning.

Running away from yourself is like trying to run away from a lamppost with a bungee cord tied around you. Sooner or later you are going to spring back and have a mighty bump.

Or, in my case, a total breakdown. A full smorgasbord of doom. Panic disorder, depression, OCD, agoraphobia, and a belief that I wouldn’t be able to go on living through so much. Which is the irony, of course. My desperate desire to avoid pain and discomfort led to me feeling the worst pain and discomfort of my life. It trapped me inside it. For days, months, years.

And to get out of that I had to ultimately find some kind of acceptance. This might be a funny thing to say in a book with “comfort” in the title, but pain is a part of life. A part of all life. And so it is also a part of the good stuff too. “Inspiration and wretchedness complement each other,” as Chödrön puts it. But what is good about suffering? What can be comforting about suffering? Isn’t suffering the opposite of comfort?

At some point, you have to accept your own reality. Even if that reality includes depression and fear and pain, alongside other things. And when you accept it, you accept other things too. The more genuinely pleasurable things. The pleasure that can be found by being yourself, rather than escaping yourself. Of being able to look someone in the eye, human to human, without any shame or stigma. Of accepting that life connects joy to pain and pain to joy within the same breath.

I didn’t need to go out and grab life. I was life.

A spinning coin

Uncertainty is the cause of anxiety, but also a solution. While everything is uncertain, everything is hope. Everything is ambiguous. Everything is possible. We exist on a spinning coin. We cannot predict how it will land but we can enjoy the shine as it spins.

You are alive

You can sound confident and have anxiety. You can look healthy and feel terrible. You can speak well in public and be a wreck. You can be externally privileged and not mentally privileged. You can lift barbells and be weak. You can have everything and feel nothing. You can be cut adrift and look ashore.

You are