This is a story about the day when things start getting better, not worse...

I took a bath in Supercrack. It was very dilute, but I still took a bath in my 'drug of choice'. Countless nights of sleep had been lost and psychosis had me in its grip. I was convinced the police were about to break down the bathroom door, it was time to destroy evidence.

I had been hiding in the bathroom all night, freezing cold, believing that the police were going to enter my bedroom through my window. As hypothermia was setting in and I was shivering uncontrollably, I ran a warm bath to bring my core temperature back to a safer level.

I had tried to use various reflective objects to look under the crack at the bottom of the door,  and even shouted out "hello! do you speak English?" to the intruders I could hear. I saw various things: a pile of red boxes, a woman lying on her side, a man peeking around a corner. None of these things could be seen with much clarity, using a shiny chrome plug as a mirror.

I was kinda angry about my private room being invaded by people who didn't say who they were or why they were there. I decided I would warm up a bit before confronting them. I was also considering the possibility that they were just visual disturbances due to sleep deprivation.

As I lay in the warm bath, I heard burly men in boots enter the reception of my building, and I was 100% certain that this was the police, and I heard one of them say "so the guy we want's called Nick, right". I heard purposeful, authoritarian, footsteps in the stairwell.

I decided I couldn't risk my remaining Supercrack being found and lab tested. I washed the bag of it out in the bathwater, while I sat in the lukewarm water. Then I towelled myself off and came back into my bedroom. There was nobody there, and no evidence of any interference with the windows.

I was momentarily annoyed that I had destroyed my drugs unnecessarily, but it needed to be done as soon as possible anyway.

So, I woke up this evening after about 16 hours sleep, and I had something to eat rather than taking drugs. Almost like a normal person, sleeping, and then having breakfast. I spoke to a friend on the phone and we arranged to see each other. Normally I'm concerned whether the barricaded doors are strong enough to hold the World out.

I should have gone and seen my GP today, but I woke up at nearly 6pm, and I'm still freezing. Everything will happen sooner or later, provided I can resist the temptation to re-order any more Supercrack.

That was a full relapse, and I might possibly still be in its grip. I had ordered a 1 gram bag, used all of that (mostly doses that were so high that I spent 18 hours in complete psychosis) and this time I had ordered a 5 gram bag, and had been doing a lot better at remembering "less is more" when it comes to powerful psychoactive drugs.

Stimulant Psychosis is strange. You're hypervigilent, so there is always a real seed for every strange thought that you have. You get 'stuck' doing something repetitively, obsessively. Sometimes, you've succeeded at doing whatever it was that you were trying to do, but then you undo your own work, because you just can't leave it alone. The skin on my hands is tough and calloused from the amount of manual work I've been doing during these psychotic episodes. My body fat has dropped to a few percent, but my core muscles have become more defined, more toned, from the strange physical activities that I have performed for hours and hours.

Sure, I need to wear a belt again, and even do it up an extra notch, but the self-neglect, the damage, is probably limited to my brain. I've been drinking plenty of isotonic fluid, keeping glucose levels topped up.

I don't think you could ever combine Supercrack with a functional life. Taking an Ecstasy pill so you can dance all night at a rave on a Saturday night, and then going to work on a Monday morning can be done when you're young enough. Because of the urge to binge, the lack of sleep & food still leaves you in a pretty shitty state after 3, 4, 5 days locked away somewhere, shovelling powder up your nose.

Some PTSD damage might have been un-done. Nobody broke into my room. Nobody shouted at me. My legs are undamaged, and I didn't need to go to hospital. There was no police involvement. A couple of times, I even managed to say to myself "I bet I'm imagining that" and dare myself to come out of the bathroom.

I still have most of the things that I had on my todo list, plus a bunch more. I've also delayed being able to start interviewing and a full-time contract, until my weight and sleep are more compatible. I feel less overwhelmed than previously... a fatalistic philosophy has been forced onto me.

There's a chance that something good could come of all this. If I get to become a published author, it increases my chances of being able to publish again. Ending an addiction in this way is much better than how it ended before: being dragged out of a hostel by police and dumped at a hospital where I got a massive telling off from the consultant.

I hate winter in the UK.

Tags: #addiction #drugs

This is a story about self destruction...

This little machine has allowed me to rise to a level of mastery of a profession where I could command in excess of £200k (gross) per annum for my skills, walk out of one job and into another, and generally enjoy a period where I didn't have to know my bank balance or save up for anything. This statement is vulgar, I hope people don't think boastful, but it's certainly distasteful.

I now live in an apartment with panoramic views of the Thames. I can see Heron Tower, The Gherkin, Tower 42, The Cheese-grater, The Mobile Phone, Tower Bridge, The Shard, The London Eye and a number of iconic London skyline icons.

This would be sustainable, but since the age of 19 or so, I figured out that it doesn't matter if it's torpedos fired from a submarine, or Credit Default Swaps, traded in the front office of an investment bank... it's all the same fucking 1's and 0's.

Some pudgy, piggy-eyed, adenoidal little pricks have carved themselves out little fiefdoms where they have constructed such impenetrable balls of mud, that no sane programmer would venture in.  They take pleasure in having made themselves key-person dependencies.

I like to think I'm ethical, and it's only because I was being whipped so hard by my bossess to deliver DTCC that I didn't think of the ethical impact of Credit Default Swaps and Collateralised Debt Obligations on the world economy. JPMorgan processed 70% of that toxic waste, and that equates to $1.16qn of money that was circulated, while the real collateralised securities and precious metals were moved into the accounts of those who knew what was really going on.

I wrote the system that confirmed those trades. I saw the data flow through. I saw live production data, and I couldn't believe the notional values that were being traded.

I feel like I could have stopped $1.6m of 'fake' money, for every man woman and child on the planet, from being pumped into an economy that was only ever supposed to last as long as the 'smart' money moved their assets. There just isn't enough precious metal, fiat currency, property and securities to collateralise all the derivatives that have been printed. The paper is worthless.

I can't see how it can be propped up. As it starts to crumble, I'm going to feel more & more responsible.

I feel like ground zero.

I don't want to wake up tomorrow.

Tags: #banking #suicide #career #london

This is a story about a technology catastrophe...

I dropped my iPhone in the bath. I will leave it to your imagination as to why I had it in the bath and was not concentrating on holding onto it very well.

I then moved my entire home directory into a directory called asnas.coredump and hid it in another user's directory. To make sure the directory could not be seen or accessed by anybody except the superuser, I changed the permissions to 000.

I then deleted the old account and renamed the new one to be me.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm sure digital forensics would have just looked at the command history and gone straight to the right place, but my brain was very, very tired.

Then my laptop keyboard stopped working. The letter 'a' would often come out as 'p'. Things would be in caps when caps lock was not on. Things wouldn't be in caps when I held down shift.

I then tried to get into Gmail. I've protected my Gmail with a Yubikey One-Time-Password. Only I had now lost the software to read the OTP from the Yubikey. Somebody had changed my Facebook password (worrying... because it's the same as the Gmail one).

With no Gmail, loads of my passwords couldn't be reset.

This is not the worst of it. I found my Yubikey and the software, and got into Gmail. HOWEVER, I have a second Gmail account for business, which I have protected using Google Authenticator, which is a mobile app that runs on my soggy phone.

I need to get to Barclays to reset my PIN which I locked out because of my soggy brain. Without that I can't get into Online Banking to download my statements to upload them into Freeagent and avoid a £150 fine from HMRC for late filing. Also, I have no phone or business email to discuss such things.

My business insurance expired only a short time ago, and so did my AppleCare, so it'd be £2k+ to replace phone & laptop if required. I'm hoping I can just do an out-of-warranty on the phone which is a mere £260 and if the keyboard and the trackpad are still screwy I'll replace them for I'm guessing around the same amount.

Currently, I've lost all my photos, all my documents, all means of communication beyond email and Facebook messenger - WHEN I HAVE MY LAPTOP SWITCHED ON. I've lost the manuscripts to 2 books (one incomplete) and a shittonne of useful code & design work.

Why don't I back up? Well. Supposedly iCloud has all my photos, but it appears to just have the iPhone ones. I normallly do all my docs in Google, but my manuscripts were in Pages (locallly). I don't really have an excuse though. This has f**ked me.

Trying not to cry.

Tags: #computing

This is a story about having to go back to work...

In my desperation to physically express my anguish, I smeared my own blood all over a canvas, from a deep gash in my wrist. The critics were not impressed.

Now I don't do much of anything. I'm just kind of hoping the world will go away. It'd be nice if some sort of Y2K virus wiped out all the computer systems, and everybody was unchained from their keyboards, wandered outside into the daylight, rubbing their strained eyes and blinking at the brightness of the sky, and started to talk to each other about more than office chit-chat.

I remember on 9/11 we all kinda remembered that it's OK to talk to strangers. That when shit is going down, you'd better make the best job you can of things with those around you. I remember that the most emotionally affected people were those who were furthest away from their kids. Why do we have to commute miles away from our kids, and be 'busy' for 40+ hours a week?

'Busy' eh? Well, if you can directly point at the impact you have on somebody's life, maybe you are busy. When I was an electrician, I could flick a switch at the end of a job, and they would have lights, electric showers, ovens, hobs, extractor fans, under-floor heating, sockets that they could plug electrical appliances into, storage heaters, immersion heaters, electric towel rails, dishwashers, somewhere to plug the washing machine and the fridge into, power to the garage, power to the shed, power to the hot tub, power to the swimming pool, lights in the garden, lights to illuminate the driveway. Yeah, I was busy.

Probably about the 'busiest' I've ever felt as a programmer was when 500,000 people downloaded one of my games. It only took me a day to develop though, and it didn't really do much, so I don't feel very proud. I wrote some utility to help field engineers set up the software on a load of busses. That was a bit better, and every time I see that model of bus ticket machine, I know that my software probably configured it... but it still feels a long way from 'useful'.

There's a real disjoint between programmers and users, especially as we're now trying to build companies with millions, if not billions of users (Facebook has 1.16bn monthly users). Personally, I was happier when I was teaching pensioners how to use Microsoft Word, back when I was a teenager.

It's my own fault to some extent. I draw out the workflow of a company, and wherever I see a stick man (a person) I devise some way to get rid of them, to automate their job. Human workflow computer systems are a pain in the arse. You need pretty user interfaces, and you have to train people how to use the systems. As a software engineer, you want data in, data out.

I've even taken to modelling customers in the most brutal state-transition diagram imaginable.

What that diagram basically says is "keep marketing our products to a person until they're dead".

Most software engineers don't build in the 'dead' end-state of their customer, and their software handles dead customers very inelegantly. My designs have baked death in from the very first whiteboard sketches.

I went to work for a company that was almost entirely run by stick men. They were very busy.

I wasn't too enamoured with the task of wrestling control away from the busy people who were, to all intents and purposes, making a reasonable job of running a UK company with stores in every major town. The problem was that they wanted to expand into Europe. The stick man system didn't scale.

So, I'm confused. I like directly helping people with their software woes. I even like building large complicated high volume data processing systems. I just don't like making software so the stick men can keep 'busy' doing their stick man tasks. Building a user interface so that a human can mis-type a figure, or press a button in error... that's like hell to me.

I used to draw Heath Robinson type contraptions as a kid. I might do one today or tomorrow. It's got to be a damn sight better use of brain power than the garbage-in-garbage-out systems that companies like paying me to design and build.

Jaded.

Tags: #career #computing

This is a story about wearing a straightjacket...

Life is better in flip flops. Life is best of all barefoot and with lush green grass underfoot, in some nice warm sunny climate. Why is it that we get so little of what our soul is screaming out for sometimes?

I decided to wear a grey suit and chase the dollars, as a technologist/engineer working in banking. That's a double whammy. Not only are you already working in a dry technical field, but you're also entering the bleak world of bean counting, which is daily corporate drudgery. There's no room for creativity or colourful characters in banking's IT departments.

My game plan has always been to earn enough to not have to worry about money. It's kind of worked. At times, I have been able to go for long stretches of my life without ever having to check my bank balance or do any budgeting. I've been able to have everything I wanted, when I wanted it, without thinking twice. However, there's another price to be paid: freedom.

In order to fit in a neat little box, and slot in and play nice with the other drones in the hive, you have to sacrifice any individual freedom of expression. There's no room for free spirits in the great grand pyramid scheme of corporate finance, capitalism and wage slavery. You need to appear to be a regular guy who is playing by the same rules as everybody else. You can't buck the trend. You can't beat the street.

Whether it's working 5 days a week, when you could easily afford to drop your hours to 3 days a week, or taking only 5 weeks of holiday when you could afford to only work 6 months of the year... you have to still put in the hours, weeks and months, to appear to be corporate enough to be allowed into the grand palaces of glass & steel.

Learning when to keep your mouth shut. Knowing who you're allowed to escalate issues to. Whose head are you allowed to go above. Learning which arses to kiss, who to brown nose. Learning when to come in early and when to leave late. Learning exactly which shade of grey is culturally in fashion at any given moment, and curtailing any longings you might have for a bright and gaudy tie or other flamboyant display of individuality.

You might have seen a scene in American Psycho, or perhaps read the chapter in the book, where the main protagonist and a colleague are comparing their business cards. The style details that they notice would escape the gaze of most people who are not immersed in the bland corporate world, but something as subtle as the serif on a font is a blaring foghorn to those who spend their days in a desert, devoid of all creativity.

This blog might appear to be intellectual masturbation, but really all this stuff had to come out. I've spent the best part of 20 years with no creative outlet. Sure, I got to design a few logos during my forays into startup land, and I got to do the graphics and sound for my iPhone games, but that was the briefest of respite from an unrelenting demand for my time to be spent pushing paper around a desk in a dreary office.

Ok, so I can't really complain. I've had a lifestyle and opportunities that many could only dream of. However, there is a feeling that everything that has come from that world is somehow dirty, and it's only by burning everything to the ground, and starting again, that I will find any peace and comfort. Everything that I've built using money from the corporate realm has felt just as fake as that entire make-work world.

Do you have to become destitute to appreciate things? What trigger is necessary in your life, to tell you to stop and smell the roses? What point do you reach, where you are prepared to watch your entire life fall into ruins, with some element of glee, with some sense of liberation? How is it that you can be happier as a person, when your whole world is collapsing?

Maybe I'll never own my own home and garden again. However I've lived in Royal Kensington Park Gardens. I didn't own the gardens, but when the park wardens have finished their sweep for any remaining interlopers (like me) after they have closed the park gates, and you have managed to evade discovery, then you pretty much have the place to yourself until the next morning.

The bulk of the homeless people in the park clustered unwisely and lazily around each other and the park entrances. They frequently robbed each other and got into fights. The park wardens and the police knew where to find them, and would go and antagonise them whenever park life was becoming a bit to cushy.

Being the lone wolf that I am, I found myself a thorny bush, with thick ground cover such that me and my tent were obscured from view, within its thorn-free centre. My bush was located a long way from any of the park entrances or paths through the park. It was in a part of the park that far fewer people would visit, as there's no monuments, statues, lake or other attraction. There was quite an extensive preparatory scouting operation and a lot of thought went into choosing my spot.

If you have chosen a more conventional lifestyle, you are probably in fear of eviction. You are probably afraid to default on your mortgage payments or get into rent arrears. You are probably fearful of losing your home and being turfed out onto the streets. Actually, it was pretty exciting and fun at times.

I really don't recommend that you become homeless if you have a family. It's more of a leisure activity for a single man in reasonable physical health, who has no fear of public ridicule or being ostracised.

Actually, this whole downward spiral has been immensely liberating. Who would honestly quit their job in order to write the equivalent of two novels, all of which would make them completely unemployable, and none of which would be commercial. There is no content here in this blog which is monetizable. I write because I have to... this stuff's been bottled up for too long. It has to go down on paper, before I lose my mind.

Who gets to be an artist? Who is allowed to have art as a career aspiration? Who has the talent? Or is it only the spoilt brat children of the moneyed elite who get to spend their days penning poetry and painting? How do artists pay the rent? How do artists eat?

Sorry, that sounds like I'm giving myself the title "artist" which is clearly undeserved, unearned. But what on earth is this monstrosity of a creation going to turn out to be? Calling the curious ramblings of an idiot in the process of losing his mind, an artwork, is surely preposterously pompous and delusional. Let's just keep calling it a blog for now. It will surely descend into an account of what I had for breakfast and other such banality anyway.

Surely words have to be printed on paper and bound into a book, before there can be any credibility for somebody's writing. Surely, unless there is a willing publisher, then the words are worthless. Without a publisher's mark, why should anybody care what somebody has taken the time to write?

There's a proper book from a proper author. I could quote from the book, and of course the words would have much greater gravitas, authority, because they're coming from a work of physical publishing. Ink had to soak into paper, and glue had to dry on a binding, for me to be able to hold this object in my hand, so therefore it exists, unlike this blog which is just made of ones and zeros and squirted down a fibre optic cable across thousands of miles.

A friend charmingly refers to my blog as a "blag" and naturally he doesn't read it. I'm not sure I'm blagging. I'm pretty much an expert in blagging and this feels like the complete opposite. I'm laying my soul bare here. I'm pouring my heart out. I'm giving you all the ammunition you need to destroy me.

There's a considerable leap of faith here, to lay yourself wide open to ridicule and shame. My actions are wide open to be criticised and cut to pieces. Every bit of my life can be dissected, like some lab animal. You'd be second to the carcass though. I already thoroughly dismantled my own mind and picked over the bones of my past.

I like to think that there might be something here after extensive editing, that could prove interesting to those going through the complete self-destruction of their life. Certainly there is inspiration that I have taken from other people's narratives of their descent into madness, addiction and destitution. I'm trying to emulate their writing, but also add to that body of literature, as I have struggled to find enough to read to satisfy my own demand.

But, let's just call this writing practice. I know that everything I've written to date is far too jumbled up and mixing topics to follow any kind of thread that somebody could just sit down and follow with any interest. It's too hard to find the nuggets that tickle your individual fancy.

Things would probably be a lot harder and flow a lot less verbosely if I was to set myself the strict constraints of a plot to follow and having to keep things in chronological order. This jumble of thoughts would struggle to make it out of my brain and onto a page if they had to be ordered, structured, constrained.

I hope you don't think I'm arrogant for considering the possibility that other people might read what I write. Perhaps it's naïve to even think that I could offer an interesting tale to another lost soul, wandering aimlessly or feeling alone.

Anyway, I'm going to go and eat my tea now.

Tags: #career

This is a story about interpretation...

Anybody who has studied physics to an advanced level will tell you that at a certain point you have to suspend the search for the tangible, the intuitive, and start to make some leaps of faith. The Newtonian Universe, with action and reaction, starts to struggle to explain real-world observations.

I'm not in a survivable situation. I shouldn't have even been able to get this far, to climb this high. The odds are stacked against me in every way. There's not a chance that I could have been through what I've been through, and emerge relatively unscathed. People just don't recover from the trauma that I've put my mind and body through.

On examination, I have a facial tic and two hefty scars on my legs. My facial tic appears to have improved somewhat, since the summer. It's made worse by tiredness and stress, but I feel like it's not as pronounced as it was.

But what does this evidence tell us? Well, it's the tip of the iceberg. My mind and body have been to hell and back, quite a few times. For example, having functioning kidneys is a big surprise. You can't see the damage from the outside, but I suffered near-catastrophic levels of muscle loss, with accompanying damage to my kidneys, as the breakdown products from my body eating itself were going to ultimately prove fatal.

Would you believe that I have induced within my mind, all the symptoms of schizophrenia? I have, at times, believed that 'they' are out to get me (I have no idea who 'they' are... that's the point... it's mental illness) and been hearing and seeing things in a distorted way, misinterpreting what my senses have been telling me. These psychoses should be permanent. I should have been left permanently paranoid, psychotic.

The fact of the matter is that sanity is quite delicate. Anybody will start to have strange thoughts, if you skip enough nights of sleep and meals. Sleep deprivation and hypoglycaemia will mean that your brain will struggle to function. You can't really predict how badly each individual will react to these unusual stresses, but you can be sure that every human needs sleep & glucose.

I guess when you total up all the time that I've been in a psychotic state, it adds up to quite a worrying amount. Certainly enough to give me that facial tic. I used to have really bad full-body spasms, but I figured out which neurotransmitters needed topping up, as a form of prophylaxis to protect against early-onset parkinsons.

If you wonder why I eat so much protein, and take so many amino acids, it's because those things are providing my body with the building blocks to repair and protect itself. It's a thin line between temporary and permanent insanity.

If you were a psychiatrist or a psychologist, just looking at my clinical picture on paper, you would have to assume that I'd be a gibbering wreck. The path that has torturously wended its way through a few different counties NHS mental health services, through the private sector, and then back into NHS with rather a lot of chaos and the involvement of emergency services, across the midlands and several boroughs of London. Well, it's not a story that sits easily alongside a person who appears - to all outward observers - to have their s**t together.

The fact that I'm coping without medication, without the help of the mental health crisis team, without outpatient services, obviously not an inpatient... it's not something that very often crops up, given my case history.

I'm a bit of a statistical anomaly. I don't fit the data very neatly. If we're talking probabilities, I'm dead & buried several times over.

But what's going on inside my cranium? How much crazy am I just bottling up? Well, it's not pretty but it's not that bad either. I'm certainly not battling any psychosis. I don't hear voices, I don't see things, I don't think that I can read thoughts or control people with my mind. In fact, I have never experienced psychosis like that. My sanity has, thus far, been fairly solid in its foundations.

However, I have poked and prodded at questions, which are to all intents and purposes, unanswerable. I have plumbed the depths of what is knowable in an Earthly realm. I have considered things which are really not advisable to consider, lest you drive yourself insane.

Once you start to consider the full implications of something like the Many-Minds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics you start to question the very meaning of what it is to be conscious. When you start to do some basic maths, regarding the chances that you are alive and conscious at this very moment in time, with 7 billion other souls on the planet, then you can get rather overwhelmed by the statistical significance of it.

These thoughts come back to haunt me time and time again. When I'm unwell, I can even believe that I can perhaps model some of the Universe from base principles. I can perhaps come up with some great unifying theory of everything. Clearly this is a delusion of grandeur.

However, I'm no less able than anybody else to conduct thought experiments. In fact, I'm blessed with a very rational, logical mind. I have even done 'game of life' simulations and models in the past, with some success. But the fact remains, we're talking about hard problems, where hard doesn't even come close to cutting the mustard as an adjective.

So what's all this rambling all about? Well, in one sense my fate is sealed. If we were to consider the evidence, the clinical picture, the pattern of behaviour... I'm doomed! Either insanity, suicide or slow suicide by addiction should surely claim my life soon. It's a miracle that those fates have not already consumed me, and I'm here, stringing a sentence together.

Indeed, many people in my life have chosen to act as if there is a known outcome, as if they have a working crystal ball. Perhaps they have simply computed the odds based on the raw statistical data, and are playing the numbers. According to the numbers, I don't actually exist. According to the numbers, I died a long time ago.

I used to be very upset that people were writing me off before I had even had a chance to make an attempt at life. I used to get very frustrated that I was always a few days or a week or two behind those who wished to frustrate and undermine me. However, the tide has turned now and I finally have a fair wind behind me, and the gradient of the ground in my favour.

It must be upsetting to have somebody who just refuses to die and conform to your prophecies. It must be frustrating when somebody won't fit in the pigeon hole that you have assigned to them. It must be frustrating when somebody refuses to act in the way that you preordained, based on a supposed character flaw or some gift for knowing the future that you believe you have been blessed with.

I'm quite a fly in the ointment, refusing to shuffle off my mortal coil, or be driven irreversibly insane. People are a lot easier to handle when they fit nicely somewhere on the curve.

But I'm an outlier. I'm a stubborn son of a gun who refuses to just lie down and be neatly categorised. I'm very hard to manipulate. I'm very hard to discredit. I'm very hard to marginalise. I'm very hard to silence.

People have tried various underhand techniques to tame me, such as bullying, shaming, assaulting and the gathering of 'evidence' that they believe will show a 'smoking gun' unequivocally pointing to some easy conclusion that can be drawn. I'm sorry, but I'm just not that simple.

If I had one bit of advice for you, it would be to stop jumping ahead. Stop thinking that you can extrapolate from the few data points that you have. Stop thinking that you can predict the future, my future. I'm writing my future, and it very much seems as though my fate is not yet sealed, from what I can see. The grand finalé is as yet unwritten, despite your impatience to flip to the last page of the book and see how it all ends.

People come and go from my life, and I'm very grateful to those who have loyally stuck by my side. You have hopefully been rewarded with seeing a few different aspects of my character, and you can see that understanding and knowing a person is not as simple as making a rash judgement based on what you see, the moment you walk in on a person's life.

People are full of surprises, and even if you've known somebody their entire life, you still don't know what makes them tick, or what they're going to do next.

Tags: #mentalhealth

This is a story about challenging your reasons for doing things...

If somebody said to me that Bipolar was an excuse to do whatever you want, whenever you want, I would find my position a little hard to defend. However, to fall into line, to fly straight, to conform, to bend my mood by sheer weight of will... that's not possible.

I'm a fairly liberated character. Since living with daily threat to my life and livelihood, my risk profile has rather altered from that of a normal rational individual. I tend to leap before I look, and certainly with very little premeditation.

To an outside observer, things look erratic, out of control, recklessly dangerous. To me, things look pretty much the same, but my actions do fit onto some kind of macro plan. Even when I backslide into something or somewhere I really don't want to go, it's a bit of a calculated gamble. It happens when there appears to be little else going on of importance, little other opportunity.

So, have I deliberately sabotaged my own life, at times? Yes, I probably have. But you might be surprised to learn that the motives are not always clear cut. I have become quite an uncompromising character, who finds it near impossible to live in a situation where my values, ethics and professional standards are being infringed.

When you have pushed yourself to the limit and beyond to deliver projects, to create cashflow positive businesses, you know the upper bound of what is possible, both personally and for a software team, and what the reward feels like. You start to get a sense of whether it's worth pushing yourself that hard, or not.

When you have sunk to unimaginable depths, in despair and abandonment of everything, you know the lower bounds of what is survivable. You know how low you can go before you will either shuffle off your mortal coil, or some shred of self-preservation instinct is finally activated. You know what it feels like to literally make a life or death decision. You start to get a sense of whether you really want to die, or not.

Above is a picture of me, 24 hours after having been discharged from the psychiatric ward of a hospital. I had been body surfing in Cornwall. Those powerful waves and strong currents. That thrashing violent cold winter sea.

There's little doubt that this extreme environment activated my self-preservation instincts far more effectively than a week-long stay in a locked Mental Health ward, where nurses checked on me every 30 minutes to make sure I hadn't topped myself. That's not to say I'm not extremely grateful to everybody in the NHS who helped me.

Teaching my friend Klaus to surf in Bude, I drifted into the river mouth, where a deeper channel has been cut into the sea bed. The water flowed faster there and I started to be pulled by a strong current, well out of my depth and into the path of breaking waves. I knew that it was going to take time, a load of stamina, and a certain amount of calmness, to swim out of that channel and back into safer waters, and body surf my way back into the shallows where I could stand on the sea floor again. I had no floatation aid, no surfboard of my own.

Drowning in the sea would be a much more unpleasant way to end your days than, say, clattering into the hard ground at 125mph from an aeroplane or a tall building, or slowly losing consciousness as your blood leaked away out of ruptured blood vessels. However, I still find it interesting that I was making game plans to save my own life. Was I going to try and attract the attention of the lifeguards, who would see that I was out of the safe swimming area and come and pick me up? Was I going to try the riskiest but less energy-consuming tactic of swimming for nearby rocks that waves were breaking onto?

It's weird how you can find yourself messing around with Sir Clive Sinclair's latest invention in Cambridge one minute, so full of passion and energy, optimism and enthusiasm. Then your mood seems to suck all the life out of you and you're not sure where or when it's going to bottom out. You're not sure if you're on a ride all the way to oblivion, or whether you'll pull up out of the nosedive at the last possible moment.

That's my true reaction to my moods, to pressure, to risk, to addiction, to unhappiness, to discomfort, to instability: I will do something extreme. I will actively seek out something that will challenge me to my very limits. I will push myself until I find the true edge of the abyss.

Sometimes you feel like you've tried your hardest, that you can't go on, that something's not possible. You've reached the limits. I'm regularly surprised by what reserves we seem to store up, as human organisms. The disparity between perception and reality is most pronounced, when it comes to strength, stamina and depression. When you come close to those limits, you realise that your fear is giving you a safety margin, a buffer, that keeps you a safe distance from the true edge.

However, my brain has been somewhat corrupted, warped, miscalibrated. I had little hesitation in attempting to climb up on a ledge on the 48th floor of a tower block, where there is a little outdoor area. It's only that my colleagues pulled me back that prevented me from standing there, on the ledge, eyeing up the drop.

As you can see, the ledge is quite wide, but there's still something that isn't quite wired up quite right in the head of somebody who would climb onto it, 48 floors above the pavement.

None of this quite compares with riding through central London, on a black bike, dressed from head to toe in black clothes. No lights, no helmet. Frankly, drivers quite often don't spot the cyclists who are wearing high-vis vests and covered in lights anyway, especially in the wet when London's many lights, and the reflection in puddles, make it virtually impossible for a driver to see what's going on around them.

I took an almighty tumble when a taxi driver who was indicating left and pulling over changed his mind in a fraction of a second, and decided to do a U-turn right in front of me. My rear brake was loose because of a buckled back wheel, and I was so quick and hard on the front brake that I went over my handlebars and busted my ribs, hip, ankle. The taxi driver didn't even see me. I jumped up and back on the bike, and carried on, and then this huge surge of pain hit me.

That could be a metaphor for my life, since losing my grip on stability in 2008. I take massive risks, but I jump up and carry on cycling after being completely obliterated. I push through the pain, knowing that stopping will only make it worse.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #nhs

This is a story about brain damage...

When George Ricaurte and his team vivisected Rhesus monkeys and dissected their brains, after having given them enormous intravenous doses of Methamphetamine, they found that their neurons had been damaged. The very cells of their cerebellum had withered and died.

It's very hard to objectively judge whether you have driven yourself irreversibly insane, or how stupid and brain-dead you have made yourself, through the abuse of drugs & alcohol. But both are freely and relatively cheaply available in massive quantities to almost anybody who wishes to avail themselves of such substances.

I have a rough measure for the strength of my sanity. I can tell you, in terms of number of nights of sleep lost, at what point I will become psychotic, and at what point I will lose consciousness. 10 seems to be the magic number.

I had to go back to my house in Bournemouth, leaving behind my new home, my new friends, my new girlfriend, my new startup and my newly incorporated company, in order to rummage in my attic and find some crap to sell in order to raise some money, because my parents had reneged on their promise to save me the stress and hassle.

For 9 nights, I was hopped up on Supercrack, just about managing to sell my car and gather a few high value things, but otherwise totally out of it. On the evening of the 10th night, just as it was getting dark, I was convinced that the house was surrounded by police, and climbed into the attic without the ladder and tried to close the hatch behind myself.

I blacked out, and when I came round I didn't know what I was. I literally couldn't understand my blurry vision or what any of my senses or thoughts were telling me. Then I didn't know who or where I was. Was I in a rustic farm building? Was I a farmer? Then it became clear to me that I was in an attic, and I remembered who I was, but I had no idea how or why I would be there. Then it became clear that I was perilously close to the edge of an open hatch, with an 11 foot drop onto steep stairs, which descended another 10 or so feet onto a hard wooden floor.

A previously absent sense of self preservation caused me to cautiously lower the ladder and descend from the attic, whereupon I noticed that it was late afternoon. At least 18 hours had elapsed. I surely could not have slept, for I'm sure that movement in my sleep would have sent me tumbling through the hatch.

Remembering then, why I had entered the attic, I was surprised to not see any police. As a precaution, I then went and hid in my shed for another day or two, before I phoned a friend and asked if he could drive me back to London with the couple of valuable items I was going to sell.

It must be re-iterated that these items were not going to be sold for drink & drugs. Supercrack costs just 18p per day, remember? I'm not really built to sell junk from attics and sheds. I find it stressful. My Dad's 'job' since getting my Mum pregnant with me had been to buy & sell junk. My job, for almost my entire professional career, has been to write computer code in an air conditioned office.

Anyway, you can see that my window of opportunity had closed, and my life had become rather dysfunctional.

As soon as I got my share of the house sale money I put myself through 8 weeks of rehab, before remembering that there was some Supercrack hidden inside a golf brochure sent to me from Canada, in my stack of unopened post from 2 months prior. Given how much I hated my parents for tossing me to the wolves, I saw no reason not to pay them a visit and have a massive relapse in their home.

My left leg was destroyed as I tried to leave, in an unnecessary tussle with my Dad. I then tried to O.D. in some terrible flat in Kentish Town. As the amount of blood in my urine grew and grew, as my organs slowly shut down, I phoned an ex-girlfriend for help, when I felt sure that I only had about 24 hours left to live. The hospital gave me about a 30% chance of survival, and treated me for about 3 weeks, 6 intensive days of which were very touch-and-go.

Camden Council were most uncooperative in helping me, despite letters begging them to support me, from my GP and Psychiatrist. Finally, with no state support, I ended up in a hostel in Bayswater, and then living in a bush in Kensington Park Gardens.

Obviously, life was rather unstructured and dysfunctional, and again after the magic 9 nights of madness, I believed I was being pursued by police, ran across a rooftop, fell through a glass window, and then went and hid 80ft up a massive tree with a huge shard of glass sticking out of my 'good' leg.

The scar on my leg is about 5 inches long and nearly an inch wide. I lay in my bush in Kensington Park Gardens, in agony, until it healed enough for me to hobble to Paddington Station, where there is a public shower. I got cleaned up enough to get myself a hotel room.

A friend invited me to come and stay at her flat in Notting Hill, but I was so mad by this point that I tried to hide under a mop bucket in her basement. A fully grown naked man cannot be concealed by a mop bucket on his head.

She coaxed me out of the basement, whereupon I then tried to hide in a fortress of pillows and sofa cushions, and then decided to hide in her shed. I then took offence to my own penis and tried to rip it off my body. Having made quite a mess of it, and clearly sanity having escaped my grip for far too many weeks, I decided to try St. Mary's Hospital and Westminster Council.

Westminster Council beat up Camden Council for being so beastly towards one of their residents, and UCLH Androgyny were quite helpful in repairing my male member. One of the mental health Crisis Houses took me in for a couple of weeks while a search party for my marbles was despatched.

Fundamentally, I still believed that the state would keep its word in helping somebody who became addicted to a legal high, which the government then made illegal. My social worker had promised imminent admission to treatment services. There was also the promise of supported accommodation, post-treatment. This was salvation.

However, it all got botched. One social worker lost all my paperwork and had to restart the process entirely, and the next one decided to keep deferring my case, because she believed I could recover without state support.

It was me who blinked first, after 6 months of this hell. I used my credit card in order to get myself a hostel bed and no longer be sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath. In a way my social worker was right, I had been sufficiently scared, shellshocked and traumatised. It helped that when I once got arrested, the police doctor was very surprised that I didn't die in custody when she saw how low my blood pressure was. Being in a cell, dying, is not a very nice experience.

Anyway, I went cold turkey in a 14 bed hostel dorm, in full public view, on street bail with the police.

After a couple of months, I got a job and things appeared to be going swimmingly. However, the lifestyle of a completely insane, drug addicted homeless person, is somewhat incompatible with the life of a middle-class IT consultant working for a global bank. There was a certain amount of friction between old life and new.

Somewhere between losing all my friends, losing my job, the contract ending on a room that I had let and the general disintegration of my life, the whole horrible cycle started again. Recovery is fragile.

By May 2015, I believed that my mobile phone was talking to me and giving me instructions. Under its direction, I then embarked on a half-marathon, with a fully loaded backpack with all of my most valuable possessions in it.

This is your brain on Supercrack. Pre-existing mental health problems + drugs + gentle external encouragement = completely bat shit insane behaviour. Somebody doesn't just run like this just because they're on drugs, but it doesn't take much to get them going.

Don't worry though, because by June I had a job working for HSBC on the number one project: Customer Due Diligence, which is naturally where you would expect a homeless, insane, drug addict known to the police to find themselves. The global bank is clearly an expert in doing due diligence background checks on people.

Anyway, I might have made all this stuff up just to embarrass HSBC and the CIO in charge of the number one project, plus the rest of the management team, who are making a bit of a botch job of things. You'd need to do the due diligence to find out, which presumably HSBC did?

So, I leave it to you, dear reader, to judge. How do you find me? Completely bat shit insane on a permanent and irreversible basis that means I should be 'committed' immediately to an institution, where I will shuffle around for the rest of my heavily-medicated days, no longer a menace to society... or is there a question mark hanging over the whole infernal affair?

This very document, this entire blog, seeks to challenge your presumptions about addiction and mental health. Has it succeeded yet?

Tags: #nhs #mentalhealth #addiction #bipolar #depression #suicide #career #banking #london #homeless #injury

This is a story about trying to break the loop...

I reprogrammed my brain. Infinite loop. Game over.

It was really hard but I mostly programmed it back. But you know why code line numbers go 10, 20, 30 etc? It's so that you can add extra lines without having to renumber your whole program: e.g. 11 GOTO 20

I took my working fixed code, and added an old buggy instruction that I used to write. It's a screwup, but I know where the bug is and how to fix it.

It's not something the hospital, or mental health services, crisis team or some specialist private care, or social services, or the police, or my GP is going to fix. There's an art installation called The Pharmacy by Damian Hirst, about our faith in medicine, at the Tate Modern. You should think about what he wanted you to think about, when he made that artwork.

Please don't think there's somebody qualified or professional out there, unless they can show you the evidence and data that proves that they and/or medications are 'curing' people of Type 2 Bipolar & any substance abuse issues they might have (Dual Diagnosis).

I managed my symptoms down to just a single suicidal episode in 5 or 6 months with zero drugs, medication, alcohol & caffeine. Also managed 5ish months work. Long hours too. Also had to move house a bunch of times, nearly go bankrupt a bunch of times, travel 3 times further than necessary, carry my life in a few bags. I would say that I'm the qualified one around here.

However, somebody has activated 'professional help' so I may be disappearing into one system or another, or one via another. The bug will still be there if I ever get out of the damn revolving doors and it's so exhausting you never have enough energy left to finish the job of rebuilding your life and getting better.

Please wish me the very best of luck in being 'assessed' and whatever is going to happen instead of me trying to fix my life and get back to normal.

I know it's well intentioned, but please re-read this whole thing again. It explains why it hurts more than it helps.

By the way: Nurses, Porters, Phlebotomists, Doctors and all the people who have to do a very difficult job under difficult circumstances. I am grateful and I do think that what you do is very important and helps enormous numbers of peoples's lives. I'm sorry for the time & effort that is about to be wasted on me.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #addiction #nhs #mentalhealth

This is a story about one hundred and one days sober...

I did it, and I also managed to go cold turkey on caffeine, sleeping pills, medication (antidepressants, mood stabilisers, anxiety drugs) and legal highs (sorry, they're called 'research chemicals' now) & illegal drugs, plus get some control over sex and spending money.

For 6 fucking months I sucked up the pill/powder withdrawal effects and over 3 more months no alcohol. I had not a single chemical that I could turn to to salve the emotional wounds, to ease the turmoil in my brain, to anaesthetise the pain. To attenuate the distress. To take a holiday from the stress.

Pure fucking discipline went into turning down every beer after work, every glass of mulled wine, every cup of tea or coffee that was offered, and every pharmaceutical that I can get by feigning symptoms in order to get an official prescription or just buy on the black market, and every 'research chemical' or just whatever the hell you want that is just one click away on the Dark Web.

Easy enough for a happy fulfilled 2.4 children, 9-to-5 family unit who watches TV all week and goes on outings at the weekends, and has their time filled with mopping up excrement and vomit and doing the kids homework. I'm sure it's very fulfilling to be guardians of your cloned genes, working as hard as you can to give those genes a chance to clone again.

I reached a critical juncture in my life where I was earning six figures including my iPhone apps, and I had a flexible lifestyle, and my fiancé/ex/girlfriend was earning £15k and didn't have very much flexibility. She wanted to be a trainee teacher, so evenings and weekends were for lesson planning and marking. I could write an iPhone app in a day and it would earn £8k. But she had a grand plan because she was so clever.

In the end I gave her three choices: either I go on medication so I don't give a shit that what I'm doing is soul destroying, I switch careers to one that will be really much less psychologically damaging but our kids will see much less of me, or we get pregnant and then it gives a reason for me to do what my professional experience qualifies me to do.

We opted for the latter, but I pulled the plug because I wasn't sure if I was going to pass on Bipolar genes or get too stressed and turn to drugs & alcohol to cope. I love her, I love kids, I love doing family stuff. But it's not all swings and roundabouts and cotton candy and rainbows. I started to doubt my coping mechanisms. I started to believe I couldn't be a trusted father (based on no evidence, beyond the fact that other people's kids love to play with me).

So our relationship became about hedonism. We took loads of GBL (GHB) which makes women have amazing orgasms. I took Cabergoline so I could have multiple orgsasms. Better sex through chemistry (or psychopharmacology actually).

I started fucking about with legal highs that would give me the energy to fuck all night. I was systematic. I would buy shitty tabloid newspapers to read what the kids were taking. Usefully, they led me to the piperazines and the cathinones (e.g. BZP and M-CAT a.k.a. Meow Meow). Those drugs are utter shit, but they led me to Methylone (bk-MDMA). I tried all the others on sale except for NRG-3 which didn't have an ingredient declared.

I'd made a list for myself of drugs to never take: heroin, crack, crystal meth, MDPV. Hang on, wait, what, MDPV. Yeah, it's the stuff that crack addicts and crystal meth tweakers get addicted to and then end up killing themselves or eating a tramp's face off or buying a Caribbean island and fucking a 17 year old girl while holding a loaded gun to their head and putting it on YouTube. Kinda standard stuff for a billionaire technology entrepreneur, right?

So if you don't know what's in the 'legal' high called NRG-3 and there are loads of crack addicts and meth addicts online saying this shit is way more addictive and they're now more fucked than ever and crack and meth seem like a weak cup of tea by comparison, alarm bells should be ringing.

In September 2011 I needed to break up with my selfish bully of a girlfriend. I didn't have the guts. I Went home, bottled out from driving into a concrete pillar at 100mph with the airbag turned off. Got home, ordered NRG-3, it was there the next day. Recommended dosage: zero milligrams. Insane dosage: 5 to 15mg. My dosage: 1,000mg.

I played with fire, got hurt, my fault right? Don't come crying to me when your medication gives you an averse reaction or a deadly interaction. Don't come crying to me when your medication does very little for your symptoms, but an endless list of side effects.

Turns out your heart can beat at 200bpm and not explode if you'e reasonably fit & active. Turns out your brain won't even start hearing voices or seeing things if your reasonably sane. Stimulants are a terrible thing to O.D. on. Barbiturates, opiates, cyanide, ricin, botox, nicotine, inert gas, poison gas, set fire to yourself, chuck yourself off a tall building or a cliff, sever a femoral or radial artery if you know enough about anatomy. Jugular veins, and any other large visible veins will get you there in the end. Fall on a sword around rib number 3 and hit the aorta or vena cava. That's all going to be in the 30 second to 4 minute region. Remember, you need to lose 8 pints of blood or suffocate for 3 minutes approximately.

Electrocution is hard now we have RCD circuit protection devices now, but if you're an electrician you'll be able to rig a circuit without protection. Hold something earthed in the left hand, touch something live with your right hand. Current will flow right across your chest and put your heart into ventricular fibrillation and probably cause enough internal burning to make defibrillation impossible.

Breathing pure nitrogen 0r s0me other inert gas probably seems least scary. No hypercapnic alarm response. Just like falling asleep, forever. Suffocation and you don't even know it's happening.

Jumping in front of busses, trains and tubes is unethical. Those witnesses will be psychologically scarred.

O.D.s... well most home attempts just screw up your organs and you die a slow and painful death. It has to be a nerve toxin, breathing suppressant, or something to stop the heart. An over-the-counter remedy would be co-codamol/Solpadine (without caffeine). Dissolve everything in warm water, then chill to sub 5 degrees C. Now filter out the nasty liver destroying Paracetamol using lab grade paper. Chill the solution again to sub 5 degrees C and filter again. What you're left with is liquid death.

Stabbing yourself in the aorta or vena cava or a pumping chamber is quickest. Just hammer the blade into rib 3 to 5 on the left hand side, and don't let muscles and tendons pull you back to the solar plexus or onto other ribs. You just need to 'fall on your sword' as the Japanese say.

A friend has given me enough to survive, food & drink wise. My flatmate has given me the space and time. My psychosis has gone after sleep. I need to check my kidneys function but my bladder seems to still be filling.

Shame seems to be the next threat to life. I have a blade that's long enough to penetrate my chest muscles, ribs and reach the top of my heart where the blood is at its highest pressure and death would be quickest. Seems prudent when I feel nowhere near close or well equipped enough to turn my health around and get my room into a phase 1 cleanup state, with the eventual state being pristine condition.

If not allowed to live without soul-destroying shame, I'd like to be a fly, vomiting on food and sucking up digested contents, laying eggs in putrid meat. Bhuddism is for me. Humans have a neocortex - consciousness - so I'd rather be re-incarnated as non-human. Thinking is a pain, although I could write an academic paper and a couple of books in a tent or a cave, or a psych ward or a prison, but the easiest thing of all would be non-human, and not troubled by consciousness.

The irony is that I now have several cerebral and physical/social things I would like to do, but I'm paralysed by shame that only I can begin to resolve. Being in hospital/psych/custody now just leaves me impotent to do anything to resolve anything. The end of the story will be written by somebody else.

Tags: #suicide #addiction #alcohol