10 Reasons to Stay Alive

Somebody kills themselves every 40 seconds.

That’s 700,000 deaths by suicide every year. It can happen to any human at any age throughout any context of their lives. They might be orphaned or they might be a Nobel Prize winner — or they might be both. Maybe they founded a waffle house or performed on Broadway or even dated Cillian Murphy and still, they can want to end their life.

That’s a whole lot of people I will never get to send Twilight memes to on Twitter.

And I get it. Or I guess actually, I don’t. Could anybody truly get what’s going on inside somebody’s head? Who knows what darkness is orbiting their brains to have led them here? It sounds debilitating, paralysing even, and yeah: deadly. But sometimes all it takes is a halfsecond of joy, a glimpse of something brighter, a momentary reminder that life is worth living for them to want to continue living.

I hope this serves as that prompt.

Because these lifetimes of ours, they’re riddled with an infinite number of reasons to stay alive. Just pull back your curtains and see. Matt Haig has even written about a few and now, so have I.

Whether you’re living in the moment or living for the moment, I hope this reminds you why existing is the best thing you’ll ever do. Here are 10 reasons why you should keep on being:

1. For your dad’s new lawnmower

Or your cousin’s new boyfriend. Or your best friend’s new home. Or that theatre trip with your mom next January. The point is, we all have people to live for, but sometimes that’s too much of an abstract, incomprehensible concept.

How do you live for a person?

So don’t think of it that way. Think of it as living for those moments you share with them. Stick around for that weekend at your dad’s house where he unboxes his long awaited guided robot mower he’s named Murph.

You won’t want to miss that.

2. For the next installment in the Fast and Furious franchise

There’s always a new movie to be released. A new book, a new album, a new iPhone or innovated bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. You might not like every new thing, but the more new things you’re around for, the more likely you are to discover the ones that you do. The ones that you love. The ones worth living for.

And come on, who doesn’t want to see how long they’re going to drag these rapid and raging car movies out for? I can see it now, Fast and Furious 78: No Longer Fast Because of That Hip Replacement but Definitely Furious Because Vin Diesel’s Misplaced His Dentures. Again.

3. For that mountainside view

Everything in your line of sight right now is not even an inch on the gorgeousness that exists along this Earth. Google Images will never quite do this planet justice — but you can. You can take your beautiful self out to these beautiful places and let their beauty remind you of why life itself is so damn beautiful.

Find a campsite halfway up a French mountain and sleep there for a night. Glance at the stars overhead like a velvet tapestry with fairy-lights sewn in, and trial your eyes across every chunk of space above you. Watch as it slips behind the surrounding peaks and down towards the midnight coloured lake. Then breathe deep.

Or just stand tall in your garden. There is beauty in all corners of wherever you are right now. Up mountains and behind sheds and somewhere inside the moonlight.

Just let yourself exist beneath the sky for a while. Because that is truly living.

4. For that thing you made

You know, that thing. That thing you’re destined to make, whether you realise it or not. Your magnum opus. Your showstopping debut. Your bestselling masterpiece work of art. Your scientific discovery. Your technological breakthrough. Your humanity enhancement. Your emotional improvements. Your hand carved ceramic toothbrush holder that you gift to your grandma.

You know: your entire life’s story.

Maybe you haven’t made it yet. But you will. If you stay alive, I promise you, you will. And maybe it won’t be a global sensation. But you are not the globe, you are you and if you love it, that’ll do. Your approval is enough.

5. For that reply email from Robert Pattinson

We all have a secret crush on an elusive celebrity (and if you don’t, you simply haven’t spent enough time on Pinterest). And we all know how minuscule our chances are of stumbling into them one day — much less falling in love with them on the spot. But low chances are not no chances. I bumped into the Weasley twins in my local supermarket once. Had a tweet liked by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. And, if I’m patient enough, I just know that one day, any day now, Robert Pattinson will reply to my email.

Now that’s worth waiting for.

6. For your journal

It might sound silly but think about it. Books contain entire worlds, right? They’re the gatekeepers of distant universes and infinite lives. Well a journal is your existence, print and bound and purposeful. Journals literally sustain the entire plot of the Vampire Diaries (just look at the damn show’s name) because within them, the characters find answers from the past that enable them to unlock unventured parts of the present.

They guide them into the future. They remind them of how far they’ve come.

You owe it to yourself to live, and to document your living. Give those blank pages a purpose. Infuse your existential energy with ink and immortalise yourself on paper. The Horcrux Hack™ to living forever. Stay alive so that your past can be used to navigate your future, to guide you, to home you, to show you that you’ve survived the journey thus far. You can handle the rest.

7. For the sake of the planet

Wasting your life is just wasteful. This is the era of recycling, the generation of sustainable living, and we are the children of mama nature.

But she’s ageing up now, getting old, and she needs us. She needs our help to protect the home in which she’s made for us. If you can’t live for yourself, live for the bees that need saving. For the stray mongrels that need rehoming. For the oceans that need cleaning. For the deep breaths of fresh air that I just know we’ll one day breathe again.

We each have a part to play in the protection of our planet. Yours is as important as any.

8. For that slice of quiche still in the fridge

Why do we convince ourselves that the little things aren’t enough to justify sticking around? Sure, we stay alive for us, for our people and our planet and our life’s purpose but also, why can’t we just stay alive to taste all the variations of croissants in the world? Or to collect souvenir pencils from every museum gift shop? Or to find out who wins this season of Love Island? Or to watch our hamster get fatter? Or to dust the skirting boards so our brother doesn’t have to?

Why can’t we find something small in each day and simply live for that? Today it might be for that broccoli and salmon quiche slice you have leftover, and tomorrow it might be for a meteor shower. Live from one day to the next and find the goodness that I guarantee you is right there inside of it.

9. For all your parallel selves

You might not think this life of yours is worth living — but a parallel version of you sure does. You know, the one who’s been falsely imprisoned for genocide. Or the one married to Donald Trump. Or the one with tinned anchovies for fingers.

Stay alive for all the you’s out there wishing that they had your life, your resilience, your soul. Be the person they’re rooting for, the you they aspire to be. Maybe you don’t believe in the multiverse, but the multiverse believes in you. That’s enough, right?

10. For all your potential selves

You can literally reinvent yourself in the next six minutes. Change your hair, your job, your identity. Be a different you by twilight. All you need to do is think, in this moment, of who you want to be: then be it. Uproot your life, ignore all your old friends and make new ones. Pretend to be Spanish. Decide to start liking heavy metal. Fake an allergy.

I know it sounds hard to believe — that completely shaking up your existence can be this swift and simple — but it can be. You don’t need money to suddenly become more outgoing. You don’t need a qualification to have your colleagues call you Neptune. You can be anybody you desire in a matter of breaths.

And if in three months time you want to be somebody new: become them, too. Maybe it’s this life you’re struggling with — but you don’t have to end it. Just rewrite it.

I live, therefore I’m alive

Life can be tumultuous. Time, unsteady. People, unstable. And there is certainly no humanual to help us navigate it. But we embark on this journey anyway, because of all the beauty that lines the roads along the way. The strangers that smile at us as we pass them. The friends who’re snoozing soundly in the back. The sunsets dipping below the horizon as we hurtle our way towards them and let’s not forget the four(teen) McDonald’s Drive Thru’s we venture to every hour.

No matter how dark or stormy or silent things might seem, the light will emerge again. The clouds will clear. Your heart will beat once more.

You don’t have to live extravagantly, loudly or in full. You just have to live. Let yourself experience life for all that it’s worth because you are here and you are a (friggin’ stellar) human being.

All you need to do is keep being. One sunrise at a time.

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Oh hey, whilst you’re here: why not put the “em” into your “emails” and lob your name onto my mailing list for weekly em-bellishments on my rose-tinted, crumb-coated lens of life. It’s the equivalent of the reduced section in the supermarket (low value Weird Crap™ that you didn’t know you needed).