This is a story about the comeback kid...

Here's quite an interesting document, to me anyway - it says that I was transferred to a Northern city hospital's intensive care unit (ITU) on Sunday 10th September and all I had were the clothes on my back. The date of my original admission to hospital - Saturday 9th September 2017 - is shown quite clearly in the top left, under my name.

The reason why this document is interesting to me, is that I started having seizures at some point after arriving in hospital. I was already well into a fatal tramadol and codeine overdose when the emergency services got to me. I'm pretty sure I remember the hospital telling me that they'd make me as comfortable as possible but I was probably going to die, or words to that effect.

I've been through all my paperwork and I can't find my hospital discharge summary. I suspect that it may have gone wayward during the insane events of the Wednesday & Thursday following my fatal overdose. I will be obtaining another copy as soon as I can. Any documents I can lay my hands on are useful for me, because seizures, coma and unconsciousness are not particularly conducive to remembering the events of my hospitalisation very well.

What must be self-evident is that I was very sick indeed, to have been in intensive care.

Anybody who's followed my story knows about my plans. One only needs to go back to a blog post on August 10th to see one of the actual boxes of legally prescribed medication that constituted part of my fatal overdose.

I use those words fatal overdose quite deliberately. I had calculated the dose that would be fatal, doubled it and then chucked in another shitload of prescription opiates for good measure. I wasn't messing around. This wasn't a cry for help. This wasn't some attention seeking bullshit. This was a very real, calculated, pre-planned and meticulously executed suicide - following the precise steps that I had outlined earlier in the day.

It might surprise you to learn that I set an alarm on my phone, so that I wouldn't tweet or otherwise let on that I was in the process of killing myself, before I was beyond the point of no return. Who does that? Certainly not somebody who has any intention of going on living, I would've thought. Would you be brave enough to take a fatal overdose and gamble that you might get saved by social media? Seems like a pretty dumb publicity stunt or way of getting attention - in all probability you'd just wind up dead.

I remember when I was in the Emergency Department of the hospital, trying desperately to get a drink of water - I was fully aware that having more fluids in me would allow more of the deadly medications to be absorbed into my bloodstream, accelerating my death. The hospital were wise to my suicidal intent and they knew that they could ignore my requests to not be treated, as soon as I fell unconscious or started having seizures. The anaesthetists must have stepped in at some point and put me into a medically induced coma.

Imagine waking up in a hospital gown, with a tube coming out of your piss hole, sellotaped to your leg. Imagine waking up and not being able to speak, because there's a tube down your throat. Imagine waking up and all you can see all around you are machines that are either pumping stuff into you or taking stuff out - loads of screens and loads of digital readouts. I had more input and output ports than a Personal Computer (PC) from the 1990s.

I've written about this before, but I need to write about it again, because I'm trying to process what happened to me with only the scant information that's available. Between the hospital and the police, they pretty much conspired to keep my friends, family and work colleagues completely in the dark about whether I'd lived or died and what the hell was going on. I wasn't really conscious until Tuesday 12th of September 2017 - that's quite a long time to be in limbo land. On the Tuesday, I was vaguely aware that my sister and my work colleagues wanted to speak to me, and I wanted to speak to them, but I wasn't allowed to. What utter bullshit.

The police have since phoned the company that I was working for, and told them in no uncertain terms that I was in hospital and not at all able to communicate with them to let them know I was going to be off work on the Monday & Tuesday. However, the company has severed all contact with me and has been avoiding the office since Wednesday 13th September 2017. What on earth could they be so afraid of, that they daren't answer the phone or go to the office? What on earth are they thinking? I have no idea, because they won't return my calls or reply to my emails.

Over that Wednesday & Thursday following my fatal overdose, everything collapsed around my ears. Without a phone, wallet, cash, laptop or any of the other things most of us take for granted every single day, I was lost in a city that was nearly completely alien to me, with not a single person to turn to. It was highly distressing. It was exhausting and stressful, to go from place to place, replacing whatever I could.

The Apple Store in the nearby shopping centre became the centre of my world, having been impolitely muscled out of my office with rather flimsy excuses. I dug my heels in, because something fishy was going on and I wanted people to come clean - what the fuck was going on? Why was I being treated so unprofessionally? It was a horrible experience, and not something I should have been put through, given my recent discharge from hospital.

I received a phonecall saying I had an email with some letters from a solicitor, from the company I was working for. How was I supposed to read this email, without my laptop or smartphone? Nobody from the company would speak to me properly. I did not receive even the bare minimum professional courtesy that should be extended to somebody who'd been a valued member of the team for some time.

Because the matter is now being handled by legal professionals, due to the complete refusal of the company to treat me with the common decency that any human being might expect - let alone adhere to contract and UK laws - I can't really go into any more detail. I'll be sure to share the details of any court proceedings so that this blasted company can't get away with their inexcusable misbehaviour.

Of course, the pages of this blog document my darkest secrets in unflinching detail, but this is therapy for me and I do not mix my professional and my social media identities in a way that might besmirch or sully the reputation of a company that is trading ethically and within the law. There are a lot of Nick Grants out there in the world, and I'm just one of many. In fact, this whole blog could have been created by somebody who maliciously intended to impersonate me, for nefarious purposes, couldn't it? Have you been careful to check who actually controls my Twitter, Facebook and blog? Is there anywhere that there is a direct reference to who and what I actually do for a day job, that could justify the mistreatment I've suffered?

One should remember that this blog has been the best thing I ever did, in terms of being able to stabilise my life and recover my poise after homelessness, addiction, alcoholism, financial problems and a whole world of pain, absolutely tore me to shreds. Should I hang my head in shame and hide in the shadows? Should I keep my mouth shut, and pretend that nothing bad ever happened to me?

There's absolutely no way you're gonna shut me up without killing me. I'm loud and I'm proud. It's more important that I write my story in unflinching detail, than cowering in fear and attempting to cover up what's happened to me. What have I got to be ashamed of? I've worked damn hard to get my shit together after it was blown to bits, so I'm damn well going to write about it.

Of course, culturally we only allow those who are already successful to share their stories of their life struggles, that challenge the status quo and our preconceptions. Paul Gascoigne and George Best have done a lot to bring the ethical debates surrounding alcohol abuse into the public consciousness, for example. Ronnie O'Sullivan and Stephen Fry have candidly shared their experiences of cocaine addiction, but yet we still revere them as great people... why is this? If you've been reading carefully, you'll know that I'm teetotal and I'm not on any drugs, except for pregabalin (for nerve damage) and zopiclone (because it's bloody hard to sleep on a noisy psychiatric ward of a hospital) which are both legally prescribed to me.

It seems I've taken a battering, because of foolish assumptions that have been made about me. Just about the only correct assumption that you could've made, is that I should probably be dead, after having ingested such a massive overdose and had plenty of time for it to take effect before the emergency services got me to hospital.

I really can't get myself into the mindset, where I would mistreat somebody who'd been hospitalised and was very sick. Please, somebody explain to me what have I done wrong, apart from what I've already very publicly admitted to? Is it right to crucify me; to punish me beyond the punishment that I've already suffered? Do you not think it was awful, what I've been through? Why would you put the boot in and kick me when I'm down? I don't understand why the shit continues to be rained down upon my head.

Does somebody want to explain to me how it's at all ethical, that I came to find myself homeless, unemployed and isolated in a city I'd never set foot in two months ago, after I took all the risks and put in so much effort to try and make a go of things?

Answers on a postcard to Nick Grant, Planet Earth.

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

This is a story about key performance indicators...

Most of us have salaried jobs and most of us have line managers. We sit down once or twice a year with our manager - the boss - and we agree some performance objectives for us to try and meet. When we have an appraisal of how well things have been going at work, we look at whether or not we managed to achieve what we were supposed to do.

I hate to have to break it to you, but what you're doing is complete and utter bollocks.

In hierarchical organisations, your pay rise and promotion prospects are decided by somebody who's been promoted into a position of total incompetence. Intrinsic to their very existence, organisations have a pyramid structure, where there are vast numbers of people trying to reach the next rung on the ladder; the next layer of middle-management.

You would hope that hard work and rhetoric about meritocratic culture would help you get ahead in life, but you've been playing the game by the wrong rules.

Work is a popularity contest. If you want to get the best pay rise and the best promotion, you have to be liked by people who are more senior than you are, and you have to make your boss look good: those are the only two rules.

If you are not liked by your boss and you didn't do any of the things that you were supposed to do, it doesn't matter at all, so long as you did things that make your boss look like he or she is 'managing' you effectively. If you are liked by multiple senior people, then your boss will not be able to block any ambitions you have for promotion, which is pretty much all your boss is trying to do - bosses are promoted until they can no longer be promoted, and then they block their subordinates from progressing in their careers.

Being liked by your peers and/or your subordinates is completely unimportant. Nobody gives a shit about the underlings' opinions. Nobody is ever going to ask your peer group what they think about you. Therefore, to be popular amongst people at the same level as you - or below - is only to waste precious time that you could spend impressing more senior people.

It is notable, that at no point have I mentioned doing any work. This is because doing work is a complete waste of time. Nobody ever got a pay rise or a promotion for doing actual work. If you're busy doing work, then how are you going to have any time to make yourself popular or do things that make your boss look good? If you do the things that you agreed with your boss, how can your boss take any credit for doing anything other than just doing their basic job?

Thus, organisations have disincentivised work and incentivised spending time kissing asses and yelling loudly about how great we are, while we attempt to get promoted into positions of incompetence.

Seriously, if you think you're good at your job, you're stuck at a dead-end - you're going nowhere.

Pictured above is a plastic crate full of empty wine bottles, beer bottles and beer cans. When the plastic crate is full, I can count the empty containers, read the ABV (Alcohol By Volume) off each one, and total up the aggregate amount of alcohol that I have consumed in a given time period. This gives me a data point, which I can record in a spreadsheet.

You might assume that there would be an inverse correlation between my alcohol consumption and my monthly take-home pay, but in fact, the very opposite is true - the more I drink, the more I earn.

I'm not going to argue with the data. The facts are the facts. My consumption of alcohol is the best predictor of my income. I can't tell you what the causality is, but I can tell you for certain that there is a correlation. However, I will tell you what my hypothesis is though.

Drinking is a social lubricant. I'm prone to saying and doing regrettable things while under the affluence of incahol, but the lunchtime 'sesh' or the after-work beers are not subject to any organisational hierarchies - we are all equals when inebriated. Being drinking buddies with the bosses never did any harm to anybody's career, provided you are not sick on anybody's shoes.

Being hungover compromises your ability to function, forcing you to find creative excuses for your lack of productivity. Hanging around the water-cooler or coffee machine - nursing a sore head - you often encounter your partners in crime from the previous night's drinking escapades, many of whom will be senior managers. When later questioned "what the f**k have you been doing all day?" you have a absolute watertight excuse that you have been talking to some highly respected member(s) of your organisation.

Over time, the objective of achieving tangible productive output is replaced by the skill of being drunk or hungover for most of the time that you're at work, while also looking busy and making influential friends.

If we consider a hypothetical scenario. Subject A works hard and drinks very little, but subject B works very little and drinks very hard. We then plot the salaries and alcohol consumption onto a comparative graph. When we do this, we can see that subject A is badly paid, whereas subject B's wages are significantly higher and climb steadily - well above the rate of inflation.

Furthermore, if we measure our hourly wage, based on the amount of sober and productive time that we give to our employers, we can see that the heavy drinkers - at least in my own case - are paid an astonishing amount of money for their work.

One caveat: drinking a bottle of vodka every night alone at home, is out of proportion with the amount of alcohol being consumed with members of your organisation. When social drinking metamorphosises into pure alcoholism, your hourly sober wage becomes infinite. You are swigging from a bottle hidden in your desk or your gym bag, in order to maintain your state of intoxication throughout the working day... you are not making your boss look good or increasing your popularity with senior managers. In short, your days are numbered.

Great companies are built on the foundations of alcohol & coffee. Some of the most amazing people I've ever met are 'functional alcoholics' but the pejorative term seems to be an oxymoron. It's impossible to decide whether alcohol gives us the 'Dutch courage' to tackle horribly stressful things, or whether people who shoulder great responsibility, are reaching for the bottle to salve their anxiety.

Of course, I am not encouraging you to drink intoxicating liquor, but it would be dishonest of me to deny the facts contained in the data and perpetuate the myth that sobriety and productivity are virtuous, in the amoral world of business.

One must question one's motives for continuing existence. Are you here to pass on your genes - to rear your progeny - and if so then why are you not having unprotected sex at every opportunity? Are you here to maximise the amount of time that you are drunk or high, and if so then why are you not drinking morning, noon and night?

Some of the more conceited individuals who walk amongst us - including myself - talk about leaving their "mark" on the world. I imagine leaving a fucking great big smoking crater, like the one from that huge asteroid that struck the Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs. That's not to say I want to commit mass murder, but simply that I'm on a trajectory travelling at high speed, and I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to smash into and what damage I'm going to cause.

To avoid the difficult questions and the certainty that you will die and leave a hole in people's lives, is folly.

Why is it that I gravitate towards brilliant individuals, who are never teetotal vegans who abstain from sex, masturbation and everything else that might be vaguely enjoyable? Why is it that when you scratch the surface of anything that glitters like gold, there's a strangely alluring stench of debauchery?

If I wanted to die in obscurity, written off as an addict and an alcoholic, would I not have just allowed society to label me and blame me for everything that's fucked up and has no other convenient scapegoat? How can we hold William S. Burroughs and Ernest Hemingway in such high regard, when they epitomise alcoholism, heroin addiction and suicide?

To say I'll die a meaningless death is apparently untrue ("you'd be missed") but to say that my death will have repercussions - like ripples in a pond - is conceited and a dreadful cliché... many suicides are motivated by the idea that it's the grandest of gestures.

We must all confront our own mortality, and every day that you spend 'doing your job' is just a waste of fucking time.

Tags: #alcohol #career #suicide

This is a story about depression and burnout...

If there's one thing I hate, it's a long drawn out journey to the grave. I really don't want to be on my deathbed, remembering the past, but unable to distinguish one day from any other. So many of us are in a routine of waking up, pressing the "snooze" button, having a shower, getting dressed, going to boring bullshit jobs, coming home, watching TV, preparing some food, loading the dishwasher, doing washing & ironing, and having joyless sex or masturbating to pornography - all purely to relieve the animal urges to copulate, eat, drink, piss, shit and sleep.

Life offers very few opportunities for memorable experiences, especially if you have made the ethical decision not to clone your genes through the impregnation of yourself or somebody else. This does not automatically mean that I consider myself morally superior or in a position to hand down judgements from my high horse. To write emotively on one topic does not logically confer that I hold negative views on those who have embarked up the one-way street that is motherhood or fatherhood. Please; do not send me your protestations that being a parent is both tough and rewarding. I KNOW that parenthood is something that I have no first-hand experience of. I DO respect everyone's unique set of life decisions - everyone's gotta live their own life as best as they see fit, and are able to do, playing the cards that have been randomly dealt to them.

My approach to life remains very much the same as it's always been: high risk, high reward.

I joked with a girl - mocking her - that I had fathered a string of illegitimate bastard children, and was being mercilessly pursued by the Child Support Agency (CSA) for money to pay for the upkeep of these offspring that I had carelessly brought into the world. She thought I was being serious.

So, where is all my wealth hidden? I've been a top-bracket taxpayer for most of my working life. Surely I can't have squandered so much disposable income on drink & drugs, and also been able to have a successful career. This is either unthinkable, or grossly unfair that I've had such a surplus, but yet still managed to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.

I've paid for convenience whenever I've been able to. Why would I clean my toilet, when I could pay somebody less than I earn per hour? While the cleaner has the close encounter with the porcelain throne, I could be working on a more glamourous project that pays very handsomely. It's a false economy to clean your own toilet, just as it is to do all of the many household chores, which can be done by a professional housekeeper.

When you apply this cost:benefit analysis to your entire life, you end up spending 37.5 hours a week reading news websites and planning your next holiday; enjoying a lifestyle that is approaching the much vaunted "age of leisure".

If you think I'm lazy, you're wrong. Only a crazy person would do the same repetitive tasks that they could easily automate, or train somebody who's prepared to do the work - subcontracted or outsourced - for less money, which leaves you with a net profit AND you don't have to do the shitty job. Repeat this process, because it is scalable, and you're on the right path... assuming you want to be rich and have lots of spare time. Perhaps you LIKE punching meaningless numbers into spreadsheets. Perhaps you WANT to clean toilets.

I looked at a list of the seven deadly sins, and realised that I could be a poster boy for Christian immorality.

If you've ever taken an interest in astrology and the signs of the zodiac, then you're easily fooled by writing that is deliberately ambiguous, leaving the interpretation to the reader, to apply to his or her own life. Religion has made a healthy living out of contrived platitudes that are completely meaningless in the context of the realities of human existence. The Bible, the Qu'ran, the Torah and all the other religious texts are so written as to be [mis]interepreted by the faithful flock.

One might as well say that if you breathe air, drink water, consume fats, proteins, carbohydrates, salts, amino acids and other vitamins and minerals, as well as trace amounts of every element & chemical compound, then you're a doomed sinner. If you urinate, defecate, ejaculate and perspirate, you're going straight to Hell. The demons that walk amongst us, corrupting our innocence and threatening to plunge society into chaos and destruction, are those who fornicate, copulate and enjoy fellatio or cunnilingus. The fact that all of these things are encoded into the very fabric of our corporeal vessels - the DNA of almost every cell in our body - is a fact that seems to have escaped the notice of those who are so easily conned by priests, vicars, preachers, witch doctors, shaman, tarot card readers, astrologers and other snake-oil salesmen and women.

I imagine I'd be pretty bummed if I found out I had an incurable terminal illness that was going to cut my life short, versus my expected lifespan. What would I do about it though? Which god should I pray to?

As a wise friend of mine said, you can be tricked by your genes into believing that love and hormonal bonding are real and tangible. If you think that parents, grandparents, great grandparents - and so on - are somehow going to end up 'less dead' than the people who didn't try to clone themselves, you're wrong. Even in the most anthropocentric & egocentric of interpretations of theoretical physics, you will have to witness the death of everybody you know, as well as the destruction of the planet, the solar system and the galaxies. Eventually entropy will be victorious over the entire universe, with time itself ceasing to be a meaningful concept and nowhere for you - or indeed anything - to exist.

If you believe in god(s) capable of making man and a world fit for human habitation, then you must also accept that this power is equally capable of destruction. He taketh away as much as He giveth - you can surely see this with your own eyes. This is the other side of the same coin that says that an infinitely small point, with infinite density and infinite energy, suddenly exploded into a universe. Following the same reasoning, either the universe will eventually collapse back into itself, by the force of its own gravitational pull, or it will expand until it is so uniformly cool and sparse that it is indistinguishable from the most perfect of vacuums - absolute nothingness.

I look at the world through a madman's eyes - I've read so much and delved so deep into the realm of the theoretical, proven in physical experiments as well as experiments that one can conduct through logical thought alone. I've seen, in my mind's eye, things that cannot be unseen. As Douglas Adams joked, if you see too much of the universe all at once it will destroy you - it's the ultimate torment; the ultimate death.

In an uncaring universe, I can see why people would seek comfort in the fairytale worlds of sky monsters and star signs, but it's pure childishness and immaturity. However, I envy the blissfully ignorant; I envy the blindly faithful, unshakable in their wilful stupidity.

I've worked very hard to master the machines of pure logic and reason - the computers - as well as spending most of my hard-earned wealth on lengthy periods, where I have absented myself from the demands of menial day-to-day existence. I told you that you were wrong about me having squandered my money on drink and drugs. The vast bulk of my conscious waking hours have been spent in startling sobriety; completely crystal clear thinking.

I carved three deep gashes the length of my forearm, with blood gushing out aplenty, before the arrival of two Metropolitan Police officers interrupted me. I can give you the long and exact chain of decisions that led me to do this, which were robustly defended by a logical thesis. That the police arrived was not a surprising outcome for me; in fact I had already anticipated everything that happened that day. The only thing that surprised me was that I was able to bandage my self-inflicted injuries using an actual first aid kit, which I discovered by chance, rather than having to resort to sanitary towels, kitchen roll and sellotape.

You would think that I would be completely insane, completely alcoholic, completely drug addicted or perfectly healthy, contented and conspicuously rich. Scratch the surface, and every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

If you think the world's gonna end, why hasn't it already? If you think everything's held in stable equilibrium, you simply haven't looked outside your front door: it's fucking war out there and nothing is stable at all. Civilisations destroy themselves and species go extinct - there's evidence of it everywhere.

Thus, you discover me - a distilled and concentrated form of sinner; completely unrepentant and embodying everything you were told in church to fear and shun; the very epitome of evil. Yet, I'm made of the same stuff as you.

I invite you to judge me; to critiqué me. I invite this criticism, because how can good exist, without evil?

Tags: #career #depression #suicide #bipolar #physics #religion

This is a story about succession planning...

The British have always liked hot drinks.

Coffee shops were terribly trendy in the late 1600s, having been launched in Oxford before springing up across London, where ships that brought the crop of beans to English shores found many willing patrons for the roasted, ground and brewed end product.

Tea symbolises imperial Great Britain. The Indian town of Darjeeling - formerly part of the British Empire - is synonymous with the tender leaves that citizens of the United Kingdom douse with boiling water, infusing bitter plant alkaloids into the hot liquid. "Put the kettle on" are four words that will be said in millions of homes this evening, despite the stimulating effects of caffeine.

Cocoa beans have given rise to hot chocolate, also known as drinking chocolate. Even a small UK food & drink shop will offer all manner of flavourings for hot water. Nestled in amongst the other things that my fellow Brits would categorise as 'hot drinks' I found something that I think of as a powerfully concentrated and flavoured spread, ideally enjoyed on toasted slices of bread - a jar of Bovril beef extract.

The flavour of Bovril is closer to Marmite and Vegemite - or any other brand of yeast extract - than it is to beef, in my opinion. How exactly they "extract" Bovril from a cow is something that I don't really want to think about. I suppose it's a macroscopic version of what they do with microscopic yeast - microorganisms are just the same as cattle really... eating, shitting, reproducing and not doing much else.

In this Bovril-drinking Northern city, conspicuous by their absence are people with skin tones darker than my own and women wearing headscarves. I formerly lived in a region where the population is 46% Muslim. Surprisingly, the Bengali shopkeepers have no issue with selling pork and alcohol to those who are not forbidden - for religious reasons - from eating swine flesh and imbibing the intoxicating liquor created from fermented fruits and grains.

In this unfamiliar part of Northern England, there are innumerable drinking establishments in my local vicinity, as well a vast number of hot food outlets where a bacon or sausage "bap" can be procured as a traditional breakfast snack.

India - before she was partitioned in 1947 - was a nation where Muslims would respect the holiness of cows in the Hindu culture, and reciprocally the Hindus would respect the Muslim rejection of pigs as unclean animals, and alcohol as an addictive intoxicant that places a heavy burden on any society that permits its consumption.

Modern global society still holds strong religious views on the treatment of domesticated animals and the brewing and consumption of alcohol. When we examine the historical evidence using the scientific method, we can see that cows and pigs would not exist today as we know them, without human intervention spanning many more thousands of years than even the oldest religion. Furthermore, we can see that humanity has been intent on its own intoxication throughout the history of civilisation. The Mayans were chewing coca leaves at least 3,400 years before Islam had its golden age, and vastly predates Hinduism and Judaism. Ergo, we must conclude that excluding beef, pork, alcohol and other things from our diet and habits of consumption is a relatively recent 'fad'.

The Chinese are the biggest per capita consumers of pork, while America and the developed nations hoover up vast quantities of refined coca leaves in the form of white powder cocaine and rocks of freebase cocaine, known as crack. Opium, morphine and diamorphine (heroin) are endemic worldwide. Caffeinated beverages - hot or cold - are guzzled by the globe. Alcohol is cheaper than bottled mineral water from desirable brands like Evian or Perrier. Yet, only in the North of England - so far as I know - do people consume a hot drink made from Bovril.

I hate being spread thin. I'm adaptable and I can be sent all over the globe to work with people who observe different cultural traditions. I am relatively worldly-wise enough to not commit a faux-pas, such as eating food before sundown in front of those observing the Ramadan period of fasting. I can pretty much figure out whatever you want me to do, if you're paying me enough and you're not open to persuasion that your ideas are probably terrible in their original unmodified form.

Why have a dog and bark yourself?

Now I find myself juggling the essential task of finding a doctor who will keep me supplied with the medications that I have become physically dependent on, while also settling in a new home in an unfamiliar city. I must also meet the demands placed upon me in the pursuit of enough money to eat, service my debts and give myself more security and freedom of choice.

I'm withdrawing from Xanax (alprazolam), Valium (diazepam), Ambien (zolpidem), zopiclone and Lyrica (pregablin). All of these drugs work in a very similar way - mimicking the brain's own 'brakes' and calming neural activity. These medications cause a chemical called GABA to be released in the brain, block the brain from recycling any unused GABA, or imitate the 'signature' of GABA itself. The overall effect is tranquillising, stress relieving and aids sleep, but the withdrawal is quite the opposite. In fact, the abrupt withdrawal from any or all of the medications listed can cause life-threatening seizures.

I must juggle social drinking - alcohol is a mandatory social lubricant in most UK culture - with the need to use alcohol as a form of self-medication for the stress I'm under. I also use alcohol as a substitute for the powerful psychotropic medications that my body has become dependent on, like heroin addicts kick their habit using methadone. Alcoholics can break free from physical dependence using benzodiazepines such as Librium (chlordiazepoxide). I'm doing it the other way round, because I know I can stop drinking - I plan on doing so in October, when I will use the excuse that I'm going teetotal to raise money for charity (a.k.a. Stoptober) - as I have done successfully before.

How I ended up with so much on my plate is not really my intended subject of this lengthy diatribe, but in my dark and difficult moments, I am facing a clusterfuck of competing demands on my time and energy, while also dealing with panic attacks and a general feeling of uneasiness and discontent; a false perception of threat, danger and imminent disaster.

My perceptions are not completely warped. Earlier this year, both my kidneys completely failed. Very recently I narrowly escaped homelessness, bankruptcy, destitution and destruction. Unpleasant feelings are a harbinger of a genuine medical emergency - I am detoxing myself without the supervision of a doctor or nurse, while also working full time.

I've skippered yachts and kept my crew safe in stormy weather; I've led groups safely up and down dangerous mountains covered with snow and ice; I've become blasé about near-death experiences, because I've now had so many. I don't think I'm exaggerating or being hyperbolic when I say that I'm facing my life's toughest challenge so far.

The demands placed upon me in my day job seem unreasonable at the moment, but I was desperate for fast cash. I was drowning and I was thrown a lifeline - beggars can't be choosers.

Friends who have submitted themselves to the mercy of the state seem to have suffered greatly from the trials and tribulations of dealing with compassion fatigued bureaucrats. A great many nurses and doctors have told me that I'm 'entitled' to live at the expense of the government - i.e. my fellow citizens - because of the taxes I have paid in my life, and because my mental illness disqualifies me from being 'fit for work'. To put work as my priority, ahead of treatment is something that none of my doctors want, but equally there's a long queue of people who would prefer to sit at home smoking cannabis and playing on their Playstations, rather than flipping burgers or scrubbing toilets for the minimum wage.

Like concentrated beef extract, I'm intense; I'm focussed; I can achieve a lot very quickly. The terrifying truth is that the world applauds anybody who exhibits bipolar behaviours... what happened to all those 'overnight successes' and 'one-hit wonders'? They spent all their money on fast cars, beautiful women, drugs & alcohol, and the rest they just wasted, is the oft-repeated quote.

Once you've figured out a winning formula, all you can do is teach others to follow in your footsteps. If you can train an army of mini-mes to do the grunt work - the heavy lifting - then life becomes more sustainable. Only a fool repeats the same behaviour, expecting different results.

And so, I desperately need to find my successor - somebody to fill my shoes and shoulder some of the burden, allowing me to recover and stabilise, rather than being trapped in a cycle of just repeating things that I've done before a thousand times.

It's hard to find somebody who's willing to do a shitty job, and it's hard to find somebody who's able to navigate their way through the piles of shit and find the better way of doing things. I might be that diamond in the rough, but that doesn't mean it's a great idea to get me scrubbing toilets or flipping burgers, even though I will do if you ask me, pay me and I'm desperate enough.

Having a desperation-driven economy, with most of us spread thinly - stressed out and always on the brink of breakdown and ruin - is a terrible, terrible thing to do to people.

Hunger will drive ingenuity and industriousness, but it's not a sustainable strategy, no matter how much Bovril you have to eat and/or drink.

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

This is a story about convenience...

I emerge from my apartment building, take a right turn and walk down a street I've never walked down before, in a city I've never visited before. I reach a T-junction and I look left and right. Which way will lead me to what I want: somewhere to buy a roll of toilet tissue? I turn right again and when I reach the end of another unfamiliar road, I see a shop which is open until late at night. My instincts have guided me swiftly and directly to the nearest supplier of nearly everything that a man could need.

As I step inside this branch of a well-known chain of miniature supermarkets, the first thing I see is a range of 5 different flavours of noodles. To the plastic containers, one merely needs to add boiling water, producing something that tastes and smells like a small meal in around 5 minutes.

I had already eaten half a Chinese take-out, when I realised to my horror that in my haste to make way for home and satiate my hunger, I had forgotten to procure anything to drink - to wash down my food - or to deal with any digested remains.

I dismiss the dishes that can be prepared with very little cookery, and continue to peruse the shelves. I almost forget the reason why I left the house, when the next thing that catches my eye is a fridge full of cold beer. It was only an hour or so ago that I switched my fridge on - it had been switched off and left empty, while my apartment was unoccupied.

Now with a basket containing 100% alcoholic beverages, I find some concentrated juice drink to balance out my diet. Then, I force myself to get the one thing I left home to come out to buy, before I forget... distracted by dizzying array of choices, colours, prices and imagined tastes, as I browse the different foods on offer.

Making my way to the cashier to pay, I realise I have nothing but shampoo and shower gel - no soap for my hands and no detergent for the cups, plates and cutlery that I'm going to make dirty. I return to the shelves which I already visited, and drop more things into my shopping basket.

Emerging onto the darkening streets with plastic bags in hand, I curse as I remember that I will have to go out again to purchase my next meal. Forward planning, I am not.

I grumble with frustration as the part of my fridge designed to hold milk and orange juice will not immediately accept the alcoholic beverages in their boxed container - the first thing that I put into my fridge; my priorities are clear. I have no milk and I have no orange juice... I can buy those in the morning.

I realised I can never be a bachelor again, because I've been married and divorced. I recalled a time when I owned a house and cooked a 5-course meal with canapés, dining with the girl I had yet to marry, along with another couple. It was a suburban cliché that could have been lifted straight from the 1970s - domestic bliss.

If the operating lever of my life had been on the "suck" setting up until a certain point, it got flipped to "blow" and the contents of the vacuum cleaner bag were ejaculated back out. In a few short years, everything that had taken decades to grow and build was a dusty unrecognisable mess. Like belly button fluff - which is always blue - the colourful fabric of existence ends up as homogenous greyish crap that you toss into the trash can.

Anybody brave enough to pick through the remnants of what has been chewed through the machine may find recognisable things, but most people are repelled by something that they associate with dirtiness - I'm somehow unclean; untouchable.

I make a bet with a boy about the date of Kurt Cobain's suicide. I win a pint. The boy wasn't even alive on that day. There's something timeless in this moment where we compare notes from the past: both of us having lived in a school boarding house. How is this possible? How is it that I'm heading backwards, while this boy is heading forwards? On the day he was born, I went to my very first all-weekend music festival, yet our lives criss-cross and the dates are irrelevant. His face fell as I got an Apple Macbook out of my backpack, and I knew he'd lost another bet, having expected me to be a corporate man in a grey suit. I was that corporate man in a grey suit, but wasn't I supposed to just get older and then die?

I write and I mix the tenses; I jumble up the sequence of events. Who knows which way the arrow of time points and if time flows linearly? Does my story make more sense if I tell it backwards? The way that our memories work dictates the convention of telling stories in the past tense, but humanity does not dictate the laws of the universe... most of us subscribe to a worldview that is conveniently bitesize, but not at all correct.

I've flown through the turbulence of existence, experiencing ripples in the fabric of spacetime - like unseen variations in the density of air, which cause an aeroplane to suddenly drop and spill the passengers' drinks.

Today has been the most stressful day of my life. I woke up shaking, as if I was shivering with cold.

Despite the vast amount of things I've experienced and can remember, all I can really tell you for certain is that I've survived until today, which is a minor miracle. It sounds incredibly egocentric - the universe, after all, does not exist for my benefit - but to all intents and purposes, the sum total of all available sensory inputs that my brain has gathered in thirty-something years, has shown me precisely the opposite, despite my most diligent investigations into the underpinnings of our scientific understanding of the world around us.

I now need to stop pulling on that loose thread, because the wooly jumper of my mind has unravelled completely and now I'm gathering it back up into a messy spool.

I collapse into a bed I've never slept in, with brand new bedding.

I'm exhausted, of course.

Tags: #career #physics

This is a story about an addiction to adrenalin...

See that red circle? That's where I've lived for the last 2 years. Only two or three times a year, the combination of wind speed, wind direction, and a low tide will all co-incide, creating perfect conditions to be able to kitesurf at my local 'beach'. That's me, launching my friend's kite at the edge of the water.

The water is slightly brackish, but at low tide it's mostly full of really really nasty stuff that will give you an ear infection, eye infection, gastroenteritis or other medical complaint due to contact with and ingestion of faecal coliforms.

I was on holiday on a North African desert island, with a beautiful sandy beach and warm water, one week after I excitedly told my friend that the conditions were perfect for him to achieve a lifelong ambition of kitesurfing in the middle of our capital city... far, far away from the sea. Is it any wonder that I didn't want to spend a week puking my guts up and taking antibiotics?

Just to prove I'm not pulling your leg, above is a picture of my mate dodging his way in-between boats, as he crossed the river on his tiny kiteboard. He even did a trick because he knew that a bunch of shocked onlookers were videoing him - ever the showman, but who can blame him?

If you don't believe me about dodging between boats, have a look at the kind of vessel that cruises down the river, that I can see from my living room.

Yeah, that's the same river and yes that's my lounge and balcony. That's the same view that I have taken hundreds of photos of, all from that same vantage point. Yes, that's a frigging cruise liner sailing right past my apartment, which is every bit as surreal as you'd think it would be.

Also, if you thought I was making pathetic excuses about why I didn't want to go into the dirty brown water, then check out this next photo, taken a week or so later.

Yeah, that's me in the shades, looking all pasty white because I don't get to leave the house much these days. Just look at the beautiful aquamarine colour of that water. There was no need for a wetsuit - the water was as warm as bathwater. Why would I want to swim in raw sewerage when I had this week of kitesurfing heaven to look forward to?

I will my miss riverside life, but I've paid a king's ransom to experience it, and I've also had a queue of lazy liars, who've wanted to take advantage of me and my industriousness & ingenuity. It's been hard work to make these kind of iconic and memorable life experiences possible. It might sound boastful, but is there anything wrong with reaching a point where you can look backwards and say - without a shadow of a doubt - that you've lived your life to the fullest possible extent.

There used to be a time when the future couldn't come soon enough. I wished away today on tomorrow's dreams and ambitions. Then, I lost my virginity, learned to drive a car, got my first full-time job, bought a house, married a girl... one by one, I ticked all the things off the list.

How rich and 'successful' do you want to be? I've owned both a yacht and a speedboat. I've stayed in fancy hotels and had luxury holidays. I've eaten in the best restaurants, had the most gourmet food and drunk the finest wines. If you continue in relentless pursuit of the glitz and the glamour that you see in films and on TV, then you'll never be happy and content. No matter how many digits you have in your salary or net worth, it'll never be enough. Do you want to earn a million? Why not a billion? Do you want to be the first trillionaire? Why not a quadrillionaire?

If you were cursed with even a handful of braincells, I hope you'd quickly figure out - like I did - that things like experiences and friendship have an intangible value that can't be measured in dollars, pounds, euros, yen, rupees or even shiny gemstones and lumps of rare metals. You can't eat diamonds, although I must say I haven't tried. I have had a drink that contained actual gold, floating around and getting stuck in my teeth, like shiny bits of food, but even if I drank loads of that stuff, all I'd end up doing would be quite literally flushing money down the toilet - gold cannot be metabolised.

So, it's with a heavy heart that I leave my riverside home tomorrow, but it's not been the best place I've ever lived. The best place I've ever lived co-incided with when I had the most friends who I saw on a regular basis. More friends = more happiness. In some ways, my apartment block has had the stench of misery about it - full of rich old men with nothing to look forward to in life except a swift and painless death.

Maybe that's all there is for me in the future: frustration, disappointment, age-related illness, pain, discomfort, suffering and then death. However, I've got a few years before I'm 40 (technically) and I haven't passed on my genes to any unfortunate offspring yet. I'm still a hopeless romantic who believes in true love and holds out hope of meeting a special somebody to spend the rest of my life with; to grow old and grey with.

There's a moral question about whether it's right to drag an individual kicking and screaming literally into existence, as a shitting, puking, pissing, blood and amniotic fluid covered hopelessly helpless baby version of a fully-grown human being. There's another moral question about whether it's right to do so, when you can see that climate change and Donald Trump have our planet on collision-course with disaster. There's a personal moral question, about whether it's right to take the risk that I might pass on bad genes, or act as selfishly and irresponsibly as my parents did - to inflict as much misery on an innocent child who has no choice in matters which so deeply affect their quality of life.

I'm so desperate not to be like my dad, that there's an easy way to guarantee that never happens: to never have children of my own. However, can I say that I really experienced every possible thing that it's possible for a human to do, unless I sire and rear my own genetic offspring? It's a gut-wrenching decision. I'm more risk-averse than you might think, given the number of times I've risked my own life, but it's quite another question entirely when you're talking about the miserable childhood of some poor kid.

In leaving the capital city, I leave behind a huge pool of highly educated, highly intelligent and devastatingly beautiful women of my age, who decided to have put career first and placed motherhood on hold. Now they're all shitting themselves about the sun setting on their fertility, and make bloody brilliant girlfriends, to be honest. Prior to my my thirties, my experiences of the opposite sex had rather made me wish I was homosexual.

Talking of sunsets, this is the last photograph I'll ever take from this balcony, in all likelihood. I literally just rushed out and snapped this photo in-between writing the last sentence and this one. This is goodbye. There will be no time for anything more tomorrow, as I throw the few remaining unpacked items into my luggage and head off to start my brand new life: a fresh start; a new beginning.

You could have walked in on any chapter of my life and felt anything from pity to envy; from disgust to sympathy; from protective instincts to the desire to join a long queue of people who'd like to cause me distress and misery. If you think I've lost my sense of perspective, you're wrong; you've leapt to the wrong conclusions and too hastily. There are two years of my life captured here, on the pages of this blog. I invite you to dip in at random and judge me based on the extreme ups and downs that you can read about... everything I've been through.

Of course, I view myself as no different from anybody else. We all get hungry, we all get thirsty and most of us want to get laid. Beyond that, of course I view pure blind chance - luck and probability - as the only over-arching thing that's led me down one path, while you down another. Our places could easily have been the other way around, in another life; another universe.

So, dear reader, I will write to you again, after I've arrived at a destination that is completely alien to me.

Wish me the best.

Tags: #london #kitesurfing

This is a story about hypocrisy...

I wasn't born into a wealthy family. I don't have trust fund income. I'm practically disinherited. My relationship with my parents was causing me far more harm than good. I don't have lottery winnings, bonds, gilts, shares, Swiss bank accounts, briefcases full of banknotes or any other assets; securities; cash; collateral. I don't even have youth and toned physique on my side any more, so men aren't going to pay for the pleasure of my company, which was always plan "Z" in the event that plans "A" through to "Y" had failed.

I've got 61% of my kidney function left, I can't feel my left foot, although - irritatingly - I do feel pain if I stand on something. I also get something akin to phantom limb pain. As far as my brain is concerned, most of the time my foot doesn't seem to exist anymore, but at night it aches all over parts of my foot, ankle and calf. It aches so much I can't sleep without pain relief and/or sleeping tablets. I drink too much. I put all the weight I lost back on. To top it all off, I'm going to be closer to 40 than 35 soon.

I'm in a precarious position.

I couldn't work doing a job that required me to stand for any length of time. I couldn't work a job that required me to do much walking at all. That rules out McDonalds, stacking shelves and being a security guard. Even the homeless people who sell The Big Issue do so standing up.

So, why would I risk my professional reputation by blogging and tweeting so candidly about every innermost thought and private detail of my life? Don't I care about my job? Being able to find gainful employment is pretty important for me, as I don't own a home and I don't have the fallback option of living with any family member. Loss of income means I can't pay rent or even afford a hostel bed. Putting my private life out into the public sphere looks like I'm jeopardising my career - my reputation - and therefore my job - my income - and my housing. Doesn't it seem like I brought my recent crisis, where I was almost homeless, on myself?

What does homeless even mean, anyway? Well, if you're not receiving social security benefits - job seekers' allowance (JSA) or employment support allowance (ESA) - then you don't get any other benefits either, which includes housing benefits. If I go to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets council offices and find their housing department, and tell them that I have been paying over £2,000 a year in council tax, but I've become homeless, they will just tell me to f**k off, in no uncertain terms.

That's what homeless means: it means that every single safety net has failed you, and you will be sleeping on the streets. It's happened to me. I've been homeless.

You would think that this would make me dash to the Job Centre to sign on for JSA as soon as I lost a job, or phone the government telephone line to apply for ESA as soon as I got sick, but there are rules. Strictly speaking, I've got a job - I'm a company director - and strictly speaking I've already got a salary... it's just that my company hasn't been able to afford to pay me for several months. My company only sells one thing: me. If I'm broken, my company doesn't have anything to sell, so it doesn't make any money.

Here's how the government process goes:

Q. Have you lost your job?

A. No, I have a job

--- I'm not eligible for JSA --

Q. Are you able to work?

A. Yes, I do unpaid work every day, without too many problems

--- I'm not eligible for ESA ---

Q. Are you receiving JSA or ESA?

A. No. I'm not eligible for either

--- I'm not eligible for housing benefit ---

So, I get shunted out of the welfare benefits system and into the hands of the NHS, who view me as a vulnerable person in crisis. Therefore I could be hospitalised for 24 hours, 28 days or 6 months, purely because otherwise it's pretty clear that I'd be fucked. I could be housed in a crisis house for a couple of weeks. However, until I tell the government a white lie - that I'm so disabled by mental illness that I can't work - then none of that income tax, national insurance and council tax that I paid over the years, is going to be used to give me some assistance with housing and income, until I'm recovered enough to go back to working full-time. Equally, I'm not going to get any paid employment until I omit to tell a prospective employer that I have had some health issues and need to work part-time, until I'm well enough to work full-time.

Do I kowtow to the government for less than £100 a week of ESA money? When you lose your ESA, you lose your housing benefit too. Where's that going to get me? Back to square one.

Do I start a full-time job earlier than I'd like to? I pretty much have to. I don't have any other options, given that the other options lead back to the same place: homelessness.

There are a lot of things that make my situation very unique and hard for the 'one-size fits all' government systems to cope with. Nothing is left to the discretion of the people who have to deal with the unemployed, the sick and the homeless.

As Joseph Heller described wonderfully in Catch 22, there are situations where to act rationally leads to the least desirable outcome. Most men don't want to fight in wars, because they'll probably be killed. Therefore if you're driven insane, that's actually the most sane response - through your madness, you also proved your sanity, ergo, you're fit for battle. Quod erat demonstrandum.

I've made my choice to use my professional reputation to get work, but I also have every detail of my private life and my psyche fully on display in the public sphere. I have no security. I have no job. I'm soon to have no home.

I would be a hypocrite to take down this blog and delete my Twitter account, because I've lived for 2 years in the public sphere, documenting very private and personal matters, which might seem to contradict my professional reputation that a person may glean from my CV, LinkedIn, meeting me, talking to me and talking to the people I've worked for and otherwise know me in a professional capacity.

It seems cowardly, having taken the brave step of being honest with 7,000+ Twitter followers, that I would hide these 750,000 words from a handful of people, because I'm afraid of damaging my professional reputation and career. We're all human and we're all fallible. To err is human. However, to document one's own mistakes and shortcomings is not at all common. To put more of yourself into the public sphere than is hidden away in any other dark recess of the world, including your own brain, is exceptional. I read things I've written less than a year ago, and I don't remember writing them, but I did. I wrote it all; every word.

It seems stupid, having an excellent professional reputation and a successful career spanning 20 years, and having made a great deal of effort to secure vital income and housing, to risk losing it by having my private life and confidential matters, publicly available. My job security depends on my employer's confidence in me to do the work that I'm highly qualified and experienced to do. Most people hide their weaknesses and their struggles. To project a false image - to be vain - to protect your ego and appear impressively faultless, is the normal thing to do.

Do I stand by my labour of love, and defend it, despite the vulnerable position it puts me in? Do I capitulate under the pressure to conform to social norms, and hide this other part of myself away in some private recess?

What's going to happen? Is it true that putting unflattering things into the public sphere is automatically damaging to your professional reputation? Who's been brave or stupid enough to try the irrational and risky thing that I've done? Who would be brave or stupid enough not to pull the plug, to de-risk the situation and limit any damage that might be done?

I can't pull the plug. I need this blog. I need this identity. I need to be brave, even if it feels stupid, because otherwise I'm a hypocrite.

In the world I want to build, we don't need alter-egos; we don't have a professional persona; we don't maintain flawless CVs with no gaps between employers; we don't make a distinction between who we are privately and who we are publicly: we are just ourselves, all the time; warts and all.

I am guilty of imagining utopian ideals, but this is different. The lines between work & home life; public & private life; speakable & unspeakable; stigmatised & unstigmatised... those lines are being blurred and people are becoming proud of identities that 50 years ago were literally illegal under UK law.

We have laws that prevent discrimination on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, religion and a host of other things, but a woman may still choose to publish a book under a male pseudonym, when gender bias shows that she will sell more books if she does so.

I would be vain and egotistical if I painted myself as some brave campaigner for ending the tyranny that a 'career' and the painstaking care we take over our professional reputation, wreaks on our lives. However, this blog has helped me to overcome career-ending obstacles. What can you say your spotless CV brought you, when you eventually crumbled under the pressure to maintain an unsustainably perfect façade?

I recently said "vanity and ego: I hope they keep you warm at night". I said it slightly maliciously, with my words dripping with sarcasm. I felt regretful for saying that to somebody.

Perhaps therein lies the truth of it all: is this a vanity project, or is it the very definition of a deflated ego to publicly display the side of your character that you always kept hidden?

I'm going to decide, because I assume nobody is going to read this. To assume I have interested readers would be vain.

It feels like a pretty brave thing for a stupid person to do.

Tags: #career

This is a story about gratitude...

In happier times, I could cycle through a tunnel under the River Thames to go and see her. During a blissfully warm Indian summer, we courted on the hills above the capital, enjoying spectacular panoramic views across London: far better than even my overpriced central London apartment can provide. Sipping Prosecco out of plastic glasses and eating Marks & Spencer finger food, it was clear that our borderline alcoholism and gluttony made us a well-matched pair, or so it seemed as we muddled through the tail end of summer, autumn and the winter.

This is not a portmortem of our relationship. If anybody was looking for that, including her, I would hope they'd read So Lonely, which gives some insight into my half of the story of our breakup: a story that would never get told to her mum, brother, best friends and work colleagues. Instead, I'm a pariah. No; worse... I have instigated protective instincts that only a short time before extended to me, as a loosely connected family member: her partner and somebody fully committed to a lifelong future together. Her brother hates me, I assume.

There's the unresolved issue of the fact that I loved that she had some association with politics, by fluke of her career, while I had made political matters the core of my thinking; political ideologies were the thing I most passionately believed in. When I write pieces which show that my thinking is ahead of the pack - unencumbered by the corrupting influence of living and working too close to the very elites who have grown apart from the electorate - I can't help but wonder what my former best friend, lover and lifelong partner, would have to say, with the benefit of her amazing intellect... but she also benefits from her privileged position of having to do nothing more than to turn up at an office each day, to soak up the status quo and entrenched beliefs of the Westminster bubble. I hoped she would read Labour's Catch 22, especially as it predated Graham Jones and Gloria De Piero's rebellion over Labour arrogance that Corbyn's popularity will be enough to sweep the party to power at the next general election.

Before continuing further, it's important to note that I'm boxing up my belongings, putting them into storage, and it's likely that I will be leaving this city of nearly 9 million inhabitants - where bumping into somebody you know is incredibly improbable - and she should know that I respect our agreement to leave each other in peace; to move on with our lives, despite the pain and heartache of a breakup. I could be in a city in the North of the country, or I could even be abroad: the chance that we should ever meet again is close to zero percent.

It should be noted that she used to read everything I wrote, proofread it, help edit it, provide feedback and even helped shaped the plot of my debut novel. This is the first thing I want to say thank you for doing, whether she reads this or not.

I'm doing this in a kind of reverse order of importance, so the next thing I'm thankful for is her tolerance and even good humour, over things that very few partners could be so kind and understanding about. She might not have understood what bath salts were at first; she might not have understood that I suffer from a dual diagnosis, which makes understanding me a whole lot harder than buying the Amazon bestseller on bipolar disorder, but she damn well did buy that book. By way of a comparison, my ex-wife bought the book "Nag your Loved one Sober". That epitomises of the difference between my relationship with my my ex-wife and a loving relationship.

The next thing I've got to give thanks for is how she listened & observed. My walls were bare even though I had a photo of nearly 20 of my best friends, a photo of me that reminds me I was a young cool kitesurfer dude once, and a photo of an animal I have always professed a desire to keep as a pet. The frames that hold these pictures were part of a Christmas bonanza of gifts that I'm now bursting into to tears thinking about. Not so much because of the thoughtful gifts - although this was without question the best Christmas of my adult life - but because I was brought into the fold of a bonded and caring family and received so much love, care and acceptance.

Early in the New Year, I secured a new IT contract. Sadly, I sat on my leg and caused a kind of crush injury normally only seen in car accidents and building collapses. My kidneys stopped working and I found myself as a high dependency case in hospital, on dialysis. She burnt herself out trying to look after me for weeks, but not only that, she marshalled the troops: my friends and her family, in order to make me feel loved and supported. In all the multiple hospitalisations I've suffered over the last few years, I'd never received a single get well card and one of only two visitors came to demand I returned a copy of the keys to his house after a suicide attempt [not in his house]. It's imperative that I thank her [and her family] for their efforts in returning me to good health, through love and support.

Apart from raccoons, squirrels are another animal that I'm mad about. I guess that, living in London, squirrels are a cute animal that has gotten so used to human contact that they come right up to you and take things out of your hands, if you pretend to have food for them. If you do have food for the squirrels, they'll crawl all over you and put up with a certain amount of petting, even though they're wild. With the collapse of my second attempt at domestic bliss - my marriage to my ex-wife - my cat had to go live with my parents, from whom I'm estranged. I'm thankful that she gave me a third period of domestic bliss, with Mr Squiz as our inanimate pet [who she bought for me]. The lovely bedclothes, quilt and pillows are all thanks to her. She made me feel loved, and that I could love again.

No domestic bliss is complete without the trimmings of high quality kitchenwares and other day-to-day luxury items. Everthing from my tatty tea towels to my budget Ikea cutlery received a quiet makeover. My cheap-brand supermarket goods were replaced with the best that Marks & Spencer and Waitrose have to offer the upper-middle-class consumer and I started to develop a penchant for lime cordial made with 30% Mexican limes... available exclusively in the top-tier supermarkets. The hoi polloi have never tasted such delicious concentrated drink products, nor have they used John Lewis' or Joseph & Joseph homewares... they haven't lived. I must be thankful to her - without even a hint of sarcasm - for giving me a simidgin of a taste of the finer things in life.

Our final quarel might seem rather ludicrous to you. It resulted in me slicing deep gashes into the length of my forearm and making footprints in my own blood, on her walls. The only thing you can really know from this is that I was incredibly unwell, but you could also infer that there was something that was deeply important to me, about whatever was going on. It's very hard to understand people who are in an extreme mental health crisis, but my crisis was deepened and exacerbated by her decision to try and ignore me. I had tried and failed to walk to the local shop - a very short distance away - wearing my Brazilian Havaiana flip-flops, but due to the aforementioned leg injury, my left foot is completely numb and I'm unable to even feel if my big toe has become dislocated, which it easily can because of damage to my tendons. This is all highly complicated, but you should know that I've spent months each year wearing those Brazilian flip flops, and they had become intricately linked to my identity. She had offered - a parting gift if you like - to buy me a pair of summer shoes, which I could wear with my numb left foot. The Camper shoes pictured offer a wide footbed, allowing my toes to spread naturally: otherwise I would have no idea if I was getting a blister on one side or the other of my foot. She will probably never understand how important these shoes were to me; nor how important it was that she at least humour me, when our relationship had fractured and virtually disintegrated. She seemingly made an overnight change in how much care and attention that she lavished on me, in what was supposed to be a love to last until our dying days. My final thank you is for something that looks purely cosmetic or materialistic, but she eventually had the faith to make a final pyrrhic effort and expense, which she would never see any benefit of, to get me those shoes. I wear those shoes every day and the quality of life improvement they have brought me would astound anybody who hasn't experienced partial loss of the use of a limb or extremity, and the loss of the choices they get to make about their attire. This is more than simple vanity: it's identity, which is tightly bound up with self-esteem.

To write the best part of 2,000 words, in thanks to a partner who you've promised - mutually - to never be in contact with ever again, seems to plumb the depths of insanity, but while she has her resurgent career, I've had a close shave with being hospitalised and have been visited at home every day by somebody checking to see if I'm still alive. I'm not saying it's been a cakewalk for her, but she hurled herself back into her career, which was both therapeutic as well as beneficial to her ongoing job aspirations.

I'm not completely insane, and I know from the analytics of my website when I've had a visitor which is her, in all likelihood. I want to honour our "no communication" and "move on with our lives" agreement, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have have the evidence to show that somebody's had a peek to see if I'm still alive.

What I need to do is lick my wounds; to try to forgive myself for acts that were driven by mental illness; to try and accept that her choice to break our no-communication agreement was for the private swallowing of her pride and to publicly swallow her pride and for any reconciliation to take place, would be unthinkable when she thinks of herself as some kind of minor celebrity.

While that final paragraph might seem bitter and harsh, given the thankful tone of everything I've just written, perhaps it's just part of the baggage that I struggle with, alone. With any breakup, there will be unanswered questions and what ifs. With any breakup, it's hard not to look backwards until the next love of your life enters the picture. I really hope that nothing I've said would detract from my overall gratitude that I met her, shared time with her, had hope for the future with her, felt loved by her and ultimately had my life enriched by her.

It's rather tragic, but where in life can you say you don't find tragedy and regret: tragedy in what might have been if only things had played out slightly differently?

Tags: #relationships

This is a story about isolation...

I've had 3 attempts at living in domestic bliss in my lifetime.

The first attempt, I was way too young. At just 21 years old, what the hell did I think I was doing living in a Surrey commuter town? Taking the old slam-door train into Waterloo every day and having to ride "the drain" which is the packed tube that carries you directly into the heart of the City of London. I played golf on summer evenings and at weekends. I generally acted as if I was 50, not 21. Also, I was with the poor girl out of a desperate desire not to be alone, rather than because I was attracted to her, which is never a good reason to be with somebody. Our flat was nice enough, but somehow bland; faceless; soul-destroying. Leaving central London for that life, was a huge mistake.

The second attempt, I picked the wrong girl. I was certainly attracted to her, and she was smart - a science graduate from a good university - so she ticked almost every box. However, she was mean; just plain mean. There was a vicious aggressive streak to her and she managed to rub most people she met up the wrong way. My friends called her "the poison dwarf". We bought a suburban house and tried to make it work. Getting a kitten was the only thing that was successful - we bonded over looking after our cat. Perhaps - although reckless - there's something to be said for doing what my parents did, which is to have a child even though your relationship is a load of dog shit. I ended up marrying this girl. It did not last long. You can't pair a mean aggressive person with somebody who's a sensitive needy soul like myself: I'm fragile; I'm easily hurt, if you want to hurt me; I'm a pretty easy target - I'm open and unguarded.

The third attempt happened very naturally. Perhaps it's an age thing - we were both getting to the point where, how did she put it? "It's time to shit or get off the pot". She was very committed and I loved that - it made me feel so loved and secure; wrapped up in cotton wool. I'd look for her hand, and hers would be there, ready to hold mine. If I felt like I was going to fall, she'd reassure me that she was going to catch me. The thing is, I was broken and sick - there was so little left of me to love. I was ridiculously needy, but she seemed to take that in her stride and make incredible allowances and forgivenesses for all kinds of transgressions.

How it came to pass that my latest attempt at domestic bliss fell apart, I shan't go into the detail of out of respect for her, and an agreement to leave each other in peace. However, there are a couple of things that I need to write about, just because I need to clarify them in my own mind. There's a certain amount of lunacy that led to the downfall of that relationship, and I need to unpick it a bit... to untangle the mess.

We hadn't had an argument for months. We got along so well. We were best friends and we were mostly inseparable. She had social engagements, and I didn't suffer FOMO or jealousy. We got through a family Christmas and some other stressful times, without so much as a cross word. In a way, that made me feel uneasy. We were not well practiced at resolving conflict.

As my health failed and my career faltered, all of our optimistic dreams of the future were under threat. She was supportive, but I was losing what little identity and self esteem I had; I was becoming ever more dependent on her. It emerged that I was full of bitter regret that my path through life had led me away from interesting things, smart people, daily challenges: my career had become little more than stoically watching projects get bollocksed up by total morons, in return for obscene amounts of money - a bribe, if you like, to rubberstamp the wrongdoing I had to witness. Her career reminded me of everything I had ever aspired to do with my life - to make the world a better place.

I became deeply insecure. Not insecure because she left me with any doubt that she would be committed, loyal and supportive, no matter how bad things got. No... I was insecure about my worth; my value as a person; my contribution; my career choice; my ability to deliver on my end of the bargain of the domestic bliss dream. I was on a hair trigger.

She didn't know how to debate; how to argue, as it turned out. We still live in an age where sexism is working out its kinks, and our intellectual women have been excused from having to back their assertions with evidence or logic, or refute a point with a well constructed counter-argument. Contradiction was all she knew, and I had to walk away in frustration, the first few times we argued.

Because of my loneliness; my isolation, when we argued - over something that was deeply distressing to me - I turned to social media to arbitrate. I didn't know where else to turn. When you have the evidence in front of you, but somebody is arguing that black is white and refusing to back down, what do you do? To post up the transcript of an argument on Facebook, and let the crowd decide is not a great thing to do, but I was being tormented; driven mad.

I'm not really sure what happened afterwards. I was completely isolated and completely exposed. I had laid out my position: the irrefutable evidence. Maybe I needed the strength of the crowd behind me, to follow through and end a relationship with somebody who would put their intellectual vanity ahead of my feelings - be prepared to lie and twist the truth just to 'win' [in their mind, at least]. Maybe what I really wanted was this misbehaviour to end, and for the relationship to be repaired.

We finally reached a point of communication where the unjustified contradictions, the lies and the twisting of the truth was replaced by apologies and kind words, but I'm not sure whether I was just being humoured - this was the endgame. Having gut-wrenchingly lost my best friend, my lifelong companion, the love of my life - albeit a whirlwind romance - I briefly thought that these words of contrition showed a willingness to try and fix the relationship. Alas, no... I was mistaken. She swallowed her pride privately, for my benefit, but to do so publicly was unthinkable for her.

She might not understand that I resorted to social media, because I have no sycophantic courtiers to prop up whatever ill-founded notions I want to believe - I have no "yes" men who tell me I'm right, even when they only know half the story. I've lived most of my life feeling isolated and alone. I couldn't be much more alone than now: estranged from my family for over 2 years and all my contact with my friends is through social media. When I'm not working, I have almost zero face-to-face human contact. Social media is the only place where my side of the story gets told. Social media is the only place where my friends can give me support, making me feel a little less isolated, alone, and vulnerable. It's easy to beat up a person who has nobody sticking up for them.

She's not a bully, unlike my ex-wife. She's a nice person and we were best friends. It's just that I became very fragile when I lost everything - my family, my regular social contact with friends, my job, my financial security. Her inflated ego brutally squashed what little security and happiness I had, as she foolishly boasted about being a public figure; a minor celebrity; at the centre of the universe.

There were periods of humility, and I thought we would get through the problems we'd had, but instead, she has thrown herself back into her career with some gusto, and I must satisfy myself with the sole and unintended benefit of now being at liberty to consider opportunities outside London.

I write this, largely driven by fear. Fear of being alone, but also knowing that loneliness and isolation are deadly. It's more fear of death - through suicide, obviously - that's caused me to write this today. I feel alone and I'm mourning the loss of that all-to-brief period where I felt I'd met my lifelong companion. It's taking longer to come to terms with and comprehend how it all fell apart so quickly, than one might intuitively believe would be necessary: to grieve for the loss and move on. Isolation breeds isolation, and I've had almost nobody to talk to about the breakup; nobody supporting me; nobody on my side.

Having learned from my mistakes of the past, I don't want to be with somebody, just because I'm afraid of being alone, but I had to write this today, because my last relationship was as close to perfect as I've ever imagined it possible to achieve... but yet it still ended, and it ended badly. I guess the lesson I learned is that there are really great girls out there, but there's going to be irreconcilable conflict where their delusions of grandeur unfortunately collide with a collapse in my own self-esteem.

Feeling as alone and isolated as I do - connected to the world almost exclusively through social media - makes it frighteningly easy to seriously consider suicide as an option. I think about a handful of people who regularly ask how I am, on Twitter and Facebook, and a friend who has helped me immensely with a number of practical matters: these are the fragile little hooks on which I hang, suspended over the precipice. Many suicides will be a result of a failed relationship, but the effect of my latest breakup was counter-intuitive: now I feel safe to discuss the complete collapse in my self-esteem, without somehow laying blame at the feet of my ex. I don't want people to feel responsible. I wouldn't kill myself to spite a person. I don't even want to die angry with the world.

My ex's productive output is out there in public and it causes me great pangs of pain, as it reminds me what I loved about her, but also I am able to see that I was damaging her career... an unwelcome distraction at a time when big opportunities were presenting themselves for her to demonstrate her very best work. "If you love them, let them go" is an oft-quoted platitude, and I wish I were able to claim in all honesty that I was acting so selflessly. In truth, it's more like "I can see that she's better off without me".

This is the seed of the suicidal: "the world is better off without me".

Tags: #suicide #relationships

This is a story about penny pinching...

Here's the friend I respect most in the world, for being able to balance having nice stuff - house, car, motorbike and other 'toys' - but he's also really careful with money, to the point of being able to live for a really long time doing some quick part-time work that brought in just enough to pay the bills.

He was also my business partner for a while, and I admire him for his attention to detail and pride that he takes in having his accounts immaculately kept, and for claiming every penny he's entitled to, in expenses and other tax reliefs.

We couldn't be much more different in character, I think, when it comes to money.

I remember being poor. Really poor. I used to run out of petrol. I used to have such crappy cars there was always a big stress about whether I'd get to work or not. Buying meat was a luxury and I would always have to budget down to my last £10 each month. The idea of saving money was as absurd as spending money I didn't have on things people take for granted - breakdown insurance, holidays, brand new tyres.

My wages started to go up fast, and I even doubled my wage in the space of a few days, when I went contracting. Finally I could save up some money - which I did - and buy a reliable car to get to work. However, I also started to enjoy some nice things, like a holiday to New Zealand and I admit that I used money to help my self-esteem, buying Harrods hampers at Christmas and the like.

After all the relentless bullying at school, I felt I was 'owed' two things, for all the daily suffering. I wanted sex and money, to validate my worth as an individual. Having these things made up for being an outcast, a pariah, isolated, unpopular and even seemingly disliked by most. All that time I should have been fingering girls in the bushes while drunk on cider, I was geeking out on my computer. It's not that I didn't want to have a group of friends doing normal teenaged stuff... it was that it was actively denied to me. I needed sex to repair the rejection and damaged self esteem of my teens. I felt like I was 'worth' the money, because of the hours I'd put in, alone in my bedroom hunched over a keyboard.

My friend, the money saving expert, bought sports cars and went through a phase of using sex to feel better about himself, but at some point, he started to take pleasure in being efficient with his money. Instead, I was relieved to no longer have to worry about money. I got to the point where I never had to check my bank balance, and that's how I always wanted it to be from then on: that was the objective for me... to make money almost invisible and unintrusive.

For many happy years, I didn't watch the pennies, but the pounds looked after themselves. I didn't fret about whether I owed the taxman £6 or £600 for the interest on my savings - I just made a guesstimate that was more than it was likely to be, and didn't bother with the detail. I didn't do my expenses: it didn't seem worth the time, fiddling with all those receipts. I didn't budget. I didn't try and keep my costs down. I just lived my life, and money wasn't a thing. Sure, I would give some paper or plastic to a waiter at the end of a meal. Sure, I would hand over paper or plastic to a sales assistant at the tillls, in exchange for goods. Sure, my mortgage and bills got paid via direct debit. But the actual money part - I couldn't have told you whether I just paid £1 for a loaf of bread or £3: I just wanted the bread.

Now, having been on a merry-go-round that's gone faster and faster, as I've needed to earn more and more just to stay on top of ballooning expenses and periods where I've been unwell, I'm faced with the sudden stark realisation that I can't keep going round and round like that - it's getting nowhere. I'm going to have to take a bite out of a big shit sandwich. Everything's fallen apart, seemingly overnight.

Whether budgeting and penny-pinching is a complete waste of time now, given how deep in the shit I am, I don't know, but I've got to face up to a future where my income is unlikely to ever dwarf my expenditure, and I'm going to have to live like the other 98% - carefully budgeting and financial planning.

Frankly, it might be a bit of a horse-bolted/stable-door situation, and I find myself in the far worse situation of not only having to budget, but also deal with an income-expenditure disparity that no amount of budgeting could solve. It's an unknown world to me: bad credit ratings, debt collection agencies and payment plans with unhappy creditors. I know that the stress of it can drive people to suicide, and I'm already in a bad way, so this fear of the hell that will probably be unleashed upon me, is pushing me beyond what I can cope with.

I've already got to leave my home, move somewhere I've never been before, figure out if there's some work nearby I'm well enough to do. There's everything I own to be boxed up. I need to leave the city where I've lived the longest I've ever lived anywhere. There's the apartment I've called home for two years to say goodbye to. These are not trivial things. In fact, they're traumatic.

My money saving expert has given me one bit of advice, to stop the rot, but there's problems everywhere I look. There are huge stains on the carpet that my ex-flatmate kindly left. There are other things around the flat that the letting agent will want to charge me for cleaning or replacing, no matter how good a job I do myself. If I don't get out of this flat that I can't afford the rent on ASAP, my letting agent on their own could financially destroy me, before I even think about a little part-time work to put some food in my mouth.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. I had a supportive partner. That's what a hypomanic episode can do to you - stupid decisions, unrealistic beliefs. I don't even know what happened, but I have a vague recollection of feeling like I had LOTS of options and LOTS of time & support. I remember that I had projects I was excited about. I went from being too depressed to work, to suddenly being too interested in a project to bother with work... I was going to make money while I slept!

So, I feel like I was driving down the motorway on a dry clear day. The road was quiet. Then, suddenly, my car was barrel-rolling down the road, with me being thrown around like a rag doll, covered in glass and blood and with serious injuries when the obliterated car finally skidded to a stop, upside down. The shock of it feels just like that. I don't know where to begin.

I hope - even though it's nothing I've ever hoped for before - that I can follow my money saving expert's advice, and I can rescue myself from the worst possible consequences. I don't want bankruptcy, county court judgements and all the other stuff that will follow you round like a bad smell for years, and even ruin your career prospects.

You can't accuse me of pride being the problem though: I've already slept rough, sold my car and used public transport and my bike, lived frugally. I'm trying my best to sell off items that would be beyond the means of many of our least well off. I'm not too proud to eat value beans and supermarket own-brand goods, or even shop around for the undesirable fruit, veg and bits of meat that most consumers don't want. I'm no martyr; no hero. It probably won't be enough anyway. You can't go from having support and a plan, to nothing - overnight - and expect that everything'll work out. There's no way it can.

Just so you know: I spend a huge proportion of my waking hours just wanting to end it. End the stress. End the worry. End the effort and exertion that will result in what, exactly? The possibility of being ripped to pieces by the courts anyway? It's not much to hope for, is it?

I don't remember ever feeling so suicidal and desperate.

Tags: #suicide