Matt Haig shares what he's learned from lockdown
When the busyness of life stopped suddenly, it was a huge shock for all of us. But as author and mental health advocate, Matt Haig has found, it also offered a chance to reconnect with what is important....
Well, what a difference a year makes. This tumultuous period has meant different things to different people. It is like one of those ink blots psychiatrists use with their patients in which they might see a rabbit or a top hat or an aeroplane.
I am keenly aware that this has not been an equivalent experience for all. Some have found this year unbearably hard, financially and psychologically, and have been desperate to return to normality, while others have found it – or much of it – a blessing in disguise, a ‘life edit’ where many of the hassles of modern existence have been taken away.
Then there are many who have found it a bit of both, and I suppose I am in that third camp.
On mental health and stress
As someone who experiences occasional bouts of anxiety and depression, I have found elements of this year intolerably hard. For instance, I could have done without the health anxiety, the worry about my parents and the frustration of not being able to properly see and hug anyone beyond my wife and kids for a long time.
But as the weeks progressed, I began to realise there were things I liked about it. I kept on thinking about last year, and how I was living. Outwardly, things had been going really well. I had been on my largest book tour ever, travelling around the nation’s theatres doing a one-man show about my book Notes On A Nervous Planet.
Ironically, that book had been about how to deal with the stresses of the modern world, and there I was battling anxiety as I stepped on stage at the National Theatre feeling the heart palpitations in my chest.
But in 2019, I kept telling myself how lucky I was. The luckiest moment of all was travelling to Prague to visit the film set of my children’s book A Boy Called Christmas and watching the likes of Dame Maggie Smith and Jim Broadbent bring the story to wonderful life.
It was the busiest year of my life and, like many of us, I had been conditioned to equate busyness with success and, well (the clue is in the word), with business. If you want to achieve something, you have to make sacrifices and you put up with the long train journeys and late nights on the laptop.
So when the Covid-19 crisis happened I was – like everyone – completely unprepared. What a cheek this sneaky little virus had, coming along to ruin my plans!
Didn’t it realise that I had a book to promote? Didn’t it know I had just agreed with my publisher to head out on a nationwide tour? Then there was the holiday to Santorini we had to cancel. Honestly! The temerity!
Taking things for granted
What I initially found difficult was that I realised the way I had always coped with working hard was by factoring in a reward. I like to have treats, things in the calendar to look forward to.
And now all these things were suddenly illegal. Going on holiday. A trip to a nice restaurant. Taking the kids to a West End musical. I had never contemplated that these things might not always be there.
Our children Lucas, 12, and Pearl, 11, had never been through anything like this. Well, of course they hadn’t. No one under the age of 100 had.
But, unlike most children, they didn’t have the shock of transitioning to being home-schooled, because we were already home-schooling them, although my daughter, the most social of creatures, was stressed that she could now only see her friends via Zoom.
A post shared by Matt Haig (@mattzhaig) on Aug 20, 2020 at 11:35am PDT
Reaching a turning point
So, combine all that with my anxiety and newfound news addiction and worry about my children and March and April were rather bewildering, as they must have been for millions of us. My wife, Andrea, was particularly worried about her mum, with a chronic lung condition, who lives miles away from us.
Then, while chopping a carrot, during the first week of lockdown, Andrea cut the tip of her finger off and it was all very dramatic because it wouldn’t stop bleeding, and she had to visit A&E in the week the whole nation had developed hospital phobia.
None of this was good for anxiety, and I found it impossible to get on with anything, let alone work.
But then, something happened. Actually, that sounds like it was one particular incident, but in a way it was the opposite of that. What happened was that nothing happened.
Despite the nightmarish information being transmitted from the news and on social media, at the domestic level our lives suddenly felt very incident-free.
Unexpected positives
And much of it was rather lovely. It was lovely to be at home. It was lovely to spend so much time with the kids. It was lovely to be able to be more involved in the home-schooling.
It was lovely to attend meetings in my slippers and via Zoom rather than packed-out trains. It was lovely to not have cars continually roll by our window. It was lovely to hear the birds and see foxes roaming along pavements and witness nature slowly claiming this new world. The sky seemed clearer. The stars brighter.
It was lovely, simply, to have less to do. Or I could do things I never had the time or inclination to do during normal times (I joined a live gym class via social media, something that I’d be unlikely to do in the real world).
And for me, the paradox was that, although we weren’t allowed to properly see people, I had never felt closer to them. Not just the people I live with either; whereas I used to speak to my parents about twice a month, I was now phoning every day to see how they were. We had quiz nights with extended family.
A post shared by Matt Haig (@mattzhaig) on Jul 15, 2020 at 2:04pm PDT
When we had the weekly Clap For Our Carers, we would be outside, talking to neighbours we had barely more than smiled at or said a brief ‘hello’ to in the whole three years we have lived here.
Even on the internet, I seemed to be making deeper connections. My online activity was suddenly less about random ‘like’ sprees, more about conversations.
I have an Italian friend in Rome – my Italian editor, in fact – and every other day in March and April I’d check in to ask how the situation was there and how she and her parents were doing.
On evening walks with our Maltese terrier, Betsy, I would stop and have socially distanced chats with fellow dog walkers. (And Betsy certainly seemed to enjoy having all her humans to herself.)
Finding a new clarity
Of course, I want there to be a vaccine. I don’t want the threat of a pandemic to be there indefinitely. But just as my experience of suicidal depression once taught me a lot about life, so too has this intense experience.
And though I wouldn’t have chosen this ‘life edit’, it has had value in helping me realise what – and who – matters to me. It was as if I could see things more clearly, for there being less to see.
If you take objects out of a room, two things will happen: you will miss some of the things you have taken away, and you will notice the things that remain more than ever. Your attention will focus. You will be more likely to read the books left on the shelves.
If there is a chess board, you are more likely to play. When things are taken from us, what remains has more value. It rises not only in visibility but also intensity. What we lose in breadth we gain in depth.
So, the thing this year has taught me is that for all my striving and working, the things that matter are the things that were always there. Family. Friends. Neighbours. Animals. And the privilege of having time to share with them.
Matt Haig’s new novel The Midnight Library (Canongate) is out now.
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