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Never Don't Not Give Up Not Never No Way

11 min read

This is a story about paralysis...

Suicide Button

I'm never really unsure of what to do. I generally have a very certain idea of what I want to do and how I'm going to do it. I have a really big problem when I can see all the way to the end, and life seems to be a bit of a paint-by-numbers exercise. I really struggle when life is predictable and routine.

I went to see a psychiatrist on Wednesday. I knew what I wanted from the psychiatrist: to see a clinical psychologist. I also knew what the likely outcomes were if I was honest: to have pills thrown at me and put myself at risk of being locked up on a psych ward. It was a situation that was so predictable, that I was able to forecast exactly which medication the psychiatrist would suggest.

Instead of allowing myself to be sectioned and swallowing the prescribed medication, I ran away. I'm currently 1,200 miles away from home and by the time I get back the system will have forgotten all about me. If I really wanted to get what I need - which is some talk therapy - then I'd have played a completely different strategy. Frankly, I can't really afford to be sitting on a therapist's couch - I've nearly run out of money.

So, I find myself away from my friends and my new home, in a strange city, in a new job. It's very stressful. I'm very anxious. However, it's also novel and therefore a little exciting. Even though I've done similar work a million times before, I'm still a little challenged by meeting new people and learning the particular nuances of the organisation I've just joined. There's a little novelty in the experience, even if ultimately I'll realise that it's the same old shit, and I'll be on cruise control until the end of the assignment.

I'm presently thinking about eating pasta from a plastic pot, having poured boiling water over it from a miniature kettle in my hotel room. I will need to stir and eat the pasta with a shoehorn, in the absence of any cutlery. This is the glamorous life I live.

You may wonder whether the stress of homelessness, near-bankruptcy, drug addiction, brushes with the law and general dysfunction in every area of my life, is something that I regret. No. No I don't regret it. Having been an adrenalin-junkie extreme-sports enthusiast all my life, you can't get more of a rush than playing "go for broke" in real life. It seems inevitable that I would push everything to the limit, including taking life-or-death chances.

It is a little hard to see where the reward is, when my life seems mostly miserable. I've had unbearable anxiety and depression for long periods during the last couple of years. However, I'm not rushing to the doctor and begging for a miracle cure. The deeply distressing feelings I'm having are doing very little to change my behaviour. I almost guarantee that I'll find the urge to self-destruct almost irresistible, if I pull through my latest episode of adversity.

Having lived in a bush in a park, it seems rather more preferable to be living in a hotel like I am now. Having nearly run out of money, it seems preferable to have a well-paid job, like I do now. However, I can't make any sense of life when I swing between impending doom and intolerable boredom. What's the point of living if it all ends in misery and disaster? I'm too busy moving from certain destitution to probable financial stability at the moment, to stop and have suicidal thoughts, but I know that the absurdity of the rat-race existence is already something that I'm not able to ignore - I'm completely unable to relax and enjoy trivial distractions.

Existential angst paralyses me. I wake up and I want to go back to sleep, but I can't because I have to go to work. I get to work and I want to walk out, but I can't because I can't lose this job. I should work but I want to scream "THIS IS ALL JUST UTTER BULLSHIT". Everywhere I look, I see needless complexity; makework. Existence itself is just killing time before our eventual death. Why go through the stressful and exhausting bit in the middle? Why not take the short-cut and just commit suicide?

It's strange to write like this, given that I've overcome the incredible stress of getting this job, travelling over a thousand miles and facing my first nervous couple of days in the office. Given that I'll avoid bankruptcy if I just keep turning up and keeping my mouth shut, why would I be writing about suicide? I'm not even suicidal at the moment. I've entered a strange kind of state, where I'm incredibly anxious, but I know that suicide doesn't make sense anymore. I know that I've gone to strange cities, started new jobs and rescued myself from financial ruin enough times. Why am I even writing about death and disaster?

January.

It's been a very, very long time since I had a stable January. Potentially, I'll still have well-paid work in the New Year. Potentially, I don't have to start job hunting and worrying about money during the absolute shittest time of year. Potentially, I start 2018 with prospects rather than worries.

On the flip side, you might say that I'm stuck in a cyclical pattern and that I keep trying the same thing but expecting different results, except you'd be wrong. I'm trying something that's been staggeringly successful, and the circumstances are different each time. One of these days, there's going to be a combination of favourable factors, as opposed to badly-timed clusterfucks.

Money is a 'trigger' for self-sabotage, one might say. Also, finding myself trapped on a rainy miserable island in the middle of winter is also a 'trigger'. My coping strategy in the past was to jet off to Venezuela or Brazil for a couple of weeks. I had a long successful career doing that.

In order to survive, I'm going to have to orchestrate friends, work, money, a place to live, a passion and a girlfriend. You might scream with frustration at your screen, because we're all trying to get that perfect balance, and there's always one area of our life that's not going as well as we'd like it to. Erm, well... you don't know how good you've got it, actually. Try living in a bush in a park with none of the things I listed, then get back to me. This is not a boo-hoo story - I'm just explaining how dysfunctional my life got. If it helps you to say it's all my fault for making bad life choices or whatever, then knock yourself out, but I'm far too busy figuring out whether there's some way I can rediscover a reason to live to worry about shit like that.

I'm just writing now. I'm brain dumping. I'm trying to write without a filter.

It's possible that I got caught in some thought loops before, and I needed to take a break from my usual blogging topics. It's possible that my blog wasn't helping me at all. It's possible that I'd lost perspective, because I'd been doing too much navel gazing. I took a break and now I've come back.

Now, I'm writing mindful of the fact that I have friends who I've been living with in Wales. I'm mindful of the fact that I've got a friend who helped me get this job. I'm mindful of the fact that I can't afford to put a foot wrong. I'm mindful of the precarity of my situation. I'm mindful of the fact that writing is actually pretty exhausting, and I need to devote quite a lot of my energies into doing a good job and impressing the people I'm working with. I'm mindful of the fact that I have repeated the pattern of boom and bust, and it looks pretty obviously cyclical to a casual observer. I'm mindful of the fact that my consistent perseverance in the face of a headwind might look a bloody-minded and stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality. That's not the case.

There's a prescription for an antidepressant waiting for me at my doctor's surgery back in Wales. Given the chance, I would be institutionalised by the mental health services. Instead, I'm pursuing a ridiculously optimistic and hopeful, yet extremely risky strategy, of attempting to avoid medication and the dead-end of financial ruin and the mire of pathetically paid jobs that're just as soul-destroying as the very well paid job I've got. I'm not happy about being unmedicated, but I wouldn't be happy popping pills either. I'm not happy about having to work a bullshit job, but I wouldn't be happy doing a so-called 'fulfilling' one either (there are none).

"What if you're still depressed and anxious in 6 weeks time?" the psychiatrist asked me. "Wouldn't you regret not having started taking medication sooner?" he asked. What happens if I don't give up though? Wouldn't I regret never finding out what happens if I stick to my guns and persevere? What am I going to find out, that nobody else ever would, because it's too hard?

I didn't mean to write so much, but I've uncorked some of the stuff I've been holding back. I've never regretted writing, despite the seemingly dreadful consequences. Writing has been financially disastrous for me, but yet it's got to be a healthier coping strategy than drink or drugs, or even going to the gym excessively, where I'll strain my heart and give myself arthritic joints.

I imagine that I'll meet a nice girl soon enough, and the pleasure of tactile affection will change my mood. I imagine that my lengthy abstinence from mind-altering substances will pay dividends soon. Already, some feeling has returned to my nerve-damaged foot/ankle. I must surely be somewhat more sharp-witted, now that I'm not taking heaps of pills every day. I must surely be on course to return to a more normal life, since kicking my addiction to stimulants.

I'm going to give myself a big pat on the back for reducing my alcohol consumption to a moderate level, breaking my physical benzodiazepine dependence, reducing my sleeping pill habit to almost nothing, getting off powerful prescription painkillers, staying 'clean' from supercrack for 6 months and otherwise living a pretty damn healthy life. It might not seem like I've done very much this year, apart from work three contracts, survive double kidney failure, survive a suicide attempt and survive a bunch of very traumatic events, but I'm damn well going to go ahead and congratulate myself on having spent a couple of days in my new job in what must be the very best mental health that I've enjoyed all year, even if I'm diabolically depressed and anxious.

Thinking about my achievements a little more, I'm going to give myself an imaginary medal for 30 days of not drinking, 30 days of writing a novel and spending more days clean and sober than I've spent intoxicated by medications, drugs and alcohol. Quitting a whole host of highly addictive drugs and medications, while in the throes of depression and anxiety, is something I'm going to go ahead and actually feel really proud of - sorry, not sorry. While I'm at it, I'm going to give myself another imaginary medal for not writing my blog for 30 days too. That was harder than you'd think.

My verbal diarrea is pretty bad, so I'm going to stop now, but I hope you can see that I'm not idle, even if you think I've been unproductive, lazy and self-sabotaging all year. It pisses me off that anybody might think I don't have a work ethic.

I'm not going to give up on my crazy experiment to see how my mental health is affected by my circumstances by just damn well being patient, consistent and relentless. I'm controlling the variables.

 

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Art, Sport, Acting and Music

6 min read

This is a story about being gainfully employed...

Affordable Art

Follow your dreams, as long as your dream is punching made-up numbers into a spreadsheet, trapped inside a depressing office with no natural light in the middle of an overcrowded polluted concrete jungle, with a horrible commute every morning and evening.

I started a new job this morning. I'm 1,200 miles from home. I had to take a train, a plane and an automobile to get here.

For a whole month, I wrote. That's a lie... I had some days off. I had to get my stuff from London, I had to get my passport from Manchester and I had some days when I just didn't feel up to writing, but I pretty much spent a month as a writer.

In order to indulge my artistic ambitions, I've had to give up a couple of months when I should really have been job hunting. My writing has also lost me lucrative contracts, when my Twitter/blog has been discovered by bosses. As a hobby, it's been incredibly expensive. As a job, it's been financially ruinous.

A friend of mine had two job options when he graduated: writer or computer programmer. He chose the latter, because the salary was five times as much and he wanted to be able to afford luxuries like food and rent. Another friend had the choice between an electric guitar and a computer. He chose the latter, knowing that it would pave the way for a lucrative career. I too have forgone opportunities to pursue academic interests, because of economic incentives.

In fact, we are strongly economically disincentivised from pursuing art. There can only be a handful of Damien Hirsts in the world, while there are millions of penniless artists.

They say that if you're good at something, you should never do it for free. However, how are you going to ever get good at something unless somebody's going to bankroll you while you're bad at it? Nobody is born with prodigious talent. There are also vast numbers of negative people who'll criticise, tell you that you're going to fail and tell you to give up and do something else. There are vast numbers of people who have a vested interest in seeing you fail - they don't want to see you succeed when they're too much of a gutless, spineless, miserable moaning, pathetic, uninspiring and otherwise wimpy excuse for a human being, to actually ever try to follow their dream or support somebody else in following theirs.

Given that it's rewarding to fuck about with paint or clay, stand in front of people singing or playing an instrument, act, play sports and otherwise pursue the performing and creative arts, one might argue that we're never going to be short of people who want to turn these hobbies into jobs. Wouldn't we all be artists if we could?

Here is the present paradigm: given an oversupply of people who'd like to do something more rewarding than the bullshit McJobs on offer, we have fierce competition for just a few slots. Only those who are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths, or those who are lucky enough to have been born into a family that already possesses wealth and fame, will be able to do a job that's fun rather than fucking awful.

Is capitalism working? Isn't capitalism supposed to reward those who work hard? Isn't the whole reason why capitalism's better than other systems of wealth distribution, because it incentivises hard work? What happens when that's no longer true?

The way I see it, we give up our childhoods to study hard, in the hope of getting better jobs. We give up our prime healthy years so that we can have a good retirement. What happens when the pension system is about to collapse and we can't hang on to the money that we've squirrelled away because our children can't afford houses? What happens when we bust a gut to get top exam grades and go to good universities, but there aren't any jobs and the ones there are wouldn't even allow us to afford the cost of living anyway?

Why are we working so hard? Why are we competing?

The competitive element of capitalism seems to have failed to deliver our most brilliant minds into productive endeavours. All those miserable hours of homework don't seem to be benefitting anybody. All those miserable hours spent in a traffic jam or otherwise in the rat race don't seem to be benefitting anybody. All I see is people chasing a dream that seems to slip ever further out of reach. What the hell are we doing, working so hard so that we might be able to one day stop and catch our breath, except we never can?

What happened to the age of leisure?

Of course, I see the irony and hypocrisy of writing this when I've been lucky enough to enjoy career breaks that have enabled me to write a couple of novels. "When do I get to write my book?" some might ask. Yes. I refer you to my previous question.

Something's gone horribly wrong and the prospect of a comfortable retirement is sailing over the horizon. Extrapolating, the prospect of any dreams being realised is an absolute one-in-a-million shot. As opposed to the buy-now-pay-later bogyman that we're all supposed to be afraid of, it seems to me as if we've sleepwalked into a kind of pay-now-never-get-the-benefit kind of dystopia. I really don't understand why people aren't chucking in the towel on their bullshit jobs and writing that fucking book. Why don't students say no to homework, and enjoy their youth? From what I can see, the stress and anxiety of modern life is ruining the vast majority of people's mental health.

I guess there are going to be growing pains, while we shift from a productivity-based capitalist global economy, back to a kind of life where we value human things like staying near our families, seeing our kids grow up and having what we want and need NOW not LATER. I mean, for fuck's sake we're not asking for much and we don't need much. Since agricultural mechanisation, we've been able to feed vast numbers with very little effort. Only about 1% of the UK's income comes from farming and fishing. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

So, as I beaver away in an office working Monday to Friday yet again, I wonder how close we are to that day when we all suddenly decide that enough is enough and we really don't need any more exotic and arcane ways of disguising the fact that what we do all day for 'work' is absolute total and utter horse-shit, for most of us. Why can't we all be artists?

 

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#NaNoWriMo 2017: Day Twenty-One – High Dependency

1 min read

Corn ear

Things I don't reccommend: writing a book in a month without a plan, while live-publishing the draft manuscript.

https://medium.com/high-dependency/nanowrimo-2017-day-twenty-one-81d99267e13e

 

#NaNoWriMo 2017: Day Eighteen – High Dependency

1 min read

Pretty flower

Having some problems posting links on my website. I am still writing. Here's chapter 18:

https://medium.com/high-dependency/nanowrimo-2017-day-eighteen-7f3e582cc89e

 

Novelist

5 min read

This is a story about editing...

Poste Restante Novel

I decided to re-read my first novel. It surprised me just how well it starts - I was prepared to cringe with embarrassment at something that had not stood the test of time well, but it was OK. Later in the book, I fumbled with a couple of things - perhaps I was hurriedly bashing out a chapter, without a clear plan of how the scene should unfold. Towards the end of the book, there was a glaring error that was due purely to a lack of research: I had been a little lazy. The ending tried very hard to be enigmatic, but I imagine that it would have been confusing for many readers, and a little underwhelming.

Wouldn't it be arrogant to assume that I would be able to sit down one day and pen a good novel? Of course my first full-length story was going to be a learning exercise, and I was going to make mistakes. All I had was the first scene, the general plot outline and a twist - I had no idea how I was going to end the story. Writing dialogue is not something I'd done a lot of, so I had to develop that skill as I went along. I would spend quite a long time trying to remember what I had and hadn't told the reader, so that I wouldn't contradict myself or spoil the surprises I had planned. As a learning exercise, it was brilliant.

As November 1st approaches, I'm getting increasingly excited about starting my second novel. My first book explored an individual, and the other characters were purely set dressing in a story which was about loneliness and isolation. My second book will study relationships; societies - my mind buzzes with ideas, because there's so much scope to play around with multiple actors in my new story.

The opening scene is very important, to set the tone for the rest of the story I'm telling. I keep adding little bits to the image I'm creating in my mind - it's so much more than an image. I think about the textures, the mood, the sounds and importantly, the smells. I want to make the book as much an olfactory experience as is possible to do without having to impregnate the pages with scratch-n-sniff chemicals.

It seems amateurish to break the fourth wall, and to be 'so meta' as to talk directly to you, the reader, about the process of writing a work of fiction. To have hijacked my blog to talk about my next book project, is an indication of just how overexcited I am about writing another novel, such that I can't quite contain myself. I'm terribly afraid that I'll be suddenly overwhelmed by the challenge when I start on Wednesday - the blank page in front of me will intimidate me, and I will be afraid to make the first mark.

As I did last year, I plan on publishing my first draft live, as I go along. I'm thinking that I might publish on medium.com this year, so that I'm sharing a popular writing platform with other authors who are partaking in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo 2017).

Many publishers will tell you to shove your manuscript up your arse, if you are foolish enough to tell them that you wrote it during NaNoWriMo. There's quite a glut of crappy unedited manuscripts that gather in the inboxes of literary agents, during December. Like people who join a gym straight after the Christmas holiday season, as a New Year's resolution, those fat unfit faces soon disappear as the year wears on. I know that if have serious intentions of becoming a bestselling author, I will need to become a better editor.

Like I did last year, I'm inviting edits, improvements and suggestions, as the new novel emerges from the depths of my imagination. It was immensely pleasurable, to have my friends trying to guess what was going to happen next, and to be then able to gauge whether the pace that I was telling the story was too fast, too slow, and whether the twist in my tale was too obvious or not.

I had a wonderful girlfriend and her incredibly supportive family, egging me on to complete my book last year. This year, I'm living with friends on a lovely peaceful farm in the Welsh countryside - the kind of environment which would leave most aspiring authors green with envy.

Completing the project - 53,000 words - was the name of the game last year. To actually finish a novel is very hard - many budding writers won't have the discipline to keep up the word count. The initial excitement and energy can quickly dissipate, to be replaced by a sense of dread, when one thinks about returning to the neglected manuscript. This is the brilliance of NaNoWriMo, which encourages you to finish the project within the month of November, and then worry about going back and editing the damn thing. As a completer-finisher, it suits my personality perfectly: what point is there in an unfinished book? Perfectionism will get you nowhere, if you never get to the point of publishing.

Tomorrow I have boring chores to do and I will write an ordinary blog post, which is a deliberate demarkation between "Nick the blogger" and "Nick the novelist". I'm thinking that I'm going to pause my blog, partly because I want to divert my readers to my draft manuscript, and partly because I don't think that I can context-switch between storytelling mode, and blogging mode.

I'm afraid to lose the comfort of writing my blog. I'm afraid that I'm going to fail. However, it's a really exciting time: I'm like a kid before Christmas.

The working title for my next novel is High Dependency.

 

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Kevin Ghora with Vow-er

6 min read

This is a story about life on the farm...

Barbed Wire

Yesterday, I was too depressed to get out of bed. Being awake was horrible - I tried to doze for as long as I could. I was irrationally afraid of having to get up for some reason; on edge that there might come a knock at the door. My friends make me feel incredibly welcome, and I would always have somebody to talk to if I was feeling lonely and desperate, but I also feel like I should demonstrate my willingness to help wherever I can.

Today, it's been sunny and mild; very good weather for the time of year. Hiding under the duvet doesn't feel so bad when it's grey skies and raining, but I feel guilty about wasting the day when it's nice outside. Nice weather can paradoxically make me feel even more depressed.

I'm naturally a restless, anxious and fidgety person. "Where am I going? What am I achieving?" I continuously ask myself when I'm not consumed by a task; fixated on a mission.

At the beginning of the week, I dragged myself out of bed to go to the seaside. It was a drizzly foggy day, so the picturesque beach wasn't going to yield any nice views, but still, it was an outing. Rain-drenched families trudged through puddles. "Why are all these children not in school?" I asked. Apparently, it's half-term school holiday time in England - not so in Wales.

This jarring disparity; this acute difference between what consumes my thoughts, and what most other people are concerned with, is being well highlighted in my current environ. I was cut off from the world in my London apartment. It was wonderful to have the space & time to think & write, but I was very far removed from the day-to-day reality that most of humanity experiences. In the past few weeks, I've been reminded about school-runs, commuting to work and long days in the office, car maintenance, housing, pets, children, cooking and cleaning, although I can claim absolutely zero personal involvement in the running of these affairs - I'm an idle observer; a tourist.

Of course I worry that I'm lazy; worry that I'm mooching; worry that I'm a leech; a parasite.

"Yes, we'd all like to be a thinker; a writer; an artist; an intellectual; a professional layabout" I imagine people saying. "Your art is just a hobby... get a job" is what I imagine people are thinking. I feel guilty for not producing anything more tangible than the words on this page.

I started to get a little stressed about November, when I plan to write my second novel. "How am I going to find the time to write?" I wondered to myself, which must sound a little ridiculous to you. Why am I even writing anyway, when I'm not overtly commercialising my creative output?

There's something more socially acceptable about saying "I'm sorry, I need to write my book" as opposed to just "I'm sorry, I need to lie in bed feeling incredibly anxious and depressed". I wonder if more people would have breakdowns and refuse to go to their stressful and boring jobs, if it wasn't so stigmatised. Wouldn't we all love to just spend all day with our children, and not get out of our pyjamas? Why can't we skip breakfast and have cereal instead of a cooked meal, and completely reject the demands of society?

I feel immense guilt for not having a proper job, spending hours of my life stuck in traffic, being bored to tears by a bullshit job. What's my contribution to society? Why am I allowed to pontificate, when I haven't done my 9 to 5 grind?

I'm not so naïve as to think that the good life doesn't have to be bought and paid for with human misery. For every beautiful countryside cottage set in manicured gardens, nestled in lush green countryside, there is also an immense amount of suffering that's gone into delivering that dream. The children who wait 5 minutes, staring at a single marshmallow on the table in front of them, will receive two marshmallows as a reward for their patience. Those same patient children will shed tears when they are packed off to boarding school, but it'll all be for a good reason one day.

Are we even supposed to be so patient; so tolerant of intolerable cruelty? Are we any happier for all that homework? Are we any happier when we get "A" grades and go on to get a fancy job, miles and miles away from our home and our family? Are two marshmallows sweeter than one?

I feel like the cuckoo in the nest: I'm no genetic relation of the lovely family who I'm living with. Why do I get to enjoy the comfort of a farmhouse straight from the pages of Country Living magazine? What's my contribution to the household? What's my contribution to humanity?

Extrapolating, I can easily imagine that I will have produced my second novel in a little over a month from now, but I will have very little else to show for my time, not to mention the food and energy that I will have consumed. To say that I have been working on restabilising my mental health and attempting to rediscover my reason(s) for living, feels a little untrue given the trajectory of my mood. To turn a blind eye to my very real concerns about the difficulty of obtaining paid employment during the Christmas & New Year period, seems short-sighted - November will be over in the blink of an eye.

Throwing a ball for the dog in the garden, sucking in lungfuls of clean fresh air that's blown inland straight from the Atlantic Ocean, my physical health is undoubtedly improving. I'm seeing an aspect of existence that I'd long forgotten, trapped in a polluted concrete jungle, and surrounded by the seething masses in densely overpopulated cities. This life is so much healthier and happier than the rat race, but I can't afford it - it feels as if I'm enjoying a retirement I haven't paid for.

Perhaps you imagine that my time is free for the pursuit of leisure. Perhaps it is. If so, why am I so damn stressed?

 

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Organic Growth

6 min read

This is a story about aide-memoires...

Pretty flowers

I've been blogging for 779 days, including a period of 120 consecutive sober days and the current stretch of 45 sober days, which totals 165 days. I worked for approximately 300 days (including weekends). I spent circa 60 days in hospital. I had two major periods of drug abuse, six girlfriends, wrote a novel and I attempted suicide seriously once. I've written 702,412 words on the pages of this website.

So, where's it gotten me?

Nowhere and everywhere.

I had no idea I had so much to say; so much stuff that I needed to write about. When I uncorked the bottle, all this stuff just came flooding out - bitterness, resentment, bad memories, as well as strong opinions on myriad subjects. Of course, there was a lot of toxic filth which spewed from my mouth - not everything I've written has been kind and eloquently put. Do I regret what I've written? Sometimes, yes, but on the whole I feel glad I spoke up. I feel ashamed that I wrote some absolute gibberish when I was messed up, but there it is: my soul laid bare for all to see.

To have poured time and effort into sharing stuff on Facebook or Twitter would have left me horribly invested in those walled gardens. To have ingratiated myself with another online community - a discussion forum - would have perhaps been a useful exercise, to give me social contact and a clear purpose, but in some ways I'm glad that I've learned how to work in isolation; to keep up the discipline and routine even when I don't know why I'm writing or what good will come of it.

If nothing else, I can proudly say I'm a writer, of a sort: I'm an eccentric hermit who's lost in his own thoughts. I've got 200 blog posts planned and my next novel to write in November - my mind buzzes with ideas. I'd write long rambling posts that jump around from topic to topic, running to many thousands of words, except that I feel like I've had enough practice of sentence construction and finding my natural voice. Now I'm starting to enjoy a kind of delicious frustration, knowing that I only allow myself to write once a day, and I aim to keep my daily word count to around 700.

As a barometer of my mood, there is nothing finer than writing. I can see all my insecurities, anxieties and my propensity to become obsessive or consumed by things, as clear as day. Of course I fear egocentricity, narcissism, navel gazing and other undesirable labels that might be hurled at me, but frankly the process of writing is an essential pressure-release. Not having this blog made me unspeakably frustrated, because I was grotesquely misunderstood. "Oh, bless you poppet... so full of teenaged angst!" you might patronise me. LOL says I.

My maturing process has been unorthodox, due to relentless bullying and a generally unpleasant start to life that robbed me of my self-esteem and opportunities to be a child, a teenager and a student. I now take my chances where I find them, and delight in acting like a great big kid. Being a late starter in life has its advantages, even if there is a general presumption that I should be better at handling life events, when I actually have not had the benefit of experience - how was I supposed to, for example, get any good at relationships if I didn't have stable friendships, childhood sweethearts or good role models in my parents?

Entering my third year of daily writing, this could be considered my "finals". I've had a few jobs which have stretched to the 4+ year mark, and enjoyed a little more stability with friends and homes in my adult life, than I did through the 8 different schools I had the misfortune of attending. This writing project has provided stability and structure, when my world was blown to bits by divorce.

While the backdrop to my story has changed from hostel to hotel room, to a few different apartments, hospital wards and psychiatric institutions, I've somehow managed to keep writing on a regular basis. I feel like the same person, when I sit down in front of the keyboard, even if there has been a huge variation in the state of my mental health. I know that I have written during periods stimulant & sleep-deprivation induced mania, causing me to pour out thousands upon thousands of words in a confused jumble. However, my mind still makes a surprising amount of sense, despite circumstances which should have tipped me into out-and-out insanity.

I am fearful that the pages of this blog might chart my final decline into a state where I'm rendered permanently useless to the world. I often wonder if I have caused so much trauma to my fragile brain, that it can never recover. If I'm at all paranoid, it's that I'm talking complete nonsense, and everybody is just humouring me while snickering behind my back. "Why didn't anybody tell me I'm writing utter crap?" I sometimes think.

Watching a friend or a stranger careen towards imminent disaster, in a slow-motion car-crash, is something that holds our gaze while also somehow stunning us into silence. I'm vaguely aware that many will be thinking "what can I do?" and be paralysed, without a clear cry for help or call to action. Not only is this the world's longest suicide note, but it's also the world's slowest ongoing crisis, for anybody following along in real-time. It took me a long time to find the guts to finally make a decent attempt at killing myself.

I'm aware now that the burden of responsibility shifts back to me, having received an outpouring of support from unexpected corners, in the wake of my suicide attempt. To resort to self-murder again, would be churlish.

As my mind begins to un-fog from the painkillers I had been taking for most of this year, I wonder whether I have learned anything from the events of the past. I hope I have developed and I'm in a better position than I was, when I was rather trapped in some most unpleasant circumstances, although I find myself in a never-ending cycle - rushing back to work before I'm fully recovered, in order to service debts and otherwise line the pockets of the rich.

Stress keeps me wired, and I wonder when the last time I cried was. Surely, there's a lot of tears that I'm holding back.

I'm tense; agitated; nervous; anxious; hypervigilant.

 

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Long Case

9 min read

This is a story about medical notes...

Hospital Note

My ex-wife - a biochemist by way of undergraduate degree - once screamed at me in an incoherent rage because I had innocently asked her "how big is a protein?" having wondered how many nanometers across, the average protein molecule measured. The sheer audacity of me asking such a question enraged her, perhaps because free thinking is expressly forbidden in an academic world which promotes rote-learning of facts and examinations graded to a marking scheme, ahead of learning.

(The answer, by the way, is roughly 3 nanometres in radius).

When I attempt to answer a difficult question, I sometimes pause and chuckle. "What is consciousness?" came one question. Although I was desperate to talk about weakly interacting subatomic particles, General Relativity and nuclear fusion, I somehow managed to constrain myself to a meaningless analogy, while keeping quiet about my "mind's eye" which could picture every piece of information that captured my entire existence, smeared out in a infinitely thin sphere at the event horizon of a singularity, across all meaningful spacetime for the entire universe that I will ever perceive, which would have been rather a mouthful to express.

Just as one may cram for an exam the night before, I've attempted to only ever amass the prerequisite knowledge that may be considered the minimum viable to navigate whatever situations I have had to endure to reach my goals. Education has never seemed like an end in and of itself, given that our understanding of the fundmental nature of reality is evolving, and the Standard Model of particle physics is rather long in the tooth. Although I find it quite delightful that there are quarks named strange, charm and beauty in the particle zoo, I would find it rather frustrating to dedicate years of my life, obtaining a degree and writing a thesis using tools which may soon look as clunky and outdated as Newton's inverse-square law of gravity.

The mathematicians will mock physics as simply being applied mathematics. The physicists will mock chemistry as simply being applied physics. The chemists will mock biology as simply being applied chemistry, and so on.

Computers are now capable of solving equations and modelling real-world phenomena, potentially making algebra and calculus into dying arts, along with handwriting and long-division. The Fractal Geometry of Nature has revealed that cold rational calculating machines can produce simulations that imitate reality, through repeating patterns. Massive computational power does not only aid human discovery of hidden algebraic equations.

Amid much fanfare, computer software is touted as potentiating new drug discovery by simulating molecular binding, protein folding, rapid gene sequencing and personalised medicine. However, we seem to have forgotten that half the planet is impoverished & hungry, and vast numbers of those who are fortunate enough to live in advanced, wealthy & technologically advanced societies, are suffering from an epidemic of anxiety, depression and other mental health issues that is bad enough to drive vast numbers of men in the prime of their life to commit suicide: the biggest killer of males under the age of 45 in the UK - more than road traffic accidents, drug-related deaths, physical disease, murder, accidents and all the other causes of death.

One should consider that I took leave of my senses in 2008, but since that time I have only managed to attract two clinical diagnoses - convenient medical short-hand - although I have acquired a third which is perhaps the bluntest instrument of the three, and much more of a pejorative than a diagnosis.

"Substance abuse" is a catch-all term which serves me well when I haven't the time & energy to go into detail. Given humanity's long history of self-intoxication, some physicians would consider themselves to be well-versed in the matter. Even the most insulated amongst us, will have struggled to escape contact with a drunk in our lives. We quickly forget, of course, that psychiatry is an extremely young discipline. The isolation, refinement and synthesis of molecules which can short-circuit brain mechanisms, is something that dates back only 70 or 80 years, along with the branch of medicine chiefly concerned with treatment of matters of the mind.

The brain: the most complicated organ in the human body - estimated to have up to a quadrillion neuronal synapses - is often considered only in terms of its vital function as central nervous system, insofar as the same fatty grey matter helps other species to fuck, fight, flee and feed. This does not, however, tell us much about human consciousness, and even less still about pathological thought.

I once sat down and hand-wrote 12 pages of notes, from memory, of every General Practice doctor, psychiatrist and hospital, which I had attended during a 7 year period. Although I kept things as brief as I could, with names, dates and locations, as well as diagnoses and medications, there was a great deal to write. I'm not a complete hypochondriac - there were important notes about my episodes of depression and hypomania, where my mental health had caused me to become significantly dysfunctional.

Perhaps your mind is now skipping ahead - as mine often does - and you're attempting to finish my sentences. Presumably, you're trying to guess the punchline of the joke. I assume you've already got more than enough information to diagnose and treat me.

I'm second-guessing myself here, and I'm struck by the egotism and "navel gazing" of the very act of being sufficiently appraised of my own medical history that I should remember such a level of detail. Who the hell am I to take an interest in my own diagnosis and treatment? Where's my certificate, framed on the wall? Where's the photo of me wearing a mortar board & gown, and clutching a scroll of parchment with a red ribbon tied around it?

When I think about where I should spend my precious time and effort, I'm not motivated by the prospect of being an understudy to a failure. While psychiatry continues to produce dismal outcomes for humanity, in terms of the epidemic of mental health problems, addiction and general societal collapse under the weight of stress and burnout, I'm reluctant to follow in the path of those who are not succeeding in improving the human condition. It should however be noted that I do not for a single moment, criticise the well-meaning intent of those in the healthcare professions, nor do I mean to discredit the lifesaving work that takes place every single day.

The idea of using myself as a case study seems quite ridiculous, but one must consider that it would be unethical to - for example - risk a person's life when there is a treatment available that has been proven to be more effective than placebo.

With a sample size of one, perhaps nothing useful can be gleaned from my first-hand experiences, but I have attempted to corroborate my findings with other evidence wherever possible. I have deliberately avoided areas where another data point would make no difference: what use would it be if I too experienced anorgasmia as a result of SSRI medication, for example?

A great deal of our knowledge regarding the anatomy of the human brain has been gleaned from unethical experiments on unconsenting psychiatric patients - lobotomies, testing of medications and induced seizures. Animal studies have been gratuitously gruesome, with a great deal of unnecessary suffering inflicted upon primates. I'm not an anti-vivisection nutcase, but there must be very tangible goals to justify the means of obtaining the results.

To bathe a brain in psychoactive molecules that will cross the blood-brain barrier, is barbaric when we consider that the theoretical reasons why drugs have the effect that they do - the theories have so often been disproven. The 'chemical imbalance' theory that said that depressed brains had lower levels of serotonin, and that SSRIs would increase levels of synaptic serotonin, has been conclusively disproven, yet it is still a widely-circulated myth.

The much-vaunted sequencing of the human genome looks like a ridiculous white elephant of a project, when we consider that epigenetic gene expression had been discovered to allow genetically identical animals to exhibit completely different physical characteristics, depending on the environment that they have been exposed to.

In a collapsing global economy, education is one of the few sectors that's not feeling the pinch, and good solid science is getting drowned out in a sea of noise: pointless research. There are already excellent animal models which demonstrate that overpopulation and otherwise horrible living conditions, will produce a "behavioural sink" and addiction, in individuals who would otherwise lead happy healthy lives.

It has seemed fairly obvious to me from the start, that my mental health problems have stemmed from the ethical objections I had to the conduct of financial services organisations, and the role of global capitalism in ruining billions of human lives, in pursuit of unrestrained, unregulated and immoral profits, to the exclusion of any and all consideration of long-term consequences. In short: my problems should not be medicalised. I'm having a sane reaction to an insane world.

While this essay goes well beyond the "answer A, B or C" multiple-choice options on the prescriptive menu that is on offer, I feel that this does not invalidate the points I am making.

To have invested heavily in a mainstream education, would be to risk becoming incoherent with rage whenever somebody was so impertinent as to ask a thoughtful question - questions that spring into a mind that's unconstrained by the narrow status quo viewpoint, rote-learned while kowtowing to those with the necessary credentials to approve clones of themselves.

This is not "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge" anti-intellectualism, but instead a suggestion that we don't need so many people who've all read exactly the same books and sat more-or-less exactly the same tests. Moving towards intellectual homogeny is as dangerous as book burning, in my opinion.

In conclusion: this is a convoluted way of saying that you're unqualified to judge me, although you're possibly technically correct if you say that my problems are mostly of my own making.

 

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Habit Forming

3 min read

This is a story about breaking the cycle...

Handful of capsules

Two of these medications are addictive. Half of these tablets are dietary supplements that can be bought from a health food store. As I stop taking three prescribed medications, withdrawal side effects that I'm suffering from include: insomnia, anxiety and panic attacks. Why stop?

If you're doing something that seemingly provides no benefit to your life, but is hard to stop, then why are you doing it?

The list of things that I could be said to have enjoyed habitually has grown to an extensive list that includes sex, spending money, alcohol, stimulant drugs, benzodiazepines, sleeping pills, painkillers, pornography, computer games, reading, arguing with people, work, masturbation, driving fast, junk food, music and just about anything else that makes life liveable. Strangely, my current day-to-day life includes almost none of these things.

Given my natural tendency to binge on anything I enjoy, perhaps it is abstinence that I am now taking perverse pleasure in the over-indulgence of. I barely have the words to describe how truly dreadful it is to be withdrawing from the most addictive chemicals on the planet - abstaining from alcohol & benzodiazepines can be so hard on your body and mind, that you will die from seizures. Why on earth would I choose to go without the things that would salve the aching that my body has for anxiety & stress alleviating substances?

It was suggested to me that my choice to go without all the things that would help me feel better, is akin to a kind of self-harm. Writing this now, I'm inclined to agree. All the stress and anxiety that I have avoided for years is all hitting me like a sledgehammer. Everything I've ever enjoyed and seen as a reason for living, is barred from me for reasons of self-denial.

Perhaps this is a kind of meditation. Like a monk who takes a vow of celibacy, through this difficult period maybe I will learn something that I would not be able to whilst indulging in the terrestrial temptations.

There is a deliberate alteration of my behaviour, of course. I have decided to deny myself alcohol and my prescribed medications (yes, this is in agreement with my doctor, yawn). I could very easily continue to drink alcohol and take pregabalin, not to mention illegal narcotics and prescription drugs which I could obtain through the black market, but I choose not to. I do not stop because I have an incentive to do so; I stop because it is hard and it is interesting - I'd gotten a little bored of my wanton excesses.

I could write and write and write - perhaps the armchair psychologists amongst you will speculate that I have simply transferred all of my multiple addictions into an addiction to writing.

 

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Did You See Me? (DYSM)

6 min read

This is a story about being caught on camera...

TV interview

There was a time before digital cameras and Facebook when it was thrilling to see photographs of yourself that other people had taken: this was the pre-selfie age. There was a time when creating a digital identity was hard - social media wasn't dominated by the big players, and maintaining a homebrew website required expert technical skills and a significant investment of time & effort.

Some enterprising tech boffins created free software that allowed bulletin boards to be created by relative novices - these were forums where internet users could discuss topics, under the banner of a certain hobby or interest. Originally, bulletin boards were telephone numbers you could dial up from your computer, to do the kinds of things we do on the internet today, except that these bulletin boards were isolated communities.

Facebook and Twitter have taken the bulletin board - where we build a community around a common interest - and allowed us to build a community around our personal identity, with the bait of seeing ourselves tagged in photos or mentioned in tweets. On forums, there was a thrill in seeing a thread of discussion getting many views and replies - to be the original author of a popular thread was something to take pride in. We covet 'likes' of our updated profile photographs and our pouting selfies, as we preen our digital identity.

With the ubiquity of smartphones that are capable of capturing and uploading photos and videos, making them instantly available on social media, we are amassing a huge library of images of ourselves, as well as projecting an identity that goes well beyond the people we see on a daily basis, face-to-face.

Our skill in presenting ourselves as we want to be seen - Facebragging - is something that we have had to recently learn, especially as we increasingly mix work colleagues with our close friends, online. Our digital identities can overspill unless we are careful to manage the audience with whom we share things.

A sinister and creepy cyberstalker made a horrifying boast to me:

"I know"

I'm sorry, what? What do you know?

"I've read your blog. I know"

What? What do you know? Have you really read my blog? There's the best part of three-quarters of a million words here - I seriously doubt you've read much, and I seriously doubt you know much.

Those words - "I know" - were said to me by somebody who was making a very important decision. Because of the sheer volume of noise on social media, I'm relatively hard to find. Thanks to my concerted efforts over a number of years I can laugh at anybody's attempt to "know" me - stalkers only scratch the surface. Yes, I am applauding myself for writing so much that even the most determined cyberstalker would be exhausted.

I live in fear of cyberstalking.

Don't we all live in fear of cyberstalking a little bit? There's probably a sex video of you and somebody else that's hidden somewhere on your computer or smartphone. What about all those sexts that you sent between you and your sweetheart? What about all those paedophiles who want to molest your children? What about all those rapists who are following your every move on social media? The world is out to get you.

My fear of cyberstalking is a little different.

I'm now convinced that almost everybody is far too wrapped up in their own self-centred little world, to give two fucks about much of what anybody else is doing. The cyberstalker who said "I know" in a very sinister and horrible way, was intent on harming me just as much as you'd expect of any stalker - zero fucks were given about my health and wellbeing, and a very great deal of harm was rendered to me.

Perhaps I should set my privacy settings to the maximum and erase everything that's personal and accessible to malicious attackers?

To protect myself from a determined cyberstalker would be nearly impossible. Our lives are lived online nowadays - to reject social media and not cultivate a digital identity, will leave me isolated and without access to online communities. To have to always consider how anything I share could be used against me is exhausting, and how am I supposed to ask for help or otherwise indicate to my friends that I'm in trouble? Pretending that my life is awesome and I'm totally OK is ridiculous, if I'm doing it just in case a cyberstalker goes digging.

I'm not suggesting we all post our mother's maiden name, social security number, credit card details and other data that would lay ourselves open to fraud... or maybe I am. In an open and trusting culture, the bad apples are easier to spot - nothing to hide, nothing to fear.

The fact that I've suffered significant financial loss due to a cyberstalker is akin to a kind of fraud that has been perpetrated against me. I'm no fraudster: who I am is plain for all to see. That somebody would steal my data and use it against me is criminal. Why should I be persecuted and discriminated against, because of what dirt you think you've dug on me? It's like a kind of blackmail to use my digital identity against me.

I wonder what kind of person would think that whatever I choose to write on my blog is more important than the facts, which have included things such as being in intensive care in hospital with a 50/50 chance of living or dying. Wouldn't you care about the person - i.e. me - and not about the digital identity? "Are you feeling OK because I was really worried you were going to die?" would seem like the more appropriate human response, rather than the extremely creepy and sinister "I know". I mean, what the actual fuck?

So, I've been cyberstalked, and the stalkers have caused significant harm to me. Just hearing "I know" from somebody who seems to be a respectable member of society, does show that there are some downright evil fuckers out there. However, I stand my decision to be brave and publicise who I am and what makes me tick.

In my experience, it's better to be brave and bold, even if it feels scary and nasty people try to fuck you up.

 

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