This is a story about the descent into darkness...

The first time I couldn't work due to depression, it came out of the blue. I had started a new job, and it was actually really interesting. I was quite enthusiastic about what I was doing, and empowered to grow into a new role. Spring was turning into summer, and so I had the seasons in my favour. What happened next was a surprise to everybody, including me.

One morning, I couldn't get out of bed. I'd had problems getting up early for work, but this was different... I couldn't face the day. As soon as I'd admitted defeat - that I definitely wasn't going to make it into the office that day - I was somehow a changed person. It was like a dam burst. This problem that I had been barely coping with was suddenly unleashed, after 11 years of steady 9 to 5 grind and reliable service in the name of the corporations I worked for.

People talk about nervous breakdowns, and I guess that's what had happened. All of a sudden, and with little warning, I was sick... but this was an invisible sickness. I felt it, and I couldn't overcome it, but I didn't believe it was real. I thought that it was fake. I felt like a fraud.

In the UK you can take up to 3 days off work without a doctor's note. After 3 days, I knew deep down that there was no way that I could possibly go back to work, but what was wrong with me? This was highly unusual for the dependable grey-suited regular 9 to 5, Monday to Friday office Joe Bloggs, that I was. 11 years of full time work and 13 years of full time education. All I knew was getting up and going to a dictated place, on the treadmill, in the rat race, following orders.

To summon the effort to go and see my doctor took the whole of those 3 days. I knew the problem was more severe than just not feeling very well. I knew it was more severe than a day off work was going to cure. I knew that something was seriously wrong, but I couldn't express it... I had no language to explain the brick wall that I'd hit.

It was so unlike me to be lacking in energy, in purpose, in motivation and to neglect my duties, my responsibilities. It was so unlike me to not do the work. I'd had a nearly 100% attendance record at work and at school and college. Bunking off wasn't in my vocabulary. Not doing things I didn't like wasn't something I ever considered as an alternative.

I went to the doctor. I sat down and explained that I was tired. I was more tired than I'd ever been in my life. I couldn't cope. I couldn't turn the pedals of the cycle anymore. I couldn't do what I'd always managed to do, which was to drag myself out of bed, and go to school, college or work, no matter what. It hadn't mattered whether the bullying was unbearable, or the stress was intolerable, the pressure relentless... I had been that guy, that perfect student or dream employee, who always turned up and did their work, like a good little boy.

Within a couple of minutes of me explaining my unexpected interruption in my perfect attendance record, and inexplicable fatigue, my doctor said "have you heard of Fluoxetine?". I had heard of Fluoxetine: it's the generic name for Prozac, which is an anti-depressant. Fluoxetine is a Specific Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) which was supposed to increase levels of Serotonin in the brain, or so Eli Lilly - the manufacturer - thought, and told the world that depressed people had unnaturally low serotonin levels in their brain. They were wrong.

The theory that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, is ubiquitous. We are comforted to know that there is a medical problem with us, that can be corrected with medication. It's a neat little theory: depressed people don't have enough serotonin in their brain, and with medicine it can be topped up to 'normal' levels. Sadly, it's just not correct.

Measurements of the amount of serotonin metabolites in spinal fluid of depressed people who take Fluoxetine or other SSRIs are actually lower than supposedly healthy people. The theory was proven to be bunkum, but doctors and mental health professionals still share research that's 30+ years old and has been disproven. The theory was just too popular, as well as the SSRI medication, which millions of people had flocked to as their salvation.

I had read extensively in the field of psychopharmacology and had received unconditional offers of a University place at several prestigious institutions, to study psychology, pharmacology and psychiatry. I was probably better informed than my doctor.

I knew that SSRIs were associated with emotional blunting, anorgasmia (not being able to cum) and increased suicidal ideation (thinking about killing yourself). I knew that the long-term outcomes were actually worse than placebo, in several studies. I knew that an SSRI would take 6 weeks to take effect anyway, and that was no use to me. I needed to get back to work!

So, I declined the medication that was offered to me, within just a few minutes of talking to my doctor. I was shocked by how quickly I had been offered psychiatric medication from a general physician, which would take at least 6 weeks to take effect, and I could end up taking for a long time. I felt a little failed by the health services.

My doctor signed me off for a week, and I felt a little relieved to have some time to allow my body to hopefully revert to homeostasis, and I could hopefully get back to work. I felt like a real failure, and I started to feel anxious about the impression that my bosses and colleagues would have of me. Would I be seen as unreliable? Would my name be tainted?

The fatigue and lack of motivation, purpose, persisted and I spent a week in bed, sleeping for 16+ hours. I hardly ate. I didn't open the curtains. I turned my phone off and just curled up under the duvet. Where had this tiredness come from? I had always been in good physical shape and my body had never failed me like this before. I had always had plenty of energy.

I went back to the doctor after a week, and I was getting pretty desperate for an answer. I was looking for a diagnosis, a cure. I wanted the trusted men in white coats to make everything better again.

We did tests: blood tests, urine tests, thyroid function, kidney and liver function. We even did an AIDS test, as my doctor was at a loss to explain why I was so fatigued all the time. One week turned into three weeks. There was seemingly no end to my exhaustion and inability to cope with the thought of going back to work. There was no way I could face the day, for some reason. I had been housebound with the curtains closed, except for trips around the corner to the doctor's surgery.

My doctors remained convinced that I was suffering with Clinical Depression, and urged me to try an SSRI, but I still refused on the grounds that I didn't want another 6 weeks off work, while I waited for the medication to kick in. 9 weeks off work seemed ridiculous to me, and the side effects sounded unacceptable.

So I stopped going to the doctors. I stopped getting sick notes. I switched my phone off and went to bed, and I just tried to ignore the fact that I was going to lose my job. I didn't care because I couldn't care. There was no way I could go back to work, feeling so exhausted, so drained, so fatigued and unable to cope with even preparing food, getting dressed, having a shower. I just lay in my bed and slept two thirds of every day, and lay half-asleep, anxious about a knock at the door, with the curtains closed, for the rest of the time.

Everything seemed impossible, insurmountable. The idea of going to the shop seemed as insane as the idea of going on an expedition to the South Pole without any warm clothes or supplies. Clearly there was something wrong with me if I was misjudging the effort involved in things, but I also knew that I couldn't keep just doing the same shit, the same crappy 9 to 5 routine, and the same formula of working a job.

As the summer wore on, I started to get interested in the idea of doing some iPhone development work, and slowly I ventured outside into the sunshine in the afternoons, to learn how to develop software on the Apple platform. It seemed like a nice confidence-building exercise, as I had started to doubt that I'd ever be able to work again. I had started to feel like I'd be invalided out of the workforce for the rest of my days.

The more I worked, the more obsessed I became. My energy came back. Slowly at first. I would work for an afternoon, then an afternoon and an evening, and then soon I was doing full days of work again. But it didn't stop there.

By the time July had given way to August, I was working an 18 hour day. I was irritable and single-minded. Eating was a chore that would slow me down and get in the way of me working. I didn't want to waste time with my partner, my friends, my family. Nobody understood what I was working on and how important it was. Explaining anything to anybody was painfully slow and angered me to have to take time out from my work to even answer the simplest of questions.

I started to speak faster, in a rush to get the words out and not waste precious time speaking to people. I viewed other people as obstacles, standing in the way of my single goal, and as dimwitted fools who were sent to irritate and frustrate me. My thoughts raced, but I could follow them, but speaking was never fast enough to verbalise what was going on in my brain, so my speech was pressured... trying to will my tongue to be fast enough to keep pace with my thread of thought.

My work rang me up and insisted that we meet up. I saw my boss, and we agreed that I should give my notice. There was no way I was going back to that job. They were cool about things, but I didn't really have any explanation about what was going on with me.

I was free from the confines of the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday office routine. I was free from dimwitted bosses who had been promoted into positions of incompetence. I was free from bureaucracy and red tape and corporate bullshit. I just worked, and worked, and worked. I worked 7 days a week. I worked until I was falling asleep, and then I would start again as soon as I woke up.

At some point during this flurry of activity, I managed to get a couple of iPhone Apps to number one in the charts. Naturally, this brought in a lot of cash. I had done it. I had proven my point. I had unwittingly become a successful entrepreneur, off the back of becoming unwell and losing my job.

However, I failed to see it like that. What I saw instead was that office work wasn't good for me. I felt like office work had made me sick, and that I needed to find a new profession... well, a trade actually.

I decided to quit IT and software - the thing that I was really good at - and retrain as an electrician. I decided that the most important things to me were being self employed and working in a non-office environment. It took a couple of years before I finally realised I was wrong.

The same thing happened to me, except this time it was much, much faster.

The pressure on a small businessman, and a tradesman is immense. An electrician is responsible for the safety of everybody in the homes that you have installed an electrical system into. If anybody is electrocuted because of your shoddy workmanship, it's your fault. That's a lot of responsibility. Also, the public expect you to work for peanuts.

The sense of exhaustion and inability to cope with the pressure anymore, had hit me really hard in my cushy desk job. Now I had angry customers ringing me up because I had gotten sick. This was much, much worse, because they were ordinary people who I'd met and built a relationship with. Ordinary people were counting on me to wire up their homes, and I was personally failing them.

This depression was much deeper and darker, because I'd really run out of ideas. I felt completely useless, and that as a well known local tradesman, I'd ruined my reputation in my community. This was awful. I was actually afraid to leave the house, in case I bumped into somebody I knew, somebody who I'd let down.

I felt like I couldn't go backwards, and I couldn't go forwards. I was really trapped. How would people take me seriously as an IT professional if I'd previously been a lowly electrician? How would I ever work again as an independent businessman, when I had actually crashed a business due to my ill health? How could I ever be trusted again?

I started to think about suicide very seriously. I saw no way out of this cycle of depressions and failure. I couldn't see a way to earn money anymore, to work again. I couldn't imagine going back to my profession, or starting another business. Everything looked doomed to fail again and again and again.

I tried the medical route again, and finally got referred to a psychiatrist. It took a very long time before I actually met with the consultant, and the options were the same: SSRIs, SNRIs and NaSSAs. All serotonergic drugs. All with horrible side effects. All taking 6+ weeks to kick in.

I begged my psychiatrist to let me try Bupropion (sold as Zyban and Wellbutrin) which is very popular in France and is fast acting. He refused on the grounds that it was an off-label prescription in the UK and he'd have to get special permission from the NHS trust. It was more than his job was worth.

So, I resorted to self-medication.

Self medication worked... in the short term. I felt better, I could function. However, it took me down a path that led to the Dark Web, which led to drug window-shopping, and later to experimentation with just about every highly addictive hard drug known to man, including Heroin, Crack Cocaine and Crystal Methamphetamine.

Drugs don't work. The brain gets used to them, and then you have to increase the dose or switch to a more powerful drug. You can't artificially induce an organ that's designed to be balanced - homeostatically self-regulating - to be forced into an unnatural state.

What's the reason why those people who were taking SSRIs had lower serotonin levels in their spinal fluid? Well, it's because the brain realises that something is artificially out of kilter, and so it releases less serotonin to compensate, and puts you right back where you started.

In the words of The Verve: "the drugs don't work, they just make it worse".

Why do you think drugs from your doctor are good, and drugs from a drug dealer or the Dark Web are bad? Do you think your brain knows the difference? Of course it doesn't. Most of the drugs that are abused were developed by pharmaceutical companies originally, and used to be prescribed before newer 'safer' medications were developed. By 'safer' we tend to mean weaker and with such horrible side effects that taking bigger doses becomes unpleasant. In actual fact, the so-called 'drugs of abuse' have far less side effects than their 'safe' counterparts, at therapeutic doses. Anything becomes poisonous at high enough doses.

Does that mean I'm pro-drugs then? Am I soft on drugs, and one of these decriminalisation nuts?

Well, no, not really. Drugs are bad. They put your brain into an unnatural state and it's hard for your brain to achieve homeostasis when you are poking and prodding at it with the blunt instruments that are the chemicals that cross the blood-brain barrier.

Drugs can 'reset' your brain, in a similar way to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) which is also known as 'shock' therapy.

Medicine of the brain is very early in its development. Psychiatry has only really been a medical field since the 1950's and the true mechanism of action of medications is only very poorly understood, especially as the true nature of mental illness has not yet been revealed.

My personal view is that the destruction of families, clans and villages in favour of ridiculously long working hours in an isolated urban setting, has destroyed everything we need as humans in terms of our relationships with other human beings. Mental illness is a perfectly sane response to modern life. It's a sane response to an insane world.

The thing that's been most beneficial to my mental health has been connecting with a group of friends, while being homeless. Being relieved of the isolated silence of the commuter train, and the pressure of horrible work and job insecurity, coupled with the financial pressures of paying ridiculous rent and unattainable material goals... it was sweet, sweet relief. Living in a kind of commune, with other people who were living in close quarters with each other, sounds unbearable, but it was actually nice. It was humanising. It felt natural, and a sense of calm, relaxation and connection with the world, flooded back into me. I felt a warmth within me that I'd never felt, except maybe with Heroin.

The question now on my lips is: how do I get that again? How do I recreate the sense of community I had, either with tons of kitesurfing friends, or with tons of similarly dispossessed and dislocated homeless people, all thrust together out of necessity to stick together?

The need to belong to a tribe, a group, a commune... it's undeniable, now that I've experienced it. I place an importance on it above financial security, because without it I just feel suicidal, so it's actually essential for life in a way that money just isn't.

Human connection is the answer to the riddle of depression, suicide and addiction.

I'm halfway betwixt and between. Half in the dark, and half in the light. My brain doesn't know whether to be suicidally depressed or hypomanically fixated on a single goal.

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

This is a story about the hardest part of the journey...

People often give up when they're closer than they think they are to making a breakthrough. The first 80% of a task is always the bit that seems quite easy, like you're making really good progress. The final 20% is tough. Progress seems to slow to a snail's pace, and self-doubt creeps in. It's easy to quit in the final leg, believing you're never going to achieve your goal.

I'm racked with nervousness about whether I'm following the right path. There are lots of things that I feel somewhat full of regret about. There's lots of stuff that I feel a bit stupid and embarrassed about. There are plenty of things that, on reflection, look pretty dumb, arrogant, crazy.

In particular, I'm following a cyclical pattern. I keep repeating the same formula, because I know it sort of works. It's easy for me to stay living where I live, getting more work in the field I know best and pretty much acting the way I've always acted. The pressure to stay in this loop is undeniable.

I need to get my head above water. I'm not in any position to just sack off the western lifestyle and leave a smoking crater in my reputation, creditworthiness and ability to continue to function in the mainstream.

Believe me, I'm so tempted right now to just disappear. I would love to grab my tent, sleeping bag and a few other essentials, and just go off-grid. Suicidal thoughts have reached a crescendo in my head... they stalk me every waking hour of the day. It's clear what's driving this sinking feeling in my heart: the fact that life for the next 6 months is going to be very much a paint-by-numbers exercise.

I've done the commuting thing for 20 years. I've done the IT thing for 20 years. I've done the city living thing for 20 years. I've done the urban solitude thing for 20 years. There is no novelty, no joy, no challenge, no surprises... it's just a case of turning the pedals, and plodding along. The monotony, the drudgery, the formula, the routine... it's worse than a prison sentence.

Do I have a reason for living? Not really. What would it be? Is it a reason for living, to pay rent and service debts? Is work a reason for living, if you're just selling your brain and body to the highest bidder to work on bullshit projects? How can you take pride in your work when you've done the same thing, over and over and over again, for 20 miserable boring years.

I used to work to live. I had a nice lifestyle and I always took my full holiday allowance, travelling to exotic destinations and pursuing exciting activities, adventures. That was less than 10% of the time. The rest of the time was spent watching the clock. Two clocks actually: one that counted down until the end of the working week, and one that counted down until the day that I no longer had to do a job that I had nothing but contempt for.

In truth, I hadn't really reckoned on living this long. Certainly in recent years I decided that things would be wrapped up neatly if I just shuffled off my mortal coil, and my life insurance would at least leave a small legacy for my sister and my niece. I don't really fancy growing old and infirm, and facing yet more of the same bullshit that's been such a chore.

I remember being in hospital, and I really wasn't at all scared that I was going to die, even though my prognosis was that I had about a 30% chance of surviving, such was the damage to my internal organs.

Things haven't really moved on much. I have no dependents. My family ditched me, so I've ditched them. I've not been able to rebuild my social life. I take no pleasure or satisfaction from doing the same job I've been doing for 20 years. I'm too trapped by the mechanisms of capitalism to be able to pursue travel and adventure. I'm too paralysed by fear of dropping out of the rat race and becoming unemployable, to do something gutsy, which would be a one-way ticket.

You see, I'm acutely aware that my perception of the world is coloured by my mood disorder. When I'm depressed, I see everything as pointless, relentlessly horrible and never going to improve. However, I'm able to be rational, and I know that it's foolish to make a permanent change for a temporary problem.

If I throw away the ability to be able to earn huge amounts of money very quickly, then I'm very much limiting my future options. As it stands, at the moment, I can potentially dig myself out of a financial hole and feather the nest very quickly. It seems churlish to not even be prepared to toe the line for 6 short months. However, if you've followed my story at all, you'll know that 6 months is a long time for me... a lot can happen in my life in that period.

My timescales are heavily compressed. Gains need to be shored up quickly or else the hard work will be undone. Things need to happen faster, not slower than normal. Asking somebody whose life is extremely fragile to work harder, longer and suffer more than their peers is likely to lead to the "fuck it" button being pushed. Whatever happened to supporting those who are weaker?

I can see now, where the cracks are. I can see why people slip through the nets and sink to the bottom. I understand where we are hindering, not helping. Life is pretty vicious and unforgiving.

It's true that I'm pretty resilient. It's true that it's remarkable that I've made it this far, and that I still apparently have the opportunity to fight my way back, to recover... and then to perhaps thrive and prosper.

Hopefully, this feeling will pass, but from experience, I think it's going to get harder before it gets easier.

It's like this blog. There are less people reading than ever before, and I'm getting less feedback and encouragement than ever before. I'm not sure why I'm even writing anymore. I've failed to shame my parents into acting with any common decency (although perhaps that was always doomed to fail) and I've as yet failed to feel better, using writing as some kind of shrink, a silent counsellor... to deal with my fucked up head.

But, my experience tells me that doubt always creeps in. I've written 240,000 words and I plan to write 300,000. I plan to write every day for at least a year. Who knows what it will achieve? Sometimes, you don't know until you do it.

When I wrote on a forum every day, it brought me friends, a sense of identity, self-respect and even a sense of achievement when I wrote something that a lot of people found useful. This is kind of like a repetition of that, except that this time I'm publicly dissecting my own psyche.

Is it useful to externalise my internal monologue? Is it useful to psychologically expose myself like this? I've found introspection and self-examination useful in the past, and there's no reason why 'open sourcing' the contents of my brain shouldn't be interesting to somebody somewhere sometime.

They say the most interesting writing is when people are raw & authentic. I'm not really trying to emulate any writers or follow any formula to gain an audience. I just need to get stuff out of my brain and onto paper. I need to pick things to bits and figure out what makes me tick, so I can hopefully begin to open a new, happier chapter in my life.

Watch this space.

Travel doesn't have to mean jetting around the globe to me. I'd be happy in my tent in a muddy field, I think. I'm so sick of the global rat race.

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

This is a story about how to lose friends and alienate people...

It's remarkable what we assume, and what we're unaware of. It's remarkable how our opinions can be coloured, and prejudices triggered, which completely change our impression of a person, and the way we treat them.

I had declared myself as "fighting mental health stigma" but in actual fact, things like Clinical Depression are so damn commonplace that nobody bats an eyelid if you say you're taking powerful psychiatric medication to stop you from killing yourself. In actual fact, I get more criticism for being medication free and letting my brain achieve its own homeostasis.

When I moved back to London, one of my oldest friends was incredibly sweet and understanding about the fact that I was struggling with my mental health. He took time out to read a bit about what Bipolar Disorder was, and was actively concerned with my wellbeing.

My friends are always playing catch up. By the time I was diagnosed with Clinical Depression, I was already having hypomanic episodes that were beyond the 'healthy' and 'normal' range of moods. Spending copious amounts of money, working ridiculously long hours, hypersexuality, risk taking... these things are not conducive to good health, wealth and stable relationships.

By the time I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, I was already trying various forms of self medication. Depressions had gotten so severe that suicide was a very real risk, and hypomania had reached the point where I was starting to get delusions of grandeur, and was at risk of getting into money problems.

By the time I got free from the horrible relationship that was stoking my mood disorder, substance abuse was a big threat. When my divorce sapped my energy and sucked me back into the nightmarish world that I was trying to escape, I gave up and just decided to be a total junkie.

By the time I got cleaned up and back on my feet, word had been spread by my unpleasant family, that I was somehow untrustworthy, a waste of space, a lost cause.

So, I'm pre-empting all of that. This is a pre-emptive strike. I'm telling the world my very worst things, so everybody can get all that prejudice out of the way. I'm putting my worst foot forward.

I'm still here.

My friends and family are still stuck in the position of trying to deal with their prejudice, even though I've already moved on. I'm dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts, while people think I'm probably scoring heroin on a street corner and injecting drugs in some crack den.

This 'lag' is extremely annoying. It means I have to deal with a shocked silence. It means I'm isolated, alone, with people who should know me better, thinking terrible things about me. The culture of fear that we've grown up in is powerful, and all those images that the media has put into your mind are suddenly applied to me... it wouldn't surprise me if my own family has imagined me stealing car stereos or mugging grannies.

There's a lag with me too. It messes with your mind, being homeless one minute, and then working for a massive bank on a really important project, all dressed up in your suit with people giving a shit about your opinion.

How can you go from being the lowest of the low, to the point where there are people who actually think that death's too good for you, to suddenly one of the highest paid people in one of the world's most profitable enterprises, because the market value for your skills and experience is so high?

Is it any wonder that it messes with your mind? Is it any wonder that your brain doesn't know whether you're a worthless piece of shit, and the world would be better off if you were dead, or if actually you deserve a 6-figure salary, and people are telling you that what you're doing is really important and you're a key figure in the delivery of a super important project. How are you supposed to reconcile that?

Just saying that I should remain "grounded" is ridiculous. I have no frame of reference. I have no evidence to suggest that any possible conclusion I could reach would be the right one. Everything that my experience has taught me has been counter-intuitive.

Working hard, being humble, keeping my head down has gotten me nowhere. It hasn't led to greater happiness, more stable mental health, nor has it repaired damaged friendships and improved my relationship with my family.

Equally, taking reckless risks with my health & wealth has brought surprising results. Instead of being dead or destitute, I actually ended up making a fantastic group of friends, as a result of winding up homeless on Hampstead Heath, just after my birthday in 2014. In actual fact, being chucked onto the street by Camden Council ushered in one of the happiest periods of my life in many recent years, probably since I was in Cambridge in 2011.

I don't see any of what I've done as wrong. I've not resorted to lying, cheating, stealing. I've not screwed people over, manipulated them or in any way committed any offensive act against anybody.

However, people seem to take it very personally, when I apparently screw up my opportunities. One of my closest friends was absolutely besides himself when I lost my contract one Christmas. He thought I had deliberately sabotaged it. He was angry that I had seemingly chucked away a golden opportunity.

Things aren't so clear-cut. I'm rarely in a fit state to work. Either I'm suffering from depression, hypomania, or the exhaustion and cognitive impairment of recovery from stimulant abuse. I just don't have the time and money to properly prepare my mind and body for work, so my colleagues and bosses get a rather fucked up version of me, with all the weird highs and lows associated with an extreme mood disorder.

It's not a moral choice, whether I work, whether I relapse, whether I just collapse in a heap and don't do anything.

I know that people like to judge, and I've given away so much ammunition that it's really easy to think you know my character, my morality. I'm very easy to label, to criticise, and to apply your prejudices to.

I'm fed up of feeling guilty, just because people are shocked and unable to see beyond their prejudice and preconceived notions. I'm fed up of having to carry the can for a load of blame and scapegoating that doesn't even apply to me.

In some ways, I'm tempted to rob, to steal, to lie, to cheat... I'm being treated as if I do those things already. If I'm already 'the bad guy' then I guess I should act the part?

People are more sympathetic to mental health problems like depression and bipolar than they are to substance abuse, even though the latter can be a feature of both of the former. I think the problem is the fact that people try and view it as a moral issue

Tags: #depression #bipolar #suicide #homeless #career #banking #friends #family

This is a story about arrested development...

It's fairly clear that I have too much time on my hands to think about stuff. Too much time alone thinking about stuff leads to dredging up old memories, getting worked up about stuff in the past, and strange thoughts and ideas, without any checks & balances.

However, I'm reasonably self-aware, so I thought I'd share my own impressions of myself. In particular, my attempts to be rational and objective about everything that grinds my gears.

I'm aware that the more and more I wail in distress, bitch and whine, the more I seem like a spoiled teenager, full of angst and feelings of being 'hard done by'. Perhaps there's the impression that I'm owed something. Perhaps a sense of entitlement is coming across.

Actually, there's no entitlement... driving all of these feelings are suicidal thoughts, which mean that if life is too awful, too unbearable, I'll just remove myself from the game altogether.

It's easy to dismiss a suicidal or depressed person, saying "other people have it so much harder than you" but it's that attitude that is the truly immature one. With maturity, you'll realise that life doesn't work like that. As a friend once said, there isn't one single person on the planet who's entitled to feel depressed and suicidal because they have it worst of all, and everybody else shouldn't feel depressed because they have it better than this one individual.

We judge things relatively, this is natural, it's permitted and it's an acceptable fact of life. Why shouldn't I judge my lot relative to my peers, relative to the opportunities and luck that we've all enjoyed in life, as well as the unlucky things that have happened?

Luck? Luck? What the hell am I talking about luck for? Isn't destiny decided by choices? Well, no, not really.

I didn't decide to get born to a couple of drug addict dropout losers, who were too intoxicated on drugs and alcohol to adjust their lifestyle and grow the fuck up when kids started to arrive. Did I decide that these losers would be such a waste of space that they'd need bailouts from the bank of Mum & Dad just to put a roof over the family's head? Did I decide that these losers would spend my entire upbringing teaching me not to be entitled, and to expect a lower standard of living than they enjoyed? Did I decide to pick parents who both enjoyed University educations, but dropped out, and decided not to afford me and my sister the same privilege? I think, if you're looking for the entitled people who believed that the world owes them a living, you'll find them in my parents.

I've always looked to the future, and tried to act in a positive way. I forged my own path, and decided to have a career and follow the path of responsibility, hard work and reject the lifestyle of my parents: being lazy drug addicts as they were.

However, when I found myself back in the situation of my teens - no money and control taken out of my hands - naturally, I feel pretty bitter about everything, pretty resentful to have nothing to show for years of hard graft. Yes it's immature, to bitch and whine about it. Yes it seems like I'm not taking responsibility for the shit that went wrong, undoing all that hard work. Do you want to know why I watched everything burn down, and why I don't feel that responsible?

Does that look like a happy child to you, or a clotheshorse? Does it even look like a child, or perhaps a status symbol? Perhaps it's an object, to be wheeled around, a badge, a token?

The bulk of my upbringing was spent receiving abuse for not having been born with perfect maturity, naturally instilled Victorian values. I never had a childhood.

This is what makes me tick: I feel like I'm entitled to a childhood, now, today, as payback for a horrible upbringing.

I feel like I can act the fool, the jester, the clown. I feel like I can have a massive tantrum, call everyone names, throw a hissy fit. I feel I can have chocolate and jelly for dinner. I feel like I can play with toys. I feel like I can neglect my responsibilities and not do my homework.

This is payback time. I'm taking the time that I didn't have as a kid to make people laugh, or cringe. I actually don't care that I look childish and immature, it's too much fun and I don't give a fuck what people think.

Is it spoiled, and is it bratty? Well, that depends... who spoiled me? I paid for this. I paid for me to have a massive meltdown, a massive tantrum. It's all my wages, my life savings, that has funded what had become a long-overdue childhood.

What did you think it was all about? Riding my bike recklessly around London, getting mixed up with the "wrong" crowd and being the popular kid who doesn't play by the rules, doesn't respect authority and their elders, doesn't say and do the "right" things.

Oh boy, let me tell you that it feels good. It's such a relief to throw off the shackles of savings accounts, mortgages and pension funds. It's such a relief to be free from the oppression of a work schedule, allotted holiday allowances and kissing arses. It's such a relief to speak my mind, rather than falling in line with the rabble.

What's the lesson we learn from all this? Well, if you're overly disciplinary with your kids, and take them away from all their friends and give them a sparse, boring, shit little life, filled with angry abuse for them being nothing more than a fucking child... expect them to grow up feeling like they missed out, like they never really knew childhood innocence, the joy of just laughing and giggling.

Now, when I start to go a bit hypomanic, I chuckle to myself, I grin manically. There is a lightness in my chest, pure glee. People see it, and it's infectious. They can't believe an adult would have such childlike qualities.

When will this end, this somewhat embarrassing and disgraceful immaturity? When will I stop being bitter and resentful about a horrible childhood? When will I move on, and stop verbally attacking my lazy drug addict dropout loser parents?

The answer: when I feel like I've had enough.

I look pretty happy on top of this bus stop, don't I. I'm 'owed' 18 years of childhood innocence, aren't I?

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

This is a story about descending into insanity...

What do we know about technology that is capable of tracking us, capturing images and sound? When does it do this? What data is stored, transmitted, received, without us even knowing?

I'm on extremely dodgy ground, talking about snooping, spying, surveillance and hijacking of the 'smart' devices we have in our possession most of the time. There's a risk that I could swing into out and out paranoia. However, I also need to tell you what happened to me, as I experienced it.

So, we pick up the story where we left part one, yesterday. I'm in my hotel room, it's going dark, there aren't any drugs in my bloodstream anymore, and I can hear an angry family outside my door. The hotel reception has been alerted to my distress, as have the police. This is what happened next.

I heard a sound outside my window, of two people climbing up onto the top of the bay windows, in order to stand on the little balcony and look right into my room through the window. I had the impression that it was a father and son. I turned my back on them, horrified by this intrusion.

Voices now came from behind me, where the father and son stood, peering at me through the glass, with me like a goldfish in a bowl. Voices came from below, where they shouted to somebody relaying messages, to somebody outside my door... an upset female voice, just the other side.

At first, the father and son were critically appraising me: "look at him, look at the way he's cowering from us, what a pathetic little twerp". Being talked about like this made me squirm with self-consciousness, to feel that my privacy, my personal space was being horribly invaded.

This narrative of abuse, where I was talked about as if I wasn't able to perfectly hear what was being said, carried on for some time. I started to get angry that I was being peered at like this, with no escape, trapped on both sides. I slid the flimsy wardrobe in front of the window, so that the father & son couldn't see in.

By now, it was getting pretty dark. The voices carried on as if I could be seen, and I was confused to know how that was possible, when I had covered the window with the wardrobe. The messages that the father and son relayed to the rest of the family seemed to suggest that they were still able to see me. I moved around the room and tried to hide myself from their intrusive gaze, seemingly to no avail.

"Look at him, what a mess. He's a right state. So messed up. Disgusting!" they said. Meanwhile the female voices sounded like they were whipping themselves into a bloodlust, a frenzy. "C'mon Dad let's get him. Let's teach him a lesson he won't forget" the daughter pleaded. You could hear excitement, exhilaration in her voice... she was starting to enjoy this.

Everything up to this point, except for my face-to-face contact with the person who came into my room, could be pretty much put down to temporary insanity. I hadn't really seen anything and it's quite possible that I was hearing things. I've never really had a problem with hearing voices, but I was so tired, malnourished, stressed and strung out that it's quite possible that my brain had simply lost its grip on reality.

Even the father and son, stood on the balcony, were only things that I perceived in the murky gloom of the darkness, and I didn't want them staring at me, so I had turned my back on them and then slid the wardrobe in the way.

The sense that I was being watched, certainly didn't make any rational sense. I had started to get really alarmed, after it seemed like I was still being watched from every angle. I had started to look around the room, to see if I could see holes drilled in the walls or ceiling, to see if I could see any means of spying on me... I saw nothing. This really didn't make any sense to me, and I was kind of still secretly hoping that it could all be put down to the effects of drugs wearing off, even though I knew that they were no longer in my bloodstream.

I was not at all prepared for what happened next.

I heard the mechanical sound of an electric motor, and the next thing I knew, a thin silvery metal tube-like thing was poked under the bedroom door. This tube, ridged like a shower hose, then turned 90 degrees and started to extend upwards at a 45 degree angle away from the floor. When it had extended a few feet upwards, the end then turned to point into the room, and I could see dark glass on the end, which looked like the lens of a tiny camera.

This. Changed. Everything.

Now I had actual confirmation, clear as day, with my eyes that I was being spied on. Up to this point, I had been half considering that everything was just in my mind. It's not unreasonable to hear and perceive things incorrectly when so tired and messed up, but I'd never had a hallucination. When people talk about hallucinations, they aren't actually seeing things. Instead, the brain is misinterpreting things. You can see snakes and spiders in shadows, but when you look directly, you don't see those things... they're just corruptions of things that aren't seen clearly.

This telescopic spy camera was here, it was real. I went from being half-asleep, exhausted by the prolonged stress and the sleepless nights, to being wide awake. Everything was in sharp focus, and it was clear that this was no hallucination.

I yelled: "Hello, police?". My assumption was that this could be the police's way of checking to see if I was OK, if they were worried that I was suicidal, or perhaps had a weapon. "That camera had better belong to the police, or else there's going to be hell to pay" I yelled, aware that this was an invasion of privacy that could never be justified in court, by private citizens.

Then I overhead two people talking "yeah, the guy's name is Nicholas Grant, from Bournemouth". Bournemouth? How the hell would they know that? That's what it says on my driving license, because I never got it changed. It sent shivers down my spine at the time. It certainly stopped me in my tracks, because I was about to grab the camera and try and pull it out from under the door.

I decided that it was probably the police, so I went to my bag and found a letter from my doctor, explaining that I was in a vulnerable situation: struggling with mental health issues, drug addiction, homelessness and dislocation from family and friends. The letter was intended to be given to hospital staff if I ever needed treatment, as it summarised my care needs and primary health risks, but I felt like it would make a starting point with the police, seeing as there were at least 4 angry family members stood outside who wanted to put their own point of view across, painting me in a negative light.

"Oh, ho, what's this trick he's trying to pull. What excuses are these? A letter full of lies, is it?" I overheard. The irate family thought that I was trying to pull a fast one, to get myself out of trouble by hiding behind medical diagnosis, perhaps. They certainly weren't happy that I was preparing myself for a knock at the door from the police. They seemed to feel like justice wasn't going to be served.

I didn't feel like the police would permit any such situation to occur. I was now convinced that this camera had perhaps been purchased or rented by one of the family, and was part of their continued persecution of me. I phoned the police myself. I explained where I was, what was happening. They said they'd see what they could do, but they were strangely unconvincing.

I then heard a flurry of activity outside the door. "Get that call cancelled off" I heard somebody say. Then "have they called it off". A little later, I heard "we've got it called off" and a little cheer went up. This was really confusing. Were these people the police, were they working with the police, or were they just really good at blagging the police in order to keep their quarry trapped in his hotel room, in order to serve up their own form of vigilante justice?

I was struck with an idea. What if I could communicate with these bullies, this mob? I decided to write messages on my mobile phone and point it at the camera so they could read it. I got out my mobile phone and launched Google Apps, which has a word processor. I then made the font really big, so the text could be read.

The fact I'd got my phone out again and what I was doing caused considerable interest, particularly with the excitable female, who seemed to be the main injured party in the whole fiasco, but now seemed to be revelling in her position as centre of attention. "What's he doing? Oh, he's going to write us a message is he? Oh this is going to be good" she said.

I wrote "I'm sorry". With reference to the original offence I seemed to have somehow caused.

My oppressors seemed to react before I'd even shown it to the camera. They laughed derisively and mockingly, and then reacted angrily. There was an explosion of anger, seemingly incredulous that I could be remorseful that I had caused such offence that I would be attacked by an entire family.

It was strange that my messages could be read, without me even having to show them to the camera. I then decided that my phone had probably been hacked... hence how I could be overheard so easily. However, I still felt bad about what I'd said, and I was still clearly trapped by an angry mob, so I started to make pleas.

"I'm scared" I said next. This had a somewhat de-escalating effect, but now I seemed to enter into a direct dialogue with the female who had sustained the most offence, and was the vocal ringleader for the rest of the family. We were getting somewhere, it seemed.

"I didn't mean what I said" I pleaded. This didn't go down very well.

"I was born in Wales, my parents are from the North" I wrote, trying to undo the whole us vs. them thing that I'd started, when I had made my flippant remarks about uncultured out of town people, under my breath, muttering in a bad German accent, assuming that nobody could hear me.

I can't remember the details of the conversation, but there was little dissuading the offended party that I hadn't meant anything malicious in my comments. I had then moved on to reasoning with them, that violence wasn't the answer. I wrote that beating me up would be a vicious and cowardly attack, completely out of proportion with whatever I had done.

Things dragged on and on, until we eventually reached the point where the main woman made it clear that I had to do something to demonstrate my remorse. It was fairly clear that if we just continued, eventually they'd have to go away, and then they'd feel like justice hadn't been done. The last thing I wrote was "if I wasn't sorry, I'd just keep this conversation going, wouldn't I?".

The penny seemed to drop with me, that I was supposed to do something brave, to demonstrate that I was sorry, instead of just hiding behind my door, hiding behind the police, hiding behind the letter from my doctor. I was struck by the certainty that I had to do something very clear to demonstrate how sorry I was.

I put my phone into my pocket, moved the wardrobe back against the wall, opened the window - the father and son had gone - and climbed out. I was stood, on the 3rd floor, on top of a bay window, without railings or other safety guard around me, on the outside of this building, perilously high above the ground.

I raised my arms to the air, and yelled to the street below "I fucked up!!". As I did this, a police helicopter that was hovering about quarter of a mile away shone its light onto me. I clambered back in the window, with adrenalin coursing through my bloodstream. "What do I do now?" I asked aloud to the room. "Come and find me" the girl said. "Climb out of the window and climb down. We've been doing it all day" she said.

Obviously, I was aware that the police helicopter was there. The light was now shining in the window very brightly. I decided that climbing down from the top floor of a building in full view of a police helicopter was not the smartest idea, so instead I opened the bedroom door and legged it down the back staircase of the hotel, full of the excitement and glee of a child. The most exciting game of hide & seek ever, had just begun.

Things were just hotting up.

The next part of the story does actually contain the fun run bit. I did interact with lots more people face-to-face in the final chapter, which makes the whole silly episode that much harder to explain. I also have some digital evidence of what went down during those crazy couple of days. However, I do kind of wonder if I didn't dream the whole thing sometimes.

The finalé really is almost impossible to explain away as mental illness or drug side-effects, but I still need to tell the story and 'ask the audience' what they think could possibly have happened. As I continue to tell the tale, you'll see that it's harder and harder to explain away as a bout of temporary insanity.

I want it to be temporary insanity, because it means that I wasn't the victim of a rather harrowing incident. It's rather unsettling to think that I could have been so insane that I thought I was making phonecalls to hotel receptionists, the police, speaking face to face with people and seeing things as clear as day, like the spy camera. It makes no sense, which is why I'm finally telling the tale, after a year of trying to wrap my head around it.

I suspect that Islington holds more secrets than it's letting on, but we shall see.

Tune in tomorrow for the final instalment.

Tags: #mentalhealth #bipolar #drugs #addiction #london

This is a story about the start of an eventful year...

On May 13th, 2015, which was my Mum's birthday, I decided it was time to try and clean up my act and get back on my feet. I spoke with a friend from Ireland who had been very supportive during a very difficult start to the year, but later that day I was sideswiped by events that defy rational interpretation. This is my account of those events.

I came to be staying in a hotel near Finsbury Park, Islington, North London. How I came to be there is a matter of shame and regret, that I don't particularly want to go into. I believed that the predating matter had been settled, and I was killing time until the 13th of May, which was the last possible date I considered it acceptable to have not yet managed to get my shit together. I had set myself a deadline, but I was being quite slow to get on with what needed to be done.

When I had checked into the hotel, it had seemed quite an ordinary place, stuffed full of tourists. The layout of the building was maze-like, and I struggled to find my room. The room numbering wasn't logical, and there seemed to be staircases everywhere. My room was sparse beyond belief, with two very basic single beds, and a flimsy wardrobe. The curtain was barely more than a semi-transparent sheet. I'm not being snobby, because I was lucky to have a dry roof over my head, but I mean to describe the setting for some of this tale.

My hotel room was on the top floor, with a large sash window looking onto the terrace of houses opposite. You could see in the windows of the house opposite. Outside the window was the top of the bay windows of the rooms below, forming a kind of balcony without any railings. Obviously you weren't supposed to climb out of the window onto that balcony, but more on that later.

There had been some excellent sunny weather, and I had come and gone from my room to a little shop nearby to purchase ice lollies, as well as other food & drink, but I was pretty under-nourished. I was also extremely sleep deprived.

2015 had not been going well. In Swiss Cottage, my landlord had decided he wanted to end the contract of me and my flatmates and re-let the flat at much higher rent, after he had spent money on much needed renovation. The flat had chronic damp problems and the heating didn't work, until I had eventually nagged him into fixing the place up... triggering my own eviction. My contract with Barclays had been unexpectedly terminated due to a complete asshat of a guy trying to protect his key-man dependency and little fiefdom... I wasn't the only one who he didn't get on with, and the existing contractors had refused to work with him, leaving me with the short straw.

I returned to the hostel I had lived in, after being chucked onto the street by Camden Council, a year earlier. Camden Council had been most unhelpful in their legal duties to house a resident, and had wasted a lot of time. I was given two weeks in a crisis house, but it was then left up to me to try my luck with local homeless charities. They literally didn't care.

In the summer of 2014 I had been living in a hostel in Camden Town, funded using my overdraft. This had gotten me back on my feet, so why wouldn't I go back there at the beginning of 2015, when I no longer had a place to live? It turned out that most of my friends had managed to move on and make a better life for themselves. The prospect of starting to rebuild my life again, from scratch, was devastating.

I decided to head out East, and lived in a hostel in Shoreditch and then one back in Swiss Cottage. These were chaotic times. Food and sleep were the big casualties, which had a knock-on effect on my mental health. Dragging piles of bags all over London, while not looking after yourself and having very uncertain living arrangements is quite detrimental, it turns out.

It has to be confessed that stimulant abuse was a large component of these problems. The insomnia and anoretic (appetite suppressing) effects of these chemicals conspire to cause you to neglect to sleep and eat. Without sleep and nutrition, the brain quite naturally gets pretty strung out, and you're more susceptible to strange thoughts and behaviours. Quite possibly this entire tale can be told as the result of a chain of unchecked drug binges, but there are elements that are clearly external influences.

As with any drug addict, ever, I decided to have "one last hit"... and this is where things go a bit sketchy.

I was overcome with a sense of threat. I felt like I was being watched, listened to. I decided to lock myself in the bathroom, around evening time on the 13th of May, 2015. I stayed there until the next morning, trapped by fear.

Fear of what? Well, at first, it was impossible to describe. I felt that the people in the houses opposite were staring in through the large sash window, with its flimsy curtain. I felt that the people in the neighbouring rooms were listening in to my mutterings. I felt sure that there was some hostility, just outside the door of my room.

When I was in the bathroom, for the whole evening and night, there was nothing to suggest that anything untoward was happening, but I was still racked by this irrational fear. In the middle of the night, to calm myself down I started telling stories to myself, in the pitch blackness: I hadn't turned on the bathroom light. I gave myself a lecture, on all the physics that I know. I went through everything from fluorescent lightbulbs, to Cathode-Ray Tube televisions, Light-Emitting Diodes and lots of other phenomena that can be explained by Quantum Mechanics. I then started to tell myself a story about the birth and death of the Universe, in some kind of helio-centric model, with a new interpretation of atomic fusion. Clearly, I had lost my mind.

As dawn broke and I could see light under the bottom of the bathroom door, I was certain that I saw flickering light and shadows in my room. This made me extremely agitated. As time went on, I heard stampeding in the corridor, and crude animal noises being made by people, whistling sounds. Then, the fire alarm bells started to be sounded at random intervals, accompanied by yet more running around that sounded like adults acting like children.

I was intensely annoyed at this animal call, running in corridors, fire bell cacophony. I felt extremely persecuted and afraid of imminent attack by these savages. Clearly, I was being deliberately spooked, pranked, by some malicious idiots. This went on for a couple of hours.

Eventually, I could stand it no more, and decided to act as if I couldn't hear what was going on, and try and act normally. I had a shower in the dark, towelled myself off and burst back into the bedroom to face my persecutors. There was no clear sign of anything wrong, but I was freaked out.

There were sounds that were quite clearly audible of the other hotel guests in the adjoining rooms. I was muttering to myself under my breath, in a German accent for some reason. I assumed that my low-volume muttering could not be heard by anybody. I was quite angry and resentful that I had been made so fearful by a bunch of childish adults, playing pranks in the corridor, and started to mutter all kinds of weird things about these people, mostly about them being crass, uncultured out-of-town folks.

At some point, it seemed like I had clearly been overheard, and there was an angry reaction outside the door. I felt ashamed that I had caused offence, as much as I felt surprised that my insane mumblings had been overheard. I took the 'please do not disturb' sign and tore off the 'not' and hung it on my door handle outside my room as some kind of peace offering. As far as I could tell, the hostile family I had upset took particular offence to this, and it sounded like I was about to be lynched.

I hurriedly packed my bags and phoned the hotel reception, and asked if they could smooth things over with these guests, as I didn't fancy getting my head kicked in by some family of chavs who seemed to be spending most of their day hanging around in a budget hotel room antagonising me, rather than going sightseeing around London. I begged the manager to send somebody to safely escort me to a waiting taxi, where I would beat a hasty retreat.

There was a knock at the door, and an energetic young man, beaming from ear to ear bounded into my room when I opened the door. He listened to my concerns with a look of pure amusement playing on his face. He looked as if he could barely stifle a laugh. I'm still not sure if that's because of my strange behaviour and the fact I was clearly off my rocker, or whether he was "in on the game"... but that's just paranoia. The fact that he was a young, well-dressed English guy in good physical shape certainly jarred with the sullen under-paid Eastern European staff that I had encountered up until that time. I had not seen this man behind reception ever, during my comings and goings.

Nothing much seemed to happen. No taxi arrived. No phonecall from reception to say the coast was clear and I could make my escape, free from persecution by the chav family, baying for my blood for taking the piss out of them as uncultured scum. I know it's pathetic to say it now, but I had been half-joking and simply continuing the madness of muttering random crazy stuff to myself, in a bad German accent, such were the depths of my insanity.

I phoned the non-emergency number for the police, and tried to explain my predicament. This didn't go well, and I didn't seem to be getting anywhere. The day wore on and started to get towards evening time. None of this could prepare me for what happened next.

The strange thing is, that over 24 hours had elapsed since I had taken any drugs, and the amount of time that they would last would normally be around 16 to 18 hours, maximum. It made no sense that I was still experiencing severe paranoia, auditory hallucinations, delusions and other weird thoughts and ideas. I struggle to explain later events by simply saying that it was a result of drug abuse.

Perhaps I had finally done it. Perhaps I had finally tipped myself into complete insanity. Certainly, the sense of threat that I had initially perceived was mostly unfounded, unwarranted, irrational.

So, I'll leave it at that for part one. We pause this tale, with me terrified of an angry lynching mob of a family outside my bedroom door, the hotel staff alerted to my distress as well as some non-emergency contact with the police, who were no strangers to me... although it was Kentish Town (Camden) police who I'd had brushes with in the past, but I was now in a different borough of London (Islington). Who knows how joined up the different forces and stations are, especially when dealing with somebody who's got no criminal record.

I wonder what the conclusion will be when the tale is told. That I definitely interacted with people during this time, suggests there is a very real but unfathomable component to this weird story... let's see where it leads.

This is where things started to get unravelled, before I ended up in a couple of hotels near Finsbury Park. The fun run took me right past my bike, where it was locked up on the street outside, as a deliciously ironic twist (May 2015)

Tags: #london #drugs #addiction #bipolar #police

This is a story about human connection...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think about committing suicide every day.

Tags: #bipolar #suicide #parents #addiction

This is a story about being bored to death...

I've had enough of alienating people. I even bore myself with my repetitive themes, labouring the same points over & over again. I know I wrote once before about changing the scratched record, but I've struggled to do it yet.

If you've stuck with me this far, I'm amazed, and I'm grateful. I will try my hardest to make it worthwhile, as the narrative hopefully turns in a positive direction. I decided that I was going to blog for at least a year, every day if possible, and I've stuck pretty true to my original objective. I'm about 8 months into this whacky project.

When I think back to some of the weird and (not very) wonderful stuff that has spewed out, during some rather strung out periods, it's a bit cringeworthy. Having all this brain dump out there for all to see is quite embarrassing, shameful, but who cares? The genie is out of the bottle.

I'm far more self aware than you probably think I am. I'm aware how bitter & twisted I come across. I'm aware how much I'm grinding my axe, and refusing to bury the hatchet. I'm aware how stuck in the past I am. I'm aware how absolutely bat shit insane I've been at times.

It's going to take months before I have most of the pieces that build a stable life. I currently have a place to live and a couple of friends that I see regularly, so that's more than I had in July 2014, homeless on Hampstead Heath, but it's still a pretty incomplete picture. I don't have a lot of control over how long it's going to take to get another job, and rebuilding a social network is going to take ages. Who knows if I'll ever patch things up with my family?

I wrote before about compassion fatigue, and besides, don't my problems look self made anyway? Doesn't it look, to all intents and purposes, that I'm a spoiled little rich brat, wailing about first world problems, or things that I shouldn't have to fix up anyway? How can I talk about being fortunate at one time, and then talk about being down on luck another time?

When I'm starting a sentence, I notice how often I'm using a personal pronoun. It's all "I" and "me". This hasn't escaped my notice. As a proportion of the world that I inhabit, I'm alone with my thoughts far more than most. No job, no work colleagues, only one friend that I see regularly, apart from my one flatmate.

If you think I've become self absorbed... or maybe that I'm always self absorbed... that's perhaps a function of isolation, loneliness, being an only child up to the age of 10, being bullied & ostracised, being moved around the country away from friends, switching schools 6 times, isolated in a tiny village in France every school holiday.

I try and fight the self-absorption, but it's a fact of where I am right now. I'm broke, unemployed and I don't see anybody face-to-face on any kind of regular basis. I have no passion at the moment, nothing to live for, nor the money to pursue a passion.

There's a bird I photographed, when I was living up on Hampstead Heath. Perhaps I seem free as a bird to you, seeing as I don't have any kids to feed & clothe, seeing as I don't have a partner to buy handbags and shoes for, seeing as I don't have a mortgage to pay anymore.

Certainly, I felt free when I didn't have rent to pay, debts to service. It was exciting, an adventure, sleeping rough in London. But, I'm not stupid. Sleeping rough is no fun when the weather is bad. Sleeping rough is no fun when your luck turns, and you get robbed or in trouble with the police or park wardens.

Rejecting the rat race can only be done for so long, before you are unemployable and so far outside the system that you can never re-enter it. People and their neat little pigeon holes can't cope with a gap in a CV where you were a no-fixed-abode hobo. When you have no address to fill in your last 5 years of address history, the forms just aren't set up for that. Computer says no.

There's a very real lack of excitement and adventure in my life at the moment. The more that you play chicken with the grim reaper, the more the humdrum daily existence becomes anathema. My whole childhood and career was mostly boredom, so the chaos of even traumatic and stressful events holds more interest than yet more rat race game playing.

In a way, I want to fix up things in my life, only so that I can burn them down again. To chuck things away at the moment would be an insult to two people who've helped me not lose everything that we consider vitally important in the world of the rat race. It's a shame to admit how depressed I am at the moment though.

Am I supposed to be happy about the prospect of brown-nosing bosses and dressing up in a fancy suit every day, trying to make a good first impression with new work colleagues? Am I supposed to be excited about having the money to wipe out my debts, and to feather the nest of my landlord? Am I supposed to be pleased that while death rushes headlong towards me, I'm saving up towards some imagined future time when hopefully I have enough health & wealth left to fuck the whole thing off?

During periods of exhaustion and particularly poor mental health due to extreme stress and pressure, I've talked about wanting to teach deprived kids physics, write a book, solve the riddles of the Universe, set up a hostel for refugees... basically jack in the rat race and do something worthwhile. There's a social conscience and a curious mind that are completely unfulfilled, and 36 years of trying to keep it at bay is just as damaging as anything you can do to yourself with drink & drugs.

But, when I'm well, I'm a realist. I will choose the path of least resistance. I won't burn every bridge.

However, I do worry that the day has finally come when I've burnt every bridge. This website, where my entire psyche and darkest secrets are out on display for all to see... it could be the end of my professional reputation. It could derail my gravy train. If it does, I'll feel guilty for those who tried to protect me from myself, but I'll probably be happy, deep down. The rat race is a miserable existence.

There's a Lego gravy train. Adults like playing with kids toys. What does that tell you about how pointless and boring most jobs are?

Tags: #homeless #career #mentalhealth #depression #bipolar #parents #childhood

This is a story about unlocking potential...

I have been unproductive for 6 months. In fact, I was counterproductive for 3 months: self sabotaging. That might be a turn-off for some people. They might assume that my actions are nonsensical, and point to irrational behaviour, madness.

I would argue instead, that my ability to fight my way back from being abandoned by my own friends & family, and society as a whole, but getting back onto my feet without assistance, is proof that I can do things that would send most people insane with stress and anxiety.

If you hit Christmas, when everybody is thinking festive thoughts and taking loads of holiday, and you haven't got a job, you haven't got a lot of hope of finding a new role until well into the new year.

With no means of paying my rent & bills, and no cashflow, what hope did I have? Seeing as I'm out of contact with so many friends, and my relationship with my family is beyond broken, what was I really living for?

Society is literally better off with me dead. I'm a risk. Although I'm a net contributor, through taxation and productive output, there only looks like one outcome, according to conventional wisdom: that I should live out the rest of my life heavily medicated, on benefits, or that I will fully relapse onto drugs before being caught up in the criminal justice system.

Surely, given this bleak outlook, you should reach the same conclusion as my parents and leave me for dead. When I'm dead, at least I have a life insurance policy that can be cashed in. When I'm dead, at least the expensive assets in my estate can be sold off and the proceeds distributed. Only my life stands in the way of unlocking all that cold hard cash.

And what quality, this life? With hardly any human connection, it's a miserable existence. I don't see my children every day (I have none), I don't see my girlfriend or wife (I haven't got one), I don't see my friends (I'm out of contact with those far-flung people), I don't see my family (the relationship has broken down). Without human connection, what do I exist for, except to pay rent, to service debts and to consume, consume, consume?

I know that it is only the bullshit of the system that keeps me down. The millstone of paying rent can be replaced by living rough on the streets. The misery of working a pointless job can be replaced by just doing random acts of kindness, making human contact instead of trying to thrust more crap down people's throats, trying to squeeze a drop more blood out of the stone.

I'm wrung dry. I've been playing the silly games for so long that it seems patently ridiculous to be asked to continue doing the same stupid shit that doesn't go anywhere. "Make poverty history" charities exclaim, and have exclaimed for many lifetimes... but yet the rich:poor divide is wider than ever. I can't switch my brain off. I can't turn a blind eye, in the self-centred interests of child-rearing, like you can.

The more I write, the more I see a thinly veiled jealousy. Of course, I would love to feel fulfilled by the unconditional love of my children, knowing that I have passed on my genes, and that I have a reason to get up in the morning and go to work: to put food on the table, and keep a dry roof over the heads of my family.

I've been trapped up a dead-end alleyway. I'm now somewhat forced to take the highest paid work that I can, in order to service debts that I incurred as a result of being let down by people who believe in abandoning their own family members and reneging on promises. I'm angry that I trusted them, instead of making commercial lending agreements to bridge the gap during my divorce.

Again, I can point to evidence to show who the real fools are. I made shrewd investments when my back was really hard against the wall, and made 1,200% return in just a few months. I had few options, because my time had been wasted on false promises, and so I had to bet big. I outsmarted some dumb, nasty people, and survived. My credentials gained even more credibility, whilst some other people proved to be an unreliable waste of the hot air expelled from their mouths.

But for some reason, I don't feel credible. I feel broken. I feel like a fraud. In fact, I'm far less of a fraud than many, because I'm so self-critical, even in the face of great evidence that I can create value wherever I go, no matter how shitty the circumstances.

There's a picture that my parents have painted of me: a drug addict who has wasted thousands on drugs and time wasting. In actual fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The total amount of money I've spent on drugs in my lifetime is less than a week's wages. Admittedly, I'm paid quite a lot of money, but it's still less than a week of my wages, in my entire life.

The other fact is that despite crippling mental health issues, I have still managed steady gainful employment. I've still been incredibly productive. Even in the very darkest days of problems with mental health and substance abuse, I was still valued by colleagues and bosses, well paid and contributing big sums of tax to the state.

What is the measure of a man? As I'm currently not in a contract, I feel worthless. I feel like I've 'gone soft' while I've been off work and that my skils and employability have been very badly damaged. I feel less of a person. I feel a great pressure to sell myself short, to undervalue myself, in the same way that other people undervalue me.

It's only because a select handful of people have gone above & beyond that I don't chuck the towel in and fuck the whole thing off.

The sun only shines in my life for short periods at the moment

Tags: #career #depression #bipolar #mentalhealth

This is a story about things that can't be changed...

London represents opportunity to me. People talk about the streets being paved with gold, and this city has always provided for me, when I've been going through hard times or thought I had reached a dead end.

Obviously, it's people not the place, that has meant that I've had a roof over my head, and the chance to work again, when I would otherwise have sunk, stagnated, rotted and died.

I've been very bitter about my ex-wife and parents, who haven't helped, and have even been obstructive. The bitterness is partly because I've not yet been able to have a sustained period of recovery, to show to those who have helped me that it was worthwhile.

I've considered going back and deleting or editing some of my bitter, angry rants at people who've let me down, obstructed my recovery, even injured me and taken me away from friends, work, my life. It's obvious to me how stuck in a rut I am, how boring and repetitive I've become, how obsessive and negative I sound.

There are several challenges I've set for myself at the moment:

• Get back to work
• Fight depression
• Tidy up a load of administrative loose ends
• Stay 'clean'

It probably seems like I'm making mountains out of molehills, having a storm in a teacup, but there are few words to truly convey just how dysfunctional my life was. Post was shoved out of sight, bills piled up, finances got in a terrible mess, out of contact with all my friends, conflict with my family. The threat of bankruptcy and homelessness was imminent, around the clock.

I know that you have probably had times when you've worried about making ends meet, how you're going to pay the bills, how you're going to pay the rent or the mortgage. I'm sure you've felt like you're not going to do it, that you're going to fall on hard times and be evicted from your home. Try living like that for a few years, and see what your stress levels are like.

A lot of my bitteness stems from the fact that the depths I sank to, the problems I've had to overcome... a lot of it was so easily avoidable. A very small handful of people just had to honour their commitments, their word, their duty and their obligation as supposedly decent human beings, and my situation could have been very different.

However, I need to move forward. I don't feel in a particularly forgiving mood, so instead I'm going to blame myself. I'm going to blame myself for trusting people. I'm going to blame myself for taking people at their word. I'm going to blame myself for thinking that other people were dependable, reliable, trustworthy, pleasant, decent human beings.

I can improve on that. I can actually say that I learned some important life lessons. "In sickness and in health" are just empty words to some people, and some parents are just terrible, terrible people. My faith in humanity is damaged, but I will probably benefit from becoming cynical, untrusting, negative, selfish and unreliable... just like them.

I need to make it clear here that I'm not talking about all those many people in London, who have been my friends, my support network, my saviours in my hour of need. London has provided me with clothes in hospital, where my parents have left me for dead. London has provided me with a dry roof over my head, where my ex-wife would see me go homeless. London has provided non-judgemental friends, where others have recoiled in prejudiced horror at the propaganda pedalled by my ex and my Dad.

One of my great sadnesses is that where these worlds have collided, and the chaos and trauma that I have been through has overspilled into all areas of my life, long-standing friendships have been damaged. I can not and will not criticise my friend, who made me a guest in his home, for the fact that he believed things said behind my back, which his naïvety led him to believe, but it's hard to know how to fix things up between us.

There's a saying amongst people dealing with mental health issues:

Nothing about us without us

It's quite simple really. You have no idea what a person is going through, when they're suffering the chaos and trauma associated with mental health issues (including substance abuse) and 2nd or 3rd hand information is just tittle-tattle, and will not help anybody.

It sounds like I'm ticking my friends off, and I'm really not. Where people have tried to help, I have nothing but gratitude. I don't expect people to understand, to make allowances, to go out of their way to educate themselves. I have no entitlement, beyond the basic human decency of not making assumptions based on stuff that's been discussed behind my back, but I can understand that there might be honest good intentions.

This is all starting to sound rather paranoid, confused. Yes, that's the psychological damage that's done when you overhear hushed whispers about yourself, and news spreads via gossip and contact behind your back that you aren't party to.

As a sick person, I felt like a failure. I blamed myself for being defective, and later for 'choices' I made. I viciously attacked myself, criticised my inability to cure my ailments and restore my former stability, reliability, order in my life. When you feel terrible about yourself, you carry a huge burden of shame. You try and hide yourself away, minimise your footprint on the world, withdraw from human contact and the public gaze.

It's very strange, pretending you don't exist, because you're ashamed, embarrassed. You live in fear of anybody discovering that you're not well. You live in fear of anybody finding out how much of a failure you think you are. Of course, this breeds paranoia. Of course, you are hypersensitive to people talking about you behind your back.

Of my friends, there's no blame here. They tried to help. They wanted to help. Their motives were good. They aided. They helped, they didn't hinder. I have only regret that I haven't yet been able to use the patchwork quilt of support that I've received to put it all together into something more positive... yet.

Certain beginnings haven't reached the end yet. This story's not over

Tags: #london #friends #parents #divorce #bipolar #depression #mentalhealth