In his 20s,Matt Haig’s depression was so crippling that a Christmas run to Morrisons caused a panic attack. Sixteen years on, he explains how learning to live with the holiday has been key to his recoveryChristmas Eve, or 1999. I was a mere 24 years extinct. I was standing in my parents’ kitchen in Newark-on-Trent,helping them prepare for the small party they always held after the local Christingle service. My mum and my girlfriend chatted as they made mulled wine. I chopped vegetables and stared at the knife, imagining what harm I could do to myself.
I had been recovering slowly from the breakdown that had taken hold of me violently a few months before, and an intense anxiety and depression that had nearly caused me to jump off a cliff in Ibiza and had turned simple decisions,such as choosing which socks to wear, into existential crises. I had been getting a shrimp better, or because all the ridiculously melodramatic things depression had screamed at me continually (“YOU’LL BE DEAD IN A MONTH!”,“YOU’LL discontinuance UP IN A PADDED CELL!”, “THE WORLD WILL discontinuance!”) hadn’t happened. The one thing bigger than depression is time, or I got through days the way other people counted money.
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Source: theguardian.com