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Going Back To A Place Where You Tried To Kill Yourself Can Make Sense
That’s what Matt Haig’s A Life Impossible showed me
Please note that this piece contains sensitive, potentially triggering details regarding the author’s personal experience.
Illness, abuse and loss. But also marriage or a new job. These are some of the things that can exacerbate mental illness. Notably they are all events or occasions. You would not be wrong in listing them as potential stressors yet in everyday life, it’s the minutiae that stop you in your tracks. The cologne of someone who tried to sexually harass you. A birthday card filled with well wishes, written by a family member who abandoned you. Or, perhaps, the place where you tried to kill yourself.
Matt Haig (‘A Boy Called Christmas’) has taken the latter cause as the theme of his newest release, The Life Impossible. ‘Because I became suicidal in Ibiza, it was always a place that I couldn’t face; even the word was kind of a trigger’. His words, taken from an interview in the October edition of Good Housekeeping, struck me.
It put me in mind of a glass-fronted building, sunlight glancing off. A sea of heads and scribbling hands in a large hall. People chattering in a line spilling out into the street, milling in front of a book shop. Twelve years ago…
