This is a story about everything trapped inside my head...

I'm lying awake and my mind is going at a million miles an hour, thinking about all the things that I want to write about, need to write about. There's a lot of my story that still needs to be told before the 13th/14th of May. I'm not sure why anniversaries are important to us humans, but we seem to attach significance to the passage of 365 days and nights.

I want to write an open letter to my Mum, for her birthday on the 13th, but I don't want that to overshadow something more significant that happened at around the same time: The Finsbury Park Fun Run. My parents have become quite irrelevant really, and I'd like to keep it that way. The further they are from my life, the more I feel within touching distance of restabilising, recovering, moving forwards.

My parents will tell you that I shouldn't be thinking about myself at the moment, when there's been a death in the family and another family member is seriously unwell. However, as I've alluded to before, I'm not exactly off the critical list myself. I took a kitchen knife to my forearm only last night, daring myself to open my veins, to end it.

When I came to listen to all my old voicemails at the beginning of this week, there were heaps of messages from my Mum, berating me for not being emotionally available to her. I couldn't believe how I'm supposed to be the responsible, reliable, dependable member of the family, there as emotional support and as a punching bag, for my flakey drop-out loser parents. Ok, so I've thrown off the shackles of wearing a grey suit and being the career-minded sensible and conservative member of the family, after the best part of 20 years in financial services technology and 9 to 5 office humdrum. However, I reject both roles: punchbag & outcast.

I can't be both left out in the cold when I'm having a hard time, but yet supposed to be there for my family when they're having a hard time. Fuck them. Fuck them to heck.

Anyway, I've kept my safety barriers up. There's too much at stake at the moment. I'm under too much pressure and stress as it is, and things are too fragile, the green shoots have only just appeared. I'm not going to have it all go down the shitter because of my damn parents again, rearing their ugly heads at precisely the wrong moment, because they want something.

I already occupy a convenient space for my parents: a talking point. They are friendless, isolated, unhealthy and unhappy. Their abusive relationship is toxic, and the only way that they know how to function is by picking holes in other people, sitting in smug judgement over the world.

Anyway, enough about my damn family already. The sooner I'm disinherited the better. I may revisit the topic of my Mother, in an open letter, but otherwise it should be case closed. The open wound that was my horrible childhood will never heal while I'm still dragged back into that sick, unhealthy family.

END OF RANT

So, what else is going on inside my damaged little noggin? Well, I feel like I haven't really bridged the gap for my readers, between the happy me who had my shit together, and the drug addict homeless guy. There's a period of time that warrants further examination.

I appreciate that what I'm doing - picking at the scab, committing public reputational suicide - is rather strange, hard to deal with, almost impossible to comprehend. If you think about the damage that I'm trying to undo though, and how close I've come to death or permanent insanity (perhaps already there, ha ha!) then you might be able to see why I have to take such a bold step.

Somebody who has been through what I've been through should be suffering much more permanent and irreversible brain damage. I should be attempting to swat invisible insects, perhaps picking off my own skin to get to invisible bugs underneath. I should be shouting at unseen people, hearing voices. I should be consumed by paranoia... convinced that something or somebody is out to get me.

I've certainly unseated my mental health, which has always had dubious stability. I was clearly suffering from a mood disorder before I started putting copious amounts of powerful narcotics into my body. The two things really don't mix well and play nice.

It's hard to be self-aware, and it was certainly surprising when I was told that I was slurring my words and talking really slowly, back earlier this year, when I was swallowing loads of legal benzodiazepines and suffering the cognitive impairment of drug withdrawal from long binges on powerful stimulants.

I'm quite familiar with the brain-killing sluggishness of stimulant withdrawal. Normally it means I'm really sleepy and struggle to hold a coherent conversation or thread of thought. When writing, I might drift in and out of consciousness, and it'll take me ages to finish what I'm writing, which ends up flitting from topic to topic. You can see it in my writing, but it's masked by the fact that you have no idea how long it took me to write.

The benzos leave big gaps in my memory. Rohypnol, the famous 'date rape' drug is a benzo, and the amnesia-inducing effects are presumably what the would-be rapists are looking for, when they're spiking drinks. So, I guess I was spiking my own drinks. Who would do such a thing, and why? Well, another effect of stimulant comedowns is horrible panic attacks and anxiety, as well as disturbed sleep and appetite. Benzos help to calm everything down after a big stimulant binge.

But anyway, I'm getting waaaay ahead of myself. How did it even come to this? How did I even get off the rails in such a bad way?

In actual fact, you don't realise this, but things have improved massively. Things were much, MUCH worse. That's the thing about your journey downwards... you don't even know where you're headed yet. People talk about rock bottom, and I think that's a lot of nonsense. I never reached a rock bottom, but I can tell you that things started out slow, crept up on me and then got the better of me. No rock bottom, but I had to learn some pretty brutal lessons before I got the upper hand.

So, let me give you a little insight into how I became a drug addict. It starts with sex.

SEX ADDICTION

I've written before about experimenting with drugs to enhance bedroom antics, but what I haven't had a chance to write about yet is just how much of an addiction sex was. Perhaps it wasn't an addiction, but it was the yardstick by which I measured happiness and security. If I wasn't getting sex, my life felt pretty meaningless.

A few of my relationships were built on an almost purely sexual basis. One girlfriend, I really didn't find at all attractive, but at least I was getting regular sex. It was somehow important to me in my late teens and early twenties to get a lot of sex. I felt like I was making up for lost time, that I had missed out on a lot of those great experiences of first girlfriends, childhood sweethearts, school crushes etc. etc. I felt like I was 'owed' a debt of sexual gratification.

One of my close friends talks about notches on the bedpost as a way of warding off the relentless bullying endured at school, and it was this exact thing that I was trying to do myself, except I was just doing it with the one girl, rather than being the heartbreaking rogue that he is. Fact of the matter was, my self confidence was probably damaged, not enhanced, by being with somebody I really didn't fancy, and actually felt ashamed that I had 'sold out' and decided to date.

The truth is, I'm actually pretty vulnerable. Very vulnerable in fact. I'm so desperate to be loved, liked even, that I'll accept all kinds of mistreatment and being pushed into things that are really not in my favour. There are desperately needy things, like being friends with people who are just taking advantage of me. Then there is the sexually fucked up thing of having sex with girls I don't fancy, just because I don't want to be alone.

My ex wife was different. I did actually fancy her. I mean, I do kind of corrupt and twist myself though. I found her attractive, but in truth, I also tried to dump her when I realised she wasn't a nice person. I also realised that I wasn't even that compatible with her, the more I got to know her. However, there was one thing that we stuck together for: the sex.

I'm not sure what your relationship with sex is, but mine used to be like this: I felt I had to have it. If I thought I wasn't going to have it, I used to get stressed, upset, anxious. I had more of it than I really wanted, just because I was fulfilling some kind of ritual, reassuring myself that I could have it whenever I wanted. When I couldn't have it, I'd react badly, getting upset or threatening to go off to find it elsewhere.

Basically, I'm pretty sure I had all the hallmarks of a psychological addiction. When my ex mentioned she'd have to be away for a period of time, the pit of my stomach would feel sick. What about sex? Where am I going to get sex? When can I have sex? Will I be able to have enough sex? What if I want to have sex and I can't? This was a major issue for me.

I must be clear: I used seduction rather that coercion to ensure I had a steady supply of sex. I worked my arse off in the bedroom to ensure my ex wanted it as much as me. In a way, I addicted her to sex. I was a sex pusher. I gave her a great time in the bedroom, but my motives were not pure. I wanted her to be available to me, whenever I wanted. It took time, it took effort, but slowly I was building a co-dependent relationship based around sex. It's all we had.

There were other reasons why sex became such an unhealthy fixation in our co-dependent relationship. Namely, she was a really mean person to me. She isolated me from friends and activities I loved, criticised everything about me and generally dragged down my self esteem to the point where I was trapped by a sense of worthlessness and loneliness. All alone in a flat in the middle of nowhere that she insisted we move into. I was miserable as sin.

I'm covering old ground here a little, but it's important to go over this, as this was the groundwork for the really destructive stuff that was to follow.

CO-DEPENDENT RELATIONSHIP

It was always clear that the relationship was unhealthy as hell, and really needed to end, but it was virtually impossible for me to back out of it, because I had so little in my life except for the sex. So many friendships had been damaged and fallen into disrepair. Even my work was suffering because of this all-consuming fuck up of a relationship.

Eventually though, I found a reserve of strength and finally managed to break up with her. This was the catalyst for me forging a more entrepreneurial path. Mingled in with the breakup was some career changes, some business ventures... basically a lot of my pent-up creativity and strength came out in much more positive directions, around the time that we broke up, the first time.

Then, when things were going really well in my life, I decided to try and get back with her. Things were different. The relationship was less destructive, but the way that things quickly developed was deepening co-dependency, with the introduction of sex-enhancing drugs.

Yes, the introduction of drugs into our relationship brought a kind of stability. I've written before about swathes of time at weekends being taken up by the drug-fuelled pursuit of sexual ecstasy. I felt like drugs would bring us closer, and they certainly reduced the arguments, the agression and abusive nature of the relationship. However, it wasn't healthy. It was co-dependency taken to the next level.

With drugs, it's sometimes only a matter of time before you take things up a gear, if you're chasing a high. What started out with some MDMA (Ecstasy, Molly) and GBL/GHB then turned into rampant experimentation across the spectrum of available legal highs, before fatefully arriving at a compound nicknamed NRG-3.

MY FIRST DRUG ADDICTION

This is where the slowly-slowly creeping up thing happens. You feel like you're in control, with your accurate measuring scales and strict rules about dosages and keeping things limited to weekends, but you're playing with drugs that erode your self-control, willpower. I was the sensible one, but I was also a lot of the driving force too... this new level of co-dependency felt a little bit like we were in love and had a stable happy relationship, with me as the architect.

It would be me who carefully researched each chemical, measured doses and made sure we stayed safe. The problem was, I hadn't yet found my nemesis: my drug of choice.

NRG-3 was deemed by me to be too dangerous for us to try, and it remained an unopened packet, a closed Pandora's Box. I was right to treat it with respect... it turned out to be every bit as dangerous as my research had led me to believe.

But, addiction needs a catalyst. Me leaving Cambridge and facing the stress of how to grow my little company to be big enough to employ at least 2 people full time, plus resolve the intractable issue of where to locate the office, reached crisis point. A busy summer of relentless weddings taking up whole weekends was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Me and my ex were absolutely paralytically drunk at her brother's wedding. We had an absolutely almighty row in front of her whole family, and I ended up back home, alone, suicidally depressed. It seemed like the perfect time to try NRG-3.

People talk about drugs being near-instantaneously addictive, and I don't think that's correct. However, the circumstances under which I tried NRG-3 certainly conspired to create brain conditions that were almost perfect for addiction to flourish. I disappeared into the depths of my first ever drug binge. All the rules about dosage and measurement went right out of the window.

So, the rest is history right? Wrong.

Chronic drug addiction still doesn't happen overnight. At the end of my binge, I had an almighty panic attack, got really scared by it, and then life kind of got back to normal... except it didn't. There was now a little devil inside of me that wanted to repeat the experience, and was just waiting for an appropriate moment.

Enter the era of the 'secret drug habit'. My ex talked about my 'drug habit' during our divorce. What utter nonsense. By the time we separated, 2 years later, I was a raging drug addict. There was no hiding a 'habit'... I was actively turning parts of our home into a crack den. However, there was a period of 18 months where I tried my very best to keep the devil at bay, and hide my habit.

I'm actually putting myself in an excessively bad light here. I had no idea that addiction had taken hold so firmly. Yes, sure, it was me who played with fire and got burned. It was me who made bad decisions that led to an ever-worsening situation. However, as I've tried to explain above, one thing leads to another. It's impossible to separate my decision making from my state of mind and the circumstances surrounding it.

So, I started to try to use NRG-3 in secret, which wasn't a problem at first as my company was going down the shitter, so I could use drugs at home when I was supposed to be working, and my ex was at her job. Whether the drugs were the reason why my startup failed, quite possibly, but actually you could say that a terrible relationship was the reason why I did a startup in the first place, which later led to unmanageable stress that was the catalyst for my drug habit... one thing leads to another!

Within a month or so, I thought I was going to die. I was carrying a letter around with me at all times, that basically confessed that I was addicted to powerful stimulants. This letter was going to be given to the doctors at Accident and Emergency, in the event that my heart started giving out, or I went insane or something.

I was a little more proactive than this, and did reach out to community mental health services as well as addiction support specialists, but when I met other 'service users' I felt that my case was unworthy of their time. Meeting child prostitutes who'd had their children taken into care, and had poly-substance abuse issues as well as alcoholism, and grinding poverty... versus me, with my health intact plus a big pile of savings still in the bank. I felt like I was taking the piss by taking up the time of those treatment centres.

This is what I mean by saying that there were lessons I had to learn. I sensed the danger, but I still felt in control. The main problem was a recurrent lie that a lot of addicts tell themselves though: I thought I could use in moderation, and I thought I was better off hiding my problems and trying to fix things on my own, which actually turn out to be contradictory things.

There's a lot of times when drugs are talked about, not as something inanimate, but actually as if they have a life of their own. It's the drugs that are to blame we say, as if they have legs and walked right into your bloodstream all on their own. It's certainly hard to unpick the strange behavioural changes that addiction has on you, from the supposed free will that we all apparently exercise.

What happened to me, during my descent into chronic addiction, was the re-programming of my brain. Whenever my ex would say she was going away or she would be doing something, my brain would instantly say "great, more time to use drugs". When I wasn't using drugs, I was planning the next time I would be able to, anticipating it, aching for it, willing the time to pass more quickly so I could get to my next fix. This didn't happen overnight.

I used to be able to go for a week between getting a fix. Then it shortened to about every 3 days. Then of course, it started to be a daily habit. Then it came to the point where I would pretend to be staying up late to watch TV or something, but just stay awake all night taking drugs. Then it progressed to 'secretly' dipping into a bag of drugs when we were actually in bed together. By the time it gets this bad, you're not exactly hiding your 'habit'... you're practically a chronic drug addict.

Two things happened to significantly worsten the addiction: firstly, I started getting signed off sick for periods by the doctor, which in my mind were to be used 80% for drug taking, and 20% for recovery. I remember when I got signed off for 5 weeks, my very first thought was "great, that's 4 weeks drug taking and 1 week to recover". It had become automatic by then... I didn't choose to think like that... that's what addiction does to you. It changes your subconscious, your priorities, the way you think and act.

Secondly, conflict erupted between me and my ex, and my response was to corner myself. I would go into the spare bedroom, and she would kick and punch the door and scream at the top of her lungs. I was always afraid of her aggressive, violent, abusive side, and this was particularly harrowing when under the influence of powerful drugs or on a comedown, so I tried to barricade myself from these attacks.

THE PRISONER

Being barricaded into a corner, with somebody raging and snarling and raining blows on the only physical barrier that prevents you from being the object receiving the beating, is not conducive to good mental health. Siege tactics were employed, but hunger and thirst don't have the intended affect on somebody so psychologically traumatised, and under the influence of anoretic drugs.

Eventually it got so bad, that my ex could finally see that she was killing me. You can't leave somebody backed into a corner with no food, no drink, no toilet, and not see that your aggression is the reason why somebody is so physically wrecked. It was being cornered that destroyed me, as much as the drugs. It was being cornered that affected my mental health, as much as anything.

By the time we separated, we had entered a dangerous dance, where it was almost routine for her to spend entire weeks keeping me entombed in my sarcophagus. It was unrelenting, the screaming, the shouting, the hammering of fists and feet on the door. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that I felt shellshocked. I was hypervigilent: I could never relax for a second. I was in a state of constant fear, agitation.

If you'd like to blame the drugs in isolation for this, you're wrong. It's quite possible that the addiction would have developed in a different direction, without this mistreatment, but it's certainly true that what I went through was inhumane. I was a prisoner in my own home. Drugs just facilitated this, made me an easier target for abuse. I can barely convey to you the awfulness of being subjected to around-the-clock abuse like that, when so weak and so vulnerable.

Finally, our parents stepped in and enforced a separation to spare my life. I was fucked, and had made a desperate appeal for my release from captivity, to both her parents as well as mine. Mercifully, they arrived and stopped the relentless vigil at my flimsy barrier.

Am I being melodramatic? Well, find yourself a tiny room in your house and lock yourself in there with no food, water or toilet for days on end, with people coming to hammer on the door and scream abuse at you around the clock. See how long you last for. See how your mental health holds up, without even the amplifying effects of a drugs.

Why didn't I run away, go somewhere else? Well, this is where the illogical bullshit that addiction spews into your brain comes in. In my mind, my drug use was still a 'habit' that could be hidden, and it was only when a weekend or holiday arrived that this folly was exposed for what it was. The arrival of a weekend can even come as a surprise to somebody completely in the depths of chronic addiction... it was only the screaming and the yelling and the kicking and the punching that I had any means to mark the passage of time at all.

You have to remember that I was the weakened one here, I was the one in trouble, in distress, cornered and traumatised. You don't fight abuse with more abuse. Nobody's psychological problems were ever cured by screaming at them and cornering them. I had enough on my plate with drug addiction to deal with, let alone an abusive partner.

I did need to quit drugs, get cleaned up... addiction was consuming me and fucking up my life... but, abusing me only prolonged the agony. I learned nothing from being cornered and abused. All it did was to leave me with deep psychological scars.

Separation only opened the door to these psychological issues being resolved, over time. When some friends in London invited me to live with them, I was paralysed by fear of somebody hammering on the door, shouting at me. When I went to stay with my parents, they actually did hammer on the door and shout at me, which is what I had spent days anxiously anticipating... deepening my sense of threat, confirming my worst fears. Obviously, these feelings were irrational, however I had been traumatised to the point where serious psychological damage had been done.

London was chaotic and traumatic in whole new ways, but at least I was eventually released from the prison cell of being trapped in a room with no food, water or toilet. My life imploded to the point where I was actually in full public view, either in hostels or sleeping rough. All privacy, dignity was stripped away from me. I was laid bare for the world to see.

But London led me to social reconnection. Having interactions with people that weren't screaming, shouting, punching and kicking... it started to bring me back to the real world. As I built a network of friends at one hostel, my life started to stabilise. The more human contact, the more friends, the more ordinary conversations and interactions I had, the more normal I felt again, the more my dignity and self-esteem were restored, the more my chances of recovery increased.

RECOVERY

Johann Hari, writes that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but human connection. Addiction is about forming a bond with a drug, when healthy human relationships are not available. I had fallen back into the clutches of an abusive co-dependent relationship, miles away from my fellow startup founders, investors, mentors, family and in a part of the country where most of my friendships had fallen into disrepair due to the all-consuming and destructive nature of the relationship I had with my ex.

Of course I was going to get sucked into drug addiction. It replaced my ex perfectly. It was actually a superior relationship. I had everything that a co-dependent sex addiction gave me, in a convenient powder form. It was this drug - NRG-3 - that allowed me to finally break the habit that was my ex. We finally broke up once and for all, and I knew that it would be easier to quit drugs than to break up with her, so I felt relieved even though I was deep in the hole.

When me and my ex wife separated, I was using heroin, crack, crystal meth, cocaine, speed, diazepam, alprazolam, zopiclone as well as my drug of choice... NRG-3. Within a few weeks, I had cut it down to just some pure Dexidrene, which I was using to get over the worst of the depression and fatigue that would be inevitable after a lengthy period of addiction.

I was using 5mg of Dexidrene per day, to combat fatigue, cravings and poor concentration that would have ruined my recovery. It was a remarkable turnaround, but unfortunately it all got ruined by a complete lack of care for my wellbeing and future survival prospects, in favour of my ex's unreasonable demands to have the divorce processed her way or the highway. I wanted her to just take everything and leave me alone. My life and my health were the most important things. She continued to make my life hell.

Not that it matters, but today I've been abstinent for 7 and a half weeks, but not only that, I'm not drinking any caffeinated drinks or taking anything to help me sleep. I'm 100% drug free, and I'm not suffering unmanageable fatigue or cognitive impairment. I have no motor tics, and I don't have any psychosis or paranoia. This is quite remarkable. Considering how long and how deep this gash in my life has run, it's quite remarkable that I should be as close to normal as I am.

Anxiety and depression are unspeakably horrible forces in my life at the moment. I guess when I think about it, it's to be expected: withdrawal from benzos gives horrible rebound anxiety, and withdrawal from stimulants can trigger deep depressive episodes. The fact that I'm chugging along through a very stressful period of financial problems and job hunting, with very little support from friends & family, while going completely abstintent from all drugs... this is a big deal. It's not every day that people pull through things like this.

I'm sorry that last paragraph ended up a bit back-slapping, self-congratulatory. Certainly, any kind of complacency will lead to relapses. I've fallen foul of thinking "I can quit anytime I want" before, but the next challenge is to try and sustain recovery and put in place all the pieces that make a proper life. Everything was so temporary and fragile before.

Anybody who says "oh yeah, heard it all before" doesn't have a fucking clue what they're talking about. Every relapse has been due to either excess stress, or a collapse of the things I worked so hard to build. Losing all my hostel friends due to the pressures and stresses associated with the life change of moving from an unemployed homeless bum to being a guy working 9 to 5 in an office, plus a breakup with a girlfriend, plus the loss of a contract. Then, facing financial armageddon with a rent to pay and no means to do it, deep in a hole of debts, ridiculous pressure on the project I was working on, and bad mental health problems due to the sustained anxiety and stress I had been under relentlessly for so long, losing friends as well as colleagues when my work contract was no longer sustainable and I had to leave a job quite abruptly and inelegantly.

We've all faced bumps in the road, and these hiccups, these hurdles are inevitable. Part of sustainable recovery is once again being able to cope when things aren't going great. However, expecting somebody who's been through hell to be able to cope with an absolute clusterfuck as the challenge to their fragile, delicate, green shoots of recovery... I've got to say... what sort of cruel fucked up world would wish that upon somebody who's trying so hard.

That's fundamentally the driving force behind so many of my bitter, angry rants. I'm just incredulous that I'd be left to flounder by so many of my nearest and dearest, when the distress flares have been going up and the opportunity to rescue an entire ship before it sinks below the waves has been there for the taking. Raising a wreck is hard, when it's at the bottom of the ocean. Better to step in when it's just a little leak in the hull, rather than after the captain and crew have drowned and the boat's sunk.

It's not anybody else's responsibility other than my own, but you can fuck off if you're going to ring me up and leave me shitty voicemails saying I'm letting friends and family down. You want something from me now? Well, where were you when I needed support?

I know that a lot of friends have been there with support at the most unlikely of times, and in the most dire circumstances. I know it's seemed a little thankless, and that friends have even felt a little used or that trust has been abused. It's really not like that.

Yup, I've made some mistakes along the way. I'm still making mistakes. However, the tip of the iceberg conceals the great mass of the shit that I've been through, and yet, I still maintain some ethics, some sense of a debt of gratitude. I have a functioning moral compass, and I'm honest and acting purposefully towards repaying my friends for their help and support, showing them it was worthwhile, aiming to restore some semblance of a will to live to my shattered life.

That's what you're doing if you help me: you're saving a life. Don't believe any bullshit about 'enabling'... it's true that's possible if I'm wrapped up in active addiction, but I have the ethics, the sense of right and wrong to not ask for anything of my friends that would be squandered on addiction. The truth of the matter is that there are plenty of times, like now, where I'm not an addict. I'm just somebody who's struggling to rebuild their shattered life. I'm less of an addict than you, given that I don't drink tea or coffee, or even take headache tablets.

Yes, you could say I was reckless, I was irresponsible. Not really. I always paid my own way. I always covered my bets. I've kept track of where any debts or favours need to be repaid.

It's true, I felt a little entitled to have a complete breakdown. I felt entitled to lift the burden of responsibility from my shoulders for a time. For a time, I didn't feel guilty for being a risk taker and for the consequences that followed. Most of the consequences were suffered by me anyway.

CONSEQUENCES

Consequences, consequences. I've felt perhaps less than I should have done, but perhaps I have paid in other ways. I certainly feel like I don't want to rack up any more consequences. In fact, I'm back to the position of wanting to end my life quickly and cleanly if it looks like everything's going to go down the shitter again, rather than prolonging the agony and creating more problems for the world to mop up after I'm gone.

I feel a little bad that I would be depriving my sister of a brother, to be there to support her and my niece after my parents are gone, but at the same time I'm aware that I need to keep my distance from my niece, in case I don't make it. An uncle she hardly knew who's now gone is no big deal in the grand scheme of things, and certainly better than a drawn-out endgame that's just continuous "will he make it? won't he make it?" heartache, until the inevitable day that luck runs out.

Maybe you think I'm being melodramatic again, or using emotional blackmail. You think I talk about my suicidal thoughts lightly? You'd seriously call my bluff on this? I really think you'll regret it when I'm dead. I'm obviously not going to feel anything when I'm dead, except sweet sweet relief from a world that's been indifferent to my suffering and pain.

It'd be so easy for me to just decide, and act. I'm a very decisive person. I'm determined, stubborn, brave... everything that could quickly snuf my life out, if the scales tip just that bit too far. I'm keeping score, and if things get too unfair I'll just tip the whole boardgame onto the floor, along with all the playing pieces, dice and cards. You might think it's childish, flippant, knee-jerk, but it's actually cold hard rational, logical.

I feel like the writing I did when I slipped back into addiction doesn't make a fine account of me. I feel like the bitterness and anger towards unresolved issues with my parents made me come across as very unpleasant, as well as obsessively stuck in the past, and even launching tirades against people who only share some of the responsibility. I can't lay everything at the door of my horrible childhood and irresponsible and unpleasant parents. At some point, I have to draw a line that indicates where the division of responsibility lies.

The fact of the matter is though, that you've got to live with yourselves after I've gone. Coulda, woulda, shoudla... that's not going to mean jack squat when I'm gone. There's a smoking gun here. It's going to be hard to say that it was inevitable that I'd meet my untimely demise, when there's a record of periods of opportunity to step in and help, before things got too unmanageable for any human being to endure.

We should be fucking celebrating somebody coming back from the fucking dead. This is a fucking big deal, where I'm at right now. I shouldn't be here. The way I've been treated thus far in my life, I've been left for dead so many times. Aren't you going to fucking learn?

BACK FROM THE DEAD

It's not right to write people off, and leave them for dead. It's not right to nickel and dime people. It's not right to let the bystander effect be your excuse for not stepping in: let somebody else make the first move, surely it's somebody else's responsibility, not mine?

What the fuck happened to collective responsibility? What the fuck happened to a sense of community? What the fuck happened to helping each other out?

Where the fuck did this every man for himself bullshit come from? Are we Darwinian beasts, duking it out in the jungle, or are we a supposedly advanced race living in a modern civilisation?

I watched the film Se7en (Seven) again the other night, and I was taken by the similarity between me and the psychopathic killer. He had filled books and books with his thoughts, and then wanted to make a grand gesture to the world, culminating in his death. He thought that his actions would be studied, that they would make a difference in an indifferent world.

In a way, I'm drinking poison, hoping to kill somebody else. Everything I've done and written since I reached breaking point has in some way hurt me more than it's hurt anybody else. I threw away a very lucrative contract, I destroyed my professional reputation with a large number of individuals, I have spread word about my personal and private problems all over the internet and throughout my network of contact. If you search for my name and any company that I've worked for on Google, there's me.... right there on the first page, for all to see.

Here I am, with my guts hanging out. All my internal organs are on display. All my gory detail is right here, on these pages, for anybody to see.

What's worse, to die with some kind of false reputation? Your friends and family could always hold some mistaken belief about what your life was really all about, in the end. The more lurid details could be discreetly swept under the carpet, to save the blushes of your family, and to preserve your memory in some slightly more wholesome light. Seems like bullshit to me. I want people to know what drove me to the brink and beyond. I want people to have the facts, and decide for themselves. I want a world where we see that the only difference between people are the circumstances that conspire around them.

To say that this writing, this journal, this log, is a gift, that it serves some useful purpose... is grossly arrogant, deluded. However, it's all I've fucking got at the moment. Perhaps I am fighting to clear my name a little. Perhaps I'm not going down without a fight, and I'm taking hostages, taking some people down with me.

It's up to you, dear reader, to decide. I present you with my side of the story. It's up to you whether you dismiss me easily, as a madman and an addict, with no worth to my words. It's up to you whether you remember me as having the potential to be good, or the destiny to be bad.

Personally, I think it's immoral to make bets on living people's lives.

Tags: #parents #childhood #drugs #addiction #depression #suicide #career

This is a story about human connection...

I try to use photos that are a metaphor for what I'm going to write about. I was thinking that the yo-yo could represent mood fluctuations, but I actually think of it more as an autonomous puppet on the end of a string.

I've been feeling like I've lost my way. I've certainly felt like I've pushed just about everybody away that I possibly can. After the 'big confession' around Christmas time, I've felt like I've been fighting to clear my name, to explain and justify myself, my actions, my thoughts.

Obviously paranoia is sometimes a product of drug abuse, and I can certainly see that my brain was getting more and more destroyed as January became February, and then March, and the self destruction was still continuing unabated.

Actually, last night when I went back and reviewed the 214,000 words that I have written to date, I could really see a frightening degradation of my capability to think and express myself, progressing over those 3 months. What shocked me most was how coherent I was in January, and how incoherent I was in March. For some reason, I had imagined that I had been 'on the mend' for a lot longer that just 7 weeks.

I'm acutely aware that the gibberish that I was spouting, plus the repetitive angry rants and axe grinding, made my writing virtually unreadable. I'm still coming to terms with the fact that I've got this bitterness that's still coming out in a very unhealthy and unpleasant way. I'm not sure why I'm still so raw, tender and full of anger and pent-up aggression about things that happened a long time ago.

I think there's a massive amount of insecurity I'm experiencing at the moment, having 'confessed' my darkest secrets, and I now feel very exposed. I feel unlovable. I feel like a failure. I feel like all the things I've been trying very hard to convince people I'm not. I notice that the harder I attack those who I pin blame onto, the more unpleasant I become myself, which shames me.

If you imagine what my life is right now: trying to fight a drug addiction that has nearly claimed my life on a couple of occasions, trying to get a job and get back into a sustainable routine, anxious about servicing my debts and paying my rent & bills, with no income. I'm doing this with a supportive flatmate and another friend, but that's pretty much it... for months, this is the only human face-to-face contact I've had.

I had about 20 voicemails I hadn't listened to. When you get into a financially distressed situation you don't really listen to voicemails or answer the phone. It's too much stress.

My mum had left me about 6 messages that were all berating me for not being emotionally available to her, for support and to dump on. Sure, the family is going through some turbulent times, but my own name might easily be added to the list of casualties. Death is closer than you think.

I think about committing suicide every day.

Tags: #bipolar #suicide #parents #addiction

This is a story about getting out of practice...

My friend Ben taught me how to program a computer when we were kids. I floundered on my own for a while when our family moved away from Oxford, to Dorset, but eventually I had managed to write a couple of computer games before I even had any proper lessons at school and college.

I've been a professional programmer for the best part of 20 years, but my recent ups and downs really hurt my confidence, and also meant that my skills got a bit rusty. It is a little bit like riding a bike, but the jargon changes and the syntax of what you have to type looks subtly different, but it's all still the same binary ones and zeros underneath the covers.

I nearly had a meltdown today, when I was set a programming test that's the sort of thing that you'd give to a first year Computer Science student. I feel a little insulted that I'm being asked to do things like that, when I've got such a strong CV. However, IT is riddled with managers, architects and other people who haven't touched code for years and years. I guess it's a test to see if you can roll your sleeves up and get hands on or not.

I'm getting really worried that there's a tech bubble that's going to burst, and bring down the whole economy. When I think that there are so many jobs that are centred around social media marketing, digital campaigns and mining the vast amounts of data that are gathered about website users and their browsing habits... it's all a lot of bullshit. At the end of the day, people have lost sight of the fundamental principle of creating products and services that add value to the real economy.

Why is it that a company can have a massive valuation and raise loads of money, just because the number of people using their website is growing exponentially? Why is it that a bank, or other financial services company, can be one of the most profitable enterprises in the world, when they don't actually produce anything of tangible value? The markets are just supposed to route money efficiently around the real economy, to grease the wheels of commerce.

I started to get panicky all of a sudden, and worry that I won't be able to get myself into a position to weather the storm before it hits. But then, when you think about it, it doesn't matter unless you're just coming up to retirement and hoping to cash in your casino chips and sit on your arse for the rest of your days until you die.

I don't begrudge people their retirement, but considering the huge population growth, the massively extended life expectancy, plus the low birth rates, retiring at the same age as the previous generation is just not feasible.

It is really sad when somebody retires, and they're so burnt out that they hardly get to enjoy it. It seems that life is very much lived backwards. When we are young, fit, healthy, energetic and full of life, we are also heavily indebted and have to work as many hours as we can just to pay the rent and try to keep a car on the road so we can get to work. Then, when we retire, we have heaps of time and money (hopefully) but our health is failing and death is stalking us.

But I'm only talking in abstract terms, because something different happened to me. I didn't quite catch the ultimate wave, but I caught the tail end of a pretty wild ride. For those lucky enough to get into IT at some point from the 1960s to the 1990s, we have enjoyed boom times that seem to have kept rolling.

Perversely, I was a little disappointed when the millenium bug didn't cause every computer in the entire world to explode, as the clock struck midnight and we rolled into Y2K. By the year 2000, I was already bored and disillusioned with programming, and I had even applied to University to retrain as a Clinical Psychologist.

It seems churlish, to be dissatisfied in my position. At the age of 20 I was an IT contractor, taking advantage of the fact that there was a huge brain drain, as most of the best programmers were working on fixing the millenium bug. I had a 20 minute phone interview, and then started work a few days later... doubling my salary in the blink of an eye.

In a way though, you have to consider the bigger picture. How many years of my life were spent locked away indoors, hunched over a keyboard, because I was unpopular and ostracised at school? The bullying I endured was pretty relentless until I finally got to college, so in a way, I have always felt some entitlement to the wealth that compensated those miserable years.

Money doesn't buy you maturity though, and it doesn't repair low self-esteem. It does, however, broaden your horizons. As the year 2000 rolled into 2001, I was taking 5-star luxury holidays around the world. I didn't rub people's noses in it, but I hadn't yet begun to feel that the debt of karma that the Universe owed me had started to balance out.

I bought a yacht and moored it in an expensive marina in Hampshire, age 21, but this still didn't seem exceptional to me. I still felt that I had somehow missed out on a lot of what other people had done: to feel popular, to feel fashionable, to feel loved, and have girlfriends that you really fancied. I still had crushing inadequacies and a poor self-image.

Getting into kitesurfing gave me work:life balance and brought me a social group that finally meant I started to feel like I had friends I'd chosen, rather than just the group of geeks, thrust together for strength in numbers, against a world hostile to us outcasts.

The dead time at work, when I had previously just been struggling with boredom, was now filled with planning kitesurfing trips and chatting with my friends on the kiteboarder forum. My bosses were still happy that the work was getting done, but I was spending 80% of my time and energy looking at wind and tide forecasts, reading and writing forum posts.

Moving to the coast meant access to the beach every day, and eliminated the need to experience kitesurfing vicariously midweek, through an internet discussion forum. However, it also meant I no longer had anything entertaining during the boredom.

Eventually, the boredom led to me obsessing about my job, and pushing hard for promotion, and then to burnout. Work:life balance is important.

I've been trying to piece everything back together again in a way that's not simply hopelessly nostalgic for bygone years. If I can get on an even keel again financially, of course I can start going on kitesurfing trips again, but the really important thing that I lost was the social aspect, and having another passion as well as work, that could keep me busy midweek.

A lot of my fear of getting back into the working routine is that I know that simply living to work is not healthy or sustainable, and I really have very little passion for IT anymore... it's just a job, and a job that I can do blindfolded with one arm tied behind my back.

I am sorry if I come across as ungrateful for my opportunities, but there's more to life than a well paid job, and I have so few of the other elements that make up a happy little life.

Would you believe that some of my happiest times in recent years have been when living in the park or the hostel? There was at least a group of other no-fixed-abode bums like me, and we formed strong social bonds. Having a group of friends turns out to be a lot more important than a healthy bank balance.

So, getting back to work is a necessary evil, but it won't stabilise me and give me any quality of life, you might be surprised to learn.

I overcame that fear, and did that technical test, and I impressed myself that I can still apply myself when I need to. However, it seems a shame that our modern lives drive us to live to work, rather than work to live. I feel certain that this must be behind the mental health epidemic that is sadly getting worse and worse.

I'm going to grow carrots, come the revolution

Tags: #computing #career #bullying #childhood

This is a story about tl;dr...

Creativity loves constraints, although I have gotten rather carried away recently, with my average post length stretching out from under 1,000 words, to now pushing 3,000 words. If you write 3,000 words a day, you're churning out nearly 2 novels every month. It's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) on steroids.

There are lies, damn lies and statistics, but I must admit that I have been gathering browsing data from my website since January. I know, for example, that the average amount of time per day, that a person spends reading my website is 4 minutes and 25 seconds.

On a more interesting note, I can also see the kind of things that people search Google for, and end up finding my website. Here is one wonderful poetic example:

"i want to go to london soon dont worry i dont want to do anything stupid no big hand outs just want to book into re hab strait away or as soon as poss get my teeth sorted and be human again please dont block me might got replys when i am sorted want to leave this funiv life for good want to see my favourite wife i always think of her i went back in hotel but she was gone i wish i had of spoke" -- anonymous

That is, word for word, what somebody typed into Google, and found my website.

Here are some other delightful highlights:

• "methylone made me think wife was cheating"
• "london people fucking on sister"
• "legal highs that make you randy"
• "i do not argue with imbecile i respect myself and my profession"
• "i bully my granny to have sex with me story"
• "fucked my sister wjen (sic.) she was hospitalised"
• "sugar mummy fucking themself"

I think that the person who was searching for a story about bullying a granny to have sex with them is my personal favourite, for some sick reason. I don't like the idea of the story or that kind of perversion, but I like that something so corrupt and awful brought that person to my website. Sucker.

I can see from the statistics that most of my traffic comes from Facebook and Twitter. You would have thought that 6,000 Twitter followers would bring you a lot of readers, but it's only 35% of the total.

Direct means people who have bookmarked or typed in manicgrant dot com. I love you guys & girls... you're my regular readers, who remember my website and keep coming back ♥︎

Organic search is all the screwed up weird stuff that people type into Google... with some of the most precious examples listed above, for your amusement.

Referral is links from other sites, like Reddit. I haven't done much link building, because I like writing, not promoting my website. I write it for me, mainly, to keep friends and family informed secondly, and thirdly, I write because I'm developing a body of work that I hope will at some point become useful for people suffering from Bipolar Disorder, depression and substance abuse.

I like writing on my own website (although it's powered by Known, created by my friend Ben) rather than one of those free blogs that you get from Wordpress or Blogger.com. I like and respect bloggers, but they make up the bulk of your readers when you blog on one of those mainstream websites. I have no idea where my regular readers found me, or why they choose to read my stuff, but it sure as hell isn't one of those "choose random blog" buttons you get on the free blogging sites.

Writing on the public internet feels a little bit like shouting, not whispering your secrets into the hollow of an ancient tree, in a very crowded park. You have no idea who's listening, and how they're reacting to a complete stranger's private life, being brain dumped onto these webpages.

It's only because some individuals have been kind enough to comment and email, that I have any feedback at all, and I know that people beyond my immediate circle of family and friends are getting something out of it.

For all of us, we face off to parents, brothers & sisters, friends, work colleagues, more distant family members and even the public to some extent. We are in the eyes and ears of all these different people, who each perceive something different, and have a different recollection of events.

The reconciliation of the version of your life, imagined by everybody and anybody you ever come into contact with, is a rather impossible thing, when people come and go at different times, and they only know snippets of your story.

Of course it's totally self-absorbed to be a normal regular Joe, who isn't famous for anything, to write something that is so biographical. We think of autobiographies as things that are ghostwritten so that they can be bought as a Christmas present for somebody when you can't think of anything else better to get for them. How completely absurd that a nobody like me should document parts of my life like this!

In a very large way, this is my anti-Facebook. Instead of trying to appear as successful, happy and having my shit together as possible, with lots of photos of me smiling and doing nice things like going out for meals with friends and going on holiday with pretty girls... this is my answer to the fake world of the perfect social media identity.

Of course, I'm playing with fire, using my real identity to write about real events in the most honest and unflinching way that I dare. Naturally, I have had my fears about employers and work colleagues reading this stuff, but the experiment continues.

Frankly, I'm through having to wear a mask, and hide my true colours in order to be considered grey, bland, boring and corporate enough to be allowed into the inner sanctum of bankerland. I'm glad that I lost my last contract, because I was too outspoken about a moral and professional duty to the shareholders.

Now, as I look for a new contract, I do so with less fear than ever before.

The last year in a single graph

Tags: #bipolar #career #mentalhealth #depression #addiction

This is a story about a fresh start...

Why do we believe we can motivate change by shaming people, blaming them, making them feel guilty, placing even more obstacles in their path, isolating them, damaging their self-esteem and denying them the basic respect that every human should expect to receive?

My assumption, from childhood, school and my longest relationship, is that I'm going to be physically and verbally abused, to get me to comply with somebody else's idea of how I should think and act.

If you tell somebody they're "bad" enough times, sometimes, that person might say "screw it" and start acting up to the bad name you've given them. If you always expect the worst from somebody, one day, they might start fulfilling your long-held prophecy.

I saw a satirical cartoon the other day, where a policeman arrests a person doing drugs, because "drugs destroy lives". That person is then tried in court and sent to prison, and of course, they then can't get a job, seeing that they're a convicted criminal. When the policemen then sees that person, now living destitute on the street, the policeman says "I told you so!".

I've been trying to escape the gravity of an abusive relationship for quite a long time now. It's harder than you think. When your partner that you love has no respect for you, and your self esteem is destroyed, you can't expect a person to get back on their feet quickly. You don't know how deep the damage runs.

I've still got the shouting and screaming and battering of doors ringing in my ears. Imagine being shut into a tiny room, with somebody raging and snarling and unleashing a torrent of vicious aggression on the other side of the door. Imagine being trapped in that corner, not knowing when it's going to end, not having any way out.

I'm not looking for pity. I'm trying to explain how a confident, outgoing, gregarious character, with a bright, sunny positive disposition, might end up becoming pale and withdrawn. How that person might end up falling foul of escapist traps, and being brainwashed into believing that they're a "bad", "evil" and "worthless" person.

I've been asked to carry the can, to shoulder a shit-tonne of blame. I've been asked to beat myself up and hold myself accountable for every 'choice' I've made, and every consequence. I'm expected to think of myself as some isolated individual, who acted entirely with free will... I'm not subject to influence of other people, circumstances, my environment. Apparently I'm the first person in the history of the Universe to be in total control of my own destiny.

I don't think it's at all useful, this idea of holding everybody accountable for unforeseeable consequences, or the unavoidable results of being beaten into a corner. Does it really make you feel better, to have subdued a person, where they just resentfully start to parrot your bullshit? Does it really feel like a victory to have abused a person to the point that they submit to your muscle-flexing and intimidation?

Feeling sorry for myself is not going to lead anywhere positive. Yes, if you do wrong by a person, you do give them an excuse to act up, to react. I'm sorry, but if you're going to treat a person like shit, you have given them the mandate to act the way you wanted them to. That's not to say that you've revealed or changed that person's character though. There's no such thing as 'bad' or 'evil' people... we're all shaped by the world around us.

It's taken a hell of a long time to move judgemental, unkind people with no compassion or understanding, away from me. Breaking the bonds with people who were supposed to care - but don't - is a hard thing to do. It's not my job to re-educate those who would rather see a life destroyed than admit they're wrong. It's not my job to soak up the abuse of somebody who's got an axe to grind, and I'm their punchbag.

I don't want to become another bitter, twisted, negative, cynical and bullying individual, out to trample other people in order to get ahead myself. If I can't beat them, I'm not going to join them... I'm going to put as much space between me and them as possible.

When we think about Game Theory, and specifically a game called Prisoner's Dialemma, what strategy would you employ? In this game, the person who rats out their co-conspirator stands to gain the most, by stabbing their partner-in-crime in the back. The person who acts in a positive, giving, trusting way stands to potentially lose everything, even though their motive is to reach the fairest possible outcome.

I refuse to switch my strategy to that used by my persecutors. I refuse to become a backstabber, because then the whole world just turns into a horrible place of mistrust and unpleasantness. I don't want to live in a world where everybody is out to screw over everybody else.

I have literally turned the other cheek. I had the trust that, having received a black eye one side, I would return my face to centre and allow it to be struck the other side, if my abusive partner wished to dish out further unprovoked blows to my head. They gleefully gave me a black eye on the other side, before planting one square in the middle of my face, breaking my nose.

Even with self defence as a reasonable just cause to raise my own fists, I'm quite glad to say that I simply took that beating and stood by my strongly held beliefs that we can't simply descend to the level of animals, and be ruled by our temper, anger, aggression, violence.

When I eventually cracked, it was with glee that I had given this vicious person exactly what they wanted, and they tried to label me as the 'bad guy'. For some crazy reason, I felt guilty about no longer wanting to be the passive punchbag. For some crazy reason I felt guilty about defending myself. For some crazy reason I felt guilty about retreating into a corner, in self-defence.

This abusive partner had the gall to talk about me infringing their human rights, when they had me as a prisoner in my own home. Violence, aggression, verbal abuse... and I was the bad guy for using a door as a shield to protect myself from the blows of their fists, and kicks. That doesn't make any sense.

That was how this horrible, horrible relationship ended, with me having been sealed into my own tomb, a sarcophagus. I had no access to a toilet, food or drinking water, but still it was me who was in the wrong, despite the fact I was completely trapped, dying, in a corner.

When the separation was mercifully forced upon this unrelentingly vicious person, a friend took pity on me and took me into his home, to release me from the place that had become my prison cell.

It should come as no surprise that there was lasting psychological damage from the sustained attacks that I received. However, the expectation - especially from my family - was that I should bounce back immediately and be absolutely fine. They were even surprised to find that given the same treatment: shouting abuse at me, while cornering me, would give the same negative response of me retreating into a position of trapped self-defence, paralysed by fear.

It was me who made the brave steps to start moving forwards. I was living with a generalised threat of abuse, invasion of privacy, being attacked anywhere, anytime. I had gone through the long period of abuse, and been psychologically scarred, but it was me who made the first moves to try and repair the damage.

I tried to allow myself to be even more open to attack. I tried to fight fear with trust. I thought that by allowing myself to be in a vulnerable situation, things would somehow improve. It's very hard to let yourself be vulnerable when you've been so deeply affected by something that's damaged you so deeply.

My attempt to open myself up to abuse by my persecutors backfired spectacularly. Psychologically, I couldn't cope with that level of threat, and it made me act in a very strange way. The net result was that I kept myself hiding in my corner, with absolutely no defence. I spent 3 days paralysed by fear, before eventually being physically attacked by a member of my family who's supposed to love and care for me. I was hospitalised with a major injury. Hardly a success.

Later, I ended up in large hostel dormitories, which meant the total loss of all personal space, privacy... living in a totally exposed way, under continuous scrutiny. Again, you can't imagine how hard it is to be suffering major psychological trauma, while being watched like a goldfish in its bowl by nosey strangers. Many people found it far more entertaining to stare at me, rather than get on with their own lives, mind their own business.

People found me fascinating to sit and stare at. Instead of leaving me alone, moving away from me and the shit that I've been dealing with, they've been drawn to me like moths to a flame. They've pulled up a chair, got out the popcorn and sat back to enjoy the show.

"Oh my god, this is awful" they must have exclaimed. "I know, we can't miss a single second of this engrossing stuff. It's so entertaining" is what they really mean. Nobody recoiled in horror, or could tear their eyes away. They were fascinated, intrigued. Are we so used to seeing pain and human suffering on TV that we genuinely consider it entertainment, a spectacle for us to simply sit back and observe, for our own sick pleasure?

One of my friends, who actually understands a bit of what I've been through, actually managed to convince people that I'm not part of the paid entertainment. I'm not a one man travelling show, for your viewing pleasure. Much to my audience's disappointment, he actually convinced them to go and gawp at something else. That helped. A lot.

Very recently, another friend masterfully diverted attentions from creating an unwelcome storm, an intrusion that would have been unhelpful. He recognised the hallmarks of somebody trapped by psychological trauma, and actually held back those forces that I feared so much, so that some repair work was finally done.

Fools rush in, and first, do no harm. These are good mottos. If you don't understand what somebody is going through, it's not a spectator sport, and you don't know what damage your interference is going to do. Hands off, back away from the person who's trapped in the corner... don't drive them deeper into their attempts to fend off the world.

There's a hell of a long journey to feeling safe and secure in my own home again. It might not seem like it, because the story is a long and complex one, but there's a lot of damage to be repaired and it takes a lot of time.

It's the rushing that makes everything take so much longer. When you expect a person to be magically back to normal overnight, and you do nothing to understand what they've been through, or try to imagine what they're dealing with... that's what keeps a person trapped in a never-ending cycle.

You might think that episodes of illness prove that I'll never be fully better again, but it's actually you who is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you mistreat a person, assume the worst, and act on your own negative views, of course you're going to trap a person into a position they can't escape.

It's hard enough to just deal with the backlog of problems. To have extra obstacles placed in front of you, to have support withdrawn and be left to fend for yourself... those are the reasons why lives get written off, why people sink without a trace.

It's a long game, helping somebody recover, get their strength back, get back on their feet. There are no short cuts, and there are no easy conclusions you can jump to. Even when you start to think you understand what makes a person tick, and you can extrapolate, guess, and work out what their possible future is, you're wrong. As soon as you start writing a person off, you're part of the problem. You're hurting and hindering that person.

I know it sucks to care about a person who's really hurting, and is really damaged. I know it's easier to protect yourself by joining in the attack on that person, rather than taking the harder road of actually undoing the years and years of attacks that an easy target sustains.

Once you've started to be abused and bullied, you get weaker, so you're easier to abuse and bully, and so the cycle continues and gets worse. Everybody wants to be on the winning team, to some extent, and there's an animal instinct to pick on the weak.

I think we should be better than that. We're humans, not wild animals. We need to be better than that.

Damaged people need a clean, fresh start, but you don't know how much baggage they've got. You don't know how much of a burden still rests on that person's shoulders. It takes a lot more effort than you could possibly imagine to give that person a chance of a fresh start, a clean break.

Tags: #divorce

This is a story about the best advice you can get...

Why write to your younger self? You won't be able to act on that advice. It seems like that letter could be concealing regrets, and things you'll never be able to change. That younger version of yourself has gone, and is not able to receive mail anyway.

So, I've decided to write a letter to myself, today. Nobody knows me better than myself. I can't even fully remember what I was like 5 or 10 years ago, let alone 20 or so years ago. I can probably offer some pertinent advice, from a very well-informed vantage point, to my present self, so that sounds more rational to me.

So, here's my letter:

Dear Nick,

Don't freak out, but this is a letter from you, to you. I mean, it's from me, to me (you). Oh, you're smart(ish) so you can probably figure out what I (we) mean. I'm going to write it from me (you) to save confusion, otherwise this letter is going to get very silly.

I'm writing to you to give you some advice, because I'm probably the best placed person to advise you, given that I know everything about you, even your darkest secrets and innermost desires, which are probably one and the same thing.

I know there's this trend of writing to your teenaged self, but you're quite different from 12 or 16 year-old you. You really went through quite rapid changes around age 19, and then another load of big life changes in your early to mid twenties, so writing to that earlier version of yourself doesn't make much sense.

While your childhood shaped who you are as an adult, to some extent, it's not who you are today. You already managed to overcome your shyness talking to girls and your tendency towards introversion and isolation is now something you recognise as unhealthy, which is good.

Your handwriting sure has improved a lot, although it looks to me like you're cheating and using some font that looks a bit like a person has hand-written this. Actually, I know that your handwriting is still terrible, but in the age of computers, smartphones and tablets, who really cares? You're right to not be swayed by dying traditions, like mainstream education & dogma, physical books and rote-learned facts.

You used to be very ruled by insecurity, and it's good that seems to have gone now. You were really trapped into situations that made you very unhappy in the past, because you feared being alone, but now you just seem to go for what you want. It's good that you cut away the things that aren't working for you, although you're still too hesitant to do it, and then you do it in quite a quick and brutal way. Try not to get yourself involved in things you really don't want, and then have to later extract yourself from those situations.

I know you really want to feel loved and like you've got friends there for you. I think you still feel unworthy, and like you have to go to extraordinary lengths to get people to take an interest in you. You're not a jester or a clown, and you don't need to bribe people to like you. It's up to them: if they can see the value in being your friend, you're a rewarding person to know. Getting used by people and then feeling resentful, and acting out passive-aggressively is not a healthy way to get rid of klingons.

You probably need to tone down the way you talk to people at times. I know that you have incredible empathy for people from all walks of life, and you're very mindful that other people might not have had the same life opportunities as you, but you still seem to have this way of making people feel insecure, inferior. I don't know what it is about you, but you can be quite intimidating, even though you don't mean to be.

Frankly though, you're a half-decent guy who tries hard to please everybody. I'm sure you'd benefit from not being so hard on yourself, so self-critical. There's a queue of people around the block who'd like to take their turn telling you what a bad person you are, or criticising your life 'choices' when they don't know their arse from their elbow, so you don't need to join in their ignorant bullshit... be kind to yourself. The world certainly isn't going to be kind to you, even though you try to be kind to people.

Certainly, judging people by your own standards is a disaster. Just because you trust people, try to give people the benefit of the doubt, try to give people chances, try to contribute rather than just taking whatever you can get... that doesn't mean that anybody else is living their life that way. You need to protect yourself.

You're actually pretty vulnerable. People recognise that vulnerability, and try to take advantage of it. I know that you've decided that you don't really care, and you'd prefer to live your life properly, rather than being another mean, selfish, grasping, horrible idiot making up the seething mass of a disgusting majority of people. Make sure you don't turn bitter though. Don't give away more than you can afford to lose. Nobody is ever going to repay those favours or that kindness. Reaping what you sow is bullshit when it comes to being kind and nice to people. The only bonus is that you can sleep at night knowing you tried to make the world a better place.

I'm sorry you haven't had a great deal of luck in recent years in hanging onto a group of friends who you see on a regular basis. It's really not your fault that your supposed support network dropped you in the shit at a critical point in your life, and you sank into depths that put you in a position that not a lot of people come back from.

There was always going to be difficulty in rising back up from a place that nobody expected you to recover from. It's other people's shame that they let you down that is the problem that means you're having to rebuild your life from scratch, not anything bad that you did to them: you owe those people who let you down absolutely nothing.

It's a hard thing, rebuilding your life and making a new group of friends in your mid thirties, and not having any family support. Remind yourself that it's impressive how much you have achieved virtually entirely on your own. Remind yourself how strong you must be as a person to go through hell without a support network close to you.

Try to forget about the pressure you're under to magically become "steady Eddie" again. I know that your family are expecting you to magically become the reliable and dependable member of the family again, in the regular job and doing all the travelling to see everybody plus not requiring any support yourself. I know that your family expects that a magic wand gets waved and everything in your life goes back to normal, and that's an enormous burden, but just forget about them... they're just living in their own selfish little bubble and looking out for themselves. Your life is so perilously fragile at the moment, so you don't need that kind of bullshit.

You know you're lucky to be clinging onto a few things with your fingernails, and you are extremely fortunate to have another chance at getting back on your feet, thanks to a couple of very kind people who've been there for you during your hour of need. You need to make sure you don't screw up that opportunity, even though you're under extreme pressure and stress, sorting everything out in your disintegrating life.

There are a couple of things you've got going in your favour that you didn't have a year ago, and summer is coming soon, so there's a slim window of opportunity. Don't self sabotage!

I know that nobody else understands just how much pressure and stress you're under to fix all the things that got very broken, because you were simply under too much strain. Forgive yourself for breaking down, for cracking under that load. It's not your fault. Anybody in your situation would have reacted the same.

Try to ignore those ignorant idiots who talk about life 'choices' and bad decisions and things like that. They are just smug c**ts who simply have a more comfortable existence and better luck than you. We are all a product of circumstances, rather than good vs. evil. Forget those moralising, judgemental little shits and get on with doing your own thing. You know in your heart that you've always tried your hardest and done the best you could in the circumstances.

If people don't want to hear your story, try to empathise, walk a mile in your shoes, then they're unworthy of your love. They can't sit in judgement over you, when they're no angels themself, and they're just being unpleasant and unhelpful. Why would you want them anywhere near you? Why would you want somebody like that in your life? Good riddance, I say.

Surround yourself with nice people who are kind to you and you value the opinion of, because you know it's not driven by judgemental ignorance. You know deep down that your gratitude and deep drive to reciprocate the love and support you receive means that you're a good person, and you deserve to have friends, companionship, care and some attention.

You're right to keep reminding yourself to be humble, and making sure you don't become too self-absorbed. I know you always think about things in context though, and you do care about what other people are going through too, but just remember to keep it up. You know that it's not a competition, and on the grand scale of things, you've been lucky. Don't fall into the trap of feeling too sorry for yourself, and painting a picture of yourself as some hard-done-by character who's had a really hard life: it's not entirely true, although you have had some shitty stuff happen to you.

People might say "grow up" and "get a life" and "stop going on about old news" or "stop living in the past" but it's OK to go through some stuff, as long as it's part of moving on, developing, letting go. Don't hold onto grudges about the shitty way you've been treated. Just let those people go out of your life, and find positive, inspiring, kind people to replace them. Try and forget about everybody who has trampled you, badmouthed you and written you off... you don't need them.

There are a lot of people out there who feel very entitled. They think about what they want and what they can get and what they need, and don't put any effort into understanding those who are easy targets like you. I know you take things to heart when somebody jumps to the wrong conclusions about you. Forget about those people. They're just trying to destroy other people's lives in order to make themselves feel self-righteous and improve their own self-esteem at the expense of others. You've wasted a lot of time and energy on those narcissists and leeches, and it's time to forgive yourself for trying so hard to be nice to them, and make a relationship work.

You need to learn to be a little more selfish, self-protecting, guarded, while at the same time, you should also remain as humble as you can, grateful for those who have stuck by you, and those very few who are close and have actually stepped in to help you. You need to spend less time and energy trying to convince horrible people of your worth and trying to make them see how much they're using you and hoping that they'll act with some common human decency... it's a waste of time. Try to forget... don't even bother forgiving: they certainly have no forgiveness in their dark little hearts. Instead, concentrate on being positive, and building on those few green shoots that you're really lucky to have. Those people who are kind and care, you should keep close to you, and try to build on that with those who are still there for you, to some extent, because they still care and haven't judged you. They understand, they empathise, they sympathise, they actually care about you as a person, no matter where they are in the world.

I know it's hard, living in this day and age when everybody gets scattered far and wide around the globe, but you're an interesting person who's kind and caring, so you should find people to be in your close support network, wherever you go. Just remember to not turn bitter, not to feel entitled. Remember to keep giving back, feeling gratitude. And don't let insecurity get the better of you. When you find something good, don't grip it too tightly.

Try to slow down a bit. Approach things with a marathon pace, not at a sprint. Everything will get sorted out in the fullness of time.

I know it's frustrating, to have had it all and then lost it, and you want to get back to that happy place you were in age 24 or 25, when you had the friends, the job, the girlfriend, the hobby... your life was quite fulfilling and you felt secure and happy.

You can't fix everything overnight, and even when you start to get things back together, it's going to take time to get back into the rhythm and routine of normal life, and start to build up a safety buffer, to protect you from bumps in the road.

There are going to be setbacks, and I know that you're really fragile and it wouldn't take much to completely wreck your life, but you need to just have faith and act in a positive way, instead of throwing in the towel when you're faced by insurmountable problems. You've added to your own problems when you've decided that everything is ruined, and that you're going to kill yourself as an act of spite.

Everything has been ruined, several times, but you can see that something fairly miraculous has happened every time, but it's dumb to keep deciding that everything is over. You should have learned by now that somehow, everything kinda works out. You are worthy of help, and help does eventually come... even if it is rather late, and not from those people who supposedly love and care about you.

If there's one thing you should have learned from 36 years on the planet, it's that life will always surprise you. Stop trying to second guess, to imagine what the future holds. Even when your future looks bleak as hell, you should know by now that you can turn a corner almost overnight.

Killing yourself would be really stupid: you won't get to find out how the story ends if you do that, which would frustrate the hell out of you.

I know that people think you're attention seeking and stuff, but just forget about those idiots. It's totally like you to do something just to prove people wrong, but you won't exactly be able to say "I told you so" when you're actually dead. Sure, they're total c**ts for calling your bluff and being unfeeling, selfish horrible arseholes, but hurting yourself to hurt them is not a great plan.

If you do end up killing yourself because existing with a world that just wants to be mean and cruel and selfish and ignorant and generally descend into base animal bullshit, where people are just rutting and raping, stealing and generally acting like a bunch of prehistoric beasts... I forgive you, and I understand why you did it. I'm certainly not happy with what I see in the world either. Somebody has to take a stand, and I applaud you for thinking about the big picture. Keep doing that, but try to act in a positive way. You can't actively improve things if you're not around to play a part.

I know you want to make a grand gesture. I know you want to make a big contribution to society, to humanity, but try to do it in a positive, constructive way. Protest suicide, hunger strikes... people are becoming so heartless and beastly that quite possibly nobody would give a shit. It would be a terrible waste of your life, your talents, your energy, your creativity.

You go a little mad at times, and start imagining grand schemes that are maybe a little crackpot, but there is good stuff in there. You'll find a project that is important, and was made for you. In time, you'll make a difference and feel like you're doing what you were made to do. You'll find your true calling, just give it time.

You're impatient, and that's OK because I do understand that you need to rush at things, because certain parts of your life are on fire, or like a ticking time bomb. You only have a short amount of time to shore things up, to lay the foundations and make sure that things are strong enough to withstand the inevitable problems that will crop up over a longer stretch of time.

It's frustrating, I know, dealing with people who don't understand the urgency of making repairs and getting a safety cushion ready, so that you can keep moving forwards. Don't waste your energy chasing any help from those who don't understand the fragility of your situation. Don't waste your breath on people who aren't really going to help... they just like to pretend they're there for you.

It's a tricky time, but remember, if you can do it, you've got plenty of happy contented life ahead of you, and a big chance to achieve something, to make a difference, to make a contribution.

Don't let guilt or judgemental bullshit get in your way. I know you want to be everything to everybody, and you'll have your chance to be there for those people who have helped you, supported you. You have a sense of debt, of karma, of right and wrong. You will make everything right again, and more besides, if you can turn those green shoots into a mighty oak again. But it takes time, don't rush at it.

It's a shame I'm not from the future or anything, otherwise I'd just give you the lottery numbers for tonight or tell you who's going to win the Super Bowl or something useful like that, to give you a buttload of money to solve those cashflow problems.

I think it's good that you're comfortable with everything that's happened up until today, and accept that it's shaped who you are, so it would be ridiculous to wish to change history. It's good to want to be who you are, not somebody else, because it's impossible to change who you are. Keep telling people who think you made bad 'choices' to go fuck themselves. The illusion of free will and all that, yeah?

I like you. I think you're interesting and funny and you try hard. Keep up the good work.

Lots of love,

Nick

Tags: #childhood #parents #friends

This is a story about engaging your mouth before your brain...

Most of what I write is not stuff that is ordinarily shared by people. We bottle a lot of stuff up, and perhaps with good reason, but what happens if your general demeanour means you're a fairly open book?

Sure, it's true that some of my life experiences - mental health problems, drug abuse, homelessness, being arrested by the police - are not things that your ordinary middle-class professional will hopefully ever experience. It is therefore logical that I should keep all these things hush-hush. Pretend they never happened.

I don't think that privacy and anonymity is necessarily helpful, judging by the direction that life is headed for many people who I speak to. We know there is a mental health epidemic, with millions of people laid low with depression, anxiety and a huge spectrum of illnesses affecting the mind. If we don't talk about this, and share our experiences, we suffer in silence.

It seems to me as if Psychiatry has failed. Pills, powders and potions have failed to cure the ailments of our very souls. Something is wrong, broken, with society, and medicine hasn't yet come up with the cures... probably because we are treating symptoms, not root causes.

It's been a theory of mine that we were never evolved as a species to live in such close quarters with one another. Open plan offices and tiny cramped apartments in overcrowded cities certainly make me feel like a lemming: compelled to throw myself off a cliff. It really doesn't help that so many service sector jobs are so soul destroying. Moving paper or electronic money around for the mega wealthy is most of what we do in the rich nations. It's not growing carrots or building houses.

Sure, some of us are tortured artists and entertainers. Some of us create organic artisan jam, or dog's milk yoghurt, or run a creative digital agency where we wear unfashionable clothes and stupid facial hair and ride fixed-speed bicycles to work. These, most surely, are the last days of a dying civilisation.

They say you should never get too close to an iceberg, because they can flip over unexpectedly. You might be rather pleased to be part of the top 1% or even 5%, but while you're sticking up at the top, there's a huge mass under the water beneath. Sooner or later, the massive body of ice that's been held underwater rises up, and the top of the iceberg is plunged into the freezing sea.

The motto of Über is "everyone's private driver" but how can we all have a jet-set A-list celebrity lifestyle? There simply isn't enough landmass to create enough helipads for everybody to be flying around by private helicopter, chauffeur driven around the place, pampered and flattered at every turn. Technology can't make us all rich, famous and able to have an impossibly high standard of living, despite its promises.

With our MacBook Pro and our high-quality digital camera etc. we all feel like a writer, a photographer, an artist. Facebook gives us the impression that people love looking at photos of us, so we must be glamour models. Twitter turns us all into bloggers, preachers, with our followers... our congregation.

There was a time when you could quit your job and probably make a good living selling cup cakes, setting up a trendy delicatessen or being a life coach. I'm not sure if those people who followed their dreams and quit the rat race are happy, but there's certainly not any opportunity to do it today. Things are so competitive. How many cup cakes have you got to sell, in order to have a salary comparable with somebody who shuffles paper around their desk and tries to look busy and important in the office, but is just a tiny cog in a big wasteful machine that doesn't actually produce anything of tangible value.

I'm mortgaging my privacy. I'm selling my soul. By making public every little tiny detail about my private life, including my massive f**kups, I'm potentially headed up a one-way street. If I achieve any kind of infamy, then I'm basically screwed, in terms of re-entering the world of the wage-slave drones.

So, I've got the best part of 6,000 Twitter followers in the space of 6 months. Do you think that translates to pounds in my pocket? Do you think that taking the unprecedented step of writing nearly 200,000 words about a fairly spectacular life implosion, would change my life significantly? Well, the ship has sailed for anybody hoping to get an easy ride, I'm afraid.

I like what I've written. I would defend it, to some extent. It serves as a permanent public record of not only what I've been through in the past, but more importantly, there is a subtle recording of what I was going through during the whole time I've been blogging. You can read my emotions, my moods, the challenges, the stresses... in-between the lines of what's written down.

I'm starting to be accused of being self-indulgent, self-absorbed, but why shouldn't I have this? Why shouldn't I be allowed to scream and wail and tantrum a bit, if I had to be the sensible grey-suited career guy, with the good job and an impressive CV, who had the mortgage and saved money for a rainy day and got married and did everything by the f**king book like I was supposed to. I deferred gratification like a son of a bitch, and there was no f**king pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The cake is a lie.

How many people are discontented? How many people are struggling? Not only struggling with stress and poverty and unpleasant things happening in their lives, but also struggling with the injustice of things, the pointlessness of some make-work wanky job that's completely useless to humanity. Or perhaps the work they can get is just so completely degrading and poorly paid it's not even worth working at all. You might as well just get off your head on drugs and alcohol and dribble while you play computer games or watch terrible trashy TV.

How many kids are getting smashed out of their skulls on cannabis, skunk and legal high smoking blends? How many kids are consuming dangerous amounts of cheap alcohol, simply to become highly intoxicated? What is it about life that these kids want to escape? Why aren't they sharing the anguish, the inner turmoil? Why do they retreat inwards, under the heavy sedation of intoxicating drugs and alcohol?

Now Microsoft and Facebook are hitting headlines, saying they're working on chat bots. The iPhone has Siri, which is supposed to be a kind of artificially intelligent digital assistant, that can understand what you ask it to do, and try and help you. People are delighted when it turns out that you can ask Siri to beatbox, and it will kinda do it, in a weird kind of way.

Why would we be wasting our time talking to computers, when we could be talking to each other? I wrote before about us sharing 21% less on Facebook, in the space of a year. Do we not keenly feel the loss of that connection with real people, who can get in contact and try to make us feel less alone with our problems and our existential crises?

No person is an island, and the isolating existence of interacting more with apps and websites and software in general, instead of with each other is a worrying trend. Ok, so I'm bucking that by providing a veritable brain dump of sharing, which is much akin to verbal diarrhoea, but at least it's putting stuff out there, where there's a chance I can get some help from my friends.

There's obviously a bystander effect, where nobody knows quite what to do when somebody starts having a public meltdown. People just aren't supposed to act like this. Where is my stoicism? Where is my stiff upper lip? Where is my shame? Where is my embarrassment and my intense desire for total privacy?

Nobody wants to be first, and people also worry that they're going to end up feeling responsible. Everybody feels they're already struggling so much to keep their own shit together, that anybody else bleating on about their own struggles should shut the hell up. Look after number one and keep yourself to yourself. Don't you think that could be the root cause of this horrible isolated existence that causes so much damage to our happiness, our sense of wellbeing, our mental health... leading to depression, stress, anxiety, breakdowns, self harm and suicides?

We're in such a hurry to label, to judge, to jump to conclusions. We like to bracket people and problems as quickly as we can. Somebody becomes known as a drama queen, or we tire of their depressed demeanour, the dark clouds that follow them around. We start to stop inviting the killjoy out, or generally interacting with them. Let them wallow in self-pity, right? I'm sure social services or somebody from a government service will step in before they do something stupid. It's somebody else's job. Not my problem. I've got enough going on with my own stressful, meaningless, empty, unfulfilling life that I hate and I'm depressed about.

I'm just typing now. The taps are open and the words are flooding out. I have relaxed my anal sphincter and a torrent of liquid brown verbal diarrhoea is jetting out of my arse and into the toilet bowl of the internet, and nobody gives a shit, because we are all sinking with shit up to our necks. There is a whole World Wide Web of shit out there, and we're all just pumping out this useless effluent into the cesspool of human emotional pain.

Do you think I'm going to look back on this frantic period of writing and recoil with horror when I read it back? I certainly expect that I will be cupping my face in my hands, saying to myself "what the fuck was I thinking?" but it must be about as close as it's possible to get to knowing what somebody's thinking, reading this shite.

I thought to myself that I won't hold back, I won't censor, edit or filter, because I can always tear this down with a click of the mouse. A stroke of the keyboard, and all this is gone and I can deny all knowledge that it ever existed. It's the digital photo that you deleted off your camera or smartphone... those shameful ones and zeros are gone forever.

But you know what? I've not felt the urge to take anything down. I've not felt the pangs of regret at sharing stuff that makes me look really bad. I've given the world everything it needs to pigeon-hole me, to categorise me, to bracket me, to judge me, to dismiss me with a label or an over-simplification of my entire existence.

That's what we want, isn't it? Computer credit scores, and computerised personality profiling, and a computer simulation of a real person, that responds in a predictable and easy to understand way. We don't want real lives, with all their messiness and unfathomable complexity. We don't want to get to know each other, but have to live with the fact that we still don't really know each other. We don't even know ourselves, even if you're an irritatingly self-absorbed little prick like I am, who self indulgently wallows in a world of introspection and deep self-examination.

Show me some more videos of funny cats. Distract me from the banality of my existence. Please don't remind me of the humanity that my fellow Earth residents possess or incite any kind of sympathetic or empathetic response in me. I'm quite wrapped up in my own world of pain and disappointment, boredom and stress. I want to pretend like technology and the advancement of civilisation is going to wave its magic wand and even though I'm fornicating with a person I'm nearly totally revulsed by the more I get to know them, in a filthy home in an overcrowded town, on a hopelessly poisoned planet, everything will be fucking rosy for the screaming brats that end up getting spawned.

What the hell is this anyway? This is what happens when the filter gets switched off. This is my life, with no filter.

I think I was born with no filter.

Look: I bought new socks. I'm sharing the private details of my socks life. Every time I have socks, I'm going to post it up on social media. Socks is supposed to be a taboo subject. Always practice safe socks.

Tags: #privacy #depression #mentalhealth #suicide #career #socialmedia

This is a story about warped perceptions...

The world in which I inhabit is vastly different, depending on the state of my broken brain. Mood fluctuations cause me to interpret things very differently than a supposedly 'normal' healthy individual would.

I've written a lot this year about drug abuse, but I'd like to talk about a time before drugs even entered the story and made the water muddy. I'd like to talk about what it was like from 2008 through to 2012, when my brain was just doing its own thing, without drugs or medication.

If you're a person of prejudice, it won't surprise you to learn that drugs mess you up, but you might be surprised to learn that my mental health problems predated any drug abuse. You might also be surprised to learn that people can recover too, and go back to ordinary life, with nobody any the wiser as to your dark past.

But this really isn't about drug abuse, remember? We're talking about a period of 4 years that predated any psychoactive substances making things all messy and confusing. We're talking about when I first went to my doctor, because I was struggling with my mental health.

I spent just over a minute of explaining to my doctor that I felt completely exhausted, overwhelmed and unable to face friends, family, work or anything... I had drawn the curtains and switched off my phone, and retreated under the duvet, and could barely make it to the doctor's surgery.

"Have you heard of Fluoxetine?" my doctor asked. I said that I had, and that I knew that the trademarked name that it was more commonly known as was Prozac. I said that I had read very bad things about emotional blunting and ruined sex lives of those people who were taking Prozac. I had read Elizabeth Wurtzel's biography, Prozac Nation, where she didn't exactly speak highly of the 25 year old medication.

How sad that the National Health Service (NHS) would be offering some cheap generic pills after only a minute of getting to understand a patient's problems. It takes 6 weeks before an anti-depressant SSRI medication like Prozac takes effect, and it's a fairly serious decision, to put somebody on long-term medication. I think it's a little ridiculous that we don't offer more talk therapy, as a first line of defence.

So, I was diagnosed as having Clinical Depression, within just a few minutes. Something I also knew, but didn't have the time to discuss with my doctor, was that SSRIs can be very bad for people with Bipolar Disorder. I knew my moods fluctuated up as well as down, so I had my suspicions that I was Bipolar, and that was another reason to avoid Prozac.

When you're depressed, everything seems hopeless. I had decided that I was useless at my job, that I hated working in offices, that I hated computers and software, and that I couldn't handle a career in IT anymore. I also lost interest in going out, sex, food... I pretty much just slept, or lay in my bed feeling anxious about the fact that I was off work sick.

After a couple of months feeling like this, I hit upon the idea that I was going to write a computer game for the first generation iPhone, to be ready in time for the launch of the App Store.

Although I had decided that my office-based IT career was over, the idea of programming on my laptop in my garden in the sunshine didn't sound too bad. I knew that the early limitations of the first iPhone meant that I could make a fairly basic game, and compete with other developers. I decided that if only a few people bought my game, it was still a fun experiment.

And so began a period of intense activity. I would work for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, in order to capitalise on those precious early days of the App Store when there were hardly any apps on there. It seems incredible now, that there were only a few hundred or few thousand apps for the iPhone. There was no Android. There was no iPad. There was just one smartphone that created a billion dollar market, overnight.

When we look at that crazy period of my life, when I was churning out apps, it's pretty clear to see that my mood had swung to another extreme. I didn't have time to explain things to people. My thoughts were racing, speech seemed like a frustratingly slow way to communicate, eating and sleeping were an inconvenience, certainly I didn't want to do anything other than work on my apps. I was single-minded to the point of obsession.

In economic terms, things paid off. I got a couple of my apps to number one in the charts, briefly. One of my apps was downloaded 8,000 times in a day once, and another one racked up 500,000 downloads in a month. This was clearly a brilliant gold rush.

I knew that the quality of the apps being released was increasing steadily, and the opportunity for one fast burning out dude in his garden were rapidly diminishing. I started to really hate the work anyway. I had a whirlwind affair as an indie games developer, and it happened so fast that I started to hate it, just like you start to hate any job that you've mastered and has become easy.

Possibly this was a sign of my mood turning again. I had managed a period of several weeks, working at a ridiculous level, and what goes up inevitably must crash down. I hadn't been able to exert myself to such an extent since the school holidays in childhood. There's no way you'd ever be given 6 to 8 weeks to concentrate and just get on and hammer out a project, in a corporate environment.

My mood started to alternate between depression and hypomania (as described above) and I would turn each episode of frantic activity into a period of opportunism, to make money or produce something tangible.

Getting myself back into an office environment and doing some IT contracting re-stabilised me a little bit, and getting a boat so that me and my friends could go wakeboarding was something I was passionate about, and consumed my lunchtimes, after work in the summer, and weekends. My life got back to normal, for nearly 2 years.

During that first depression, I had set certain wheels in motion, however. One particular scheme was retraining as an electrician, while I was working as a programmer still. When I had finished my training, I quickly quit my job.

Going back to an unstructured form of making money, I started working too hard again. Building a business from nothing, to breakeven and hopefully to profitability is not quick and it's not easy. I managed to start getting good clients and increasing my turnover very quickly, through some shrewd partnerships and advertising choices. However, I was extremely inexperienced, and took on way more work than I could manage, sustainably.

I got my new business to the point where it was profitable, and had paid back the initial capital expenditure on training, van, tools etc. but I was burnt out again. I had lived and breathed my business, and only because it was hard physical work, had it lasted slightly longer before my brain was finally frazzled.

Depression reared its ugly head again in 2010, and I realised that I had made a mistake in cutting away from the easy money that a career in IT had to offer. I failed to recognise the importance of a stable working environment though: restricting your hours to 40 or 50 a week, giving yourself weekends off, having the occasional holiday, working with other people who share some of the responsibility and workload... those things are important.

My hypomania started to get a bit more extreme. After reading an enormous pile of books on Particle Physics and Quantum Mechanics and other theories & models of theoretical Physics, I started to read huge amounts of academic papers from Cornell University's online library.

Some of the academic papers that I read were extremely interesting to me, and I emailed the authors to ask them questions. To my surprise, most of them responded, and we started to correspond via email.

Spurred on by this, I started to believe I could author my own paper and get it published, and I developed a hare-brained idea of my own, around a thought experiment that was particularly hard to test in the real world. I eagerly sent my paper off to several academic journals. A couple of the journals even responded... unsurprisingly to say that they wouldn't publish something that hadn't been peer reviewed.

Obviously, it's on the border of a delusion of grandeur to imagine that you might have anything of merit to contribute to a field, after only a few months reading the literature and educating yourself about the deepest mysteries in the Universe.

These delusions are something that I've always been wary of, and I try to be self-aware, but it's fairly clear that there was a progression in the difficulties that I was having with Bipolar Disorder, and the regulation of my moods. I wasn't imagining that I was the next Einstein, but I was having to say to myself "be careful, you're not the next Einstein" and give myself regular reality checks.

I still cringe when I think about some of the emails I sent to very important academics, and how, even though they indulged me, it must have been with slight tongue-in-cheek, to respond to a complete layman such as myself.

After yet more time lost in a pit of despair and hopelessness, where I did very little except for mow the lawn and feed the cat, the iPhone App gold rush cropped up again. This time I decided to sell picks & shovels.

Depressions are very similar to one another. You sleep a lot, you don't do much, everything looks shitty and you hate yourself. My depressions were clearly getting worse, as I started to think about suicide more and more. I started to accumulate more and more paraphernalia with which I could kill myself: inert gas, razor blades, Barbiturates, Cyanide etc. etc.

Periods of hypomania are easier to tell apart, because I can tell you what I was obsessed about in each one: iPhone Apps, boat, megashed, electrical business, physics and then my picks and shovels for the iPhone App gold rush.

I formed another company - Roam Solutions - which was later to become MePublish.com and Hubflow.com. I talked a couple of friends into joining me on my mad escapade, and generally threw everything and the kitchen sink at this particular endeavour.

My new company put on an exhibition stand at London Olympia, Learning Technologies conference, only months after I first conceived the idea for the service we sold. Delivering eLearning was something I knew nothing about, but that wasn't going to stop me.

By the time the winter was over, I had managed to get the company involved with the TechStars network, and we relocated to Cambridge in order to do a 13-week technology accelerator program, where we would be introduced to billions of dollars worth of investors.

13 weeks is just longer than the sweet spot for one of my hypomanic periods, and I was really struggling by the end of the program. Suicidal thoughts were quite intrusive, and I was drinking like a fish. I hated myself, and what felt like lies that I was telling to potential investors. It was a struggle to keep going to the end of the program.

I feel bad that I let 2 co-founders and 11 investors down really badly, when I imploded in September 2011. I never got back on my feet, because of relationship problems and a number of things that eventually led to very bad life choices and a whole world of pain, destruction, devastation.

I don't feel too bad because I'm clearly unwell and because nobody risks their money and a stable job unless they want to try and get rich quick. I genuinely didn't pull the wool over anybody's eyes. There was a big opportunity there, and I'm only partly to blame for everything going tits up. The biggest part, perhaps, but still only partly.

Writing code for iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry, as well as the back-end (serverside code in PHP, Linux administration, database etc. etc.) plus rebranding, raising money and everything that goes with a startup is a hell of a lot to fit into 13 weeks. A crash was inevitable for me: I was too close to the detail, too close to the coal face, too close to the customers, too honest with the potential investors.

At the end of the day, I got my arse handed to me. I was completely spent. I've never experienced such hard work and stress and pressure in my life, although there was a lot of fun too, and I had an incredible time meeting some of the most inspiring people I have ever had the good fortune to cross paths with.

The main lesson I learnt though, was that I really can't ignore my mental health. Even if I avoid clinical labels, like Bipolar Disorder, I definitely have a predisposition to mood instability if I make bad choices. I can't ignore the number of times I've swung between extreme depression and extreme 'highs' which are characterised by massive productivity, and increasingly delusional hopes of being rich and famous.

Things are obviously still very 'up and down' for me, but there is seemingly no end to things that spur on my hypomania. Most recently I ended up working on HSBC's number one project, and being made responsible for a really critical part of that project, by the CIO at the project townhall, in front of the entire team. The facts as they are presented to me, do little to discourage a kind of boom & bust lifestyle.

I guess I could reshape my life around working for 3 to 6 months, and then taking 3 to 6 months as a break to recover from my over-exertion, but I don't think it's very healthy. I'm now faced with the challenge of how to manage my own mental health in a more sustainable way, before I really run out of luck and tread on some toes that get me in super big trouble.

Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.

I really didn't sleep very much while I was at HSBC. Naturally, this started to be detrimental to my mental health. Eventually, I was very sick indeed, and it was hard to continue... I had to go into hospital

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #career #banking

This is a story about social media sharing...

Apparently we are sharing our own words and own photos 21% less on Facebook, in the space of a year. How much of your wall is filled with professionally created content that you have 'liked' and shared, with two clicks of the mouse?

I made a conscious decision to use my own words as much as possible on social media, to the point of writing "like" in the comments instead of just pressing the convenient 'like' button. I've started unfollowing and leaving groups that churn out content that is purely intended to be spread by people sharing on their walls.

The endless lists of things instead of proper articles, the clickbait "when she saw what happened next... she was AMAZED!!" that is intentionally lacking in any further detail, the copy-paste status update, the rebranded memes and quotes and every chain email and internet hoax you've ever seen in your life.

The cat, dog and baby photos are in declining numbers. So, unfortunately, are the status updates that give us a little window into the inner world of our friends, or at least somebody who we spoke to for a few hours several years ago.

Professional content producers whine about ordinary people drowning out their talent and creativity with a wall of noise. The internet should be a library of the same content as would have been found in bookstores, concert halls and theatres, they say. The media columnists say that the internet is OK for conversation, but the articles being discussed should be written by journalists and authors.

When Facebook decides to show us our most liked photos, in an attempt to re-invigorate our interest in the platform, some of us are swayed. We get a flood of birthday messages from friends around the world, because Facebook has told everybody that it's your birthday... according to the date of birth that they have stored. Anyway, it's still nice to feel popular, in that moment.

If we share some content and it gets liked or shared a lot by our friends, we feel proud, like we made a contribution, even if that content wasn't actually created by us. The sad thing, for me though, is the loss of the platform as an actual social tool for staying in touch with friends, and staying abreast of developments in people's lives.

I'm a bit of an oddball character though. I was even writing in newsgroups - a really old part of the internet - using my own name, and back in 1998 I made a real-life friend and climbing partner through a newsgroup. Putting your life in the hands of a stranger from the internet must be the ultimate test of faith in humanity.

We fell out, kind of publicly, when he accused me of putting the life of his child in danger, in the comments section of a photo of some Potassium Cyanide I had bought, that I had posted onto Facebook. I sarcastically reminded him that I had bought it to commit suicide, not to poison toddlers.

[Note: as an aside, I kept the highly toxic substance inside 3 thick layers of airtight nonreactive plastic, and that inside a locked steel box, in my megashed - not even in the house]

I was hurt that some friends chose sides during my separation and divorce from my wife, and I did quite an aggressive purge of friends who I thought were not acting with impartiality. I probably ended up unfriending people who were actually still my friends, but I will perhaps never know.

One of the reasons for starting this blog was because I disappeared into my shell for quite a long time, especially while my ex-wife was vociferously slandering my character. She went on quite a mission to demonise me, certainly not sparing my blushes for any mistake or wrong turn she could possibly turn to her advantage.

But the point of the blog is no longer to embarrass and shame, as I have attempted to do with a certain amount of bitterness and resentment towards those who have judged and acted in ignorance of the full facts, or simply in a way that was unfair, unkind, unpleasant, incorrect.

The reason for the blog has been to walk people through the dichotomy of the wayward geek. The unremarkable guy who was politely spoken, with good manners, who turned out to have developed a dark side during the years when he should have been developing a beer belly and more grey hair.

Social media can be abused by the attention seekers, the sensationalists, apparently. Obviously, I didn't swallow that Potassium Cyanide, nor did I jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, but I did slice down my forearms with a razor blade, along the length of my veins. I don't see any friends on a regular basis, so social media is just about one of the only routes I have to share some of what I'm going through.

It's pretty much madness to put some very personal stuff up in a very public way, to wear my heart printed on my T-shirt, baseball cap, coffee mug and mouse mat, not just my sleeve.

However, I've personally benefitted from the support and kind messages I've received from friends, as well as keeping many more people informed of what's gone wrong in my life and why I disappeared from people's lives quite abruptly. Obviously, I still need those friends in my life, so in a way the telling of this story is the precursor to improving those long-neglected friendships.

Another unexpected thing, that suggests there is good reason to share personal stuff on social media, is that it's prompted a few friends to get in contact and tell me their stories of similar stuff that happened to them. It's kind of made me feel less of a failure, as well as to have deeper, more meaningful friendships with those who want to be emotionally connected, honest, open. The truth about how you're feeling, and bad shit that happened is a good thing. Feeling terrified of anybody ever finding out I ever made a mistake was unhealthy as hell.

Finally, sharing stuff completely publicly, on the open internet, on Twitter, Reddit etc. sounds completely off the wall insane, but to have feedback from complete strangers, to know that somebody who I've never met or talked with in my life has read my complete blog, from start to finish, which is the equivalent of about 3 novels... that's pretty mind blowing.

I'm not sure I've hit the sweet spot yet, in writing stuff that is interesting and useful to a big group of people who are going through hell and feel like they're the only one in the world facing such problems, and therefore a failure somehow, a bad person, defective... they're the people I want to give hope to, as well as collecting lifelines for myself.

I guess if you're friends with me on Facebook, I could be polluting your news feed with unwanted spam, just like the suggested posts and those friends who are using Facebook to promote their product or service to their friends & family a little too enthusiastically. I could just stick to Twitter and Reddit, where only those with a direct interest can 'opt-in' to see my content.

Anyway, I plod on, bucking the trend of contributing original content to social media.

Tags: #socialmedia #friends #suicide

This is a story about grinding to a halt...

I have been enjoying writing immensely, and continuing this blog is certainly no chore. Words still flow effortlessly, but I am floundering a little, as I try to avoid repetition and decide what direction to go in next.

I really need to get another job/contract, and the easiest work to find would be as a programmer. I hate programming other people's systems. They usually haven't stopped to answer the simple question: are we solving the problem in the right way?

Most computer systems that ever get created for a company are CRUD systems. That means they can Create, Read, Update and Delete data. Think about it... how many companies know your name and address? They all want that exact same data. Think how hard it is when you move house, change address, to update all those companies to send their correspondance to the right place.

The thing about creating CRUD software, is that if you've done it once, you've done it the same as you're going to do a million times after that. They're all the same. Garbage in, garbage out. Ok, user interfaces have gotten prettier, and we now employ people specifically to work on User Experience (UX) but it's solving the same old problem in the same old way.

I specialised in something called Straight-Through Processing (STP). The idea that the processing of transactions should be fully automated, wherever possible. This at least means that you're not doing yet another CRUD user interface, and you're building elegant pure software solutions, not just trying to stop a halfwit user from doing something they're not supposed to in the system.

Software still gets boring and repetitive. Most of the software challenge is change management. If you can control the change so that the software is well versioned and releases are well managed, then everything gets much more stable. The amount of time actually spent programming is minimal. It's actually kicking arses and taking names that takes the time. Most corporate systems have been over-complexified by the cowboys and the have-a-go heros.

If I had an hour to spend writing an extra feature, or an hour to analyse some rats nest of a mess that nobody's owning, I'll go for the mess every time. Still, it's all thankless work though, and there is no novelty, no sense of achievement in doing something you've done a zillion times before.

Bitcoin and Blockchain really fascinated me, since 2011, when I read the famous paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

Bitcoin has everything the frustrated programmer could possibly wish for. The original source code is in C++ for a start, which is just a joy to behold... the seemingly impenetrable world of templatised code, where the templates are a complete black art, developed into a style completely unique to each developer.

Algorithms are enticing little puzzles. The one-way hash is particularly interesting to anybody who likes the idea of being a codebreaker or hacker. Trying to find the weaknesses in encryption and hashing is a mathematical, formal logic and computer science challenge. I love thinking about how to reverse engineer a problem like that.

But it's brain-exhausting stuff, having to think about bit shifts, and the endian-ness of your numbers, and all the myriad complexities of a hardcore problem. I can't spend too long thinking about things before I start to worry I'm going to need to take a drill to my skull to try and relieve some pressure.

Using statistical analysis to reduce an important algorithm to an equation with known co-efficients, could make you rich and famous, at least amongst geeks. However, it's the challenge for your mind that's the reason why you'd tackle such a problem. The intellectual stimulation, the incurable curiosity.

Once you start thinking about Bitcoin though, it's hard to stop. It's hard to leave a problem that hasn't completely defeated you. When you know there are still things that you want to try, approaches that might work, it's like an addiction... you keep going back to the hard problem, again and again. Pandora's Box is open and you can't unsee the things you've seen.

Mining never really made me much money, but speculating on the cryptocurrency brought substantial rewards

Tags: #computing #career