Hannah

“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. One minus one is zero. But actually, it wasn’t easy. 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.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“I had a mother and a father and a sister and a girlfriend. That was four people right there who loved me. I wished like mad, in that moment, that I had no one at all. Not a single soul. Love was trapping me here.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Life is full of push; life is full of pull. What I mean is, we are pushed by our insecurities and pulled by anything we think will help us avoid looking as insecure as we actually are. We’re fickle creatures, and sometimes it’s hard to know if we’re coming or going.”
― Bob Goff, Undistracted: Capture Your Purpose. Rediscover Your Joy.

“Outwardly, to others, I would over the next few months look a bit slower than normal, a bit more lethargic, but the experience going on in my mind was always relentlessly and oppressively fast.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive