This is a story about logical conclusions...

My parents were illegal drug addicts for 30 0dd years, but their logic was that they weren't proper addicts because they supposedly didn't become addicted when they used heroin, cocaine and speed. They used to boast about being "old school" people who were immune from addiction (apart from the drugs they were addicted to, of course).

I was getting pissed off with my parents and ex-wife's assumption that they held some moral superiority over me. I was suicidally depressed, so I obtained all the drugs, to prove that I could take them and then stop taking them, without becoming addicted.

The first thing i got hold of was Cocaine. It didn't do much for me. I could see that taking Cocaine leads to more taking of Cocaine. I was able to see that it was self-reinforcing, but I couldn't really see the point. All that happens in your brain is that it tells you "do that again". There was no enjoyment, only addictive potential.

So I took what was left of my Cocaine, mixed it with baking soda, microwaved it, and made my own Crack Cocaine. Because I was a middle-class homeowner with a similarly highly paid group of friends in professional jobs, I didn't happen to have a crack pipe lying around. My solution was a wine glass over the stove with a drinking straw to catch the smoke.

Crack Cocaine was not pleasant. My heart shot right up to Maximum Heart Rate (MHR) and my nose and mouth were all numb. It was a bit scary actually.

So I bought a rock, and then decided to break a bit off, crush it up and snort it. When that didn't have any effect, I ate the remaining rock. It turns out that Crack is not water soluble. You can only smoke it. I bought another rock and got somebody to show me how to smoke it off a perforated Coca-Cola can. It was shit. Don't waste your money.

Ok, what next? Crystal Meth. So I didn't have a meth pipe, on account of being a respectable member of the community, so I just chopped it up really fine and snorted it. It kind of worked. Not mind-blowing, but there was energy and euphoria there. I could imagine myself getting addicted, and for a week, I did take it. But I couldn't quite see the fuss. It was just like having a massive dose of speed.

I assumed the problem was ROA (Route of Administration) so I bought a pipe. There's something satisfying about watching the stuff liquify and then vaporise. The high is very short lived versus snorting it or eating it though. It also starts to leave you pretty edgy, anxious, paranoid.

So, having tried, Coke, Crack and Meth, there was only really Heroin to complete my 2 week experiment. I bought a gram of No. 3 Afghan Brown. I have no idea what that means. It just looked like dirty brown powder. Given my lack of hypodermic syringe, I decided to try foiling it (chasing the dragon). It's quite hard to stop the damn stuff from running around when it liquifies, and it takes co-ordination to not burn yourself and catch any smoke. My first experiments were not successful.

I decided to use my meth pipe to try and smoke it. It's got a lovely sweet flavour, but maybe that's psychosomatic because you're getting 'high'. I didn't feel high. I felt like I wanted to have a really nice sleep. Solution: put crystal meth AND heroin into the pipe together. Non-injected speedball. Man, that confuses the hell out of your body. On the one hand you're monged out, and on the other you're highly stimulated. Everything takes on a warm yellow glow.

Now I ripped through the Crystal Meth, but I'd barely used half the bag of Heroin. I decided that it was probably too subtle - like Coke and Crack - to even notice addiction creeping up on you, so I flushed it down the loo.

When the Crystal Meth was gone, I looked at the price, and thought "screw that". You can get nearly 30 grammes of Speed Paste (Base) at 70% purity for the price of a gram of Crystal Meth. So I used Speed Paste to manage my nonstop poly-drug usage down to a level where I was functional again.

Then I switched to Dexedrine/Dextroamphetamine. Very expensive, but at least it's slower release and you know exactly what dose you're getting. Was I addicted? Well, it's a very effective antidepressant. Fast acting and long lasting. You don't even get much of a high.

The final route to freedom was Bupropion (legal). It's pretty much like an amphetamine. You get an energy boost, a mood lift, and it takes care of cravings for other things. It makes normal things enjoyable again.

I know it says Zyban, but it's Bupropion and is marketed as the antidepressant Wellbutrin

You can re-enter the world of the living, legally. Bupropion is not a controlled substance. Buy it from India or somebody's leftover prescription from when they tried to quit smoking, and hey presto, you have some semblance of a normal life back.

You can't even take too much Bupropion because you'll just have a seizure. Thankfully my seizure threshold is quite high.

However, the insomnia and anxiety, panic attacks can be quite bad, so it's useful to have some Zopiclone for sleep, and some kind of fast acting benzo for any panic attacks. Zopiclone's not a controlled substance, but most most benzos are. Benzos are physically addictive and abrupt withdrawal will kill you.

You have to do a lot of half-life calculations to get off benzos. Diazepam lasts frigging ages. It was still coming out in my urine 5 days after I stopped taking it. Alprazolam (Xanax) starts to move you in the right direction. Then move on to Zopiclone to get some sleep without being totally monged out the next day. Then there's Zolpidem, which is handy when you're off all the other stuff but you just can't initiate natural sleep. Then you just need to half the dose, then skip every other night, and before you know it, you're free from the Benzo trap.

From top to bottom: Zolpidem (Ambien/Stilnox), Zopiclone, Alprazolam (Xanax)

But, back to the original point. I can know tell my parents and my ex-wife to go f**k them selves, because I've been able to try these drugs, and not become addicted. I just needed to escape their sneering ignorance, and sense of superiority to quit drugs cold turkey. When my life was a living hell with the people who are supposed to care about you but treat you like you're weak, inferior, lacking in willpower, I showed that substitute prescribing could replace harmful hard drugs with medically sanctioned antidepressants and sleep aids. The root cause of the issue was still present though... the people who are supposed to care about me most in the world treated me like shit, with no excuse.

So is addiction a disease? Is addiction a way of treating depression? What's causing the depression? In my case, I was depressed because the people who supposedly loved me wished me dead. The whole thing started out with me wanting to die of a drug overdose, and suddenly I was the bad guy. My ex-wife and Mum absolutely loved the faux sympathy they got from spreading my secrets and painting my problems in the light of somebody who'd done something selfish and didn't love them enough to stop.

You're damn right. If you're going to spread rumours around my family, friends and work colleagues, you might as well just smother that person to death with a pillow while they sleep. That's what you're doing to them. It's not about you, cunts, you'll have plenty of time to grieve when the person's dead. You can't blame the drugs. Drugs didn't buy a gun, come to my house and shoot me.

"How did he die?" people say, and if the answer is "drugs", then the response is "oh, yeah, drugs are so evil". No. Incorrect. Most people take drugs because people treat them like shit and it's a way of escaping the ignorance and the blame. Blame for what? If somebody commits suicide and they never took any drugs, and they leave a suicide note saying "I couldn't take your bullying, and being treated like dog shit anymore" then where does the blame lie?

People are slippery little cunts. I know I keep banging on about it, but my parents have zero respect, and they're liars. For some reason my Auntie wouldn't re-issue a cheque I forgot to cash. For some reason my Dad thought he knew what the f**k he was talking about when I travelled over 200 miles to sell my house. If my ex wanted to get a bunch of valuations, she lives in the local area, she could get as many valuations as she wanted. If I make a trip to sell a house, I sell a house. I had the deal done on the same day, with cash buyers who wanted it all completed in 6 weeks. I battered the Estate Agent down on his fees, and there wasn't a single penny needed spending on the house to get it sold.

Instead, my ex-wife put it on the market with a total fucktard agent, took weeks to put the place on the market, brought us some buyers in a chain who used the most retarded firm of solicitors imaginable, and quelle surprise, the 6 week sale took 6 months.

I actually offered to top up the sale price £7k in cash, if she'd just back the fuck away from financial and property matters she didn't have a frigging clue about. Worst case, I'd lose about £3.5k but I wouldn't have had to pay her a £1k bribe for unnecessary 'decorating', so that puts my loss down to about £2.5k.

It was obvious that there were many tens of thousands of pounds of equity being unlocked, and my parents told me not to worry about short-term cashflow. What a couple of lying cunts. I could have used my good credit rating and low interest rates to bridge the gap, but when I really needed to raise some  money, my parents had put their efforts into telling lies about me. They told people I was addicted to expensive street drugs, and I was as good as dead. The truth of the matter is that as soon as I left that abusive relationship with my ex-wife, my 'addiction' just magically disappeared. Hard drugs bought illegally are expensive. I've probably spent less than £300 on illegal drugs in my life. You see what happens when you lie?

There is a substance nicknamed Supercrack. It used to be sold as NRG-3 for £13.50 a gram. A gram is 1,000 milligrams. A dose of supercrack is around 10mg and lasts 18 hours. S0 y0u can fuck yourself up for 3 months for 14 pence a day. Now, I did get addicted to Supercrack. You can snort it, rub it on your gums, swallow it, put it up your arse, and presumably inject it. The stuff is potent. 10 days without sleep is my record, and then I passed out in my attic hiding from 'police' (there were no police, I was just psychotic).

I'm not even going to tell you what Supercrack actually is because I had decided I was never, ever, ever going to take it. The horror stories were just too much to bear. It's clearly one dangerous drug.

Anyway, thanks to the tabloid press, they alerted me to legal highs, and I read about them all, but nobody knew what was in NRG-3, so I didn't risk it, especially as everybody who'd written about trying it had ended up in hospital. Anyway, when I got home from trying to get enough courage to kill myself by driving into a concrete pillar at 100mph, I decided to try it. I was pretty terrified.

2 days later I heart arrhythmia and was having trouble breathing, having consumed 800mg of a substance you're only supposed to take an absolute max of 30mg of. I wrote a note describing my symptoms, saying what I'd taken and would you please mind taking me to hospital if I was unconscious, and stapled a £20 note to the note. I then walked to the hospital. I calmed down a bit before I got there. I found that it was mostly a psychological problem and my tight pounding chest and shortness of breath went away if I kept my mind occupied.

Anyway, Supercrack became the benchmark. Regular crack, crystal meth, heroin... they're all a bit 'meh!' once you've tried Supercrack. The comedown is so terrible that you are literally convinced you're going to die, but you can always take more until you pass out through sleep deprivation.

The more you take, and the more sleep deprived you get, the more paranoid you get, and the more obsessive you get with completely futile tasks. I spent a whole 12 hours trying to rig up a webcam so I could see if anybody was coming to my house. I spent hours and hours trying to rig up a sheet and a towel as a short of makeshift privacy curtain. You're so obsessive that you keep trying the same thing over & over, even though it didn't work the 999,999 times you tried it before.

The worst part of all, is that you're addicted and psychotically ill, but then the government decides to make Supercrack illegal, but you're already addicted. Is there any plan for those people caught in that net? Is there hell. I managed to wangle myself 28 days in The Priory thanks to a pre-existing mental health problem: Type II Bipolar. However, they call it Dual Diagnosis when you have mental health and addiction problems. The statistical outcomes don't look good for the double whammy.

I could always manage 2 or 3 weeks without a 'fix'. You're so f**ked from 5 to 7 nights without sleep and hardly any food, that you're body is pretty badly in need of those things. The problem is, that all the reasons why you were susceptible to addiction are still there, and everybody's got the same genius idea that taking drugs causes addiction, not a shitty lives that cause people to take drugs.

Everybody assumes that when you're not taking drugs, your life is f**king peachy. Well, normally it's a lot worse than when some selfish shitbag decided to start slandering your character. My own mother said "I can smell the drugs on you" on the morning of my sister's wedding. That's total bullshit. I hadn't been taking drugs, and even if I had, the only thing you might be able to smell is a slight sweatiness, and that's only if you're absolutely so off your nut that your body temperature is getting towards hyperthermia.

If somebody has pupils like saucers in a relatively well lit space. If they have restless legs. If they're talking faster. If they seem to have boundless energy. If their mood seems extremely elevated, they're chatty and confident... those would be giveaways. The smell capabilities of somebody who's nearly 60 and smokes are not going to detect something that a portable mass spectrometer can't. Sure, you can swab surfaces like hands and the inside of your mouth, and detect drugs, but just about the only thing you can smell on a drug addict is self-neglect.

Naturally, I was showered and wearing a freshly dry cleaned suit and laundered shirt to my sister's wedding. I was also wearing body spray and a splash of aftershave. It's people's presumptions that they know f**k all about you and your life that makes life very hard to justify continuing.

I once took a flight out of Heathrow and I was taking Dexedrine at the time. A policeman and his drug dog came over, his dog sniffed me, but he didn't sit down (the signal that the dog has smelt something). It's possible the dog was trained for coke and heroin, but you would have thought that if any animal could smell drugs, it'd be a trained dog,  but you're probably wrong.

I've got a theory that the dogs can't actually smell the drugs or explosives, but they can smell fear. Fear of a dog is a fairly primal instinct for animals, from the time we were preyed upon by packs of canines. For dogs to be able to track the scent of an animal in fear, obviously has huge evolutionary advantages, when hunting. Domesticated dogs are also incredibly good at understanding human body language.

So, perhaps even dogs can't smell drugs. They can just smell fear. You probably want to train a pig if you want it to snuffle for something valuable.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, I quit cold turkey a bunch more drugs than my parents ever have, or indeed most people have. I've done the experiments, and Supercrack is top of the pile. Heroin relapse rates and overdoses are highest (about 40% of heroin addicts will die in a 20 year period, from OD or AIDS) but of the stimulants, Supercrack is way more addictive than regular Crack or Crystal Meth according to my research. I've actually chucked Crack and Heroin down the toilet, just because one addiction at a time is enough to handle.

They actually sell opiates over the counter, legally. You just have to go to about 8 chemists, buy the maximum of 3 boxes of 32 tablets you're allowed to buy of Co-Codomol (8mg of Codeine). So that's potentially almost 768mg of Codeine. You just have to get rid of the 48g of Paracetamol, because that'll f**k up your liver.

Luckily Codeine is soluble below 5 degrees celsius, but paracetamol isn't. So you smash up all the pills, dissolve then, then put a load of ice in there and put the saucepan in the fridge set to 3 degrees for ages. Then you filter the paracetamol out of the liquid. It should weigh the same as the paracetamol + pill filler, once it's dried out. You might want to rechill the liquid and repeat the filtration, just to be sure you get out as much paracetamol as possible.

Then you're left with 768mg of opiate dissolved in water. Enough to kill you. So just drink half. 384mg of codeine is way less than the 450mg that would kill somebody of my weight, 50% of the time (calculated using the LD50 = the lethal dose that kills 50% of people). It's 17% less, so I figured that gave me a 67% chance of surviving. 2 in 3 odds.

I hadn't really reckoned on the fact that I was fairly drunk when I came up with this crazy idea, and that would affect my tolerance, but I did still manage to do the sums and follow some kind of experimental procedure to safeguard my liver from paracetamol poisoning.

Anyway, I had a nice sleep, and everything was kind of 'rose tinted' for a bit. Not what you''d call euphoric, but my problems did kind of melt away. I was soothed. Can't see myself getting addicted. It's not really life enhancing, it's more life avoiding. It's nice to take a day off, but it's not real life, is it?

So, what of Supercrack? Well, I've done 6 months without it, cold turkey. But so what? People will say "oh, that explains everything" even though I made a buttload of cash, got through a divorce, moved house a million times and worked on some incredibly stressful projects. Also, if I had all the money I'd spent on drugs back in my pocket, I'd maybe have £700-800? Remember... Supercrack is 14 pence a day. I spent far more on anti-addiction drugs like Bupropion, less addictive substitutes like Dexedrine and treatment. Let me tell you about treatment.

The way it's supposed to work is that you detox to get your brain back to some semblance of normality. That's a 3 or 4 week process. Then you rehabilitate. All the backlog of shit that hasn't been done because you've been completely dysfunctional is piled up and threatening to topple over and squash you flat. If you try it on your own, you're swamped by stress and depression and pressure, and you're brain is quite rightly telling you that you have to deal with twice the shit of everybody else, because you have to run the household affairs, and deal with the backlog. Actually, it's 3 times the shit because nobody will help you because everybody's been telling people you're an untrustworthy addict

Sure, don't let somebody in active addiction come and stay in your house or lend them money. But what if they detox? What if their game plan has changed from "get drugs, take drugs" to "get friends, get place to live, get job, get hobby, get girlfriend"? Well, you have a little insider information thanks to kind people like my parents and my ex-wife, who like to talk about isolated incidents of behaviour as if they're really talking about character.

"He's dangerously violent, he hit me" is the nice sound bite that condemns a man's character. It's also asymmetric information. The complete statement might read "I used to verbally and physically abuse him, and hit him, and then one of the many times when I was getting aggressive and threatening and he was scared, he hit me" which is behaviour, not character. The next question, to our 'dangerous' man would be, "how do you feel about having hit somebody?". If they say "they deserved it, they got what was coming to them, it felt good to get some revenge" we might doubt the character, but if they say "I feel really guilty and ashamed, and bad about what I did"  then we start to build up a true picture of somebody's character. We can ask the other person, and they might say "he should have stuck up for himself. it made me angry when he wouldn't do what I wanted. it made me angry when I didn't get what I wanted". Now we have discovered the root of why addicts struggle to quit.

It doesn't matter if you're 6 months clean, or 6 years clean, you still know a hell of a lot more about self-discipline and biting your tongue in the face of blatant character slurs, than those who like to taunt and undermine. My parents are dead to me because they can't be bothered to travel 45 minutes to help me, or even see me die in a hospital bed. If I want help, I'll go and get it from somebody who wants to see me succeed, not some arsehole who never leaves the house out of sheer laziness and smugness. If I want help, I'll go and get it from somebody who keeps their promises. There is no excuse for breaking your promise to somebody at the most fragile time in their life. Some pathetic pocket change, 2 and a half years later, probably done without my Dad knowing. It's a joke.

Don't claim you don't owe me anything. You offered help, I didn't ask. Your risk was secured against a huge pile of equity. You owe me for the damage of breaking your promise at the most critical time imaginable.

I blame you for 2 and a half years of setbacks. I blame you for making me so unwell I had to spend £17,000 trying to get better after being hung out to dry for 3 or 4 months. After you f**ked me over.

You owe me the self esteem you stole from me, sending me to school on stolen girls bicycles, dressing me like a fucking idiot, not listening to a single word I said about what was important. These weren't "nice to haves" you stupid cunts. I had to spend 35 hours a week in those c**ting schools. I had to face the consequences of your selfish ignorant decisions, not you.

So if you think I'm going to ask nicely for help: f**k you! So if you think I'm going to be grateful for a pittance of cash, 2 and a half years too late: f**k you! So if you think I'm to blame for having to spend £17,000 on treatment to try and undo the damage you did by breaking your promises and undermining me: f**k you. You think it's helpful to take someone away from their own home, own friends, everything in their life: f**k you.

You sell some f**king stuff and bust your balls photographing and describing stuff on eBay for some pittance.

I came back to London, beat addiction, did a new startup and incorporated a Limited company ready to do some IT contracting. What did you do? Fuck all apart from get in the f**king way and undermine me, so here's the bill:

• 4 months house sale delay mortgage: £4,000
  
  Butt the f**k out of my house sale. I needed a deal done quickly because my ex-wife said she wouldn't wait until my life was stabilised. I did a great deal. You f**ked it up
  
  
• Detox: £10,000
• Rehab: £7,700
  
  Yeah, if you lie to somebody, tell them you're going to support them, delay their house sale by 4 months and leave them virtually penniless, that cost is YOURS to pay. I had enough bitcoins to buy a lifetime supply of Supercrack but I was clean until December. when you started supporting my horrible ex-wife in some bullshit game where she was trying to keep my money from me until March. What a shower of c**ts.
  
  
• Grievous Bodily Harm: £3,500
• Recovery loss of earnings: £18,000
  
  Yeah you remember when you smashed up my leg. Can't really get suit trousers on over a plaster cast. I had interviews lined up. There's this thing called human language. You should look it up sometime. Physical attacks are for animals.
  
  
• Loss of earnings due to stress caused by your recent lies: £6,000
  
  Remember when I had to spend 2 weeks in hospital. No, you can't remember s**t can you, you f**king c**ts. Especially not your promises.
  
  
• Additional expenses occurred because of your recent lies: £2,800
  
  Stay in a hotel you said, because you didn't want me to be stressed out of my mind. I think you'll find it was me who paid, and that kind of wasted money is stressful.
  
  
• Self storage costs due to your lies: £4,000
  
  One day, a nice parent will help their child, until then, they'll always being trapped in a load of shit you made for them
  
  
• Having to borrow from commercial lenders because of your lies: £7,200
  
  Yeah, you remember when you said 2 and a half years ago that you didn't want a stressful divorce, moving house, finding friends, finding a job, getting back on my feet to be a stress when I had many tens of thousands of pounds just waiting to be released from my psychopathic ex-wife? Yeah, you lied.

TOTAL: £64,500

All of this has come out of my own pocket, or is owed to me for the Grievous Bodily Harm.

The time to get you the fuck out of my house, get you the fuck out of my life, shut your lying trap has long expired. You've had your chances to defend me, to make good on promises, and now it's time to add up all the damage you've caused by dragging me somewhere convenient for you and my ex-wife, smashing up my leg and then pretending I don't exist. All the damage caused by the fact that I believed that I could avoid thousands in interest payments if you kept your promises. 

All my f**king time and money wasted coming to see you sitting on your lazy f**king arses talking b**lshit. All you do is criticise and break promises.

So, this is goodbye. I've had enough. I know you'll never settle your outstanding balance. I know you can never be trusted. I know that you robbed my childhood happiness in order to give you just about enough money to sit in your house reading newspapers and watching TV, slowly selling off your assets until you die penniless.

G00d for you that you just did whatever the f**k you wanted, whenever the f**k you wanted to. Good for you that you're so heartless you didn't give a shit about the suffering of your children.

I mutilated my own body to show you how much I hate you. The words in this blog barely express how you've left me totally in the s**t. My Mum would be OK if I could get her away from my Dad's poisonous words. He's so controlling over my Mum that I have to voice record telephone conversations with them, to point out that he's stopping her from loving and supporting her children. When she does help, it has to be in top secret.

My Dad knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. He's the son of a wealthy accountant who sent the kids to private school, and they always had cars and motorbikes, and he fucked about all he wanted, changing jobs because he's a spoiled middle class twat. My Dad could never have afforded to send me to private school or buy me a decent bike, or a decent computer, or do the activities my friends did, or make any contribution to higher education if I wanted to go. He's a classic case of a middle class guy who's fucked up every opportunity and has nothing to show for it.

Yes, my Dad's got some property (which is really my mum's... she's always bankrolled my dad) but it's their pension fund, and they're going to have to sell all of it so I can put them in the shittest nursing home I can find. I want to find one where the patients are degraded every day, bullied by the staff, patronised and talked down to. Yup, that will be poetic justice for the shit they put me through.

I had offered to pay for one of the houses to be set up with a lift, and home nursing care, but f**k that. I'll probably just wait until they've been 2 and a half years dead and then burn half the cash equivalent sum of £50 notes, and mix that in with their ashes, and then scatter them in a sewerage farm. Ashes to ashes, s**t to s**t. Rest in pooh.

I hope you can see from this simple illustration that if you have a hard working son who is doing everything in his power to be self sufficient and generate a substantial income, and a large proportion of that had been earmarked for supporting my ungrateful parents, your belittling of children you don't love, messing around doing things that never make any money, and generally ignoring the distress of your kids, is going to have major consequences.

Instead of your kids worrying that you're getting old and you're going to die, you're already dead to them and they're angry with you. You failed as a parent.

Hopefully, the silver lining is that if I become a dad, I'll reprioritise my life, so that I have adequate income to provide for the family. I'll provide a stable home, and try and be the most consistent father I can be. I'll try and listen and understand my kids and their frustrations. I'll concentrate on them having as many friends as possible, rather than dragging them all over the country and asking them to say goodbye to all their old friends, and have to make a load of new ones. I will look for value not cheapness, and if something is really important to that child, I'll buy the best that I can afford and economise in my own life. I'll try and treat my kids as individuals, rather than putty to be moulded into uniform shapes. I won't treat my kid as a performing animal or a clotheshorse.

There's potential in people, and you just have to support them so that they can achieve it. Assuming somebody is bad until impossibly proven beyond all reasonable doubt that they're amazing (which means they're not bad, they can never be amazing because they were once labelled as bad) despite everybody booing and jeering  and sneering and trying to hold them back.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #childhood #parents

This is a story about legal highs...

When your parents are drug addict losers, you have to do a lot of research if you're going to save their life. Their health damage is probably too bad to save them now, but if my niece gets to spend a little longer with granny & granddad, then it will have been worth it.

The above amino acid and vitamin complex is what is necessary if want to replenish the brain chemicals that drugs wash out of your system.

Let's do a bit of a tour:

L-Tyrosine

This is the precursor to dopamine. You can give yourself early-onset Parkinsons if you take excessive dopamine agonists (e.g. Cocaine) and damage the neurons in the Basal Ganglia. Don't fuck with dopamine. It gets you out of bed in the morning.

You can fuck up your domaninergic system with all kinds of drugs. Crystal Meth and Amphetamine and Caffeine. Yes, that's right, Caffeine. Same thing. Caffeine is legal amphetamine.

5-Hydroxytrypophan (5-HTP)

This is the precursor to Serotonin and Melatonin. Very important for mood regulation, digestion and sleep. You do want to poop don't you? Well, it's best to not cause neurotoxicity to your serotonin releasing neurons. 5-HTP can also be an excellent sleep regulator, as it will give you a melatonin boost.

There are few street drugs that deplete 5-HTP. But there's one very popular one: 3,4-Methyledioxymethamphetamine... Ecstasy, or 'pills' as they're colloquially known. Suicide Wednesday is not known by that name for no reason, amongst the clubber/raver community.

Phenylalaninie

This is the precursor to adrenaline and noradrenalin. You might think it'd be cool to be like me and have your adrenal gland so burnt out that I have no self preservation instinct, but most people don't drive or cycle with the ability that I do. You're an organ donor if you hesitate for a single second in threading the eye of the needle in-between double decker busses.

Adrenalin might seem annoying when you get "Elvis Legs" on a really difficult climb, trying to clip a bolt and knowing that if you miss, you're going to fall about 40 feet or more. Eventually your body re-adjusts, and standing on the top of a 1,500ft tall spike of rock, without any ropes attached to you, is all about the photo-op rather than the potential death.

In the office, people get annoyed with you. They wander over to your desk to tell you how important the report they need is. You just ask them how many people's lives are at danger. You ask how many lives are going to be saved, and then they go away.

Vitamin B6

Very good for allowing all the amino acids to be absorbed into your body. You get a lot more bang for your buck with B6.

Tea & Coffee Extracts

You've been drinking tea and/or coffee for most of your life and your "because I like it" excuse is not watertight. It contains caffeine, so you have habituated the ritual of drinking it. I like making tea. I like the hot water plant alkaloid extraction method (infusion). It reminds me what a bunch of ignorant addicts - who are in denial - that I have to live with.

The extracts that I take are a bit like decaf tea or coffee. They are giving your body the other complex set of chemicals in tea and coffee, without the addictive caffeine and the weirdo behaviour of having a hot drink on a hot day.

Vitamins & Minerals

Yes, everybody knows you can knit your own yoghurt if you have a flower in your hair and have wind chimes that annoy the shit out of the neighbours. Rather than grow a massive pile of fruit and vegetabes in a window box that I don't even own, it's easier to make sure that I'm topped up on all my vitamins and minerals with a single daily pill.

Pills don't replace a balanced diet but they sure as hell are more convenient than having to plan meals around whether I'm getting adequate trace amounts of everything that makes a healthy body.

If you drink alcohol or take mind-bending drugs, they're depleting your body's nutrients. Your brain will be flooded with a month of serotonin, for example, when you drop an Ecstasy pill. I don't condone drug taking, but kids will be kids. The best thing that the mum and dad of a raver kid can do for them is to buy them some 5-HTP, if you want to avoid suicide Wednesdays.

Also, if somebody who isn't me had been on a massive drug bender, their cravings would be pretty damn terrible. The NHS will put you on a 'script'... that is to say that they will keep giving you the drugs you need because the crash will be so awful that you'll probably kill yourself, or go and nick a car stereo to pay for a bag of drugs. It's smart drug policy to have your population not nicking car steros and killing themselves on a comedown.

Would it surprise you to learn that I've been in The Priory? It was a bit shit actually. There were no celebrities (apart from me) and the tellies were bolted down so you couldn't even chuck them out of the window, not that the windows opened very wide.

I wasn't in The Priory on a Librium script, so I couldn't have been an alcoholic. I wasn't in The Priory on a subutex or methadone script, so I couldn't have been a heroin junkie. I wasn't in The Priory on a dexedrine script, so I couldn't have been a crystal meth or amphetamine junkie. I've decided to make it the world's shittest Christmas present to tell the world why I was in The Priory, on this coming Christmas Day 2015. Just for the hell of it.

One of the most amusing phone calls I have ever received was from my boss at JPMorgan saying that they'd got a really nice bonus for me, because of all my good work in the 6 months I'd been in the team. I'd saved the world from a market liquidity event that could have seen another Credit Crunch get triggered. I had other things on my mind, but it's still nice to hear that stuff.

If I had one piece of business advice for you: hire a junkie. They work their fucking arses off.

Staying clean is expensive though. What goes up must come down, and you're going to need £200 of dietary supplements to plug the hole in your brain.

When I say 'junkie' I also include those compliant little freaks that like doing homework, and people who are prepared to neck huge bottles of Modafinil and Methlyphenidate (Ritalin) and any other study aids. Doping in eduction is as bad as doping in sport, if not more widespread. The drugs are cheap and your earning potential will pay you back many times over. It's a good investment.

The adversarial system with 'winners' is totally screwed.  People will do anything for a competitive edge. Personally, I just want to have the odd day where I'm not lethargic and negative and disinterested in everything, and I have to try and shout down the urges to run a sharp knife through my radial artery.

Never let it be said that I didn't try every avenue.

No drugs for me, please. I'll just take a coffee to go. Could you just put a shot of dexedrine in it for me though, please? (February 2015)

Tags: #drugs #addiction #notanonymous

This is a story about stormy weather...

Apologies for the interruption to the blog regularity. This was caused by unpleasant winter weather and being unemployed. I also couldn't see straight and I passed out. Normal service will be resumed again soon.

Since my life fell apart due to illness and divorce, I have never managed get all the essential life things in place at the same time:

1. Stable Accommodation (without 13 snoring people per dorm)
2. A job that's more than just giving blow jobs in a toilet (never tried it, but it's plan "Z")
3. Friends, who respect me, and understand that my life was decimated
4. Family, including parents who can understand how hard it is to do all the things on this list (with no money, despite working)
5. Getting my stuff out or storage and into my apartment
6. A hobby: kitesurfing maybe. Failing that, at least some holidays
7. Deal with a huge pile of 2-and-a-half-year-old post
8. Do my business administration and tax affairs
9. Live near work
10. Not just getting totally smashed drunk all the time, and don't abuse drugs

You have no idea how hard it is too do almost all those things, when you are barely just surviving. The individual tasks are not hard for a person with a job, girlfriend, home. I'm is pretty much totally exhausted and suicidal from other attempts to fix my life. When you get low on funds then idiots start pulling the plug, and all the other work is ruined.

Just because you have a sorted life, don't lecture me. I bought my own home and did loads of work on it, never missed a bill payment, quit my job despite having a "top" ranking in the company (according to my annual performance review). I went to work for New Look to help them internationalise. Job was OK. Commute was too far.

I became an entrepreneur again. I sat in my back garden and made iPhone apps. I had a couple of number 1 hits. This gave me encouragement to say away from 9-5 drudgery, I started IT contracting again, and it was an improvement on being disrespected by the people above your pay grade.

I was then an electrician. If you think your paperwork is bad... wait until you've got to do safety certificates, inspection reports, quotes, cashflow forecasting, wholesaler credit and the challenge of doing all of this comes before paying any money into the bank.

After being an electrician, I went back to iPhone apps, but developing custom ones for companies. That business gave me just about everything I wanted, except a high quality team, and having the cash to grow. There is also even more paperwork associated with a technology company.

I took Hubflow/Mepublish business through the Springboard Accelerator program in Cambridge. We even won 2nd prize at the Cambridge Union Society. The angels didn't want to invest in me at first, because I pitched for their money in flip flops. We still managed to find investors though.

Seeing 150+ mentors in 2 weeks, plus all the other Springboard work was hard too. We had very little time to fix our users bugs, stay on top of invoicing our clients and all the other business administration crap. There were actually too many things on the list.  It was too much to handle.

When I got back from Springboard, my horrible ex was there, pressuring me to go to social occasions and blocking me from moving to the Startup capital of the UK: London. She liked having at least 3 or 4 luxury holidays a year. She liked doing a hobby job that got to stroke her ego. Teachers can work anywhere. She needed to support my 3 years of busting my balls to get into the Tech startup scene.

Anyway, she wouldn't. Her main preoccupation was getting blind drunk at social occasions and then smashing up my expensive camera(s). She'd smashed up one of my cameras 3 weekends in a row. She was never sorry. "It was an accident" is not accepting blame. "I'm sorry" is how humans apologise.

Shortly after Springboard finished, in 2011, the last evening event we ever went to, she smashed another camera, and then when we got back to our hotel room, she started verbally abusing me. She was saying things like "you're a weirdo, none of my family like you [not true] and none of my friends like you [not true]" then she got up, opened the door and stood in the doorway, just shouting "YOU'RE A WIERDO, YOU'RE A WIERDO, EVERYBODY HATES YOU, YOU WEIRDO, YOU'RE A WIERDO" at me at the top of her voice.

I'm not sure whether she held the door open so that people could hear, if I shouted back, or whether it was so she could make a quick getaway if she verbally abused my too much. Whatever the reason, it backfired.

I snapped. I don't really remember what happened, because the next thing that I remember is her screaming. Her scream brought me back to reality. Reality at the time was that she was on the floor, pinned down by me, and my fists was raised in anger.

Because she screamed I let her go and she ran off to many of the concerned faces peering out of their bedrooms: they had been woken up by her tirade of verbal abuse.

I tried to remember what had happened. I remembered asking her to stop abusing me. I asked her to stop being so disrespectful about having broken 3 digital cameras in 3 weeks... I'm the one who paid for those cameras and replacements. I remember being called a "weirdo" over and over again, which was often a schoolyard chant for bullies, which I was on the receiving end of a lot.

Afterwards, my brain finally pieced what had happened together. She had said I was worthless and abusively insulted everything I've ever done, interspersed with calling my a "Weirdo" and telling me that friends and family don't like me.

I grabbed her, but she started trying to punch me, so I threw her on the ground and pinned her arms. She spat in my face, and then the rage was really unleashed. I was no longer in control - I'm guessing - because I don't remember the rage bit. I threw 4 or 5 punches against the struggling abuser before she screamed. The scream woke me up and I got off her and let her run away to the people who had been looking, because of her shouting "weirdo! weirdo".

She spent the night surrounded by her friends and family. I got in my car, knowing that there were a couple of concrete columns I could drive into at 100mph.

Domestic abuse perpetrators should commit suicide though, right. I agree that there need to be severe repercussions for those who commit domestic abuse. Smashing up my face with her fists, going though my personal stuff, isolating me from my friends, controlling my life, verbally abusing, destroying my stuff with no intention of replacing or repairing it, generally being a low grade piece of shit... that kind of stuff affects people.

I blamed myself. I didn't even use the provocation or fact that she physically abused me, as an excuse.

I turned my airbag off and made I made a couple of 100+mph lunges for motorway pillars on the way home. Sadly, most of them have fencing to deflect drivers who  have fallen asleep or want to die.

When I got home I bought something online to kill myself with. It almost worked, but it had very unexpected consequences.

If you think domestic abusers deserve to be miserable, depressed and die, then I'm in agreement with you to some extent.

I had to go to work with two black eyes and a broken nose, and lie for my girlfriend. Nobody can see the verbal and psychological damage that she was doing either. She had an insatiable appetite for spending hours, days, outside my cell, just hurling abuse and threats of violence.

If there is that kind of abuse going on, and you're missing one or more of the 10 things on my list, you are going to struggle to be well. Yes, my mood gets very bad in winter and Xmas/January are particularly horrible times for making it through the seasons.

How can you expect somebody to sort out all the broken things in their life, when they just escaped an abusive relationship, but they lost their job, their home, their friends, their money etc. etc. Just because you've entered a routine boring life, doesn't make you special. I had a normal life. In fact, it wasn't ordinary. It was extraordinary.

Bipolar Disorder can have its blessings. When I'm depressed I can't do much about the shits who gang up on me, but when I'm hypomanic I can work like an absolute machine and avoid having my reputation tarnished by the people who hit and verbally abuse me, and make promises they have no intention of carrying through (another form of abusive): like waving a £50 note in front of a homeless person, asking them if they want it, and then setting fire to it.

To help somebody with a manageable mental heath problem, it's really easy. Just don't lie to them. Don't insult them. Don't stigmatise them. Don't make them spend all their money on private treatment, so they don't have any money. Don't take away their house. Don't badmouth them too all their friends so that they're totally isolated and alone. Don't tell them that you know f**k all about managing a mental health problem that they already successfully managed for 32+ years.

If you're always leaving them out in the cold. If you're always removing opportunities rather than creating them. If you're physically injuring them. If you talk to them in a disgusting way. If you're a totally disrespectful c**t... that's going to drive that person to a bad place.

During my 6 month experiment I discovered this, beyond all reasonable doubt. My Dad's an abusive waste of space who would ruin a supercar to save the money on a single bolt. My Mum is kind and generous, but she's not immune from ignorance, and she trusts my Dad's disgusting views. My ex-wife wanted me dead so she could have my live insurance money, and she's successfully painted a picture of me as some sort of demon.

In private treatment, they teach you not to accept a clinical label for an acute illness as a it will be used against you as derogatory term. Stress and unreasonable expectations, abuse and the relationships collapse around you. Your only visitor is the one who runs the prison. The prison in your home. Your gaoler will come and bang on your locked door around the clock, to make sure you are as agitated as possible.

That's what I've learnt. I've learnt that playing by the rules, being kind, not being vindictive, trusting professionals, but fundamentally evaluating everything base on an objective analysis of the data, has shown this:

• The NHS is wonderful, but Fluoxetine as a first line of defence is ruining lives
• The NHS is wonderful, but getting a referral to a Psychiatrist takes far too long (6+ months)
• The NHS is wonderful, but their Psychiatrists are used to dealing with mostly psychotically ill people who are completely dysfunctional
• The NHS is wonderful, but it's NICE who get to decide what medication they can use. Most things on offer will give you horrible side effects and have very little evidence of long term efficacy
• So, in short, if you're an educated patient, don't listen to your GP. My GP helped to kick me out of my house, so my absolute c**t of an wife could have an affair without distractions
• Your parents know f**k all. Especially if they've put you in hospital a couple of times. Oh, and if they've caused Grievous Bodily Home because they've such primitive apes that they don't have the power of speech, to say "I'm coming to attack you with a piece of glass now because I only know how to be a violent psychopath"
• Private Psychologists and Psychiatrists can be very kind and non-judgemental, and can actually say things that really help. You can actually have a conversation with them about whether a medication is good for dribbling and Jeremy Kyle, or whether there are any upsides
• Dual diagnosis is a fucking curse. Dual diagnosis is a death sentence. When you say something, people have an unlimited amount of ignorant idiotic crap with which to belittle and dismiss your opinion.

But the short explanation is this: people are not very mature and people are not very intelligent. People love to point and laugh and label and exclude the different kid. That translates into adult life too. One of the big reasons why adults don't lose their vicious c**tishness is that all they do is do crosswords and watch TV. They're hopelessly idiotic. When I go to the doctor, I tell them what I want, and they give it to me.

I went to my GP and said "I'm having unmanageable suicidal thoughts, and thinking about self-harming. I've tried to keep myself safe, but I no longer feel able to keep myself safe any more".

My GP wrote a letter to Psychiatric Liaison at the Royal London Hospital, and sent me there immediately.

I spoke to Psychiatric Liaison, and explained that my life was unmanageable, because "my parents kept lying about supporting me, but they were just stringing me on, and that was an unmanageable situation, with a stressful job and the recent stress of moving (without their help of course). I explained that 2 years ago they had told me not to borrow a small amount of cashflow money, and that they would help. I explained that they lied. They waited until the last minute and pretended they had never made the offer, even though they had made it on multiple occasions"

I spoke to the Duty Psychiatrist, and told her I wanted Olanzapine (never taken it before, but I knew it was fast acting... I had no plans to take it... I just wanted to give the Psychiatrist a job) but I wanted to be admitted to hospital.

The Duty Psychiatrist gave me the spiel about hospitals not being a nice environment. I reassured her that I had been on Psych wards before.  She suggested Monday to Friday visits with the Crisis team. I pointed out the day was Saturday.

When I got into the Psych Ward that I wanted, I was happier, relaxed. That's the way things are supposed to work. It took me 13 hours, but I got what I needed.

One of the nurses brought me my Olanzapine, which is what I said I wanted. I knew it's a much smaller pill than Quetiapine, so I could hide it under my tongue and then spit it out when I was out of view.

Yes, I finally got what I wanted out of the NHS, which was to help me from committing suicide. They gave me a safe hospital environment to shield me from the bullshit life that drove me to suicide. Can you believe that my boss at HSBC actually gave me and my sister a hard time. I was in hospital for 2 weeks with a suspected heart condition. That's disgusting.

3 hot meals a day and a bed. Oh, and maybe a TV. I was a little bored, but the other patients were good to talk to, and we did our little Hole in my Bucket musical number. A s**tload more interesting than working on a project that's falling flat (HSBC Customer Due Diligence: CDD) on it's face because they terminate the contracts of anybody with expertise and skill and has a track record of turning failing projects around.

Oh, and while I was in hospital (was it the 4th or the 5th major admission, I've lost count) my parents decided to give me half the sum of money that they promised me I could borrow off them 2 and a half years ago, but just lied. That's right, they lied. They lied about wanting to help, and their lie was exposed too late for me to be able to arrange an alternative. Two and a half years later! Having to spend 2 and a half years living off my wits in London is hard.

So here's the bottom line: if you love your children and you want to help them, listen to them and if you make a promise to help them, don't let them down.

If you think you've got a "bad kid" you're probably a hypocritical c**t. My mistreating your kids, mugging them off, taking the p**s out of them, never praising them for anything, just doing whatever the hell you want all the time. There's no such thing as a "bad kid" they've all got parents. If those parents drink and smoke and take drugs and can't be bothered to get a proper job, and had their house bought for them by their elderly parents... what disgusting hypocrisy.

The reason why this blog post is late, is because I always have to take matters in to my own hands. You know all those anti-depressants you pop, and the beer, wine and vodka that you tip down your gullet? You're buying overpriced medication, and self-medicating for whatever problems you have in your life, or baggage you're still carrying around.

I'm still not drinking, but I'm sick of being in hospital. I'm sick of how much time & money it costs me to be your convenient scapegoat. I'm sick of people looking at medicine bottles and thinking that they know something about me. I actually keep my medication in a bottle by the bed to get rid of shallow girlfriends. The medications inside have never been touched.

I'm going to start tapering psychoactive substances into my life. Total abstinence proves nothing. If we follow the abstinence theory to its ultimate conclusion, we give up on food, because it's converted to glucose in the body, and glucose is sugar.

So, which is a more fitting epitaph?

Here lies Nick. He was such a non-addict he even gave up food. Any oxygen. What a hero. He died, so that his parents could continue being complete selfish ignorant cunts. A noble sacrifice. Turns out that life is a lot more livable with sugar and other things

Or I've got another one for you. Do you like this one?

Here lies Nick. He died doing what he loved. His parents actually gave a shit about him, so they decided to support him for once, and involve the rest of the family rather than just spreading malicious bullshit about him. Turns out that you don't die young if you're nice to your sons and daughters. Rumour has it that Nick's dad even gave £1 to charity for the first time in his miserable life, in the hope that Nick could see it from the afterlife.

They're quite long. Maybe they need to be edited down a bit.

Anyway, chemical oblivion awaits. Wake me up when 2 and a half years have passed and my cunt Dad might actually let my mum help her son.

Oh, help myself? Did you say "help yourself".... yeah, good idea. I've been doing it for my entire adult life, because my parents are such selfish liars who should never have had kids. I've had barely the briefest breaks in between companies in my career. I work my f**king arse off. I'm busting my balls to help myself, and others too.

This is what my parents think I spend my money on. No, when my life has been completely fucked over I very rarely spend the price of a large Dominos pizza on enough drugs to tranquilize an elephant, because you lie to me and fuck over my plans, which is very stressful (December 2015)

Tags: #drugs #suicide #bipolar #nhs #addiction

This is a story about libido...

You're probably not aware of the role that your sex drive plays in your thoughts and actions, but it's the most fundamental force in your human behaviour. It's programmed into your DNA to procreate. It's essential for the survival of the species.

Ask yourself the philosophical question why are we here? What is your answer? If it's something about watching TV or getting fat and dying or going to work, then you're clearly not a very elevated thinker. If it's something to do with children, then you're at least able to identify that you're basically just an animal under your fancy clothes.

Personally, I want to figure out as much as possible about how the Universe works. I want to answer questions about the fundamental nature of reality. I want to know the answers to unanswerable questions. But how do we know they're unanswerable unless we search for answers?

Theologians from all religions were content to come up with some hand-wavy claptrap theory that wasn't backed by any experimental evidence. They attempted to come up with convenient ideas that dumb people could grasp, and could be neatly packaged into sermons and soundbites, so that the ideas would spread like a horrible virus of stupidity.

People like to spread ideas, just like they enjoy spreading their genetic material. Being influential, being a thought leader... it brings you more power & status, and therefore the better potential mates. If you are a powerful thought leader, you get to have a pretty girlfriend or a hunky boyfriend. It comes down to sex, again.

Every time you get a new Twitter follower, or a retweet, or a like on Facebook, or a post shared, or a friend request, or a comment that engages with something you shared or liked or posted yourself... you get a dopamine hit. Your brain rewards you for spreading seeds.

Internet memes and email chain letters. These kinds of things are just somebody wanting to test the reach of themself as a cult personality. You see loads and loads and loads of pictures of teachers being shared, holding a piece of cardboard that says "Let's see if I can get this shared in Australia. Do it for your kids!" or some other lame patheticness.

If you don't have kids of your own, you feel acutely aware that you're dying, and you're not going to leave any mark on the world. Yup, you'll be gone and forgotten, because you have no genetic heirs who might carry on your name and your teachings. Parents are very influential in their kids lives, beyond the genetic material they give to them. They shape their values and their fundamental ideas.

Because I don't like my parents, I reject their ideas and values. Instead of history, I studied geography. Instead of religion, I study science. Instead of the piano, I learn the guitar. Instead of being a Conservative, I'm a socialist. Instead of being a selfish c**t, I'm a humanist. You get the general idea.

So it looks like I'm very down on parents, but really I'm not. I see lots and lots of great parents out there who give their kids a brilliant life. I see lots and lots of parents out there who love their kids and make them feel loved and cherished and cared for and happy. I see lots of my friends with smiling happy looking children, and I know that because my friends are caring and nice, they are caring and nice parents too.

It looks like I'm being down on teachers, but I'm really not. I had some amazing teachers who I can still remember the names of, and loads of really important things that they taught me. I had teachers who really went the extra mile, and taught me the things that are really important in my life and allowed me to distance myself from my parents and escape a horrible life.

I'm a big believer in planned parenthood. If you're not going to go the distance with kids, don't get involved in their lives. Kids need consistency, reliability, inspiration, praise, love & care. The world has plenty of things that are going to kill kids and injure them and knock their confidence and destroy their self-esteem. It's not a parent's job to add to a child's woes.

In the UK we have a nanny state. However, that doesn't mean that you're a rich Victorian who has employed a nanny to rear your children. What it is supposed to mean is that there's a safety net there if you f**k up. You're not supposed to f**k up. Having a safety net there does not mean you can just take drugs and not work, and spawn as many children as you want.

It sounds like I'm having a go at a tranche of society, but I'm not. I'm aware that there are a huge number of young people who just smoke dope and play computer games. It looks to the untrained eye like they're lazy and idle, but the fact is that they have no prospects, no opportunities.

Those kids who sit around smoking dope and playing computer games have been failed by parents who decided to have children without thinking about their future. The time to plan for a child's future is before they're born. You line up your ducks and then you shoot them down. You don't just risk it and hope for the best, unless you want to go back to living in caves and bashing each other over the head with clubs.

Earlier this year, I was sent this photo from a girl I knew. I looked at the date stamp of the image. The photo was taken in 2006. I put the image into Google Reverse Image Search and found that she had taken the image from another woman's blog. That's rather strange behaviour.

The strangest part was that she claimed to be pregnant by me, even though I hadn't ejaculated in her vagina. The thing about being pregnant is, that it usually involves ejaculation into a vagina. Some sperm have to be ejected near enough to the cervix for those little tadpoles to swim to an egg and fertilise it. I'm not sure if I have super sperm, but I'm pretty sure they can't travel through time, get another woman pregnant and then transport the foetus forward in time and implant it in a different womb. Maybe I'm just a bit too heavily reliant on this science stuff though?

Yeah, I put my faith in technology and science, rather than religion, and it turns out that I was right. You do have to ejaculate in somebody's vagina for them to become pregnant. It turns out she wasn't pregnant. What a bizarre turn of events. Who would have thought that I could have planned to not get somebody pregnant like that?

There have been other times when there's been a risk but there's this thing called the morning after pill, which is an exceedingly unpleasant thing to have to take. I'd never recommend or suggest a woman should take it. I imagine that you wouldn't take it unless you want to be really careful that you don't have a baby after a moment of drunken madness.

Babies are for life, not just an inconvenient mistake.

Yes, if you decide to keep your baby, you should really prepare yourself to go the distance. You might have to look after that kid for up to 18 years. That's a long time. They're also not cute like a kitten or a puppy. They scream and shit and vomit everywhere. Your fanny will get ripped to pieces and all your nice things will get covered in snot.

Babies also grow into little children who need trainers and a tracksuit or whatever sub-culturally appropriate clothes they need to wear in order to not be beaten to shit for non-conformity. They can be your special little angel, who is unique and is going to be a brain surgeon. Yes they can be your fantasy, but only in your f**king dreams. At least let them not be bullied their entire f**king childhood if you send them to school rather than locking them in a basement.

I don't know if you can tell from this photo, but I wasn't very well. I had been sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath. I bumped into this friend when I was looking for a warm bed for the night and she was very keen that she get this photo of us together. I was very keen to get some sleep. Sleeping rough is hard.

So why on earth would a woman want to get pregnant by a homeless guy anyway? It seems ridiculous. Probably the very least likely person to be able to provide a happy stable home for a growing infant. Well, my theory is that women's caring instincts are activated by seeing a proverbial bird with a broken wing.

It does work to a certain extent. If you can't find Mr Perfect, you can find somebody who's heartbroken and in trouble and help to fix them up. You can fix a man and make him happy and healthy. I don't recommend or condone faking a pregnancy though. You shouldn't take things that far.

Because my parents lied about supporting me, I had to turn to friends and girlfriends. My parents told me they would help me get through my difficult divorce, until my house was finally sold and I was back on my own two feet again in London. They are liars. There was no support. They just lied. They liked saying the words "we'll support you, we'll help" but they had no intention of helping anybody. They are liars and c**ts.

Luckily, there is a peer-to-peer support network. Friends and girlfriends helped me out when my parents lies were exposed as nothing but hot air.

My parents are always looking for an excuse not to help. They are masters of the reason why they aren't going to do what they committed to doing, or just lying. They will say something and then deny they ever said it, if it's more convenient to just lie. They figured out that it's easier to just tell the world you're a good parent, to lie about being a good parent, than to actually do the hard work of being a good parent.

Being a good parent is hard work. Alternatively, you can just concentrate on lying, then you don't have to do the hard work. If you just concentrate on sitting around taking drugs and lying and training your kid to hide your guilt, then you have a lot more time & money for drugs and alcohol.

The problem is, that you are dumping your child onto the state. The child doesn't expect it, because your child trusts you and believes your lies. The state doesn't expect rich middle class parents to dump their kids on the state either, which means that those kids end up stuck in a precarious position.

The state can't really afford to support any broken homes. I don't feel entitled to state support, but I do feel aggrieved when people who supposedly care about me break their promises. Especially when those promises are repeatedly and insistently made. If you make some throwaway remark about "just let us know if there's anything we can do to help" then I understand that you just like the way those words sound. You just like the warm fuzzy feeling you're giving yourself by making some empty offer you have no intention on making good on.

My parents work very hard to demonise me. To ruin my good standing with people. To blacken my name. Family life is much easier if you've picked a black sheep to be the one you blame for your own shortcomings.

My Dad had previously used his own brother as the black sheep. He liked to spread negative gossip about his own brother, and generally ostracise and antagonise him. When his brother sufficiently distanced himself from my unpleasant father, he moved on to me. I'm now the guy who he likes to bitch and whine about, while with his other face pretending like he's a supportive Dad.

The fact of the matter is that he perpetuates a co-dependent abusive relationship with my Mum. He's horribly abusive to her. They managed to numb themselves to the destructive nature of their horrible relationship, by taking loads of drugs and getting drunk all the time, but they're horrible spiteful people when they're together. They hardly have any friends because they're so horrible to be around.

So, I've decided to break the cycle. Because I have a brain. Because I have self-awareness and I can self-direct my actions, I have decided that I'm not going to pass the buck. I'm not going to pass on the blame. I'm going to shove it right back to where it belongs. My Dad needs to stop abusing his girlfriend (my Mum) and stop being such a critic and a liar and a spreader of malicious crap. He needs to support my Mum and her kids or f**k off and die.

Obviously, it would be pretty hard on me to force his hand on this matter, so it's probably best if I just distance myself from him. However, I do worry that he will make my Mum's life even more hellish, or find another victim for his abuse. I feel responsible for stopping him from spreading any more human misery.

One way I have decided to stop the spread of his influence, is by considering my own potential fatherhood very carefully. It's very important to me that I'm absolutely nothing like that complete c**t. It's very important to me that if I do decide to have kids, that they have a really happy childhood and they're well supported when they need support.

Just having sex and then lying about taking responsibility is not acceptable. Abandoning your kids onto the state is not acceptable, especially when you have promised to help and misled your kids into believing they can count on you.

I've always planned around the idea that my parents are a complete waste of space and I'll need to make my own way in life, which is why I paid for the deposit and mortgage on my house and fully furnished it and spent loads of money on it, all without a single penny of parental support.

However, when I was going through a horrible divorce, moving from Bournemouth back to London, trying to find work, working on a new startup idea, reconnecting with friends and my business network... my parents were interested in earning money from me, while I waited for the equity in my home to be released. It was easier than going to a commercial lender. The problem is, that my parents are liars.

I could have arranged a bridging loan, but my Mum, on multiple occasions, reassured me that I didn't need to go through all the hassle of arranging a bridging loan. Given the fact that I had a huge pile of equity in my home, and we were only talking about a very small amount of money, and a potentially very healthy rate of interest for them, it seemed to be a win:win situation.

The problem is that my Dad's a c**t. He talked my own Mum out of helping her son and left me high & dry. What an utter c**t. They waited until the last minute and then pulled the rug out from under my feet. What total c**ts.

Don't make promises you have no intention of keeping.

I wonder if it's some Munchausen by Proxy thing. I wonder if my parents like keeping me sick and desperate. They are certainly a couple of irrelevant shrivelled up junkie alcoholic c**ts who should be kept away from the world. They certainly have nothing of value to offer, except to die and finally allow my sister and me to stop being beaten down by their harsh criticism, laziness and unrealistic expectations.

Anyway, I'm exhausted by it all. If they think they have won, and they get to label me for life and die smug, buried with their hoarded wealth but hated by their kids, because they totally failed as parents, then f**k them. I will shame them as much as I possibly can. I've done enough to prove my value. I've done enough to prove my work ethic, my ingenuity, my resourcefulness, my kindness, my caring. I've done enough.

I'm done, I'm through, I'm fed up, I'm p**sed off and I'm at the limit. I'm at the bitter end. I can't take it anymore.

I've been strung along. I've been lied to and had enough promises broken. I've had enough of the smug cunts telling everybody they're doing everything they can when really they're just undermining me and leading me on.

Yes, I've been led on. I was sold a lie. I was told that parents should be respected. I was led to believe that parents care. Throughout my childhood all I saw was that they cared more about having enough drugs and booze and cigarettes. They cared more about sitting around with their few friends or arguing with each other. That's where the time went. That's where the energy went. That's where the money went.

Sex is a dangerous thing if you're having it unprotected and you're not prepared to take the morning after pill or get an abortion for a child who you have no intention of loving and caring for. If you're not going to love your kids, kill them in the womb.

I'm going to abort myself, age 36. It's the abortion my mum should have had.

You like coffee for the same reason why you like sex and you like drugs... dopamine is released in your brain. You're just chasing a high, and you might be doing it so recklessly that you're making unhappy little children (October 2013)

Tags: #parents #childhood #divorce #addiction #alcohol #mentalhealth #suicide

This is a story about anger management...

I like to nurture. I like being with nature. I like to mow the lawn. I like to plant things and water them and watch them grow. I like to look after animals. I like knowing that I'm helping living things.

When people were shitty and mean to me, I liked to be with my cat in my garden. I liked to take care of my lawn. I liked to get rid of the dead leaves and dead flower heads, and feed the plants.

I'm a pretty simple character really. If you make me sad and anxious and afraid, I will be depressed. If you keep attacking me, I will withdraw more and more and more. You will back me into a corner.

What do we know about cornered animals, that are beaten and stressed and anxious? Well, it's time to stop being unpleasant to them and either leave them alone or be nice to them, unless you want to get bitten.

I'm not out to bite anybody. I just want a little garden and a cat. If you take those things away from me, you'll make me very sad.

I don't have a lot of opportunity to nurture anything at the moment. I don't have any plants or kids or pets. I treat my girlfriends nicely, but those relationships tend to be a lot more complicated than boy & cat.

My Dad thinks that rearing a little boy is just like owning a dog. He thinks that little boys are members of his pack, and they will respond like a pack animal would to the leader of the pack. Humans are not pack animals. Humans are advanced primates with complex social and emotional needs. You shouldn't try and 'train' them like you would with a dog. They're not performing animals, like dancing bears or dogs that roll over and play dead.

Respect is a two-way street with humans. If somebody orders me to respect them, they will lose my respect. Respect is earned. I don't respect anybody who doesn't respect me back. There is no automatic entitlement to respect. Everybody's opinion is equally valid. When my Dad's car broke down, my sister opined that it might have run out of fuel. He dismissed her opinion immediately. She was right, he was wrong. More fool him.

One of the few times that my parents came to visit London was because they had gone to go away on holiday, but then discovered that their passports were not in date. I can tell you exactly when my passport expires, and I'm not such a drug addicted disorganised lazy layabout that I would fail to be able to take my flight because of such an idiotic oversight.

Yes, this one-way-street is a source of a lot of anger. I have been disrespected a huge amount by my parents, but when we examine the evidence it becomes clear that they are hypocrites and there is no excuse for such disrespectful behaviour.

I need to be the bigger person, and vent off this anger at such injustice, mistreatment and damage to my identity, self-confidence and happiness. Ideally, I would like to forgive and forget, but it's very hard to forgive somebody who is not at all sorry.

I've had to be sorry all my life. I've had to be very sorry that I was so inconsiderate as to become a fertilised embryo, grow and eject myself into the world. What terrible poor planning on my part. How grossly irresponsible of me to not think of the impact on my parents plans for drug taking idleness.

I've come up against anger that has been misdirected against me time and time again. Recently, a girlfriend started to physically attack me and throw objects at my head, when she threw a tantrum about the fact that she had strewn rubbish all over my flat and didn't want to clean up after herself. She wanted me to 'admit' that I was the messy one, and flew into a rage when I told her the true origin of every sweet wrapper and crisp packet, that she had absentmindedly thrown on the floor.

I have an atypical reaction to stressful situations. My pulse slows and my blood pressure drops and I calm down. I get very cold and rational. I've been in life and death situations enough times to know that losing your head will get you killed.

When my ex girlfriend started hurling plates and knives at me, I didn't react, except to make sure I protected my head. When she left, I was glad she was gone. When she slammed the door of my flat on the way out, I was relieved. Obviously, I didn't want to date her any more after that. That's rational, right?

When my ex wife started getting aggressive, I would put a door in-between her and me. Some kind of physical barrier to stop me from being physically attacked. Sure, she would attack the door - punching and kicking - which only further confirmed that I was right to put some protection around myself from somebody with a streak of violence in them.

My ex wife would sometimes scream that her human rights were being infringed by her not being able to enter my prison cell, in-between beating the door with her fists. It seemed more like an infringement of my human rights, that I wasn't able to move around my home without fear of physical aggression against my person.

The psychological trauma of being trapped in a room with an angry person trying to kick the door down is not healthy for your mind. The more it happens, the more if affects you. You are attempting to retreat to safety, but some cruel and abusive person is rattling your cage, banging on the bars of your prison.

Why didn't I just leave? Well, if you're in a corner, you only tend to have one escape route, and that's right through the arena you're trying to escape. That means running the gauntlet right past your persecutor(s).

Trust me, if you want to help a person who is cornered, harassing them and being menacing and aggressive towards them is not going to coax them out of the corner.

My solution is to either wait for starvation or the police to release me from the trap. I have never called the police to come help me. I once had to threaten to call the police, in order to be allowed to be released from my cell to go to hospital for urgent treatment. That's not right.

Here's the bottom line: don't persecute people. Don't harass people. Don't stress them out and corner them with aggression and threats. Don't relentlessly bang on the door to their cell and kick and stomp and tantrum. They're in there, starving. They're in there, cornered and alone and dying.

Yes, I can tell you a lot about dying from starvation. I chose to die of starvation rather than be beaten by my abusers. That was a rational choice that I made.

A person doesn't retreat into a corner for no reason. A person doesn't starve themself to the brink of death for no reason. There is no 'carrot' or 'reward' in being trapped in a corner. It's being beaten with a 'stick' that drives them into a corner. It's verbal and physical abuse that makes a person cower in a corner.

I don't feel very safe, because my parents and my wife all abused me. They all put me in hospital and none of them give a shit. They're not sorry. They think it's my problem, not theirs. Well, isn't it strange that now that I've got away from those abusive people, my life has improved?

They will blame drug taking, but I'm not a drug addict and I'm going to show you in the coming weeks, it's them who are the drug addicts, and who act abusively. I'm going to show you conclusively that I'm not a drug addict and that their accusations are an attempt to cover their own guilt.

I'm going to show you that paranoia is not something that just exists in the mind of a sick person, but a reaction to extreme stress and mistreatment. Can you imagine being shut in a room with no food, drink or toilet, and having violent aggressive people pummelling on the door and screaming abuse night & day? Can you imagine what psychological impact that would have?

I'm going to show you every part of the psychological trauma and abuse that I sustained, and how that drove me to suicide attempts and mental illness. I'm going to show you how mental illness can be induced in somebody by mistreating them. I'm going to show you how the human mind reacts to bullying and abuse.

You're going to have to be a really clever smarty pants with a good memory, and remember that there is such a thing as cause and effect. You're going to need to remember the sequence of events, otherwise you're going to get confused. You're going to start trying to make quick and easy assumptions.

The main thing you're going to need to remember is this: abuse nearly killed me, and I was abstinent from drink & drugs. You just need to remember this one thing: I was driven to suicide, and there were no drugs involved, and I wasn't an alcoholic.

See if you can remember that, as I tell you the rest of the story. It's important that you do, because otherwise you might get confused.

It's easy to get confused when you're drinking and smoking and having tea & coffee, because you're manipulating your own mind. You're muddying the waters. You are confusing yourself and your perception of reality.

I'm able to make an accurate appraisal of reality, because I am speaking about periods where I wasn't on any medication, drugs or drinking. I'm able to rationally analyse all the facts and evidence now, because I'm completely abstinent from any psychoactive substances whatsoever, including all medications, legal drugs, illegal drugs, caffeine etc. etc.

The only time that you tend to have a clear mind in modern society is when you have kids. Becoming a parent normally sharpens the mind a little bit, and good parents decide to clean up their act (mine didn't). However, you also become filled with irrational fear, because you have children that you want to protect. You start to become afraid of the boogeyman.

Actually withdrawing from alcohol can make you very anxious. Being a parent is very tiring, and it's easy to try and compensate with tea and coffee and other wakefulness agents. However wakefulness agents make you very anxious and paranoid. You start to imagine that the world is full of dangerous people out to hurt your child.

This is the power of nightmares. You get pregnant because you're fucked up on booze. Perhaps you were so pissed that you vomited your contraceptive pill. Anyway, you end up pregnant even though you're right in the middle of being a massive binge drinker.

So you not only have the anxiousness of becoming a new parent, but you also have to give up alcohol and cigarettes. That's pretty hard on your anxiety levels, which you had been self medicating for with booze and fags. Now you don't have those crutches and you've got a kid that's going to need a stable home, but you haven't sorted your life out... you were still in party mode.

Dad has to give up on his dreams of being a footballer, Formula One driver, professional gambler or whatever idle fantasy he had been secretly harbouring. He's going to have to put on a grey suit and go to a dull concrete office until the age of 65 doing something very boring. That's stressful. He's also going to get a lot less sex, because his girlfriend/wife is going to be busy raising kids. It's an anxious time for the new Dad. He should probably show support to his partner by also quitting smoking and drinking, but he's not going to.

So, the home environment is filled with stress and anxiety before the screams of an incontinent midget have even pierced the tranquility of sitting around getting drunk. This isn't how that drunken night was supposed to turn out! What a little bastard for inseminating itself. Let's load it up with lots of blame and stress and teach it a lesson for arrogantly getting born.

It's a shame I'm so exhausted by it all. I have enough energy to finish the story, to prove the point. The point is simple: I'm good enough to achieve some cool stuff. I'm good enough to make a difference, to make a contribution. I haven't got enough energy to fight all the bullies though. I haven't got enough energy to fight the stigma and the presumptions and the lazy assumptions and the prejudice. I haven't got enough energy to be ganged up on. I'd done, I'm over.

When I've finished my story and killed myself, you can cut me open and you'll see the truth. You can dissect my body and see that I was physically healthy. I have written this text so that you can dissect my mind and see that I was mentally well, but driven to suicide by relentless abuse and a lack of apology or opportunity to beat my oppressors.

People like my Dad and ex-wife could just say sorry, but I know they never acknowledge their own guilt.

I'm guilty of lashing out. I'm guilty of reacting to stimuli. Sorry about that. Sorry for being a human being.

My parents and ex wife think they're saints, so I will be the martyr, in the hope that somebody else might get to avoid being killed for other people's sins.

I asked you to stop being mean and abusive. I asked to be set free. I asked for help. You failed me. I forgive you.

If you pile unmanageable stress and pressure on somebody, they will go wonky, they will get bent out of shape. You will put their world into a downward slope that they can't escape (1994)

Tags: #childhood #parents #divorce #addiction #drugs #alcohol #unpleasant #bipolar #suicide

This is a story about clinging on for dear life...

When you are hounded to the edge of the abyss, you will fall to your death if you allow yourself to be pushed one single step more. You shouldn't push people that hard. You shouldn't be so harsh, critical, judgemental, presumptuous. You don't know how close somebody is to the edge, until they're gone.

I don't want to go on about this, but I'm dealing with suicidal thoughts on a daily basis. If you think that's because I'm mentally ill, you're wrong. My brain has correctly judged the circumstances, and it's telling me that I have very few options. My brain is correctly informing me that I'm on the edge of a precipice, and the other side is a jeering snarling crowd who don't care whether I live or die.

People accuse suicidal people of being attention seeking, or selfish. It's actually neither. You have all the time in the world to hurl those accusations at a gravestone when they're gone. They won't be receiving any attention or anything for themself when they're gone. They won't even be stealing a single precious breath of your oxygen anymore, so how can it be selfish?

I've got a life insurance policy that covers suicide. My family are literally better off if I'm dead. That's cold hard cash in their pockets, rather than the rather draining task of repeatedly telling me I'm not good enough and I'm selfish. Yes, it's hard work to have to keep telling somebody to keep taking steps towards their demise, to keep hounding them until they're dead.

In Oxford, I'm pretty sure I came up with the term pushy parents. It kind of stuck with my friends, and their parents, and the phrase entered the popular vernacular. There were a lot of high-achieving kids at my schools in Oxford, and living nearby. My parents had big plans for their only son. They were going to make me achieve everything that they had failed to ever achieve, by force.

We all want our kids to do well, to get ahead, to achieve their greatest potential, but you have got to realise that they're still children. If you push them hard their whole childhood they won't thank you for it, if you push them beyond their limits and make them sick. You will struggle to judge how hard they can work, and how much stress and pressure they can handle, because you are a mature adult, and they are a developing child.

A child's attention span is different from yours. A child's knowledge and experience is different from yours. A child's ability to express distress and protect themself is different from yours. A child's capacity to experience daily stress and pressure and bullying and coercion is different from yours.

You might think that you are bringing up baby Einstein, but in fact you might be twisting that child's personality into somebody who's very bitter and resentful about being kept in from seeing their friends in order to study more. You might not be aware just how deeply etched childhood experiences are in that child's memory. You have no idea what is important to that individual child, especially if you don't listen.

Why am I bitching and whining about this stuff? Well, let me remind you: I'm living with the desire to commit suicide. I can only act on this once, and then I have no further opportunity to tell you who I really am, to tell you what makes me tick. This is a time capsule. It tells you everything you didn't want to know about me when I was alive.

This is the inconvenient truth. This is the smoking gun. This is the postmortem analysis.

I read a few books that were posthumously published after the author's death. The anguish, the distress, the emotion of the authors, thinly concealed behind passive agression and satire, oozes out from those works of literature. The words are soaked with emotion. Every sentence packs a punch, swung wildly at an unseen enemy.

I was systematically re-programmed to believe that my life was worthless, which is why I take huge risks. It's not selfishness if the self has no value. The more that you tell a person that they're shit and they're a burden and they're not good enough, the less risk-averse they become. They will go to great lengths to prove themself or to feel some connection to life.

I don't care what anybody says. Extreme sports are not stupid... they're brave. I can barely express to you just how cold, hard & rational you have to be to step into an extreme environment. You are literally weighing life & death with your every action. You are making decisions that can barely be comprehended by somebody who hasn't willingly laid their life on the line.

My Dad's a real coward. He's abusive to me and my Mum, and he won't admit he's in the wrong. He's such a coward that he hid behind his front door and got the police to deal with me when I went to confront him. He won't even face his own son, on the level, like an adult. He's never done anything brave in his life. He's a real disappointment to me.

I'm actually very calm and rational. I realise my Dad's an old man, and he's good to my sister and my niece, so I wasn't going to risk his life by pulverising him. I just wanted him to stand and face his own son, and confront the issue of him abusing me and my mum. I wanted him to admit he was wrong, to my face. I didn't demand it, but I felt that only a coward would shy away from an honest face to face conversation about his wrongdoing. I was right. He's a coward.

My Mum gave me life, and actually helped save my life and give me hope when I had my back against the wall, but my Dad is poisonous. He actually talks my Mum out of helping me. He probably thinks he's being a protector, a hero, but he's wrong. He's protecting nobody. My Mum will be hurt when I'm dead, and his son will be dead. My sister won't have a brother, and my niece won't have an uncle, and he won't accept any responsibility.

Yes, responsibility. Let's talk about responsibility.

On a daily basis, I'm responsible for my own life. I need to eat, sleep and not throw myself off a tall building. Yup, that's pretty much my entire existence at the moment. I'm trapped at the edge, and the route back to safety is blocked by my Dad, the 'protector' so I'm desperately trying to find another route back to safety, while my Dad is busily telling everybody not to help me.

I have no idea why somebody would step in and tell a caring person not to help a desperate person. I have no idea why a Dad would tell a Mum not to help their child. It's really upsetting. It's upsetting for me, and it's upsetting for my Mum, to have my Dad driving wedges in-between family members. Why can't we all just get along?

I'm not a defective toy, and you can't just return me to the store. I'm not broken, you just have to accept that I'm a human and I have my own identity, and I have identical needs to any other human. I need glucose, water, oxygen, salt, protein, fat, fibre and emotional sustenance. Cutting me off from my own mother by trying to poison her opinion of her own son, to compensate for your own shortcomings, that's patently disgusting.

I can have a lovely conversation with my Mum. Then, the next time we speak, her views will have been completely tainted by my Dad. I have no idea what his big problem is, but I suppose I should try harder to get to the bottom of it. It's no longer the case that I should assume that his 30+ years more on the planet means that he should be the more mature one.

Yes, I've always wanted to look up to my Dad. I've always wanted him to be a role model for me. I've always wanted him to lead by example.

My Dad doesn't really follow through though. He's a quitter. He's never had a career like I have. He's never achieved anything academically like I have. He's never been able to provide enough for his family. He's a real failure. A drunk and a drug addict, he's a bit of a loser, and I guess he feels pretty bad about himself.

Yes, he took his parents money and squandered it. His parents were wealthy and sent their kids to private school, and he messed up his chances of achieving anything of note. He mucked about with drugs and decided that was his priority in life... to take drugs. Even after the arrival of his son, he decided that the pursuit of drugs was still the most important thing in his life.

One of my best friends was a drug addict. When his son arrived, he cleaned up his act. He got himself a mortgage and a steady job. He quit drugs and smoking and keeps himself fit and healthy for his son. He's my role model. I look up to him. I admire what he's done. He's the gold standard that I aspire to emulate.

Men need father figures in their lives. They need masculine identity, which is about strength, leadership, trust, providing for loved ones, consistency, resourcefulness, reliability, dependability. You can't depend on a drug addict. The only thing they love is drugs.

My Dad actually destroyed his health with drugs, and had to go to hospital for a series of operations at around the time that my niece was born. I'm not sure whether fear of death or the arrival of a grandchild was the reason why he cleaned up his act, but he did finally quit drugs, in his sixties.

Nobody preaches louder than a convert, and I imagine that my Dad is very pious now that he's no longer abusing drugs. I don't drink or take drugs, but my Dad is pretty insufferable about many aspects of my lifestyle. He assumes that because I live in London I'm high on cocaine all the time. He assumes that because I have high earning potential, I spend it all on drugs. He's completely wrong.

Because he's a fuckup, he assumes I'm a fuckup too, but he's wrong. Because he's made mistakes in his life, he assumes I've made the same mistakes. Because he let people down, he assumes I'm going to let people down too. He applies his own guilt to me. He makes me carry the guilt for his wrongdoing.

I've got a brilliant title for a blog post lined up for December 26th, so I can't tell too much of my story at the moment without spoiling the surprise. There aren't actually any surprises. Everything is here, somewhere, but I'm going to spell things out for the world. It's extremely frustrating that I have to pace myself, to tell things little by little, but patience is a virtue.

I'm currently writing 2,000 words a day, and it's already swamping people. Hardly anybody is still engaged with my writing. It's gotten a bit unbalanced, and there are themes that are beginning to be a bit like a broken record. I'm actually dragging things out a little now, because I picked some milestones, and I'm making sure I don't give away enough to allow people to think that they can extrapolate and guess how the story ends.

I'll tell you how and when the story currently ends, according to my plan: I kill myself on New Year's Day, having told my tale but without the energy, support or resources to be able to continue living. It's exhausting being beaten for your 'sins' which are actually a result of taking abuse for somebody else's guilty conscience.

I'm going to tell you how somebody gets driven to extremism. Extreme risk taking. Extreme behaviour. Extreme moods. Death, which is at the other extremity from birth.

When a child is born, you write their future, based on the opportunities that you offer them. Choice is an illusion. Free will is an illusion. We can only play the cards that we are dealt.

Tags: #childhood #suicide #parents #depression

This is a story about being down and out on the streets of Camden Town...

Performing your greatest hits over and over again drives you insane. However, the public and society expect you to keep repeating what you do best, again and again and again, like a dancing bear or a dog trained to do tricks.

Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, but I'm not a CD player. If you want to listen to the same song over and over again, just press the repeat button on your iPod. Making an artist compromise on their creativity, in order to simply be a human machine, a robot, can destroy them.

The anxiety associated with knowing you have to do something that you've done so much that it's a complete paint by numbers, starts to become an unbearable burden on your ability to be able to function. Pretty much the only way to remain functioning is to drink yourself into such oblivion that you just don't care anymore.

Alcohol is a GABA agonist. What that means is that it suppresses a certain amount of your brain activity. It's effectively making you chilled out and dumb. Yes, if you're chilled out and dumb, you don't mind doing the same stupid shit over and over and over again. If you're intelligent and creative it destroys your soul, your desire to continue living.

Is it arrogant to say "fuck this" and stop doing what your talent and experience qualifies you to do, because it's destroying you? Should I just shut the hell up and "get a job" as I've been told to do by some ignorant twats? Well, it would literally kill me.

There are 2 ways I could die right at the moment. I could kill myself or I could drink myself to death. These are both sane responses to an insane world. I'm not a robot. Sorry about that.

My whole job is to automate human tasks. My whole job is to get mechanical robots, machines, to perform repetitive tasks instead of having human slaves or human robots doing them. We have reached a point with the development of technology, computing, software, where we don't need to do stupid repetitive shit anymore. Even creating software doesn't have to mean re-inventing the wheel anymore.

So, if you ask me to do something that's just plain wrong, I won't do it anymore. If you ask me to write code that's just going to go into the dustbin, I won't do it. I've stopped writing bugs. I've stopped supporting failures and idiots who don't have a software background. If you don't know your arse from your elbow, I won't show you the respect that you don't deserve.

If you want to know how to build software that can process $1.16 quadrillion ($1,160,000,000,000,000) per year, you can pay me for my professional opinion and I'll show you how it's done. That's the most money that's ever been processed by a banking software system, so that means I know what I'm talking about. If you don't want to listen, we can part company and I'll wish you the very best of luck.

1% of 1 quadrillion is 10 trillion. 1% of 10 trillion is 100 billion. 1% of 100 billion is 1 billion. 1% of 1 billion is 10 million. Any questions?

Ignore what people tell you. Money really does grow on trees, for those who can be bothered to climb. Yes, geese that lay golden eggs really do exist. You just have to climb the beanstalk and risk the wrath of an angry giant.

Magic beans are not a waste of money. They can help you to climb the beanstalk. They won't help you climb back down again though. What goes up must come down, but you might take a tumble. More on this in a future post entitled: Self Medication (Part Two).

You've heard about doping in sport. Why would you think that the athletes of the corporate world would be any different from those who compete in the Olympic Games? The pressure to perform at the very top of your game is just the same, if not greater. The competition is fierce, and anything that gives you a competitive edge is needed unless you want to be trampled underfoot by the thundering herd.

Did you ever wonder why London drinks so much coffee? Did you ever wonder why people are prepared to pay the best part of £3 or £4 for some bitter black sludge? Well, it's because of a plant alkali called Caffeine. Yes, that's a performance enhancing drug. It helps you to concentrate, and allows you to work with more energy, stamina, than would ordinarily be permitted by your body & mind. It increases your output potential.

Limitless? No, not limitless. There is a cost involved, and that cost is insomnia and anxiety. But don't worry about that, because there's always alcohol to take the edge off the anxiety and put you into an alcohol-induced coma that is a substitute for sleep.

You are never more than a few tens of metres from an outlet for caffeine or alcohol in London. They even have bars at bus stops. Well, they don't really, but me and my friends made one. It was very popular. It was the ultimate London pop-up.

What can I get you, sir? Would you like uppers or would you like downers? Uppers in the morning, and throughout the day. Downers after work and throughout the whole weekend. Uppers again on Monday morning to get you going again. Heaps of downers on a Friday to try and calm down from the working week, to 'rest' and recuperate. Oh yes, London is a very high performance place.

So if it's not limitless, what happens when you reach the limits? What happens when you're working on the number one projects for the number one companies, dealing with the biggest amounts of money that have ever been processed in the history of humanity? What happens when you have completely saturated yourself with alcohol and caffeine?

Well, you need crutches. You need a wheelchair. You need something to keep you rolling. You become somewhat disabled, but you need to keep moving, so you get wheeled around or you have to hobble along. Why do you think your office chair has wheels on it? It's because you're probably so f**ked that you can barely stand.

Yes, globalisation and corporate culture will f**k you up. You're only playing by the rules. You're only trying to compete and stay up with the herd, but it's f**king everybody up. Setting everybody up to compete with one another is causing people to be trampled to death.

Adversarial culture is wrecking lives. Us vs. Them and the zero sum game is in the spirit of competition, not co-operation. For somebody to win, somebody else has to lose. The system is designed to have losers as well as winners, and because there can only be one winner, that means everybody else is a loser.

Ultimately, somebody is going to win. Yes, that's right. One person is going to have it all, and everybody else will be dead and buried. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, apart from the one-eyed man, who is king of the world. Everybody else just starves to death. Great system!

But we're all in this together, right? There's safety in numbers, surely? Well, you shouldn't put the Lions in charge of the herd of Zebra. That's pure madness. The conflict of interest between the Lions and the Zebra means that the Lions are not best placed to be in charge of the herd, even if they are at the top of the food chain.

Being an apex predator does not mean that you are best qualified to judge what the greater good is. It means that you're incentivised to be selfish. You don't want to tumble from your position at the top of the pyramid. Being one of the struggling masses is shit beyond belief.

Counter-culture does not mean sitting around smoking dope. That's just totally dumb. You might as well just hurl yourself into the Lion's mouth. Making yourself slow and stupid is just about the dumbest possible thing you could do. It's playing into the hands of the oppressive ruling class.

You think this is a bit paranoid and conspiracy-theory-esque? Well, do you feel lucky, punk? 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Would you and your family like to join them? Would you like to get to the back of the queue? Would you like to swap your decadent western life for the life of somebody in the developing world? No, I didn't think so. You'd much rather prop up the adversarial system where you're lucky enough to be near the top of tottering tree.

Yes, luck is the decisive factor here, not skill or hard work. You don't think people in Asia and Africa work hard? You don't think people in the developing world are smart and resourceful? You're wrong. You're arrogant. You're deluded.

So, why do I reject the system that I profit from? Why do I prefer to live on the street in a cardboard box? Well, it actually pains me to know that I'm part of a system that's causing so much human misery. It's actually physically and mentally damaging to me to help to perpetrate deeds that cause death and destruction. I can't bury my head in the sand like you can.

I know you'll say or do anything to defend your family. More fool you though for not keeping your cock in your trousers. There are plenty of orphans who need parents. Why the f**k didn't you adopt? Are you literally the most selfish c**t in the whole wide world? Yes, the evidence would suggest that you are. You prop up the adversarial system and you create more mouths to feed in the decadent west and do nothing to give a hand up to the already starving mouths in the developing world.

There's no pride in having made a screaming, shitting, vomiting midget. Your body is evolved to do that. You had sex because you enjoyed having sex. You had a baby because your body is programmed to make babies. You did what snakes and scorpions do. You did what sharks and wasps do. You did what spiders and mosquitos do.

If I could give you one bit of advice, it would be to have a lobotomy. Ignorance is bliss. Being stupid is brilliant. Having higher brain functions is a curse. Being conscious and able to absorb information from the world and process it using rational thoughts is a f**king nightmare.

If you're wondering why I liked living with homeless people, it's because our footprint was much smaller. We lived small. We only consumed what we needed, and nothing more. We weren't making more arrogant ignorant greedy clones of ourselves to fill the void in our meaningless lives. We were just surviving and self-medicating for the agony of the f**ked up world.

We were very cheap, in terms of our economic, social and environmental impact. When a white middle class rich person goes haywire, they normally hurt the world a great deal. That's why it's such a great shame that the west is run by such criminal psychopaths. They'll drop bombs and starve people in order to remain quaffing champagne in their palaces. I include relatively modest homes when I say 'palaces'. Yes take a look around at your home and remember that $2 a day to keep a person alive for a year is probably the price of one of your many flat screen TVs.

So am I a hypocrite? Well, calling me one from your palatial surroundings makes you a hypocrite. You can't hypocritically accuse somebody of hypocrisy. That's ridiculous. Have you been homeless? Have you lived on less than $2 a day? No, I didn't think so. Shut the hell up and go and buy your kids an iPad.

So, what's going to happen to me? Well, my current thinking is that I'm going to finish my story and then take the final exit. I can't really see any more point in existing beyond telling this story, this cautionary tale. I'm literally wasting oxygen.

I loved being homeless in Camden Town. At least it was an honest existence. At least it was true to my values (September 2014)

Tags: #homeless #suicide #frank #capitalism #drugs #depression #alcohol #london #career #banking

This is a story about life support...

I was in a metaphorical coma for 4 years. I was virtually on life support for the first 2 years, and then I woke up to find my wife and parents trying to turn off the 'machines' that were keeping me alive. Shame on them. I gave up on life and spent the next 2 years at death's door, in and out of hospital.

The first 2 years, there was nothing anybody could do. Having suffered 6 years at the hands of somebody so unfaithful, cruel and abusive, my body & mind finally gave out on me. I cracked, collapsed, capitulated. The crash was inevitable. You just can't abuse somebody for so long and expect them to just suck it up.

Two years might sound like a long amount of time to 'care' for somebody, but if all you're doing is going on dating websites and taking holidays using my money then it's not all bad. I don't even care about the money. I'm open hearted. I pay it forwards. If you take and you don't give back, then I know that you pay a debt of guilt. I know that if you have a moral bone in your body, you know what the true balance of karma is.

Actually, not a lot of caring went on. During my first hospital admission, my ex-wife didn't even ask about visiting hours, the phone number to contact me or bother making any plans to come visit. The moment I was admitted to hospital, she jumped right on those websites and started arranging to meet people. What a c**t.

Oh, sorry... I'm not supposed to be bitter about stuff. Yes, I'm supposed to be the punchbag. I'm not supposed to have feelings. I'm supposed to be a pincushion. If you prick me, I'm not supposed to bleed. I'm supposed to be inhuman. But insofar as I can tell, I'm very much human. Sorry about that.

I suppose she's human too, although it's hard to imagine when she treated me so inhumanely. I suppose she was probably a sex addict or something. Definitely some psychological problems, but who am I to judge? I'm just the guy who was nearly killed by her narcissism and selfishness.

I wonder how you can move on like that. Destroying somebody, putting them in hospital, and then just immediately thinking about the next victim. I wonder what kind of callousness, lack of empathy, psychopathy, allows you to expend a human life and move on as if it was nothing.

I suppose if you've decided that you want another boyfriend or husband because you don't like the one you've got, the best thing to do is probably abuse them until they kill themself. It's a lot quicker and easier than just breaking up with them. I guess she had moved on, which is why she thought it was OK to go on dating websites while I was fighting for my life.

What difference does having a supportive partner make anyway? What difference does having supportive parents make? It can't be very much. The parents should just support the partner who's going to be bereaved and help to finish off the sick and weakened person. Yup the sick person is a lost cause, so it's a good idea to hurry death along a bit.

My parents initially refused to help at all. They refused to help either of us. Then they started abusing me too, but I can see that it was probably an ill-advised attempt at 'tough love'. Well guess what? I'd had my fill of tough love having my face smashed in by my partner.

Then my parents did what she wanted, which was to get me out of the way so she could go on dating websites as if she was single and had managed to buy a house on her pathetic salary. Yes, she quite liked the house that I paid for. She did let me have the deposit back when we divorced, but only because my solicitor fought for it. I just wanted my life. I told her to take as much as she wanted, and horrifyingly she wanted it all, including my life!

Perhaps this horrible treatment had something to do with prolonging the first terrible 2 years. I was a bit like a car running on 3 cylinders, spluttering and coughing, kangarooing down the road. There were opportunities for recovery. There were periods of improvement. However, the toxic atmosphere still persisted. You just can't recover when your partner wants you dead and your parents are co-operating with them.

I'm pretty canny. I know how to choose my battles wisely. I knew that it would drive me insane if I tried to battle the abusive shits head-on. You just can't win a battle where you're outnumbered and weakened. If you want to live, you need to curl up in a ball and protect your vital organs, and wait for the blows to stop being rained down on your head. You need to play dead.

So my ex-wife took her loot and ran for the hills, leaving me bruised and bloody in the gutter. I don't begrudge her taking her share. She paid into our joint finances, and took far more than that, but it's not her fault that she's so sick that she can't do the basic maths. She felt entitled, to damages perhaps? But it was me who was damaged. It was me who was left fighting for my life. It was me who was nearly dead.

I just wanted her out of my life after she said she'd rather I was dead and marked my suicide note in red pen, with loads of abuse all over it (she's a teacher, you see... so that's OK, right?). She was homocidal. I'm not saying she's a murderer (that I know about) but it's pretty worrying behaviour. Certainly a breach of the "in sickness and in health" marriage vows we made to each other. What a c**t.

Oh sorry, almost a bit of bitterness there. Except it's passing now. Now that I know that I'm free, and I'm alive, and I'm somewhat recovered from where I was 2 years ago, when we finally separated. It was a very close call. Apparently probate is a lot easier than divorce. That was her preference anyway, to be widowed rather than divorced. That's what she said to me. What a c... oh, hang on, I'm now starting to feel pity for her, rather than bitterness.

Yes, I'm wondering what could drive a person to have such careless disregard for a human life. It's rather worrying. She must have had some pretty horrible stuff happen to her as a kid. Yes, I really pity her. What a sad messed up person. What a shame. She is very smart and I found her very attractive, although a lot of people wouldn't fancy her. I was totally in love with her, even though she was very hard to love.

I really hope she learnt some stuff from our relationship. I know that I did. When a recent ex-girlfriend started throwing abuse and plates and knives at my head, I dumped her immediately. She was a feisty Italian lovable little thing, but there's no future for me with somebody who thinks that kind of abuse is acceptable. When another girlfriend started using abusive language towards me, I told her I didn't like it and asked her politely to stop, and she did. That seems more normal to me, more healthy.

I think alcohol and drugs can be dangerously disinhibiting. I don't think my Italian ex was drunk at the time but she was probably high on drugs or on a comedown. I have no idea. It's just an excuse anyway. Those things are not changing your character, they are just revealing what lurks beneath the surface. They are showing you what that person is really like, under the surface.

When you get drunk or you get high, you are testing yourself to the limits. You are effectively putting yourself into an extreme situation that would never occur in normal life, except during exceptional circumstances. You are switching the mode in your brain to a state that it would normally only enter because of a response to something very unusual.

By taking drink or drugs, you are going to trigger fight or flight responses in yourself. When I got very upset with my ex-wife, I used to get in a taxi, or drive to an airport. I'm a lover not a fighter, so it's the flight response, not the fight response, that gets triggered in me. I left our joint birthday party in 2006 because she was having a tantrum and saying she was having a horrible time.

I called the cab for both of us, but she was having such a horrible time that she wanted to stay, so that everybody could see how horrible it was for her, having a massive party. What was horrible for me was seeing the girl I loved very upset. I was trying to take her away from a situation that she was telling me was horrible for her.

Another time, she was having such a horrible time, sitting on a sofa with my friends, with me excluded for some reason. It was so horrible for her, having all these friends around her, caring about her. It must be so horrible to be loved by somebody who cares and wants to make you happy and protect you from horrible things. That must be horrible. I drove to Gatwick Airport, because I didn't know what to do. The flight response.

Yes, I fly, I don't fight. I can fight, but I won't. I will take flight. Fighting doesn't achieve anything. Flying gets you out of the situation of conflict and stops anybody from getting injured. It's the more evolved response to a stressful situation.

I flew us around the world many times. That was my solution. I paid for tens of thousands of pounds worth of flights, to keep her happy, to keep us happy. She was very hard work, and had very expensive tastes, but she was worth it and I don't regret it. I loved her to bits.

It kind of works, having 5 star holidays all over the globe. I remember her having an absolute meltdown every time something would go wrong with our travel arrangements, and I would just have to quietly move her a safe distance away, and then go and use a charm offensive to repair the damage caused by her sour face and tantrum, before negotiating what she wanted.

Holidays were very stressful. She wanted a camper van when we went to Hawaii. The poor people who ran the camper van company just wanted to have a relaxed Christmas break, and when their camper van broke down, there wasn't a mechanic on the island of Oahu who fancied fixing it during the holiday season. I had to bust my balls, and theirs, just to keep her from throwing her toys out of the pram. It was hard work.

That's just one example. Every holiday, she was very demanding, and I was her personal tourguide, smoothing things over with the locals. Yes, she was very organised, officious, but that's not the way the world works. Things go wrong, and things don't run like clockwork. I remember getting wound up when taxi drivers would stop in the middle of the road and talk to each other in remote windswept locations that hardly any Europeans ever visit, but then I realised that it's important to embrace local culture. It's important to go with the flow. I learnt some patience, some humility.

Yes, you can go to a place and splurge your cash and expect to be chauffeur driven around by a man-servant. However, when I asked her, she said she wanted the authentic experience. As her personal tour guide, I delivered what my client asked for, always. I think she really liked the local bus we caught in Egypt, packed full of farmyard animals and cargo, with the passengers who just wanted to discuss English Premier League football with us.

Travelling is hard work, and it's stressful, when you're the one who has to figure stuff out on the ground and actually deal with the language and cultural barriers. Getting stroppy and telling people that you're disappointed and "it's not good enough" really doesn't get you anywhere. Tact and diplomacy are the order of the day.

I hope my exes enjoyed their holidays. I really poured my heart & soul into making sure they had a lovely lovely time.

13,796ft high, at the summit of Mauna Kea. Trip of a lifetime. Was she grateful? The fact she wanted me dead would suggest not (December 2012)

Tags: #divorce #suicide #depression #mentalhealth #bipolar #frankie

This is a story about three amigos...

You need some fire in your belly if you're going to achieve great things. The three handsome gentlemen above have all bucked the trend and excelled at what they do, in their own unique ways.

It's not my place to share other people's stories, but we all had events in our lives that have had an influence on the passions we have pursued. You never know what somebody else has been through, so it's always the best policy to be non-judgemental.

I'm not saying that we had it harder than anybody else. It's not a pissing contest. It's not a competition. And this isn't going to be a tear-jerking tale of woe is me. In fact, I'm not even going to tell you anything more than what I have already stated: behind every driven ambitious person, there is usually an unseen reason.

So, have we got chips on our shoulders? No, we have each others arms on our shoulders. We stand in solidarity, brotherhood. We are positive can-do people who act with energy and enthusiasm, not negativity and bitterness. If we have a reason to put more effort into things, to try harder than Average Joe, then it's because we are channelling our feelings in positive ways.

My friends aren't always immune from gossip, rumour and prejudice. However, they have been good enough to reserve judgement of my character. Yes, I have been pleasantly surprised that my friends have been good enough to listen to my story, now that I'm becoming well enough to tell it.

Writing somebody off, writing off a life, declaring somebody a 'lost cause' is never good. It's a death sentence. You never know just how close somebody is to the edge of the abyss.

Something happened yesterday that really struck a chord. Somebody was pushed in front of a tube train, at Kentish Town station, where I used to live, until very recently. I would travel every day from that very station platform. That's what is happening in our society. People don't jump, they're pushed.

Nobody chooses to jump off a building or in front of a train. Nobody chooses to slash their wrists or eat poison. Nobody chooses to suffocate themself or slit their own throat. Nobody chooses to blow their brains out or electrocute themself. Nobody chooses to hang themself or overdose.

Yes, it's more obvious when you can physically see somebody else pushing the person to their death, but it also happens in unseen ways too.

Every ignorant comment, every bit of gossip you pass on, every time you pass judgement and assume that you even have the faintest idea of what's going on beneath the surface of a person's life, you are slowly killing that person. You are driving them inwards, you are isolating them, you are killing them.

Yes, talking about somebody behind their back might feel like helping. Wringing your hands and saying to each other "what can we do?" while you exchange your guesswork, your ignorant speculation... it's not getting to the heart of the problem. It might be making things worse, by making that person feel alone and not understood.

It's hard, I know, trying to help somebody who has stopped communicating, clammed up. But I have no words that can possibly express the difficulty of trying to communicate with a far greater number of people who are talking to each other about you. The numbers just don't stack up. There's only one of me, so there's no way I can keep everybody informed, especially when I'm very sick.

Please don't think this is a criticism of my friends. The fact that they have reserved some judgement and they're slowly coming back into my life is spurring me on in recovery. You have to have hope and optimism to fight back from the brink of suicide, and you need friends. You need to feel like there's some chance of escaping depressed isolation, which is a death-spiral downwards.

People might think I'm pedantic. I am, but only on things that matter. If I correct you on the difference between mania and hypomania, it's because it's an important distinction that allows me to maintain hope of having some kind of quality of life. If I point out the research that shows better long term outcomes for unmedicated patients, in my situation, then it's important to know that I've had many discussions with many doctors and you telling me to follow doctors orders is not helpful, because you have no idea which doctor you're talking about.

Oh snap it sounds like I'm ticking people off. I'm really not. I just want friends in my life, not amateur psychologists, amateur psychiatrists, amateur doctors. It's really sweet of you if you've done any reading about Unipolar Depression, Type II Bipolar and other issues affecting my life, but it's really not necessary. I've done all the reading and the best possible thing would be to just judge my character and trust me... I'm working on the illness thing.

The thing that I'd like to reassure people about is, insofar as me and the docs can tell, the illness is acute not chronic. That means there's a chance I can get better if I'm given a window of opportunity.

Looking backwards to move forwards is 'wrong' apparently, but I tend to ignore the advice of anybody who hasn't been to hell and back. I've tried doing things the way that ignorant people have suggested, and I can tell you first hand that your oversimplified version of reality doesn't work.

There are no short cuts and you have to use stepping stones. Sometimes the path might double back on itself, but as long as it's the right path, you have to keep following it. I went up a cul-de-sac and I could have raged and stormed and sulked and generally allowed myself to be trapped in a dead end - indeed many people wanted to trap me in the dead end - but in the end I had to just ignore all the haters, travel back down the one-way street from the dead end and find the correct path.

Everybody boos and jeers you when you have taken a wrong turn. Nobody congratulates you on having figured out you have made a mistake, and pats you on the back for being strong enough to retrace your steps, rather than just kill yourself. Nobody says, hey, you've had to travel twice as far as everybody else, let me give you a hand. Nope, people will expect you to work three times as hard, because you made a mistake. You already have to work twice as hard, but that's not good enough for people. They want to put the boot in and make you work three times as hard, because having to work twice as hard is not enough punishment as it is.

Yes, it's easy to end up hating the world, because the world is looking to scapegoat you. The world is looking for easy answers. The world is looking for convenient members of society to isolate and blame. Adults are not really very grown up. Adults have never really left the playground, where they liked to pick on children who were different. Bullying is rife in society.

When somebody gets weak, they're such an easy target. And the best part of all is that they get weaker and weaker until they die. Yup, it's great fun being an adult bully, because you get to kill people and then deny all knowledge, because you're smart now. You can cover your arse with plausible deniability. You can point the finger at all kinds of things that were symptoms of that victim's distress.

If it looks like I'm stuck in the past, it's because I've waited 10 years for the opportunity to be able to move on from a fateful mistake. It's a messy story, and it's not like I can point to a single error, but there was a significant life priority change in 2005 that threw my world into chaos.

I left London to live by the beach, but that wasn't a mistake necessarily. However, it put me in a precarious position. New town, new friends. I was rebuilding my life fairly quickly, but things were still fragile. Plus my circle of friends were all starting to leave London anyway. Lots of people came to visit. It could have worked.

I played for the title. I took a shot at the top. I tried to have it all. I thought I had found the girl of my dreams and I had it all. Turns out, I wasn't as mature as I thought I was. I made the mistake that nearly every adult must surely make at least once or twice. I picked the wrong girl.

Because I was in a fragile place, I had one or two attempts at correcting my mistake. I tried to break up with her, when I could see that my quality of life was being destroyed. It was my mistake. It was my lack of strength. It was my neediness and insecurity, being relatively young and inexperienced and in a strange new town and in a new job... I couldn't just walk away so easily. I don't blame her for not letting me go. It was my fault for getting trapped.

If you love them, let them go. I loved her. She didn't love me. You live, you learn. My parents taught me to never give up on a relationship, so I didn't. I kept going. I don't give up on things. It's not in my nature to give up on things. I'm the guy who fixes things. I'm the guy who makes things work.

Yes, I've read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and I know that women aren't after a Mr Fix-it, but it's more romantic than that. I'm a soppy loved-up kind caring sort of guy who just wants to make things work, patch things up, move forward together. I'm a diplomat, I'm a pacifist, I'm a lover not a fighter.

Did I deserve to have my face beaten to a pulp for the way I felt? Did I deserve to be driven to the brink of suicide? There has to be some shared responsibility somewhere, but I'm over it now. I know that I'll never get an apology. I know that she'll always think she was justified for battering both sides of my face when I turned the other cheek. I didn't lift a finger in self defence or retaliation, because I'm an open hearted person.

Three strikes though. Three strikes and you're out. Nobody has hit me in my adult life except for my ex-wife. Probably because they can see that there is anger just waiting to be unleashed if you mistreat me. Yes, it's really not advisable to hit me. You can try, and you might get away with it a couple of times, but I really wouldn't advise you to test the three strike rule. You might get a knuckle sandwich.

Why would you hit somebody who is kind and caring and open hearted anyway? What's it going to achieve? I'm a lover not a fighter. Just be nice and kind and caring and then we'll get along just fine. If you abuse me, my response is going to be predictable. Yes, abuse has predictable results. Bullying has predictable results.

My Dad raised me as a pacifist. I was raised to ignore bullying. I was raised to not rat people out. I was raised not to complain about abuse. I'm very good at calming myself down. I'm very good at absorbing blow after blow that is rained down on my head. I'm like a giant abuse sponge. I soak up all that abuse.

However, there is a saturation point. When the abuse sponge has become completely soaked with your rage and agression that you have taken out on me, you'd better be a little worried. When the punching bag can't take any more, you'd better not take another cheap shot.

I can tell you a lot about de-escalating situations. I can tell you a lot about anger management. I can tell you a lot about dissipating negative feelings. I can tell you a lot about de-fusing a ticking time bomb. Blaming me - the abuse victim - is not a successful strategy for helping somebody to get over their mistreatment.

Am I hamming myself up too much as this big victim? Am I too self pitying? Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink? Well, people have to find a way to cope somehow. Presently, that's this blog for me.

Yes, you can follow my progress right here, as I work through a bunch of stuff, in public. I'm not holding back. I'm staying true to my values of honesty and openness. I'm baring my soul as I'm working through this stuff. It's weird that I'm still carrying this stuff around, right? But where's it supposed to have gone? How do you get rid of all the crap you've taken, all the abuse you've absorbed? How do you dump it?

People have got a zillion and one techniques, suggestions. I've got a suggestion for you. Fuck off unless you want to be my friend. I need friends not therapists, carers.

I want friends. I need friends. I miss friends.

Before everything went to hell in a hand-cart (April 2005)

Tags: #friends #divorce #mentalhealth #bipolar #suicide #depression

This is a story about the doors of perception...

So I radically altered my appearance for over a month. I went from being the suit wearing IT Consultant working on the number one project in the biggest bank in Europe (HSBC) to being the crazy suicidal mental patient guy with a moustache and a tattoo. That how I roll [on the floor laughing].

Self sabotage and self mutilation are strange things to do, but then so is suicide. They are symptoms of a very sick society. It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a broken system. There can be no pride or honour in being able to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing.

I knew what I was doing. I could have held back. I could have buried my feelings and kept my mouth shut. I could have bitten my tongue. However, things have been eating away inside of me, like acid dissolving the container it's kept in. It was time to vent some toxic gas.

This is all a rather extreme form of bridge burning. I'm really pretty sickened by what global banking and corporate culture is doing to the world and I want to do the right thing. I want to whistleblow on all the life-wrecking and economy destroying corrupt bullshit that I have had to endure.

It's not going to do me any favours, it's not going to make me any friends, it's not going to make me rich, famous or popular, but it has to be done. Somebody has to stand up, be counted, and do the damn right thing. It's going to hurt me, a lot.

Is this some personal grievance? Well I wouldn't be so passionate if it wasn't personal, but it's not personal in the way that you probably assume that it is. I was a Griffin Saver with Midland Bank since I was a little boy, and I've always loved HSBC and I was so proud to start work for them, age 21. Later, in 2003, I was amongst the first 8,000 people to work in the prestigious 8 Canada Square... headquarters of the HSBC Group Plc, which employs 245,000 people worldwide.

If you look after me, I will look after you. Actually I tend to do things the other way around. I will look after you on the assumption that once I have proven to you - beyond all reasonable doubt - that I am adding value to your organisation, you will look after me, to some extent. Sadly, the way the system works is to try and get blood out of the proverbial stone.

Yes, the employees of global banks are driven very hard indeed, but they share so little of the reward, in terms of the wealth that they generate for their masters. The customers of global banking pay huge sums of money for financial services, but it's them who still toil all hours to service their debts, rather than being enriched by the products they are sold.

Consumers are being sold a lie. They are being told that products and services will make them happier, richer, more attractive, more successful. The truth is that the only people who will get rich are those who own and operate the pyramid schemes. There simply aren't enough pay rises and promotions for you to be able to reach the rungs on the ladder where you will be able to see your kids and sleep at night... you're going to be stuck on that treadmill for the rest of your life, sorry.

It's not market economics that is broken. The markets really are efficient. However, they are not free from political influence. They are also not immune from manipulation by exceedingly wealthy individuals and institutions. Here's how it works...

Imagine if I were to buy all the insulin producing factories. Building a factory takes quite a long time. During the time that I own and operate a monopoly on insulin production, and the time that a competitor could enter the market that I have monopolised, the demand for insulin is going to remain constant, because diabetics don't want to die. So, if I am in control of the supply, and I know that demand is constant, then I can demand practically whatever price I want. That's market economics.

We see artificial scarcity created through cartels in many industries. Diamonds are only worth as much as they are on the markets because the De Beers family has such a large monopoly that they can control the amount of diamonds supplied to the market. Oil is only worth as much as it is because the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) can artificially control supply in order to maintain high prices. They are quite open about their monopoly, their cartel.

So you can't eat diamonds or money, but we do need energy. Money is the way that energy is swapped for goods and services, like food. It's easier to grow more food or make more goods, using energy that has been generated from a power station, rather than by manpower. Welcome to the industrial revolution.

Technology has made vast efficiency gains in terms of being able to move money around to get it to where it can work most effectively, but it doesn't mean that the system can't be gamed. In fact the whole financial system is a giant game. We need to remember that it's simply a way of keeping score and deciding who - as a person - is somehow 'worth' more than another, using some arbitrary measure.

That's right isn't it? The people in the West are 'worth' a lot more than the people in the developing world. Because they have more zeros on the end of a computer system that is keeping score, they get to have all the food, shelter, medicine, education, transport etc. and everybody else is a worthless slave. The human lives in the developing world are clearly not worth anything because their electronic bank balance is as good as zero, if not negative.

You can quite clearly see from the image above, who the superior being is. Yes, it's the one with the biggest bank balance in the global casino. They're the winner. Gold medal for them, hurrah!

Actually, huge numbers of people in the developing world have been saddled with debt that they didn't even agree to. Their nation's leaders signed away their natural resources, signed huge loan agreements to pay for some multinational to come and bleed the wealth, and then mortgaged every man, woman and child to pay for it all. That's really not acceptable.

When the people inside that country get a bit p1ssed off that their leaders have sold them down the river, then the developed nations can sell a bunch of guns, tanks, artillery and warplanes to keep their people in check. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

Oh, and when the people have really had enough, then it's time to bomb all the roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, power stations, sewerage plants, factories etc. etc. so that they have to have the developed nations come and rebuild it all again using yet more lovely lovely loans.

Yes, economic slavery is the New World Order. Yes, you might not see people in physical chains toiling in the plantations in your actual country, but somebody still has to grow your sugar, wheat, cotton, coffee etc. etc. Did you grow it yourself? Did you see where it was grown? Do you know anything about the life of the people who grew your food?

We're all rather busy in our wanky make-work jobs, feeling all high powered in a suit in a swanky glass & steel office, pressing buttons in the lift and doing the photocopying... great, but how many meals does it put on the table? Has it stopped war and human suffering? Has it stopped the spread of preventable disease? Has it saved the life of sick people?

I'm fed up of being shouted down by people with vested interests. I just wanted to do the right thing at HSBC and I got muscled out for escalating my concerns in line with my moral duty and legal responsibility to the shareholders and customers. I actually wanted to try and save jobs too.

So this is a call to action that is not some viral marketing, psychologically A-B tested, clickbait horseshit spam scam. This is not some pump and dump. This is not me grinding an axe because of a personal grievance. This is about the big picture and a sickness on all our souls, if you are part of the perpetration of the economic enslavement of the developing world.

In actual fact, the wrongdoing extends to your own doorstep. Somebody you know is in distress because of consumer lending. Their life and livelihood is under threat because they were told to borrow, borrow, borrow! Buy now, pay later! 12 months interest free credit! Low rates! Consume consume consume!

The whole ponzi scheme is set up to get people paid out by suckering other people in. Sure, my life looks fantastic with my riverside apartment, and of course I've had cars and boats and luxury holidays and hot tubs and flat screen TVs and Macbooks and iPhones and gadgets and technology galore. It doesn't make you happy, and eventually you realise the human cost. You wake up and smell the coffee.

So, as Nicholas "Mr Ethical" Wilson (@nw_nicholas) says:

I have been radicalised by HSBC/Tory fraud & corruption

Yup, I woke up one day and realised I couldn't carry on being part of something I knew was wrong, from the depths of my experience in my 19 year career as an IT consultant to global banks. It made me very sick to be living with such internal conflict. It made me upset to see talented professionals being completely ignored.

You can't buy me. You can pay for my opinion, but you don't get to choose what my opinion is. I will give you my opinion based on my experience and an objective analysis of all the evidence that I can gather. If you don't like that opinion, it's not up for debate, unless you are qualified to contest what I'm saying.

So my approach is very unorthodox, but the orthodoxy led us to the brink of economic armageddon, so why should I conduct myself in a manner which is clearly misconduct? Only an idiot expects to see different results each time they do the same thing. The only reason to play by the old rules is to protect the old system, but that system has failed.

Thankfully, there are all these motivational posters around HSBC telling you what to do if your manager isn't listening and the number one project is going down the shitter. If you're a consultant, you're specifically paid for your expert opinion... and very highly paid too. Lots and lots of shareholder money is being spent on the number one project in the biggest bank in Europe (HSBC) unsurprisingly.

So, what happens if you do speak up? Well, I'm not giving out any prizes for correct guesses.

But maybe my contribution just wasn't valued? Maybe I wasn't pulling my weight in the team? Maybe I have too much of a high opinion of my expertise?

The email from the HSBC CIO in charge of the number one project in the biggest bank in Europe reads as follows:

"I cannot thank you enough for the work you have put into this and for your commitment"

So, I'm a little bit confused. The Programme Director also told me, in front of loads of people, that he was really happy with my work... shortly before I was sacked. Curious, oh so very curious.

Anyway, I've got no mandate, no authority to communicate these things, so I'm just going to wait and see what happens. Let's see what happens with the Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) and whether the US Department of Justice is satisfied with the naughty banks who have managed to allegedly commit crimes but not been prosecuted for them.

Good luck, I say to them. Like I say, I've been a Griffin Saver with Midland Bank/HSBC since I was a little boy. I'm very loyal.

Merry Christmas!

Tags: #banking #career #london #it #capitalism #politics #hsbc