Nick Grant

This is a story about hopelessness...

2017 was an annus horriblis like no other that I've experienced. I can't imagine as many issues conspiring to swamp me ever again. Despite being extremely mentally unwell, my rational analysis was correct: there was no hope of me escaping my dreadful circumstances.

There are many inescapable traps in life. Addictive drugs and medications, debts, social isolation, abandonment, stigma and suchlike exert such a powerful gravitational pull that no person - dumped by society - would ever be able to escape their fate without a miracle.

I don't believe in miracles.

That I had become hooked on prescription painkillers, sleeping pills and tranquillisers, due to nerve damage, kidney failure, lengthy hospitalisation and job loss, was something I had no hope of dealing with on my own, especially when then compounded by financial distress and having to leave my home city for the first job I could find, which didn't pay enough to deal with my financial woes. I wasn't even managing to tread water - I was drowning.

I'd had some help from crisis teams and home treatment teams - care in the community - but all they could do was bring me medication. My problems were more to do with hopelessness in the face of insurmountable odds. I was haemorrhaging cash and in danger of being evicted; losing everything. I was too sick to work. However, the home treatment team at least managed to force me to hand over some of my stockpile of prescription opiates, which I was planning to use for an overdose - that one small thing probably saved my life.

To expect me to put all my possessions into storage, move to a city I'd never foot in before, live in an apartment I'd never seen inside and work a demanding job, was too much pressure to place on a sick person in crisis. To expect me to deal with all my problems on my own and with inadequate support, was signing my death warrant. I was set up to fail.

I managed to withstand a few setbacks, such as a new relationship not working out. However, a second breakup - and the loss of the social group which came with it - was the straw that broke the camel's back. I knew I wouldn't have the energy to pick myself up and try again. I was too lonely and isolated. I was too vulnerable. I was to stressed and exhausted. I knew deep down that the numbers just didn't add up: I wasn't earning enough and I was working too hard. There was no escape. Suicide was the only option.

Of course, suicide was one of two options. I could have become homeless. I could have allowed myself to be abandoned by society and marginalised; demonised. I could have allowed myself to be ejected from the mainstream, never to be allowed to return because the stench of poverty would have seeped into my clothes and coated my skin. I could have accepted the labels which people were quick to slap on me: loser; unemployable; waste-of-space; unreliable; shady; untrustworthy. I could have lived out the rest of my days in a shop doorway, sleeping on a piece of cardboard in a dirty sleeping bag, begging.

I'm a realist. I'm pragmatic. I knew that I'd had my chances but they hadn't worked out, and I was highly unlikely to get any more. Time to die.

I got a pint glass from the kitchen and a box of white wine. I emptied out hundreds of strong opiate painkillers into a makeshift tumbler and tipped the capsules and tablets into my mouth, washing them down with alcohol. There was no hesitation; no regret; no self-doubt.

I set a countdown timer on my phone. I knew that the medications would hit my bloodstream in roughly 40 minutes time and I would soon begin to have seizures and lose consciousness. I presumed that the blood-plasma concentration levels of the medications would peak after 60 to 90 minutes and no amount of activated charcoal or gastric lavage would be sufficient to save my life. I thought that provided the alarm wasn't raised during that brief window, I would definitely die. I'd calculated the lethal dosages and I'd amplified the effects by combining with alcohol.

When the timer went off I was feeling very dizzy and disoriented, but I was able to find my phone and send 3 tweets. An old schoolfriend saw one of my tweets and replied. I replied back:

"I'm sorry Ben. I was looking forward for seeing you in November"

Those were my last words.

We lead lives of quiet desperation and we've been scattered to the four corners of the earth. I have school-friends from Oxford and Dorset, but I've spent most of my working life in London. What was I doing in Manchester? There were no friends or family anywhere for hundreds of miles. I'm cared for by people all over the world, but what can anybody do when we're only connected through cyberspace?

I thought nobody who cared about me knew where I lived.

Online friends raised the alarm. Emergency services got to me and took me to hospital in enough time to save me. I regained consciousness in intensive care on life support. It's quite miraculous that I'm alive today, writing this - the prognosis was not good at all.

The things which pushed me to suicide had eminently practical solutions: housing, employment, finances, social, intimate. There was no reason I had to die, except for the way that our society has become an "every man for himself" barbaric struggle. Our communities have collapsed and we live lives of isolated quiet desperation, where we don't feel like we have the time, the money, the energy, the space, the resources or other very practical things, in order to help the needy.

In the absence of a stable and secure life in the so-called "real world" I've maintained relationships which aren't disrupted by moving around geographically. I maintain relationships which follow-the-sun: I talk to people in all different timezones at different times of the day. My online presence has allowed me to keep a toe-hold in the world of the living, thanks to others' willingness to be part of an online community too.

My "real world" life is not much different today than how it was a year ago, but my situation is much improved. The suicide attempt brought the help I needed - albeit seemingly too late - and I've been able to break free from addictive prescription medications, stabilise my mental health and get myself into a financial situation where there's light at the end of the tunnel. I'm able to work, sleep, eat and generally function with independence - a life which is mostly tolerable. My lack of "real world" social life and romantic relationship is made more bearable by the vast amount of care and support I receive from my many friends who I'm in regular contact with online.

Things are far from perfect, but they're vastly improved versus a year ago, and at least I feel like I've got a fighting chance. I at least have the dignity of being able to work my way through recovery and get back on my feet.

To those who took an interest during that fateful night of September 9, 2017 - thank you.

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about quality of life...

Two years ago, on this day, I was writing about how depressed I was. I was researching into how depressed people rated their quality of life - I found out that it was 70% lower than happy healthy normal people. At the time I was trapped in a job which I hated. I had serious doubts about my skills and experience, so I'd taken some work which I knew I could do with my eyes closed, but I was bored out of my mind.

I hypothesised that my quality of life wasn't going to improve until I retired, because I couldn't stand my job but I couldn't imagine being able to get another one that was any better. My job was the reason why I was so depressed, anxious, bored, demotivated and miserable, and the only alternative was to be a penniless writer, which would bring its own problems... not least how to save up enough money to be able to afford to retire.

This got me thinking about retirement.

I presume that the first few years of retirement are excellent, because old age and age-related health problems haven't started to have a major impact on quality of life. Modern medicine, safer working conditions, good diet, better air quality and a multitude of other things have improved massively for the baby-boomer generation, and those retirees will live much longer than their parents. For my generation and people younger than me, we've worked longer hours, commuted further, had far more financial insecurity, job insecurity and housing insecurity, and we have no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - the retirement age keeps getting older and older and the prospect of an impoverished old age seems increasingly likely. Retirement looks like it's not something worth even daring to dream about.

I started thinking about how good retirement would be anyway - sour grapes perhaps - what with the inevitable demise of my health. It seems unlikely that I'm going to live beyond 85 years old, being a man.

With partial deafness, partial blindness, mild incontinence, diabetes, heart disease, lung disease, liver disease, kidney problems, back problems, joint problems and a whole host of other things I might expect to affect me in old age, exacerbated by decades of miserable office work, it seems unlikely that I'd be lucky enough to enjoy even 50% of the quality of life in my eighties as I enjoy in my sixties.

These are very conservative estimates of course. I could drop dead at age 70.

With all those things considered, I then started to do the calculations to work out whether it was worth shackling myself to a miserable job or not. I started to calculate if it was worth being miserable and depressed today, in the hope of a better life if and when I retire. My conclusion was simple: NO.

As you can see from the graphic above, I can increase my quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) by a maximum of 30 points if I live for today, or a maximum of 30 points if I live for retirement. Obviously if I was to die at age 80, I'll only have benefitted by 24 points. If I was to die at 75, I'll only have benefitted by 17 points. If I was to die at 70, I'll only benefit by 9 points.

So, I might as well plan on the pessimistic assumption that I'll die early. In fact, I can at least guarantee when I'll die, because I always have the option of committing suicide. In fact, it seems sensible to plan for the day I commit suicide instead of the day I die, because old age, sickness and infirmity seems like an undesirable fate. Why would I be miserable today, so I can spend more years as a geriatric, waiting to die?

I'm hoping to get myself into a strong position by the time I'm 40 so that I can exploit the fact that I haven't rutted and spawned offspring like a mindless beast, and I'm therefore free from any responsibility for brats I brought into existence. Soon, I won't need to shackle myself to miserable boring bullshit office jobs which I hate, because I'll have recovered my financial security and stability, such that I'm free to do what I want without a guilty conscience - I won't owe anything to anybody, and I won't be running away from any responsibilities.

By the spring next year, I should be feeling quite wealthy again, and much more free to be able to dare to dream. Perhaps I'll travel. Perhaps I'll write. Perhaps I'll create art. I can pretty much do whatever I want, once I've finally dealt with all the consequences of divorce which caused my life to collapse. It's hard on a man, losing everything - it nearly cost me my life.

It's been so hard getting to where I am today, and I can't believe there are still so many months before I get back to a truly safe and secure position. I can't believe it's taken so long and it's been so difficult. Perhaps that's why so many men commit suicide. Perhaps that's why rip-off merchants have run off with so much of my money. It's hard to do things right. I've always tried to do things the right way.

I'm now at the point where I've worked too hard for too long to see the chance of breaking free get away from me. I really think I'll just kill myself right now if there are any major setbacks, because I've been trying so hard to overcome a heap of problems and I've got nothing left to give. I deserve a break. I deserve things to pan out for me.

It'll soon be my turn to start enjoying life and the fruits of my labour; the payoff for my struggle through adversity; the rewards for my ingenuity and sheer determination to fix problems. I've overcome terrible obstacles and put up with so much suffering and I've done the miserable work that nobody else would do, because it's awful. Now I deserve to be like those spoiled brats who've been allowed to do whatever the fuck they want - follow their dreams - because they have doting indulgent parents. Maybe I'll be a student. Maybe I'll have a gap year. Maybe I'll take a dead-end job with no career prospects, because it's rewarding. Whatever. I can do whatever I want... soon.

It's been a slog. I can't take much more slog.

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

This is a story about the money multiplier...

Let us imagine for a moment that I manage to obtain a banking license and start a brand new bank, but I don't have any money. In this hypothetical example you want to buy a house valued at £100,000 - for the sake of easy maths - and you have a £10,000 deposit. Further, let us imagine that there are lots of people who would be glad to take out personal loans, overdrafts, credit cards and other kinds of borrowing, and pay high rates of interest. Let us set the central bank lending rate at 0.5%, the mortgage rate at 5% and the unsecured lending rate at 20%. With me so far?

What I seek to prove to you is how capitalism is rigged so that those who control the money in the economy - the bankers and other capitalists - can make as much money as they want and not work at all, while the rest of us pay double. We pay with everything we earn and we pay again because we pay with our time and labour, which all ends up in the pockets of the capitalists.

Here's how it works.

You go to your bank with your £10,000 deposit. You give the bank your hard-earned cash.

Then, here comes the magic trick.

Your £10,000 is a liability on the bank's balance sheet. That is to say, if you were to deposit £10,000 the bank would be liable to pay you back as and when you demanded to have your money. However, the banks can do a little trick to turn a liability into an asset: It's called the money multiplier.

Banks only need to keep about 5% - or less - of the money that's deposited with them. So the bank can lend out £9,500 of your £10,000.

Then what happens?

Well, that £9,500 comes back into the bank in the form of a deposit. Let's say that our bank is paying a very generous 0.25% interest on their deposits. So, the bank has a £10,000 liability on one side of its balance sheet and a £9,500 asset - in the form of a loan - on the other side of its balance sheet, plus £500 in its reserve account. The loan brings in interest of 20% and the deposit attracts interest at 0.25%. The net monthly income for the bank is therefore £158.33 and the net monthly cost of interest payments is £19.79, yielding a very healthy £138.54 of profit every month for doing nothing.

So that's almost £140 profit every single month - £1,662 per annum - for doing absolutely nothing! But the best part is that it doesn't end there.

Because the bank now has a deposit of £9,500 it can now lend 95% of that. The bank can lend £9,025, making sure it keeps 5% in its reserves. The bank then has assets of £18,525, liabilities of £19,500 and reserves of £975. Somehow £18,525 has appeared out of nowhere.

The two loans yield £3,705 a year, while the deposits only attract interest of £463, giving a net annual profit of £3,242.

Three thousand quid a year for doing nothing!!

Yes.

That's right.

But it doesn't end there.

The bank keeps on lending money that it doesn't have.

A loan of £8,574, a loan of £8,145, a loan of £7,737, a loan of £7,351, a loan of £6,983... and so on.

Eventually, the bank has made loans of nearly £190,000 from an initial deposit of only £10,000. The bank also has deposits of almost £200,000, but these attract very little interest. The annual interest payable on the loans is £38,000 and the interest payable on the deposits is only £5,000, so the bank has an annual profit of £33,000 for doing nothing.

Now what?

Well that person still wants to buy that house so the bank is going to need some money. Where's it going to get the money? Well, no problem - it will borrow it from the central bank.

The central bank will want some collateral as security against the loan, but that's no problem because the bank has assets of almost £190,000 worth of loans bringing in £38,000 of anuual income, so it's clearly a creditworthy institution. The central bank is happy to lend the bank £90,000 at interest of 0.5%. The bank can then use that money to buy the house, which it adds to its balance sheet as an asset.

Now the bank owns a loan book of £190,000 worth of loans, cash reserves of almost £10,000 and a house valued at £100,000. It's very important to note that the person who wanted to buy the house does not own the house - it's the bank's property!

The bank now signs a mortgage contract with the house buyer for 25 years at 5% annual interest for a loan of £90,000. This loan will yield £4,500 per annum in interest payments for the bank, but it only costs the bank £450 a year in interest which it has to pay to the central bank, netting it a profit of £4,050 per annum, in addition to the £33,000 of other profit it makes from its loan book.

Now the bank is making a total annual profit of £37,050 and they are doing nothing.

Nothing.

Meanwhile, the person who bought the house needs to earn at least £6,312 a year to pay their mortgage. The person who bought the house no longer has the £10,000 they saved up. The person who bought the house has not only handed over their savings and committed themselves to having to pay a large amount of money every month... now they have to go and get a job from the capitalists or else they're going to be homeless! Remember, the bank owns the house, not the person who pays the mortgage - the witless idiot is now enslaved by capitalism.

Also, there are more than 100 people who took out loans, credit cards, overdrafts, store cards and other forms of unsecured personal debt, who now have to work hard to pay off the loans at 20% interest. People have become indebted by an additional £190,000 because one person wanted to buy a house, but they didn't realise they were going to get conned along with the rest of working-class society.

The magic trick that gets used by the banks is called fractional-reserve banking, which it allows a very small group of capitalists who have a banking license to economically enslave the whole of society in debt-based indentured servitude.

When loans are necessary to purchase basic survival needs - such as shelter - then there's no other word for it except for slavery. Shelter is not a luxury. Shelter is not an optional nice-to-have.

Insecurity about our shelter drives us into the open arms of the exploitative capitalists, who benefit doubly, because they earn money from us in the form of interest on loans and mortgages, and they have us right where they want us as an insecure workforce who desperately need to keep our regular income lest we be evicted and have our homes repossessed. The workers own nothing and the capitalists own everything. The rentier class have all of the wealth and do none of the work. Capitalism is the greatest crime ever perpetrated on humanity.

I hope you've been able to follow along the basic maths, and you can see how rigged the game is. It's quite simple to explain this horrific scam.

Tags: #capitalism #banking

This is a story about secret identities and alter egos...

I'm Nick Grant and these are my glasses, which are my cunning and infallible disguise to protect my real identity. It would be a disaster if anybody found out my real name - Nick Grant - because this blog is pretty unflinchingly honest and contains a lot of very unflattering things about me. I'm pretty damn exposed, hence why I wear my disguise.

Today I'm celebrating 3 years of blogging. I've been writing every day for 3 whole years, with only a few gaps due to sickness and near-catastrophic events in my personal life, which have threatened to see me bankrupt, evicted, homeless, penniless and destitute. To have kept writing regularly throughout all the ups and downs of the past 3 years is a huge achievement.

To date, I've written and published 1,013,091 words in that 3-year period.

The last 36 months could be summarised thus:

• September 2015: working for HSBC, living in a hotel, dating a BBC journalist. Rent an apartment on the River Thames.
• October 2015: working for HSBC. Suicidally depressed. Hospitalised. Fly to San Francisco.
• November 2015: fly back to the UK and deliberately get sacked from HSBC. Dating a PA to one of the directors of a major investment bank. Meet my guardian angel.
• December 2015: protesting against bombing Syria. Sober for 100 consecutive days. Relapse back into abuse of legal stimulants and benzodiazepines.
• January 2016: self harm and drug abuse. Start drinking again. Destroy my bed.
• February 2016: abuse of sleeping pills and tranquillisers
• March 2016: poly-drug abuse, combining legal highs and medications
• April 2016: holiday to Southend with my guardian angel. Start dating again
• May 2016: working for undisclosed major multinational organisation, with 660,000 employees worldwide. Replace destroyed bed.
• June 2016: working. Suicidal. Bored.
• July 2016: holiday to Fuerteventura for my birthday with my guardian angel.
• August 2016: working. Suicidal. Bored.
• September 2016: project cancelled. Meet love of my life. Minor relapse. Lies. Antidepressants and tranquillisers.
• October 2016: in love. Mini-break to the New Forest. Weaning myself off tranquillisers.
• November 2016: in love. Drinking a lot. Writing my first novel.
• December 2016. in love. Christmas with her family. Eating and drinking a lot.
• January 2017: DVT and kidney failure. Hospital and dialysis. Working for Lloyds Banking Group. Neuropathic pain from nerve damage. Taking tramadol, codeine, dihydrocodeine and pregabalin for the pain. Abusing large amounts of Valium and Xanax. Lose contract
• February 2017: fully-blown supercrack relapse. Completely addicted to prescription opiates.
• March 2017: supercrack. Abusing sleeping pills and tranquillisers. Quitting prescription opiate painkillers. Drinking. Still in love.
• April 2017: supercrack. Still in love.
• May 2017: attempting to quit supercrack by staying at girlfriend's and taking dextroamphetamine. Not succeeding
• June 2017: drug and insomnia-induced mania, paranoia and general insanity. Break up with love of my life. Regret
• July 2017: run out of money. Get a job in Manchester. Put all my stuff into storage. Leave London. Fling with girl from work.
• August 2017: working for a startup in Manchester. Dating a different girl. Still physically addicted to painkillers, tranquillisers and sleeping pills.
• September 2017: breakup. Suicide attempt. Hospitalised. Sectioned. Locked up on psych ward.
• October 2017: move to Wales.
• November 2017: writing my second novel.
• December 2017: working for undisclosed bank in Warsaw and London.
• January 2018: working for same undisclosed bank in London. Dating a Welsh girl
• February 2018: bank. London. Girl.
• March 2018: working for undisclosed government organisation. Rent an apartment in Wales.
• April 2018: successfully quit all drugs and medications. Job, girlfriend and apartment all in Wales and very close.
• May 2018: relapse. Breakup.
• June 2018: government project finished. Mini-break to Faro, Portugal to see old friend.
• July 2018: working for another undisclosed government organisation. Living in a hotel.
• August 2018: government. Hotel. Single. Depressed.
• September 2018: still working for same government organisation. Dating again.

By my calculations, 27 out of 36 months have been relatively OK, but 9 months in the past 3 years I've been a complete and utter train-wreck. The damage that's been done in that quarter of the year where I've been struggling with addiction, has been enough to completely screw up my life the rest of the time, but not quite bad enough to lead to me becoming unemployable, bankrupt and homeless - I always find a way to bounce back.

Somehow I've managed to fit 5 serious girlfriends and 5 major IT projects into the madness of my day-to-day existence, as well as 3 hospitalisations for major medical emergencies, being sectioned, two psych wards, an arrest, two evictions, moving 5 times, 6 cities, 5 countries, 13 powerful prescription medications, 5 street drugs, 121 consecutive days sober, 56 consecutive days sober, 799 blog posts, 1 million words, 14 thousand Twitter followers and a couple of hundred thousand pounds... and all I've got to show for it is this poxy blog.

The story of Nick Grant and his ups and downs might be a bit repetitive, but I'm sure it's not boring. I would argue that it's pretty remarkable that I'm still alive and kicking, and able to string a sentence together. It's remarkable that I'm reasonably mentally stable and I'm working full time on quite an important project. It's remarkable that my colleagues don't suspect a thing. It's remarkable that I haven't made myself unemployable or otherwise ended up excluded from mainstream society. It's remarkable that I'm unmedicated and yet quite functional and productive.

Along the way, I managed to lose my original pair of glasses, but I had a new identical pair delivered today, which I'm wearing now. I had no idea when my replacement glasses would be delivered, because they were being hand made to order, so I find it deliciously wonderful that they were delivered on the day I'm celebrating the 3-year anniversary of starting this blog.

When I think back to my very first blog post 3 years ago - Platform 9.75 - it's amazing to reflect on the journey I've been on and marvel at how effectively my daily writing habit has functioned as a stabilising influence. I very much doubt I'd have been able to recover and continue my journey without the huge amount of help and support it's brought me. I feel really proud of what I've achieved, which gives me some all-important self-esteem in the times when I need it most. I'm sure I'd have killed myself long ago if it wasn't for the people who've engaged with me and what I write, and encouraged me to keep going. I feel loved and cared for even during some very dark and dismal days.

Obviously what I've written is not particularly palatable or compatible with dating and my professional life, but they'll never be able to find me - Nick Grant - because I've been so careful to disguise my identity and make sure that nobody could just Google me and find out all my closely guarded secrets. Nobody will ever be able to make the connection.

My next objective is to get through September 9th - the anniversary of my most serious suicide attempt - without incident. I plan on phoning a couple of the people who managed to get the emergency services to rescue me in the nick of time, to thank them for saving my life.

Tags: #writing #secrecy #privacy #nickgrant #socialmedia #blogging #career #addiction #bipolar #hospital #homeless #alcohol #drugs #sex #relationships #london #startup

This is a story about school dinners...

I went out for dinner and drinks with my colleagues. It was very good to socialise. I enjoyed what I ate, what I drank and the company.

It's late, I'm drunk and I have to get up early in the morning.

I'm not going to write much tonight.

Tags: #career #colleagues #food #social

This is a story about diminishing anxiety levels...

It's very hard to be objective about my circumstances. When I'm bored it feels like I've never been so bored in my whole entire life and I can't stand my job - I feel like I'm going to walk out of the office and never go back. When I'm anxious it feels like I've never had such dreadful problems to deal with and it's more than I can stand. When time is passing slowly it feels like it's taking an eternity to reach my goals, and it feels impossible that I'll be able to last the months and years required to get back on my feet.

Clearly, my perceptions are not 100% correct.

When I think back to January and February at the start of this year, I was a lot more bored. I started taking more and more days off sick. I was turning up very late for work and struggling a very great deal. When I think back to the summer of 2016 I was horrendously bored and I would spend a lot of my waking hours thinking about committing suicide.

When I think back to October and November last year, I was convinced I was going to go bankrupt. I was convinced that I wasn't able to work. The loose ends in my life were unbearably awful to deal with - even simple basic little things were driving my anxiety levels beyond what I could tolerate. When a friend helped me to get some work, I didn't think I'd be able to do it - I didn't feel capable or competent.

When I think back to March I was convinced I was going to fail security clearance. I was convinced I wouldn't pass credit checks and tenancy checks to be able to rent an apartment. I was overwhelmed by the stress of maxing out my credit and spending every penny I had to buy a car and rent a place to live. I didn't think that my cashflow would stretch quite far enough.

In reality, when I look back over the past 5 years there has been an iterative improvement since my divorce. Every year I've had problems with my finances and my mental health, and every year I've become far more leveraged, but every year I learn, adapt and approach things slightly differently. Every year, I come slightly closer to pulling out all my best tricks and linking everything together to reach escape velocity.

In 2013 I started a company. Every year since then I've followed the same pattern: I'm absolutely screwed from December to the spring, then I start getting my act together. My plan is always the same: earn a six-figure income doing consultancy and get back to a position of financial security. It's a simple plan.

I'm very worried that I'm going to fall into one of the very many pitfalls which have scuppered me in previous years. I'm hyper-sensitive to any warning signs which might indicate that I'm going to fall into the bad pattern which has kept me in this seemingly never-ending cycle. I try to consider everything that's ever gone wrong in the past and avoid repeating those mistakes.

The biggest positive differences which I'm aware of at the moment, are that I'm not paralysed by anxiety - thinking that everything's going to go wrong and unable to stay on top of things - and I'm not having a lot of suicidal thoughts. I'm very impatient, frustrated and quite bored a lot of the time, but I'm nowhere near as suicidal as I've been in recent years. Some years I haven't been very suicidal, but that's been because I've been manic - in 2014 and 2015 I was very busy and working very hard, so I wasn't at all bored, but I couldn't see that disaster was looming. Looking back at my manic behaviour, it wasn't at all compatible with office life and it seems obvious now that I was on borrowed time.

It concerns me that mania might return and I'll start acting strangely and being a pain in the ass again. It concerns me that depression and anxiety might lay me low and cause me to have to take time off work and to be late. However, that I'm able to consider these risks and force myself to get out of bed, or to hold my tongue when I'm about to shoot my mouth off, suggests that I'm in a bit more control for once. Those times I went manic in the office, we need to consider how much pressure I was under at work and in my personal life - I was virtually penniless and homeless.

I'm still a long way from financial security and I feel quite depressed about that, but I'm using very conservative accounting to estimate my cashflow. When I check my bank balances I'm always pleasantly surprised, not disappointed.

I do a lot of moaning but I'm slowly inching my way forward. The day when I'm debt free and have a comfortable cushion of savings again is getting closer. The day when I can quit my job and find something more challenging and rewarding is gradually approaching, but my days in the office are also gradually improving - some days I even imagine that I might actually choose to stay longer in the job because it's not so bad sometimes.

I need to be careful not to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. Yes, it's good to keep moving and keep life exciting, interesting, novel and new, but it's also exhausting and unbelievably stressful. There's a lot to be said for the improvements I'm feeling in my mental health stability and my financial position, which have come about because I've decided to be disciplined and force myself to do things I don't like doing very much. My anxiety levels and suicidal thoughts are diminishing quite nicely.

This all sounds very positive, but there are huge challenges ahead. I need to cut down my drinking, eat less, exercise more, make more friends locally, start a relationship *AND* keep everything else I've been doing ticking over in its well-established routine.

I've reached the point where I feel like I'm good at my job again. I feel needed and wanted at work - people seek me out and ask my opinion. I feel like I add value. I feel secure.

My finances are in good enough shape, such that I'm no longer worried about money.

My routine isn't the best but it does the job. It's bearable.

I like my apartment.

Looking for love isn't great, especially when I'm feeling overweight and unfit. I feel like my skin is pale and pasty. I feel old. I feel unattractive. I haven't had a shag in 4 months and I'm feeling like my bedroom skills might have gone to rack and ruin.

I've done all the calculations and I need to work my ass off until at least spring time next year if I want to well and truly turn my life around. It won't be as horrible to get through the next 6 to 9 months as it was to get through some recent awfulness, so it sounds eminently achievable, but it doesn't feel like I'm living for much other than the slow and steady improvement to my overall financial position. Counting beans is nothing to get excited or motivated about, especially when coupled with the prospect of drinking less, eating less and exercising more - it sounds pretty miserable.

Miserable and boring it might be, but it's hard to argue with the facts. My life is considerably better today than it's been for a long time. I need to remind myself of the facts once in a while.

Tags: #career #debt

This is a story about working during the summer...

My drive to work this morning was dreadful, despite leaving at the crack of dawn. The roads are clogged again as the little darling children get taxied to school in gigantic 4x4s. There's a notable change in attitude of people now that the new term has started. My colleagues are much more in work mode than holiday mode. The mood is very different.

This summer has been the 4th consecutive year where I've had to work and not take any holiday.

To be honest, I'm really glad the school holidays are over.

I want to visit some friends in Prague, but I didn't want to travel during August, because the airports would have been rammed with holidaymakers. I want to visit friends in Ireland, but it makes more sense to wait until the madness of the school holidays is done and dusted. August is a dreadful month to travel anywhere and do anything, because everywhere's teeming with tourists.

I'm utterly exhausted, but at least I have a huge advantage compared with previous years. 2016 was relatively settled and I had been earning good money for several months. I had a very good chance of getting back on my feet in 2016, but the project I was working on was terminated unexpectedly early. In 2015 and 2017 I had the stress, exhaustion and financial pressures associated with moving house. In 2015 I had to pay thousands and thousands in rent, deposit and letting agent fees. In 2017 I had to put all my stuff into storage and move to Manchester. At least all I have to do this year is keep up my well-established routine.

Seemingly "little" things can have an enormously draining and exhausting effect, because they're very stressful. Travelling back and forth from Wales to London and staying in lots of different AirBnBs took a lot of time, planning, money and energy, at a time when I had very little spare cash. Not having my own place - an oasis of calm - to return to after a week working in the City meant that I was constantly uneasy and unsettled. The demands of being a guest in somebody's home shouldn't be underestimated, if you're similar to me in that you feel like you need to live small, neat, tidy and provide some 'value' to your hosts. It's very different being in your own home, versus being a guest in an AirBnB or sofa-surfing with friends, even if you have 'your own' room.

I've tried to engineer my life to give myself the greatest chance of success. I stay in the same hotel every week and I have an identical room. I eat in the same gastropub. I wear the same shirts on the same days. I pack the same things in my bag. There's a system and a routine which makes things less stressful and unsettling. I still don't sleep as well as I would in my own bed, because of the unpredictable noises of other guests, although I'm very glad that the hotel is of high enough quality that loud snorers - and there are so many - are not audible enough to make sleep impossible, through the sound-insulated walls. I've chosen a hotel which mostly accommodates business travellers like me, so I don't have the din of a family of 5 all cramped into one room, opening and closing the door and shouting in the corridor for hours every morning and evening.

I'm not one of your "children should be seen and not heard" miserable mean-spirited people, but I have little time and patience for the imposition of other people's lifestyle choices which negatively impact me. I don't mind kids in restaurants and bars. However, I've made a very conscious effort to carefully plan parenthood, so it's not fair that I should have my beauty sleep impacted as if I was simply one of the herd of rutting beasts, mindlessly spawning brats into the overcrowded world.

Most employed people think that the unemployed should get jobs, simply because they have to get up early and go to work, so they can't abide anybody who's not suffering the same miserable slog of the rat race. Perhaps it's like that with me and the holidays - I'm upset that I've had to work all summer without a holiday, so I somewhat begrudge people who've had lots of time off during July and August. Maybe I'm more bitter and resentful than I'm fully aware of.

I'm not going to dwell on my sense of being hard-done-by, because I'm starting to get myself into a position where I have enough financial security and employment security, as well as the freedom of being unencumbered by children, to be able to do pretty much whatever I want. I'm starting to regain my wealth, which means soon I'll be able to have some very luxurious holidays, I hope.

It helps having my colleagues in more of a work-mode. The attitude change is important. I need to be busy. I can't stand being bored.

It's very cool that I've made it to this point and my life is much more stable and secure than it's been in the past, and commensurately my mental health is much improved. Even in 2016 - which I think of as a good year - I was desperately suicidally depressed and struggling a lot more, I think.

I've definitely managed to get myself out of the danger zone yet again, which I'm very good at doing, but my luck usually runs out and I'm quickly plunged back into the red. At least I have critical pieces of the puzzle in place this year - car, apartment, job, cash - and I've got my routine well established. Provided I can keep turning the pedals then I should be able to cement my position. That I was able to withstand an almost disastrous May and June with little lasting ill effects, was a really good test and proof that my recovery is starting to be a little more resilient to life's slings and arrows.

I feel like I'm almost on a level playing field with my peers now - the fun and frolics of the summer are behind them and we all have months of miserable hard work stretching ahead of us. It feels better to be "in it together" rather than jealous of my colleagues jetting off on their holidays. In fact, I even have a slight advantage because I can take my holidays whenever I want - I'm not bound to the school holidays.

It might seem like schadenfreude but I don't care.

Tags: #holiday

This is a story about marketing yourself...

The image I present of myself online is thoroughly incompatible with my professional life and my aspirations to meet a girl and start a relationship. I speak my mind and I'm very honest about some things I've experienced which are taboos. It's not very common in our society to talk about our failures and other unflattering things which might paint us in an unfavourable light. I would attract a lot of stigma and prejudice if I was up-front about unpalatable things from my past.

Half-naked photos of yourself and presenting yourself as an all-round faultless great guy - a real man's man - is not a particularly successful strategy. I include the image above ironically. Unsolicited dick pics don't work either, but there are a lot of men who seem to think that they do.

For a brief time I had included the fact that I'm a writer on my online dating bio, but I realised that my blog doesn't exist in a particularly sanitised form and I would hate to be writing with hesitancy, thinking about how my words would be received by an online love interest who's just getting to know me. I'm very exposed in a way that most people usually aren't. You almost never have the opportunity to peer deep into somebody's psyche and read about all their deepest darkest secrets.

Earlier in the year I tried dating with my blog offered as part of the package of information presented. Usually the information we have when dating is a name, age, a few photos, a very short bio, then after some discussion we know what a person does for a living, whether they have kids, whether they have pets, where they studied, where they've travelled and a few other details which actually tell us very little about that person's character. It's not a lot to make a decision about whether it's promising enough to warrant an actual in-person date, but we have the writing style - from text message chat - to gauge whether a person is intellectually stimulating and easy to converse with or not. Subtle language cues tell us whether we're of a socioeconomically similar group, which is important not least for reasons of insecurity and feelings that we were hard-done-by in some way. Nobody likes feeling poor in the company of somebody who's enjoyed wealth and privilege, or feeling stupid in the company of somebody who's been lucky enough to enjoy a great education.

The problem with having my blog as part of the information bundle, is that there's an almost unlimited amount to be consumed and processed, which is available anywhere, anytime. It's tempting for almost anybody with even a casual interest in other people's lives, to dig and dig, and it raises troublesome questions which would normally never come about in the course of a relationship, because we don't usually have access to the inside of somebody's mind.

I'm quite comfortable with friends and the general public having access to the entirety of the dark recesses of my mind, because I've found that most people are sympathetic and kind, and they've used the information for purposes which have been very beneficial to me. I get messages of support. I make connections with people, and that feels good. I feel that people care about me.

When somebody who I have a romantic interest in starts to read my blog, however, it can make me somewhat paranoid about being judged negatively. Indeed, many people have a very negative view of those who do online dating, believing the online world to be a hotbed of murderers, rapists, sadists, perverts, pedophiles and other unsavoury characters. If you're looking to find out something bad about me, and you're hoping for your worst fears to be confirmed, then there's a lot of material here which can be twisted by the mind of a sad, miserable, negative and mistrusting person, who has no ability to perceive their own flaws and less-than-perfect personality. I make a leap of faith every day by choosing to expose myself and make myself vulnerable, sharing my innermost thoughts and feelings as honestly and candidly as I can. To abuse my trust by twisting my words and turning me into a monster is not very nice, but it's what a lot of people do, because they're looking for reasons to reject, not reasons to connect.

Similarly, prospective employers are looking for reasons to reject, and this is the reason why my blog is not at all compatible with my professional life. There's an unwritten rule in the corporate world, which is that you never talk about your flaws and failures. It would be career-ending if I was to include a link to this blog on my CV or LinkedIn. The contents of this blog is gold dust to the gatekeepers who very much want to see me penniless and destitute; unemployable.

I need companionship and intimacy. I need a job. I have to play by the unwritten rules of society, so that means keeping certain parts of my life under wraps. It would be too much for your average small-minded square to process, and it's almost too much for even the most kind and compassionate, to get beyond the usual knee-jerk reaction which is to reject anybody atypical.

There's nothing I need to tell anybody per se. I don't have any secrets particularly. I'm not trying to cover up a drug habit or pretending to be something I'm not. I'm not trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes. I'm not withholding important or relevant information.

To mistreat people by treating them with suspicion and mistrust is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think somebody's going to let you down or do something bad, you're increasing the likelihood of that happening, because you're ostracising and persecuting that person, just like so many others do too. If you're expecting bad things to happen and you're withholding trust and commitment - refusing to take a leap of faith - there can only be one outcome, ultimately.

I think the decision to have this open document is the right one, but I still need to get laid every now and again.

Tags: #dating #sex #socialmedia #writing #privacy

This is a story about being observant...

I don't get out much. Working away from home, living in a hotel, then trying to cram all my chores into the weekend, I don't explore my local area very much. I don't know much about where I live.

I was walking up the steep hill from the town centre, back home, and I noticed a load of orange plastic things on the ground. On closer inspection these turned out to be safety caps for hypodermic syringes. There must have been 30 of these things scattered around the entrance to a kind of alleyway. I didn't look too carefully but I couldn't see any of the syringes. There was a police van with a riot shield covering its windscreen parked not far away. Smelling cannabis in the street is very common and hardly worth noting, but seeing the obvious detritus of heroin use is more telling about the character of an area.

In Manchester last year, I would overhear homeless people shouting to each other: "you scored? What did you get?" and "two Bs and a white" which means two bags of heroin and a rock of crack cocaine. I saw people standing in the middle of the pavement in a comatose zombie-like state because they'd been smoking Spice or Mamba - brands names of synthetic cannabis sold before the New Psychoactive Substances Act (2016) made it illegal to sell almost anything psychoactive.

Homelessness and drug abuse is less conspicuous here than in Manchester and London, although there are far fewer people living here.

In London earlier this year a female crack addict ran up to me and asked me for money. I said "sorry" and then she started verbally abusing me. She must have been "rattling" pretty badly but she kept up the pretence that she was "starving" and wanted money for "a hotel". I started to explain that I'd been homeless myself and she shot back that I should be more sympathetic, but she was simply enraged that I wouldn't immediately give her the money she was demanding quite menacingly, abusively and aggressively. She didn't waste any time finding somebody else to harass for money. We didn't converse. Literally the only words I managed to say were "sorry" and then "I've been homeless" before she decided that I was a waste of time in her frenzied attempts to gather enough money for her score. I saw her again subsequently having a blazing row with a homeless man about the fair division of the drugs they'd scored.

Recently, when walking somewhere with a friend and on another occasion with my ex-girlfriend, we passed people begging and they questioned why I didn't give them money. The presumption was - again - that I should be more sympathetic, given my prior experience with sleeping rough and being no-fixed-abode. I was almost rebuked for being callous and uncaring, which is a kind of stupidity reserved only for small-town small-minded idiots. I've seen enough Brasilian favelas, slums in India and of course spent enough time sleeping rough on the streets of London, and have attempted to help a few individuals. I know better than most people exactly what kind of a difference it makes.

To be clear, I do give money to alcoholics, junkies and the homeless, but I do it in a very targeted and considered way. If some guy with a dog is right outside a supermarket, sheltered by a doorway or a bus shelter, and I happen to be walking past, I'm very unlikely to give money to that person in prime begging position. If it's raining and somebody is getting soaked to the skin in the middle of winter, it feels like a more exceptional circumstance, so I'll sometimes walk to a cashpoint and get out enough money to pay for a hostel bed. If I see somebody suffering really badly with delirium tremens (DTs a.k.a. the shakes) then I'll get them a drink or enough money for them to buy one. If somebody asks me nicely for money for drugs, I tend to look at that more favourably than being abused for saying "sorry".

I worry that I'm a "have" and others are a "have not" and perhaps it's simple logic to say that the "haves" should and must give to the "have nots" if and when they demand it. I worry that I'm a gatekeeper. I really don't want to become part of the paternalistic patriarchal sneering guardian class, who will dole out what people need provided the misfortunate wretches put themselves through the degrading experience of begging and portraying themselves as a worthy needy cause. It's not fair or right that I should sit in judgement over my fellow men and women. Believe me, it's not like that.

As a proportion of my wealth, I've given away an enormous amount. I've been extremely philanthropic. Indeed I've been so charitable that I've put myself into a financially distressed position. Anybody who thinks I'm cold and callous doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about, they can fuck off, and they're no friend of mine.

Ultimately, I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the fair division of wealth, lack of opportunities, how the welfare state should operate, and humanity's general attitude towards the less fortunate members of society. I'm no Mother Theresa but we should be wary of those who do style themselves as such, because it's very much in the interests of the ego of a person who proclaims that they "do a lot of good work for charity". Clearly, charity has had its opportunity to solve the vast social problems of the 21st century, and it's failed abysmally, except for making a bunch of wealthy twats feel very smug with themselves.

I'm greatly moved by what I see all around me, but not such that I give 50 pence to a person who I just happen to be passing, because that'd be buying off my guilty conscience very cheaply. It's only right and proper that those who have been fortunate in life should feel guilty about their luck, and that guilt should drive us to enact real and meaningful change to the whole of society... not just chucking some pocket change into a begging bowl and feeling good about ourselves for the rest of the day. The guilt is something we should live with while the grotesque problems in society are allowed to persist.

It might look to the casual observer as if I'm living a luxurious life on my 6-figure income, but in fact I live in a very precarious situation. It frustrates me very much that I'm in too much of a fragile position to be able to jeopardise my own recovery trying to help others. I tried that and it was a welcome distraction from my own problems, but it was also excessively costly to my own survival prospects - it nearly cost me my life. I think it's quite fair and reasonable that I should put on my own oxygen mask before helping others.

As this story progresses, you'll see a change in what I'm up to and where my focus is, but right now sadly I have to focus on digging myself out of the hole. This is not selfish - it's what I have to do if I'm going to remain alive.

It is frustrating that I don't have spare capacity or any money to help others, beyond what I already try to do by sharing my story, but that's just the way things are going to be for the next 6 months or so.

If you think I should be volunteering or working for a charity, you're an idiot. My life would collapse in a domino-like chain of events which would see me bankrupt, evicted, penniless and destitute in the blink of an eye. I myself would become one of the very people I aim to ultimately help. You have entirely failed to grasp the gravity of my situation and the difficulty of dealing with everything I've been dealing with, and indeed still am dealing with.

I find the kinds of comments from my former friend and former girlfriend about giving money to the homeless vastly more insulting than the crack addict verbally abusing me for not immediately giving her the money she demanded, although all have missed the obvious point: that I have the first-hand experience, and I'm the one who's doing what I can, rather than telling others how they should act.

Homelessness and heroin addiction are a huge problem in my local area. I'll do my bit to help as and when I can.

Tags: #homeless #addiction #drugs

This is a story about screen time...

The button to silence my smartphone has broken so I leave it permanently in "do not disturb" mode, which suits me just fine. Hardly anybody ever phones me except for agents and other cold caller sales types. My time is mostly spent in the 12 apps pictured above. Perhaps I'm not on my smartphone all the time, but essentially I'm context-switching non-stop throughout my waking hours, so I thought that warranted a little examination.

Starting with my 35,225 unread emails, my inbox has gotten rather out of control. Email has become such a victim of its own success that no IT professional I know even uses it anymore - we're all on Slack. Most communication is entirely transient and there's no need to have a record of anything except some kind of chat transcript to catch up on - anything old can be archived and forgotten. I spend all day every day chatting to my colleagues on Slack, including colleagues from organisations where I don't even work anymore.

Messages comprises SMS messages - mostly telling me about voicemails I haven't listened to - and a handful of iMessages from people who aren't using WhatsApp for some reason. WhatsApp deserves special note though, because of the group chats. I was removed from the only group chat I was a member of - discussion between cryptocurrency enthusiasts - and I was usurped by a guy who screwed me over last year when I was on my deathbed, which is kinda besides the point but it galls me.

Instagram I don't actually use very much. I live in a text-based world and the photos I take are in 4:3 or 3:2 aspect ratio, not 1:1. I don't take very many selfies.

Facebook Messenger is my most active chat app, but I only use it to chat to one person - my guardian angel - and we mainly exchange memes about suicide, mental health problems and the ruined economy. Facebook messenger also makes calls - as do many of the apps - and I occasionally speak to a friend in Poland, which is about the only time I speak to anybody on the telephone.

Recently I've been using Tinder and Bumble in an attempt to meet girls. It adds additional complexity to my context-switching life.

I'm not really sure what I use Facebook for. I do browse through the feed once a day - not on my smartphone - and I occasionally like and comment on things which are especially noteworthy, but I generally try to avoid over-investment in that particular walled garden. I used to share a lot and indeed I've managed to rather make a fool of myself in front of all my friends and scupper my chances of ever working in some organisations, because I dragged my own good name through the mud. I don't put my dirty laundry on Facebook much, only for it to be conspicuously ignored. Instead I write over a million words on my blog and broadcast my ups and downs to thousands of followers and anybody who does Google searches.

I don't use Twitter properly. I don't generally retweet stuff and I don't spend enough time reading the tweets of the 6,000+ people I follow. How anybody could sift through it all I have no idea - Twitter is a pretty noisy place. Generally I just look to see if anybody I know is tweeting about any of the trending topics, and I otherwise rely on an email I receive in the morning each day, which tells me what my favourite people have been up to. I must admit, it's sometimes a struggle to stay on top of my notifications and DMs and then I turn turtle and hide for a while until things quieten down.

I don't bother with LinkedIn much. I don't struggle to find work. I don't much see the point in ploughing much time and effort into my corporate image - I've got a perfectly professional CV and LinkedIn page, and otherwise I rely on my contacts, skills, experience and references to be able to get work when I need it.

I wake up in the morning and I quickly scan through my notifications - mostly Twitter - to see if there have been any comments, which I make a mental note to reply to later in the day. When I get bored around mid-morning, I have a glance at my inbox to see if there's anybody demanding money with menaces or otherwise harassing me. Approaching lunchtime, I might kill a bit of time with Facebook, but I don't want to get too engrossed in my phone when I'm at work. If I'm having a really dreadful day, I might reach out to a couple of friends via Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and see if I can get them to send jokes, memes or anything that might provide a moment's distraction from the boredom. After leaving the office and generally before my evening meal, I write a blog post. I often scan through my website analytics to see if there's anything notable going on. If my mind is busy and distracted I frequently find myself flipping between half-watching something on Netflix and several tabs in my browser - a mix of Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes I read the news, but I find that I spend less and less time engaging with current affairs at the moment, because I've been stressed out of my mind with basic survival. A new part of my routine is chatting to girl(s) via the dating apps and if I'm ever lucky enough to get a phone number, then chatting on WhatsApp.

The amount of context switching is pretty remarkable. In any given day I might have to switch between fully professional mode, with colleagues who I want to present with a squeaky-clean corporate-friendly version of myself, and a more relaxed but still guarded version of myself which allows a little bit of my personality to show, but hopefully keeps my bad not-safe-for-work (NSFW) stuff hidden. I might be chatting to somebody who I've known for a long time online who's in a different timezone - ahead or behind - and they'll know an incredible amount of personal stuff about me and we'll be talking very frankly and honestly about everything and everything... then I'll be talking to a girl who I've just started chatting to who doesn't know me at all... then I'll be chatting to work colleagues who I spend 40 hours a week in close proximity with and they think they know me but they don't [and I don't want them to know everything]. Then, there's the image I present and the interactions I have via my blog and social media. and all the people who I have frequent and infrequent contact with, and the different ways I know people. Facebook is a particularly weird melting pot, where former work colleagues mingle with people who I know through kitesurfing, my startup days, the time I was homeless and living in parks and hostels, people who I've just randomly friend requested when I was mentally unwell. Facebook is kinda the worst, because I never know which guise I should be in, so I'm probably too honest and I'm tarnishing my own reputation and good standing that I once had with friends.

My brain has to switch between survival mode - where I've been worried about money, housing, addiction, alcoholism, transport, sex, isolation, suicidal thoughts, self harm, depression, anxiety and odds that have been very much stacked against me - and professional mode - where I'm expected to perform at a very high standard and navigate extremely complicated large organisations and know all the ins and outs of massive and complex software systems and the infrastructure they're deployed on, plus all the many teams and the zillions of people and the processes and procedures - and my digital identity which I'm cultivating - which needs me to compose a blog post every day and stay on top of any replies, messages and emails, and generally keep in touch with an ever-growing list of friends who I've never met in person, but who've been amazingly kind and supportive during rough times - and Mr. Eligible Bachelor mode, which requires me to present myself in the correct sequence, so that I can be understood without at the same time being overwhelming and off-putting.

To some extent my life looks quite simple. I have a job and not much else - I don't socialise and I'm not in a relationship. To the casual observer, all I do is move between my home, the office and a hotel, and I'm always in front of my laptop, tapping away at the keys quite furiously.

I suppose my life is quite simple, if we imagine that my fixation is the screen and the keyboard, but the screen time is a red herring - it's a window to an unimaginably gigantic and complex world of thousands of interactions with people all around the globe.

The context-switching is pretty hard though. I've struggled to stay on top of everything during the last couple of days.

Tags: #socialmedia #privacy #writing #friends #career #computing #dating #sex