The Life Impossible – Matt Haig The Inability to Feel Pleasure
The Inability to Feel Pleasure
I was upside down when I decided to go to Ibiza.
The surgery bed I was lying on was tilted so far back I thought I was going to slip off. There was a mirror on the wall. I looked at my unkempt grey hair and tired face and hardly recognised myself. I looked like a faded person. I avoided mirrors, where possible.
They were trying to reverse the blood flow in my legs, you see. I was more covered in blue veins than a chunk of Gorgonzola and I needed to get them done. Not because of how they looked, but because they were making my calves itch and giving me sores. My aunt had died of a blood clot which broke free and achieved the lofty status of a fatal pulmonary embolism, so I wanted to get the varicose veins sorted before a clot of my own arrived with similar ambitions. I am sorry if this is too much information. I’m just determined to be as honest as possible with you, so I am starting as I mean to go on.
Truthfully.
So, as I listened to the radio, the vascular surgeon injected me multiple times with local anaesthetic along the length of my left leg – the final injection she fondly but accurately named the ‘bee sting’. Then we got to the main part where, she told me, a catheter would be inserted into my calf to blast my great saphenous vein from the inside with 120°C of ‘sauté-an-onion heat’.
‘You should be able to feel something …’
And I did feel it. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was something. The truth was that I hadn’t really felt much for years. Just a vague lingering sadness.
Anhedonia. Do you know that word? The inability to feel pleasure. An unfeeling. Well, that had been me for some time. I have known depression, and it wasn’t that. It didn’t have the intensity of depression. It was just a lack. I was just existing. Food was just there to fill me up. Music had become nothing more than patterned noise. I was simply, you know, there.
You should be able to feel something.
I mean, that’s the most basic and essential form of existence, isn’t it? Feeling. And to live without feeling, then what was that? What was that? It was like just sitting there. Like a table in a closed restaurant, waiting for ever for someone to occupy the furniture.
‘Think of something nice …’
And for once, it wasn’t very hard to think of something. And the main thing I was focusing on was a letter I had received from a solicitor’s office less than two hours before.
