Flying Snow’s Reviews > Reasons to Stay Alive > Status Update

Self-help

How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.

Love. Anaïs Non called anxiety ' love's greatest killer'. But fortunately, the reverse is also true. Love is anxiety's greatest killer. Love... is our road out of our own terrors, because anxiety is an illness that wraps us up in our own nightmares. This is not selfishness, even though people read it as such. If your leg is on fire, it is not selfish to concentrate on the pain, or the fear of the flames.

The day came. Tuesday, 17 March 1997. It looked like so many other drab Hull days. But it wasn't. Looks were deceptive. There was threat in the air. Everything - even the furniture in our student house - looked like secret weapons in an invisible war against me. Reading Dracula for my Gothic Literature module wasn't helping either. ('I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things...'

Depression is also...

Smaller than you.

Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but - if that is the metaphor - you are the sky.

You were there before it. And the cloud can't exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.

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 cold.

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 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, ... wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn’t kill you.

She filled in the blanks that worry and darkness had left in its wake. She was my mind-double. My life-sitter. My literal other half when half of me had gone. She covered for me, waiting patiently like a war wife, during my absence from myself.

If, as Schopenhauer said, ‘we forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people,’ then love — at its best — is a way to reclaim those lost parts of ourselves. That freedom we lost somewhere quite early in childhood. Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.

What had Andrea gained in that time, since the night before her nineteenth birthday? A continued sense of financial insecurity? An inadequate, alcohol-impaired sex life?

Minds move. Personalities shift. To quote myself, from The Humans: ‘Your mind is a galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile. Which is to say, don’t kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.’