Reasons To Stay Alive
Reasons To Stay Alive
Source: iWeigh Podcast: Matt Haig + Jameela Jamil (Listen: 1 hr)
Contributor: Selena Garcia
“There isn't always a clear-cut backstory to depression or panic disorder or OCD and all those things. Sometimes part of the hell of a mental health problem is you don't know the trigger. You don't actually know what got you into that hole.” – Matt Haig
This podcast talks openly about depression, suicide, and the guilt and self-shame that can come with them. Sharing personal stories while offering insight into what it can feel like for those who struggle with mental health Jameela and Matt share candidly and vulnerably.
Podcast description: “Author Matt Haig joins Jameela to discuss pandemic mental health, his ground-breaking book Reasons To Stay Alive and why he wrote it, how anyone with any amount of privilege can struggle with depression, social media's contributions to mental health issues, their own social media regrets, and his new book - The Midnight Library.”
It's clear this is a topic Jameela is very close to and passionate about. The work she does and the ways she shares so personally around mental health is commendable. At times it feels she’s sharing over Matt, but it's a very fruitful conversation regardless.
“It’s really important that for anyone who’s struggling out there to understand that mental health is not a destination, it’s an on-going journey.” – Jameela Jamil
(13:53) Matt: “Often, my worst experiences, years later or maybe even just months later, have turned out to be pretty fertile in some other way. I wouldn’t want to live through suicidal depression again, but I wouldn’t want to press a button and to have never had it now it’s in the past. Because all kinds of things came out of that—a sense of gratitude came out of that, a sense of being able to cope with neutral existence.”
(19:19) Jameela: “I know that in my own history of depression and anxiety, OCD and suicide attempts that I had made in the past, that for me it wasn’t like a long, drawn-out planned thing. It would be a day or an hour of such panic of like ‘stop the world, I want to get off!’ I think I’ve heard you talk about it as the difference between, not just generally wanting to jump out a window, but ‘oh my God, the room’s on fire. I have to jump out the window in order to get away from the room being on fire,’ and I think it’s important to understand that both can exist. It’s not always this planned, long, sad, drawn-out—sometimes it’s just instantaneous panic.”…What if you just hang on? What if you just keep going? What could happen?”
(22:03) Jameela: “You think you’re in a life sentence, and I think that that was the hardest thing for me—like ‘fuck this, I can’t keep going on like this.’ And I did somehow find the motivation to keep going. It wasn’t much motivation, but I tried my best to keep going and, in doing so, embarked upon this really ruthless journey of changing everything in order to save my own life.”
(24:16) Matt: “How do you stay alive when you feel you’ve got nobody?... I now think the answer to that question is that you still stay alive for other people, but those other people aren’t the people in your life at that moment. They’re not even other people that will exist in a future moment. They’re you. They’re other versions of you. I am a different person. I am still me, I’ve still got memories of that time, but I’m such a different person from who I was at 24. And that experience is part of the experience that made me a different person. And there’s so many different versions of me in life that aren’t all identical and each one of those is grateful for that 24 y.o. who stayed alive. So, you stay alive for those other selves.”
LISTEN HERE (1 hr)
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