The Life Of Bryony - Can You Overcome Intense Feelings of Guilt? with Matt Haig

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

Welcome to The Life of Bryony, the podcast where we dive headfirst into life’s messier bits. GUEST: MATT HAIG In today’s episode, I’m joined by the marvellous Matt Haig! Matt has written so beautifully about the fragility of mental health and how we can find resilience in the darkest of places. He opens up about revisiting locations in his life that once held so much pain and how reclaiming those spaces has been a healing journey for him. 📚 Matt’s latest book, The Life Impossible, is a must-read and is out now. Also, if you haven’t already, check out The Midnight Library and Reasons to Stay Alive—two books that have helped so many of us. GET IN TOUCH 🗣️ If you want to get in touch, I’m only a text or a voice note away! Send your message to 07796657512 and start your message with LOB. 💬 WhatsApp Shortcut: https://wa.me/447796657512 📧 You can also email me at: [e-mail] BRYONY RECOMMENDS You asked, and here it is—my current favourite mascara is the Rare Beauty Perfect Strokes Universal Volumizing Mascara. Two coats and you’re good to go! (This is NOT an ad, by the way, just something I genuinely love.) Join me again on Friday for a special bonus episode of The Life of You, where Matt and I will answer your questions and do our best to tackle your troubles. Bryony xx FOR MORE INFORMATION AND SUPPORT It’s worth noting that we discuss depression and suicide in this episode. For more info and support you can visit: Mind - https://www.mind.org.uk Samaritans - https://www.samaritans.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

just for variation can i get a slightly more upbeat one i have two tones manic depressed welcome to the life of briarney a podcast where we embrace the messier parts of life with no shame and no filters. Today, I'm joined by the marvellous Matt Haig, a man who's written beautifully about the fragility of mental health, resilience and recovery. We delve into his journey of revisiting the darker corners of his past, his relationship with guilt and how he's learned to reclaim spaces that once held so much pain. Illness is terrible but what recovery gives you can be immense. This is an episode about finding peace in the places we least expect. I'm podcasting from home. It's a Saturday afternoon. I woke up this morning and my brain was completely swamped by intrusive thoughts. And my brain, I have come to realise this,

it doesn't actually want the best for me at all. Like my instinctive thing when I woke up this morning was go back to sleep, cancel everything. Don't go to your 12 step meeting. Don't do any of the things that you've said you're going to do. Let everyone down because that's all you're worthy of, Briony. Take some melatonin, go back to sleep. And it's a really interesting phenomenon that I have noticed is that when things are going well or good things happen in my life, my brain goes into this sort of panic mode and it says, you don't deserve this or you're not allowed this or something bad is going to happen. It's what the wonderful Brené Brown describes as foreboding joy. Foreboding joy. Or what a therapist would describe as catastrophizing basically but I've realized

what it also is is a kind of like sense of lack of self-esteem it's really common this feeling that we don't deserve stuff and I remember my mind being slightly blown away when my therapist told me about how actually some of us find comfort in discomfort and I thought what are you talking about like why would I chase these feelings of misery and he explained that actually what it is is that our brains are used to feeling bad they're used to being told off they're used to kind of not being in the right um and you don't have to like a feeling for your brain to get used to it. And maybe naturally, you might like the feeling of relief you get afterwards when you realise that actually everything's okay, and everything passes. Or you receive the reassurance that you're not the

worst person in the world. I don't know if I'm making any sense here. But you know, there's comfort in what we know, even if what we know happens to be really fucking uncomfortable. Does that make sense? And I remember my therapist saying to me really fucking uncomfortable does that make sense and i remember my therapist saying to me consider the possibility that ocd is your brain's way of fulfilling this sort of childhood belief you have that you don't deserve good things that you need to dim your light that if you dazzle or you know you step your light, dark things are going to come. I sort of put this out there on Instagram this morning because I just, well, I find that lots of the people that follow me happen to have the same sort of things as me and the same experiences as me. And I find a lot of comfort in sort of vocalizing them and knowing that I'm not alone in them. And someone

sent me this message and I asked her if it was okay to read it out. And she said, yes. And she said, you have reminded me of something a good friend said to me many years ago when I was young and struggling with my self-belief. He told me, here's the thing. You're not afraid of failure. It's success that scares you to death and at that time I didn't think too much of it but now I see it was possibly the most astute observation anybody ever made fear of success has held me back in so many ways fear of other people's hostility and resentment around your achievements is so toxic it's what other people call tall poppy syndrome which I think is a really interesting thing and I think we all think that we fear syndrome, which I think is a really interesting thing. And I think we all

think that we fear failure. But actually, I think for a lot of us, what we fear is the exposing feeling of success. Because once you've achieved something, or you've done something, like, I don't know, like, what if it goes? What if it gets taken away from you, God forbid? I just want to leave that with you before we go into the podcast. You know, how often our brains fulfill this contract of dimming our light because we're scared of the light. We're not used to it. But guys, the light is where the joy is. Go and get it because you deserve it. This week, Matt Haig. Matt bloody Haig, an author who's helped so many people, myself included, with his honest take on mental health. Enjoy my chat with Matt.

with his honest take on mental health. Enjoy my chat with Matt. The Life Impossible is your latest book and I mean there's so much to say about it. It's about Grace Winters who is a 72 year old woman. She is. Who is from Lincoln. Of course, where else would she be from? She is called to Ibiza. Yes. By something that we shan't spoiler. No. I'm setting the scene. So I'm reading as 72 year old Grace here. Whenever I read an autobiography, Maya Angelou or Anne Frank or Richard Feynman or whomever, I feel a kind of empathy where a tiny part of me becomes for a short while the person I'm reading about. I suppose that's one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one you're inside. It turns our single room mental shack into a mansion. All reading in short is telepathy and all reading

is time travel. It connects us to everyone and everywhere and every time and every imagined dream and i loved that because the genius of you matt if i can begin by blowing smoke up your ass is that all of your novels are like you deliver these beautiful sort of therapeutic lessons through magical stories therapeutic lessons that lots of people would spend a lot of money to get and this one is no different so this reading is not just telepathy but for me this book and the midnight library as well obviously or also kind of therapy i know it's the biggest cliche in the world, but I kind of write for therapy reasons. This book, especially, in a way, this book couldn't exist without you, Briony, though, because when I was low a few years ago, you obviously know this, but I'm saying this for other people. a bad time and everything and in our conversation i asked if you had any good therapists or that you know about and you did know um someone who we both have um and he was a great help and a great

choice for me personally with the issues i was dealing with at the time i was back drinking again and back slight yeah sort of depressed i was depressed i was sort of getting there again. And I shouldn't have been because everything was going great externally. But you know what it's like. And you just disconnect between what you're meant to be feeling and what you're actually feeling. And yeah, so the big theme of what, you know, we spoke about facing up to things and things I've been running away from. And one of the big things I'd been running away from was my younger years, being a drink and drug adult fool in Ibiza in the 90s, which led to me having a breakdown in 1999. And for many years, Ibiza was like my trigger word.

I couldn't even think about Ibiza. I couldn't listen to dance music you know if pete tong came on the radio i would be running away from it i just anything a beef it was just like no and so i realized after two decades that it was ridiculous to have this sort of like block about it so while i was still having a therapy i went in April, two years ago, and I went there under overcast skies, saw a very different island, saw literally the cliffs where I nearly died. I saw the hospital where I was prescribed industrial strength diazepam just to get on an airplane home. It was a total breakdown I'd had there. and so it's very hard without any external reason or trauma being part of that to explain to people who haven't been through that experience how

just seeing a site of a building that you remember seeing when you were at your lowest point how that can be a big deal and so to go there and to actually sort of stand amid the scrublands where i've been at my very worst and wanted to die and to look out at the mediterranean sea was an amazingly cathartic thing because i remember and i think i even wrote about this and reasons to stay alive a decade ago but I remember feeling so overwhelmingly depressed and the actual beauty of everything around me making that worse because we were in a very peaceful side of the island it was absolutely picture postcard Mediterranean sparkling sea um pine forest behind us absolutely beautiful and I felt absolutely like shit and the worst I'd ever felt in my life about

anything and I just didn't understand why it hadn't even been like a bad trip or something you know I was actually starting to get healthy at this point in our time in Ibiza and I'd been running that morning and then just 11 in the morning panic attack that didn't end and then a few days after that totally suicidal wanting out of it because i didn't know how to get out of it hadn't slept for days my system was such a mess i couldn't keep anything down to go back there 20 years later and actually appreciate this view that i never thought i'd be able to appreciate and just see it you know it was a big everything and a big nothing all at once it was just like i'm someone different it's a different place i'm a different person and it was a very powerful thing to sort of take ownership of your past and writing the

book like was heading into it and focusing on the place that I'd been trying to run away from I think just listening to you and I was thinking there is something incredibly therapeutic which I would I'd sort of suggest to anyone actually listening to when you're in the right space to go and reclaim a place that and I was listening to you and talking you know just then and you're talking about the beauty of the place which felt or made things worse like it's almost like it feels obscene and I was last week it's really interesting I was I went on a run with my husband and my daughter a family run and we ran past this spot on the local common um and there were loads of conkers right and uh seven years ago i had gone on my last night out

which what was ended up being my last night of drinking and i'd passed that spot and i remember seeing a conker and being so angry with it like furious with this thing because i'd said i'm gonna stop drinking at the end of the summer i'm gonna you know when you know it was all those kind of promises and i was like i was in resistance to the conker i was like how dare you exist yes because because it was an autumnal yeah in fury and then there was this beautiful moment last weekend where i was like oh my i'm in exactly the same spot but so much has changed you know and i held with my daughter we were holding these conkers oh wow that's powerful and yeah i just yeah i totally relate to that yeah I totally like memories of places when you're at

your worst and then you're at your best and the flip side of that when you've depressed and then you've got happy memories which can sort of torture you but then you invert it in recovery and I think recovery and getting over anything has a kind of like surreal dimension to it like I think the reason I love the word impossible is because I think everything that's happened to me after the age of 24 has been impossible because I was convinced I was going to die. Like, I knew, like, you know, there's things we think

and then there's things we know. And I would have said I knew I wasn't going to survive. And so now I'm 49 years old it's just a powerful thing to know that you've disproved depression uh so many times because I went a really as you know I think I went a real long winding way I didn't go the right way really in terms of recovery I was very resistant to like getting a therapist even if I'd been offered one um partly because I was agoraphobic and this was before zoom before you could just sit on your sofa and do it so I think also because I'd had a bad time on diazepam I was

resistant to the medicate any medication offerings which I shouldn't have been I think and so it took me a long time and it took time itself it took to have to get to the age of 25 and realize oh hold on a minute or to keep going to the supermarket and realizing you're not going to die and stuff like that so that slow disproving yourself uh your brain finally catching up to the reality that the panic isn't needed the fear isn't needed and all that for me the big theme of this book is guilt and moving through guilt and there are some amazing quotes actually some people may see this as sacrilege but i sat with a highlighter and i highlighted the bits that i that really chimed with me and so I'm just going

to read some of these back to you so nothing pollutes and clogs a mind as thoroughly as guilt was something that I thought I needed to get tattooed down my arm and Grace because of things that have happened in her past tragedies that she's experienced she really believes she's someone who just doesn't deserve happiness and there's that quote where she says i was faulty at a fundamental level and that oh i felt that in my veins that but that core belief yeah that is so often true for so many people where you don't even dare to have a nice time or create fun things you think you're not meant to and you think you'll be tempting fate if you have something good happen to you because you're not you don't deserve anything yeah there's that sort of punishment like oh no

i don't and that really comes through in the book can you talk to me a bit about your experiences yeah of guilt well I write a lot about guilt and regret and I think at some level I've kind of always felt it my mum was adopted so I think she's had a lot of anxiety but she wasn't wanted and I think some of that passes down a little bit and I think a lot of it's about going back to my 20s as well you know guilt relating to my relationship with Andrea because we've been together since teenagers so we've been through pretty much everything that a couple can go through and I've put her through more stuff than she's put me through she hates being called an angel or considered one and she's not she's a real human being and she has her issues as well but having me I'm essentially an addictive personality and

certainly when I was younger I wasn't aware or mindful of how you know addictive I was or you know I didn't have a clue about neurodiversity or anything like that like if we'd have rowed in the early stages of our relationship it was always because I wanted to just stay out drinking um I relatable yeah I mean that's why I went to a beef I mean epicenter of 24-7 everything in the 90s I think I was like it sounds ridiculous but i was scared of like going to bed i was scared of like like when i was little i used to have night fears and i think in your 20s night fears comes out as drinking all night and taking drinks and so by the time you're in bed yes that was definitely fear of going to sleep yeah fear of being left alone you know and addiction comes in many forms you know it's not

just about substances you know it's about attention you can be addicted to work you can be addicted to anything that can give you any kind of like dopamine rush but you know but alcohol was definitely problematic you pour a mass amount of alcohol on any relationship, it's going to create issues. And so, I mean, and Andrew would drink as well, but then we'd have blazing arguments. Normally my fault because I won't go home. So I went from that person,

that averagely toxic boyfriend person, to the absolute opposite after my breakdown i was someone who never wanted to go anywhere or do anything and andrea had to become my carer yeah through panic can go to kind of shop on my own i used to count lampposts um you know my progress was measured in lampposts you know i'd be pleased if i got to six lampposts and so that was very hard the fact that and because we're not talking weeks or months we're talking years of me being someone who needed proper care even to you know I wouldn't have been able to get to the studio

in London today for years so I was properly ill and I don't know mental illness it's sometimes hard to care for when depression's involved you don't necessarily feel you deserve to be cared for so you can still be an arsehole you can still be difficult person and I say it wasn't like I was just this meek fragile person who you know was never difficult and just was lying under a blanket just being cared for with cocoa and just because that's i'm just thinking that my husband and andrea should get together not get together like romantically but they should like perhaps create a sort of therapy support group because if so much of this is yeah like we don't talk do we enough about how when you were in mental illness you know we're not sort of uh stereotypically ill people you know

it's it's it's awful yeah and behaviors are sometimes awful yeah and like andrea ben was or you know i had that feeling of holding Andrea back. I mean, she would never put it in those terms. But essentially, that's what I felt like. She'd got a first in business at university. She actually had a really good job over in Spain and was on the way up and going. And then suddenly I became ill, couldn't be in Spain anymore, had to go home, live with my parents. She even lived with my parents for

a couple of months before that got too much and within all this we had the normal life stuff we had left university like everyone does with loads of debt and i had no ability to earn money at that point and andrea's ability to earn money was hindered by me but you know so 20, you know, so 20s, I've got a load of guilt about it. And I know you shouldn't have guilt around illness. But with mental illness, as I say, it's very complicated because you can never work out where your personality ends and where illness begins. And you know what I mean? So you can't, it's dangerous, I think, to always pull it out as a card. Same with neurodiversity, because I've been diagnosed with

ADHD and autism now and it's like I think there's a danger sometimes of that being your defense let you off the hook and that can actually lead to worse behavior so in my case I think it's actually had the opposite effect and it's made me more mindful of um certainly with alcohol you know it's been relatively easy because i've had sober periods before but this feels easier now i feel like i'm more in tune with myself um three years just over three years well done uh what are you at seven seven any seven year itch or you're just oh no no seven year itch no i feel like all your cells supposed to turn over every seven years all right so you are technically i'm like a whole new person yeah i don't miss alcohol at all no i miss not being able to numb terror

yeah and not being able to numb fear i miss that yeah but i don't miss alcohol no i don't i do wish sometimes so as a not an off switch but a dimmer switch to the mind i definitely don't want it off but just dim it a little bit and alcohol temporarily uh sold itself to you as that promise but it was always uh diminishing returns and it was always a false promise because then you'd wake up with double the need to dim that switch i really want to talk to you about almost accidental mental health advocacy. And I feel like this is how we kind of met and encountered each other. We both kind of came up talking about stuff roughly at the same time.

You were before. And I remember reading Reasons to Stay Alive. And just, I was in a terrible place. I was always in a terrible place. Like I was in a perpetual state of terror and a high anxiety and setting fire to things and having to try and like put those fires out. Like that was my life with alcohol, drugs, whatever. Do you know what I mean? It was just, I was vibrating up there in a terrible way. And I remember what I loved about Reasons to Stay Alive was that because I couldn't read I couldn't concentrate you know

and something about that book broke through where I could almost open it on any page and it would tell me what I needed to hear that day and you have this sort of your ability to talk about tough stuff in such a kind of comforting way is beautiful but I'm aware of this kind of when you start talking about mental illness very publicly there's this almost this pressure to be well and to be kind of or maybe to be ill as well i don't know yeah well no and there's another pressure to be like 24 7 guru you know like advisor you know and when you're not a doctor when you're not a therapist when you're not a doctor, when you're not a therapist, when you're not professional mental health, anything, because it's easy in a book, you know, where the limits are, and you write the book in a very sort of like, private space. And it's very your conversation

with yourself. And reasons to stay alive was never meant to be big book, it never got a big advance or anything. And, you know, my career was doing okay but you know but then that for that one to be the thing that broke out suddenly thrust me into a strange position because I'd always wanted to obviously have a successful book but because book number 10 was the one that was successful and because book number 10 was the one that was about me and about the sort of worst days. I struggled with it for a while. I didn't know what people wanted from me and where my, you know, was I suddenly like the Samaritans? You know, I was getting messages from people

who were suicidal sometimes and other people who had partners who were suicidal. That's what Reasons to Stay Alive had a lot of. It had a lot of people who weren't themselves depressed, but they wanted a window on what it felt like. I think that's what I can do, and that's what you can do, and that's what writers can do. I mean, that's a good role for writers

to actually articulate unseen things. And I think, you know, I'm comfortable with that. What I'm less comfortable with is when you're on a kind of panel or something where you're almost in a doctor role you're almost in that you know prescriptive role which I'm not good at because I can remember in the early days like on the tour for reasons to stay alive I wasn't exactly having panic attacks but i was in a sort of state of anxiety and frazzlement and what was probably heightened adhd which i didn't know was adhd which i always translated as anxiety you know just a very fast moving mind so i'd be and there and i'm thinking right now i've got to look wise and calm and considered and say the right things about suicide prevention and the right charity and I was like I'm an absolute mess and

I don't know what I'm talking about but people would suddenly look at you like you weren't a mess you wrote a book called reasons to stay alive for god's sake so you're meant to have answers and all you really had was a story that was a true story about how you got to a better place. But it's not necessarily everyone's story. And you can't represent everybody. And for a while, I struggled with that. Because as a writer, you're trying, as you say, to be easy to read. You're trying to be accessible.

You're trying to find the universal in everything. But when it suddenly comes to giving advice suddenly becomes more subjective because you're going to insult people if you're saying this is a catch-all solution for everybody and it's just not going to be when you look back so coming back to the life impossible one of the other big things which i really loved about it there's a sort of mystical element to it it's about not always being able to explain everything and not always knowing the reasons for things happening sort of I guess what we would now in therapeutics and recovery terms call trusting the process you know and I'm going to read another bit out to you sorry the willingness to be confused I now

realize is a prerequisite for a good life wanting things to be simple can become a kind of prison it really can because you end up staying trapped inside how you want things to be rather than embracing how they could be you end up closed you end up shutting doors to so many possibilities being open to possibility is being open to pain failure disappointment so the temptation is to curl ourselves up like armadillos. And it's perfectly understandable. Sometimes it's easier to press our metaphorical noses into our metaphorical backsides than to look out into the universe. we do anything to reduce that ridicule. We clothe our bodies, we procreate behind closed doors, we hide every bodily function, we don't cry in the post office or sing in the street and we try to keep our own ideas in line with what we are told we should think. But life is mess and confusion and full of awkward shameful realities. Of course we all make our own beliefs in this world and

sometimes to shift them is a frightening thing. you really want to make wonderful discoveries as any good armadillo knows you eventually have to remove your head from your bottom and look out at the bright confusing day into the hidden glory into the deeper mathematics into the ultimate reality into life sitting here now can you look back at all of that stuff that happened when you were 24 and does it make a sort of sense to you now yeah I mean it absolutely in a way gave me everything I don't mean in terms of like career terms I just mean like if there was a button there to press reality where I didn't have a breakdown at 24 and to just sort of like get myself healthier a bit earlier i wouldn't press that button because i'd actually be scared to of our reality i kind of needed to go through that i wouldn't want to relive a single day of you know the worst depths depression. And I may at some future point have another episode

like that. Again, I don't know. But I right now sitting here would not go into that alternate timeline where I didn't have that breakdown, where I didn't have agoraphobia, where that because illness is terrible, but what recovery gives you can be immense. It gave me a complete gratitude for life, for people, for my partner, for my parents. I was very privileged and very lucky that I had at least three people who were absolutely, truly there for me when I needed them. My parents, you know, they weren't rich and couldn't sort of like finance me, but they had a home I could live in and they were there for me in that sense. I had Andrea, obviously, who, if she questioned leaving me,

she never voiced that thought. And, you know, I felt as stable as I could have felt at that time with people. So I ended up with immense gratitude for that. But it was only through recovery that I could sort of look back and realize what people did for me I mean I've basically a level analyzed this book like this is like my York notes but the other thing that comes through and I think that you definitely get when you've been through dark things and you've done dark things and you've experienced dark things and you've been a bit of a shit and you've you know, You haven't is like there's a huge amount of empathy for people who fuck up, right?

Yes, and I think we're lacking that Massively lack that now, you know We could talk for hours about a cancel culture about judging people and what comes out of the life impossible is there's a huge amount of stuff that comes through to me about judgment and about i spend so much of my life matt trying to be a good girl or to be like you know like please validate me please like me please yeah and what really comes through in all of your work but it especially in this, is this kind of like, we're all beautiful, complex creatures. There's a quote about, you know, all humans have context,

and we don't necessarily see all that context, and we're very quick to judge them because of it. Because I think most of us feel a little bit guilty, guilty might be the wrong word, but a little bit worried about our inner true selves and is it really acceptable like our thoughts or our relationship or whatever it is or our drink problem i basically when when i'm sort of writing stuff or putting my cheesy things out there on instagram i am basically just not necessarily feeling it myself, but it's words I want to hear. I want to feel like it's okay. You know what therapy can give you sometimes. And I think there's confusion out there where people think that's letting you or other people off the

hook. And I don't think that. I massively believe in responsibility and I really feel there should be consequences for actions and stuff. But I think if you're actually wanting to change people's behavior, how are you going to do that? You know, we all know in terms of parenting advice, if you tell a child over and over again, they're this terrible person for this terrible thing they've done, they're not going to become a better child you know what i mean they are that person aren't they they're becoming what they're the story that they're told that they're told yeah and i don't think obviously there's difference between children and adults but i don't think fundamentally psychology changes that much in terms of the stories we tell about ourselves i don't know

you've gone through similar when when you've got depression or OCD or anxiety or whatever it is, the voice in your head is giving you a bad story. You don't need someone on the outside to give it to you. You've got that voice in your head, but that voice may have been interacting with voices in the outside and you know what you were told as a young child. So I'm a great believer in doing good things and wanting people to be better and do better, but it's how do you get there? That's where the debate is. And I think it has to come from a position of compassion.

You cannot change yourself for the better if you don't believe that person, i.e. you, deserves any better. If you think you're a terrible person, well, yeah, do something stupid and get stupid consequences, doesn't matter. There's a thing that people talk about with suicide, about how, you know, the selfishness,

which people, I know people think is a way to keep people in the world and it's a way to make people feel like they should stay here. But if you just sort of say, oh, it's selfish to be suicidal, that's not going to make that person feel less suicidal. That's going to make that person feel like I'm a terrible person. I'm a burden on other people. I can remember, like people always say,

well, you stayed alive for Andrea or you stayed alive for your parents. I don't know. Maybe I did. parents. I don't know, maybe I did. But in another sense, I remember massively feeling like I was a burden on those people, and that I should die because I'm a burden on those people, and I'm holding those people back. So it's complicated. You know, if you tell someone they're selfish for thinking a certain way, or they're wrong for a certain thing that they did, it can actually entrench that rather than make that person a better person so how do we do it we can't just say oh yeah you can get away with doing everything you've got your mental health card you can get away with anything but you can say well you don't want to be that person and we know that you're not actually that person you know the way

you would as a parent to a child talk about that and you're better than that and all that sort of thing. So let's imagine there's someone listening to this now and it's Monday morning or it's Tuesday morning or whatever, and they are on the bus or they're on the train or they're in their car or they're walking or something and they are in complete self-loathing, you know, because there's a good chance that quite a few people listening to this podcast are going to be in a bad place um but my people that might be you are my people and that person thinks they are a bad person that they are a terrible person that they don't deserve to be happy that everyone is going to judge them for whatever the bad thing is they've done i'm just kind of thinking because i have totally been that person that person on the bus listening

to something to try and help what would you not to put any pressure on you matt but what would you say to that person beyond all the normal cliches about not being able to change the past and so in a way dwelling on the past is not useful for anyone least of all yourself i think it's just understanding that out of bad things and out of even bad behaviors there can be some unseen future good from it all i know from my own life is the very worst moments of my life, somehow, further down the line, ended up weaving some kind of magic that turned them into the opposites, turned it into something hopeful, or made me stronger in certain ways, and made me sort of see things differently, or made me a kinder person. So sometimes, you know, the fact that

you're feeling bad about yourself for something shows goodness. You know, it's goodness looking at something you've done and not happy with it. There are people out there who never feel that and do all sorts of terrible, toxic things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They don't listen to podcasts like this.

No, they don't care. They don't analyze. They don't feel guilt. So you're not the worst of humanity. If you're in that state, you are aware of humanity and goodness, and you've got potential to be even better and act on the goodness that's watching the badness and become, you know, shape a different future for yourself. And I think I never know precisely what to say to someone who's feeling

exactly like what i was feeling like at my worst but i think what i would just tell myself is that it's not always going to be like this so if someone could have actually come from the future and told you know that would have been all i needed but things will be different you will feel differently about yourself at some point you You know, there are people who've done really terrible things with people who've like, you know, armed robberies and all sorts of things who turn their lives around, helping people in the future. And they're not running away from what they did. They're using what they did. And, you know, using it for good. so i feel like it's about not running away from that side of yourself but acknowledging it and changing because of it me and matt right now if

you're listening to this and you are in a hole we are you in the future coming to tell you yeah that everything changes and you're gonna be okay yeah i've got one more quote it's from the life impossible i want to leave everyone with this because oh it's so beautifully hopeful and if you're in the darkness it's gonna make you feel light i had once thought him mad but now i realised he'd just been understanding things that others didn't. Maybe that was what madness was. The loneliness of understanding what others can't. Mad people of this age are the sages of the next. I like the way you read it, Bryony. I don't like reading my words aloud but thank you. I should take you on tour and you can just read my words. But I like that idea that maybe the mad among us

are actually the most sane and they are all responding appropriately to a kind of sickness in society. It's a messed up world, isn't it? So if you're a sensitive person, that messed up world gets in in some ways. But, you know, it's about how we understand ourselves and

our relation to that world i think that hang you're a marvel thank you brian it's been a joy massive thank you to matt for sharing so much with me if you want even more matt hay and i mean who wouldn't his new book the life impossible is a. And luckily, there's about 25 other books once you got through that one. If this episode touched you in any way, please subscribe and share it with someone who might need it. I like to end each podcast with a little recommendation. And this week, what I'm going to do is give you the thing I'm asked for all the time, which is my favorite

mascara. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. This is important stuff, guys. This is probably along with where I get my sports bras from. We can do that another week. I want to tell you about my favorite mascara at the moment. It changes from time to time. So this may update in a few months and i will tell you if it does my favorite one right now is the rare beauty perfect strokes universal volumizing mascara this is not an ad just so you know it is not an ad uh it's it's just honestly what i like to put on my lashes and if you put like two coats on oh my god just sensational guys sensational we shall meet again dear listener on friday i hope for our bonus episode the life of you if you've got a problem please email me and myself and a guest we'll do our absolute best

not to make it worse details of how to get in touch are in the show notes. See you on Friday.