This is a story about the wilderness...

Why am I not more rich and comfortable? Why don't I have financial security and a home which nobody can evict me from? Why do all my years of experience and all the massive multinational corporations on my CV assure me a comfortable standard of living?

Conversely, why haven't I ended up with a criminal record? Why haven't I ended up in jail? Why am I not dead?

Why am I not bankrupt? Why am I not sleeping rough? Why am I not an alcoholic or a drug addict?

Why is my physical health OK? Why is my mental health OK?

I've picked up my life and carried on as if nothing happened, but something very major did happen.

Luckily I had a head-start of 3 or 4 years on my peer group, at least in terms of career progression and the accumulation of wealth. When we do the math, it seems I'm no more than 1 or 2 years behind where I should be, and I'm rapidly catching up again.

I get frustrated that it's going to take a couple of years before I'm back in the position - in material terms - which matches my skillset and experience. I get frustrated that there's no way that I can accelerate the process of clawing my way back to the position in society which I used to occupy.

I could have arrived back at a position of health, wealth and prosperity much sooner, but my experiences during my wilderness years have altered me for life. Most people live in terror of loss: Losing money, losing assets, losing relationships and damaging their reputation. I learned during the difficult wilderness years that the world is a big enough place that even the most madcap escapades go entirely unnoticed.

It is with great pleasure and pride that I am returning myself to a position of status which gradually begins to approach the status I held before my fall from grace.

Is it shallow and vain and pretentious, to wish to maintain our status in society?

Bullshit.

At first, it was an adventure to sell my house, sell my car, give away all my possessions, sleep rough and truly start my life all over again. I felt a great sense of relief that I was unburdened by the constant worry that what I had worked so hard to get and to achieve, would be stolen or damaged. It was liberating and I had the time of my life, truly free from any sense of responsibilities or duties. I entrusted my fate to good fortune, and a healthy dollop of my own wit and ingenuity.

Then, I realised that my wide-eyed innocence and trust in people laid me wide open to exploitation. I'm sure I hardly had any money stolen off me by other homeless people, but as I began to get my life back on track, I found that there are an entitled, spoiled, brattish, immoral group of people who've never known suffering or deprivation, and they see it as their birthright to dip their hand into my wallet, instead of paying their own way. I attracted a lot of freeloaders, who had no guilt or conscience, when it came to stealing from me - these were people who've never slept rough; these were people who've never known what it's like to lose everything, and they never will, because they're spoiled brats who can telephone their mothers and fathers and receive massive cash handouts. Those freeloaders will never have setbacks in their lifetimes, because they're from wealthy, generous, loving families.

It's a source of great shame and damage to my self-esteem that I drive a very battered and rusty old car, and that I live in rented home in one of the poorest areas of the country. It's a source of great shame and embarrassment that I have indebted myself in order to pay my rent and bills, simply to house myself and feed myself. It's a source of constant worry and anxiety that my work colleagues might wonder why one of their "superstar" consultants dresses in worn-out clothes and gives away other clues which hint that the wealth they would expect me to have, is not present: I'm poor.

It's shit being poor. It's shit being poor when you work in a world where everybody who does my job as well as I do is not poor. The loss of status should not be underestimated.

When a man loses status, he is highly likely to lose his life.

It's one of the hardest things to do, to recover from a major setback, which has ruined your finances, your secure housing, your material possessions, like your new car and your nice clothes. The hard thing is knowing that everybody can see that you fucked up and it takes years and years and years to put things right. Some people will never be able to recover.

My recovery is not about mental health. My recovery is not about alcohol. My recovery is not about drugs. My recovery is about self-esteem, which is damaged so drastically, and is so hard to repair, that for most people they will just give up and kill themselves. It's a fatal blow.

One of the reasons I keep trying and I keep writing, is because I want to be one of the few people who's lived to tell the tale of coming back from such a major setback. Plenty of people have survived, but few have gone on to thrive. I want to tell the story of regaining my pride and my dignity, and of being indistinguishable from a person who didn't spend 5 lost years in the wilderness.

This is our little secret. Every day I pay off a little bit more of my debt and I fix up a little bit more of my life. Every day I become a little bit more like the person I would've been, if it hadn't been for my missing 5 years. This is our secret, because the joke is on those people who have absolutely no idea what I've been through.

At work, I feel so proud that I'm doing valuable work and I'm almost back to being as good as I always thought I was going to be, by the time I reached the age I am. I'm so proud of the work I do. I'm so pleased that my brain and my natural aptitudes and the talents I was fortuitously given, are being put to good use and I feel as competent and capable as anybody. I don't feel damaged, and that's so important for my self-esteem.

This isn't about pride. This isn't about regret. This is about the damaging effect that loss of status can have on a man, with fatal consequences.

Tags: #career #suicide

This is a story about prostitution...

It is fashionable to describe a female prostitute as a victim, which is a claim we should examine more closely. Certainly, few of us would choose sex work instead of a so-called dream job but what would that dream job need to look like, in order to fit the bill?

The bill.

How is a person supposed to pay for a crack, meth and/or heroin addiction on ordinary wages? How is a person with the chaotic lifestyle of a drug addict supposed to be organised enough to travel to work, arrive on time, and be presentable enough for a regular job?

Turn tricks. Score. Get high. Repeat.

If we examine the behaviour of an average low-income law-abiding productive member of society, we can see the same pattern of behaviour: Work a job which is thoroughly unpleasant, get paid at the end of the week, immediately spend the money on a binge drinking session, and then start all over again.

If we examine the behaviour of a high-income professional in a so-called 'good' job, we can see the same pattern of behaviour: An entire career which feels like a dead-end bullshit job, getting paid at the end of the month and immediately spending all the money on status symbols - the house, the car - in a never-ending cycle of performance reviews, pathetic promotions, job interviews and pitiful pay-rises.

"Do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life" is more applicable to heroin addiction than it is to the pursuit of a dream job that doesn't actually exist.

What did those saintly Oxfam charity workers - who were presumably working in their dream job - infamously end up spending the charity's money on? Prostitutes.

Did we conveniently forget that sex work is well paid with flexible hours? Did we conveniently forget that somebody without academic qualifications can do sex work without having to attend a job interview? Did we conveniently forget that those who have criminal records or other black marks against their name, such that they would find themselves excluded from conventional employment, are able to earn money doing sex work?

Also, do we wish to disbelieve all the very many sex workers who tell us that they choose sex work of their own free will?

Women choose to be prostitutes for very many reasons, but some of the reasons we choose to ignore include the gratification, the reward of the job. Just as a chef likes to delight diners with gastronomic creations, and takes great pride in their work, can the same not be said of prostitutes: That they like to give pleasure? Should we simply forget the fact that sex is a biological imperative, which carries pleasurable rewards: It feels nice to fuck. We get a dopamine hit from having sex, just like eating, drinking, smoking, drinking tea & coffee and all the other vices.

Of course, it's true that if sex is your job, sometimes sex isn't sex... it's just work. We are all very familiar with those times that work isn't pleasurable. In fact, work is often unbearable.

"Oh but prostitution is so unbearable" I hear you cry. It's so relatable, the idea of an ugly fat, sweaty, smelly man, with bad breath, doing something so intimate with us - "to us" - that we struggle to imagine anything worse, short of painful torture. And yet we must confront this truth: You get a lot of buck for your bang.

If we examine every way of making money, we find an relationship between how much we get paid and how much exploitation is involved. The more unethical and exploitative something is, the more lucrative it is.

A company boss might earn a thousand times more than his employees, but this is because he or she is prepared to inflict misery and suffering upon everyone who toils on his or her behalf. A software engineer developing artificial intelligence might earn a very high salary, but this is because he or she is prepared to ignore the potential negative consequences to society. A university professor might enjoy a very intellectually stimulating life, but this is because he or she is prepared to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of the developing world, and its economic enslavement, to support a life of such incredible privilege.

We must distinguish between the slaves, the exploiters, and those who sit somewhere in-between.

We must acknowledge that, in the majority of cases where a man pays a woman for sex, she exploits the fact that he wants more sex than he can get for free, while he exploits the fact that she wants money to pay for drugs, sold by disadvantaged drug dealers who exploit the only money-earning route available to them. The drugs come from countries that are desperately impoverished, deliberately so that the labour and natural resources of those countries can be exploited by the men, who exploit the man, who exploits the man, who exploits the man, who exploits the man who's eventually managed to save up enough of his money to pay a woman for sex.

Do you really know what the company you work for is up to? Do you really know where the money in your paycheque came from?

If you follow the money, you'll see that most of the so-called economy is a massive money-laundering scheme, involving banks, accountancy firms, law firms and numerous shill enterprises, funded with dirty money, which originated in weapons, war, slavery and waste of natural resources. If you're not a slave - working for nothing - then you're probably an exploiter, so who are you to say who is doing the most exploitation?

Those who have the luxury of time to sit around pointing the finger and wringing their hands about 'victims' they know nothing about, are probably the ones who are the biggest beneficiaries of human exploitation, for how else did they achieve their opportunity for such idle talk?

Wouldn't we all dearly love to idly pontificate in some revered institution, and get paid for our trouble? Wouldn't we all choose to think, write, talk and create art, instead our daily toil, if we were given the choice?

I respect the prostitute. I respect anybody who has figured out how to get money and get what they want, by exploiting the minimum number of people. Give me your money, here is your sex. It's a simple transaction of two-way exploitation: No victim, both are slaves.

We're all junkies and prostitutes, in one way or another.

Tags: #sex

This is a story about being on tenterhooks...

I'm a living contradiction. I choose security and certainty over the vain hope of hitting the jackpot. If I was given the choice between having a "B" grade, but not having to do any work or suffer any uncertainty, versus the potential to achieve an "A+" then I would take the "B" grade without a moment's hesitation. If you think that's settling for mediocrity, you're wrong - I choose my battles and I achieve "A+" grades all the time... as an accidental consequence of pursuing the things I'm interested in and passionate about.

The other part of my contradictory personality is that I choose to take incredible risks. I jump out of planes. I climb rock faces. I scale high mountains. I ride gigantic waves in gale-force winds. Why the hell would I do that?

There are a lot of risk-reward-cost-benefit calculations that go on inside my head.

I've gathered a lot of data.

The decision to take dangerous highly addictive drugs might seem like one of the most baffling choices that a person would elect to do. For example, taking heroin is seen as an indication of character flaw, but being a BASE jumper is seen as cool, although the latter carries the same risk of premature death.

Let's do a bit more in-depth analysis, shall we?

Cost of being a rock climber:

• Rock boots: £45
• Harness: £75
• Chalk bag & chalk ball: £15
• Rope £150
• Helmet £50
• Belay plate: £20
• 10 quickdraws: £150

TOTAL: £505

So, for somebody who wants to climb a rock face safely, the minimum amount they're going to have to spend is over £500. Also, you might fall and die. Let's re-iterate that: It's pretty damn obvious that if you climb up a vertical rock face and you lose your grip, you can fall to the ground and be killed on impact.

Cost of being a mountaineer:

• Crampon-compatible boots: £200
• Crampons: £120
• Base layers: £40
• Mid-layers: £80
• Shell layer jacket: £250
• Shell layer salopettes: £180
• Ice axes: £250
• Helmet: £50
• 9mm waterproof rope: £175
• Ice screws: £120
• Warthogs: £40
• Deadman: £40
• Backpack: £150
• Survival bag: £20
• Down sleeping bag: £300
• Down jacket: £200
• Tent: £350
• Sleeping mat: £60

TOTAL: £2,625

So, for somebody who wants to climb a 4,000m+ mountain (Mont Blanc etc) then you're going to have to shell out more than £2,500. In fact, it's going to cost you a lot more, because you're going to need lots of things I didn't list, like spare pairs of socks, spare base layers, and also a stove, cooking utensils, plus all the other expedition gear. You're not going to have much spare change out of £3,500. Did I mention that you're highly likely to be killed by falling rocks, avalanches, falling into a crevasse, or simply plummeting to your death.

I shan't follow the same process for kitesurfing, yacht sailing or skydiving, but the financial cost of putting your life in danger can be staggering, especially when we consider that rugged outdoorsy types are somehow healthy and laudable people of good character and moral fibre; made of the right stuff.

Another group of people who we might consider are the entrepreneurs. Who are these people who reject conventional employment - salaried jobs - and instead choose to make their money by means other than selling their singular body and brain. Are these people risk takers too?

In fact, all the celebrated members of society have one thing in common: they've had the financial means to pursue avenues that are not available to most of the populace, because the need to eat, be housed and be clothed is an insistent demand which is too pressing for all but those who enjoy considerable economic advantages. Do not believe the bullshit - rugged adventurers are not brave souls and entrepreneurs are not gifted geniuses... they're all people who've had the financial backing in order to pursue their expensive dreams. Don't believe any of the "self-made man" bullshit. Behind every "self made" man are a whole bunch of people who've underwritten their risk.

I busted my shoulder up pretty badly - broken bones - on a beach in a remote part of Brasil. My startup co-founder broke his leg very badly indeed in roughly the same part of Brasil. That part of the world is many hours away from a good hospital with a surgeon and operating theatre where complex orthopaedic surgery could be performed. Would we have been so adventurous if we hadn't become somewhat complacent about the bubble we live in?

I'm on probation at the moment. I'm on best behaviour. I'm trying to impress my new girlfriend. I'm trying to prove that I'm a good boyfriend.

But, do I really think that I'm going to fail?

Have I ever been worried that I'm going to fall to my death?

Have I ever been worried that world-class medical establishments and all the many wonders of modern civilisation aren't rapidly available in an emergency? Have I ever been worried that somebody wouldn't patch me up as good as new, if I had an accident?

It's never really crossed my mind that I might not get what I want. Of course, I've had heart-stopping moments when I've suddenly realised how staggeringly exposed I am. I've spent so much of my life living on the edge that I've become desensitised to the worrying fact that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the more times I put my life at risk, the greater the chance that I'm going to be badly injured or killed.

I was worried that I was too fat, old, mentally ill and addicted to drugs and alcohol to ever meet somebody who'd fall in love with me. I was worried that I was too indebted and lacking in any assets - such as a fast car and big house - to be attractive to any object of my affections. I was worried that I was a washed-up loser; a has-been.

Our whole lives are lived under Damocles' sword, somewhat. We could mess up our exams. We could mess up our careers. We could mess up our relationships. There's never a single moment when we can really relax and feel like we're not on probation in some way.

I guess I'm pretty sanguine. I get anxious and I torment myself a very great deal with catastrophic thinking but ultimately, I feel the fear and do what I was always going to do anyway. I'm well aware of the innumerable and virtually unimaginable risks, but if you examine my behaviour - as opposed to what I write - then you'll see that I never choose the low-risk option; you'll see that I continuously pursue the very best that life has to offer, despite stress levels which are almost intolerable.

Tomorrow is an important day, but I already know that I'm going to be OK. My risk is underwritten. What's the worst that can happen? Death? Hospitalisation? Been there. Done that.

Tags: #relationships #kitesurfing #sailing #climbing #mountaineering #adventure #friends #startup

This is a story about radio silence...

On June 20 of this year I attempted to write my life story from 2011 onwards, covering the happiest, most successful period of my life and the pinnacle of my career - doing a tech startup accelerator program in Cambridge with a cohort of incredible people - and the subsequent reasons why I stepped down as CEO, separated from my wife, sold my house and settled my acrimonious divorce.

I wrote 10,000 words in a non-stop brain dump. Once I started I couldn't hold back - the words flooded out onto the page.

It was supposed to be succinct. It was supposed to be a simple set of bullet points.

It turned out to be a lot harder than I thought, to write down even the first part.

Part two has a lot to cover:

• Homelessness
• Hospitals
• Police
• Drug addiction
• Psych wards
• Suicide attempts
• More banking jobs
• More IT projects
• Moving to Manchester
• Moving to Wales
• Several relationships and breakups; love and loss
• Psychosis
• Self medication
• Alcohol
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Boredom
• Financial problems
• Near-bankruptcy
• Salvation

I'm not going to write part two in the same way that I wrote part one.

That was 6 months ago. This is now.

A lot can happen in 6 months.

As a quick recap, here are the problems I've been trying to tackle this year:

• £54,000 of debt
• Homeless
• No job
• No car
• Single
• Addicted to prescription drugs: sleeping pills, tranquillisers and painkillers
• Alcohol abuse
• Depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder

As if those problems weren't enough, in June I had relapsed onto supercrack. I'd been working but I'd lost my job - through no fault of my own - and I was in no hurry to get another one, because my addiction had returned with a vengeance. I was in a place with no family and only a handful of friends, none of whom were equipped to deal with my clusterfuck of issues. I was more-or-less alone, except for the people who I try to connect with on a daily basis through my blog, Twitter, Facebook and other digital means.

I came up with the title "No News is Bad News" because it's usually true. I came up with that title, because a period of silence on my blog is usually cause for concern. It's usually time to start phoning round the hospitals to see if I've been admitted. It's usually time to start worrying if I'm dead or dying.

Back in June - 6 months ago - the title was very apt, because I hadn't been online for a while. Losing my job had completely destroyed my hopes of dealing with the mountain of issues I was facing. Losing my job had wrecked my plans for recovery.

Today, my world looks very different.

I can't tell you too much - because it's private - but I'm writing from the comfort of my girlfriend's bed. Her bedroom is very pink and girly. She just brought me a plate with a generously buttered thick slice of toast and a glass of orange juice, which I am eating in bed. I'm getting crumbs in the bed and greasy finger-marks on my laptop.

I'm no longer living out of a suitcase in a hotel and eating in the same gastropub every night, sat at a table for one. I'm unofficially co-habiting. We only met a few weeks ago. The relationship is going fast. Too fast some might say.

I kiss my sweetheart good morning and wish her a good day as I depart for work. My journey takes no more than 15 minutes when the traffic is kind to me. I'm finding it easy to get up in the morning. I don't dread lonely evenings in a bland hotel room. I don't dread the unsustainable interminable monotony of miserable days in the office, and miserable evenings spent alone.

I'm going too fast though.

I'm working too hard.

It takes vast quantities of alcohol, sleeping pills and tranquillisers to prevent me from working 12 to 14 hour days. It requires a huge amount of effort to stop myself from working at the weekend. I'm desperate to achieve results as quickly as possible, because the finishing line is within sight.

It could be months before I'm well-and-truly out of the danger zone and enjoying some long-overdue financial security. It's definitely going to be a long time before I get truly settled at home and at work. I need to decide where I'm going to live and what I'm going to do for a job, on a more long-term basis. At some point, my good luck is going to run out and I'll be forced back into living out of a suitcase, maintaining a long-distance relationship, and having to face the anxiety and stress of proving myself in a new organisation, with a new set of work colleagues.

Mania has arrived. There's no doubt about that.

My manic energy has been ploughed into my day job, instead of my new novel. I worry that my work colleagues have noticed that I've completely obsessed by my project. I worry that the undesirable accompanying behaviours - irritability, rapid and pressured speech, arrogance and delusions of grandeur - will become so hard to hide in the office that I might be forced to disclose my bipolar disorder to my colleagues, in the hope that they'll be sympathetic.

My blog has been neglected, along with my friends.

I work too hard. I'm moving 'too fast' in my new relationship - the "L" word has been used and she has given me a key to her place. We're going on holiday together. All my original problems are still there, to some extent. I need to decide where to live, pay off my outstanding debts, drink less, quit the sleeping pills and tranquillisers, get my mania under control.

What else can I tell you?

I can't try to tell you too much all at once, even though I desperately want to. I want to sit down and write 10,000 words without taking a single break. I want to pour my heart out onto the page and tell you everything, but I'm trying to pump the brakes a little bit. I'm trying to be a little bit sensible, even though I'm clearly going too fast.

It feels like the week-long hiatus from blogging was not bad news. Perhaps it's good news? No. It's not good news. I'm not looking after myself. I'm not managing my bipolar very well. I'm allowing myself to become manic, for the purposes of achieving 'great' things at work. It's exciting to be manic after so many months of depression and misery.

It would be a good idea for me to resolve to resume my daily writing, but I'm wary of making unrealistic promises. Today, I'm coming to terms with the fact that my 3rd novel remains unfinished, when I had hoped to have completed it yesterday.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is my present situation in a nutshell.

Tags: #bipolar #relationships #debt #homeless #addiction #medication #alcohol #writing

This is a story about the hivemind...

It's getting late and I'm tired, so I thought I would retransmit some of the disturbing data that I receive. Having started this website about 3 years ago, Google quickly found it and began to index its contents to make it searchable, and therefore discoverable by anybody who uses its search engine and enters keywords which seem to be relevant, according to Google's algorithms.

A strange thing happens.

I get to see the search queries where my website appears in Google's search results - an impression - as well as the search queries which brought me a website visitor. What I write and publish on my blog makes it more likely that I'll appear as a high-ranking search result, and also more likely that I'll have visitors coming to my website for weird and wonderful things they're searching the internet for.

It turns out there are a lot of people who want to kill themselves.

I wrote a blog post a little while ago where I chose a title specifically to improve my search ranking, which I knew would work very well, so I tried to write something which was useful in some way. I thought to myself "why do so many people ask Google if they can drink themselves sober?" and I thought it was rather tragic that these people had reached such a level of desperation that they'd bother to sift through pages and pages of search results, hoping to find an easy answer. I felt like I should give those people an answer. I felt like those people should have the best possible answer I could muster.

Problematically, lots and lots and lots of people seem to want to suffocate themselves to death; to asphyxiate. More than any other thing, my website pops up time and time again on Google for people who are searching for answers to questions like "how do I kill myself with a plastic bag?".

Obviously, this is disturbing, but it also puts some responsibility on my shoulders.

This website is the second link on Google - second only to Wikipedia - if you are searching for information on the hypercapnic alarm response, which is the reason why you can't just hold your breath to kill yourself. People are quite fascinated, it seems, with the idea of suffocation, which I find very disturbing indeed - I could not imagine a worse way to die than gasping for air.

Given that a number of visitors will be directed here by Google in search of answers to their disturbing questions, I feel duty bound to give the most responsible and best answers that I possibly can, when those people are clearly desperate and vulnerable.

Firstly, do not kill yourself by suffocation. Your final moments of existence will be more horrendous than anything you've ever experienced in your life. The tragedy of self-suffocation - most often achieved inadvertently by hanging - is that you will trigger your most viceral survival instincts which your depression has robbed you of. Your survival instincts are merely dormant and imperceptible during the unbearable humdrum tedium of modern life. The tragedy of self-suffocation is that you will spend your final moments thinking "make it stop" but you will not mean life but in fact the terrible torment of the hypercapnic alarm response. You might think you've had bad anxiety and panic attacks, but you've not experienced anything that even comes close to your body's hard-wired survival instinct, which keeps you taking breath after breath, even though you feel dreadfully depressed and suicidal.

Remember of course that breathing is partially voluntary. We can choose to breathe fast or slow. We can choose to hyperventilate. We can choose to hold our breath... for a while. We cannot choose to hold our breath until we die. Almost nobody can choose to hold their breath until they lose consciousness. Besides, when we lose consciousness we lose our ability to make conscious choices, such as holding our breath.

The idea of an exit bag deals partially with the problem of resuming normal breathing as soon as we lose consciousness, except that the hypercapnic alarm response will cause you to claw desperately at the plastic to tear a hole in it, when the panic becomes unbearable. Your body has set safe limits, such that you will begin to feel the urge to save yourself well before you're in as much danger as you perceive. Perception-altering drugs can dangerously depress our breathing, because we're more impervious to the anxiety and stress that we would otherwise feel, causing us to increase our rate of breathing.

I've talked before about the role of high carbon dioxide concentration levels in the blood - quite literally hypercapnia - causing the alarm response. Because the hypercapnic alarm response is CO₂ dependent we can easily lose consciousness and asphyxiate when breathing almost any other gas, including the stuff which makes up 78% of the air we breathe: nitrogen. It's ironic to think that almost every single constituent part of the air all around us is deadly - including the oxygen - if we were to breathe it at high concentration. It's also shocking to think that carbon dioxide is only 0.004% of the air, but yet this is the only gas which warns us we're suffocating to death.

I don't write this because I'm feeling particularly suicidal. I write this because for some reason this website is the second place people come after visiting Wikipedia, when they're reading about humanity's battle between the conscious decision-making part of the brain - where we have free will apparently - and the part which stops us from killing ourselves by simply not bothering to take our next breath. I write this because people want to know, and if they're determined enough they're going to find out the answers.

I can see how determined people are to find out the answers to some pretty messed-up questions. I can see how many zillions of pages of results they trawled. I can see all the different ways that people ask the same disturbing question.

For sure, I ask myself how much I see a world which reflects the way I project myself outwardly. They say an angry man sees an angry world, for example. It shouldn't surprise me that my website brings a lot of people who are interested in topics relating to suicide, but it surprises me that so many people are interested in suffocating themselves to death, when it seems so doomed to fail and would cause such terrible suffering in those final moments when it succeeds. Don't people who want to die just want to fall asleep peacefully and not wake up? I know that's what I wanted, when I was suicidal.

If the world really does reflect upon ourselves, I don't understand why I don't have more variety in the kinds of suicidal ideation searches which bring visitors to me from Google. Where are the people asking about which direction they should slice their veins? Where are the people asking how to locate their carotid artery or jugular vein? Where are the people asking about lethal doses of various substances? Where are the people searching about how to calculate the right amount of rope to avoid decapitation or a lengthy period of terminal strangulation while suspended by the neck?

I've been simultaneously accused of writing irresponsibly while also applauded for discussing things which need to be discussed, if we're going to make any progress towards reducing suicide rates.

From looking more closely at my analytic data, I concluded that many of my visitors are concerned with animal welfare and particularly with the slaughter of livestock, which is often done by gassing the animals. I had written in my blog post, which has proven my most popular, that I was concerned about how awful it would be for little piggies if they were gasping for breath in their final moments before death. I had written about the curious question of whether dolphins could hold their breath to commit suicide or not.

I write this tonight, because I'm interested to know how much concern we have for humans, compared with other animals. It certainly concerns me that seemingly vast numbers of people want to know if they can kill themselves without even bothering to take a few short steps to the nearest window, or to locate a sharp object.

I write this provocatively as always. I'm transmitting out into the world to see what bounces back.

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about stubbornness...

I try not to talk about my friends too specifically, but shall attempt to tell you about two friends who are notable for both their differences and their similarities.

The first of my friends who I want to tell you about was undoubtably born into wealth and privilege. His father was a judge and the family has a number of homes around the globe in some of the most expensive cities to live in. His family is extremely asset rich and my friend grew up with servants in the household. Without being too indiscreet, my friend was called posh by even his upper-middle-class university chums, who attended the same Russel Group red-brick high-ranking academic institution, where the less intelligent privately schooled childen get sent when no amount of private tutoring and extra lessons are going to turn them 'gifted'.

The second of my friends who I want to tell you about is the polar opposite of the first in many ways. The other friend I want to tell you about was undoubtably born at a considerable disadvantage to 99.9% of other people, due to a life-limiting illness and relatively poor family. No private schools. No private tutors. Not much money at all, in fact. It would be too indiscret to say more, but it's incontrovertibly clear from the evidence that this other friend arrived at a similarly highly esteemed university on merit alone.

I wanted to tell you about these friends, because I feel as though I should give you - the reader - an idea of where I fall on some relative scale.

I was not born into wealth, but because my parents were drug addict alcoholic losers who refused to get a proper job and work hard, my grandmother saw fit to buy a house for my parents, in which to raise me, her only grandchild at the time - my sister wasn't born until I was 10 years old. The pity that my grandparents took on me - as an innocent small child being raised by druggie losers - meant that my parents received vast sums of financial assistance. This financial assistance meant that I attended better state schools than would have been possible if I'd been at the mercy of my selfish lazy layabout druggie loser parents. Those better schools happened to be in Oxford, where there happened to be many sons and daughters of many brilliant but underpaid academics who couldn't afford to send their children to private school.

We three friends ended up cohabiting briefly. My posh friend with the wealthy family had bought a £1.5 million house in London, thanks to a hefty deposit contribution from his parents manyfold more than most people would pay for an entire house. My friend from humble beginnings was a lodger. I was a house-guest of my friend, because I was selling the house I had bought entirely with money I fucking earned. My house was being sold as part of my divorce settlement.

A running joke I have with my posh friend is that I earn more per hour than him. This was the case for a very long time, but there was a brief period when I parked my ambitions, when meanwhile his career started to finally gain traction and his earnings began to skyrocket. Despite my years of mental health problems, homelessness, drug addiction, alcoholism, near-bankruptcy and a horrible acrimonious divorce which pretty much triggered the whole thing, I've been very pleased to continue to earn more than him per hour.

However, one should note that my friend from humble origins is now earning more per hour than both me and my posh friend. My humble friend has managed to make a property purchase, entirely with money generated by his hard work and dedication.

I wonder about two things. Firstly, why would you sell your soul and become a wage slave if you're born into obscene wealth? Secondly, why would you sell your soul and become a wage slave if your life is going to be short due to a health condition?

The latter is easier to answer, because I've enjoyed a very high standard of living thanks to doing what my lazy fucktard druggie parents didn't do, which was to get a proper job and work hard. The former is a harder question to answer. I have absolutely no idea why my posh friend works so hard when he could have had an amazing standard of living without lifting a finger. Equally, I have no idea why my own parents didn't bother to get off their lazy druggie arses and work for a fucking living, instead of sponging off my grandparents and the state.

This is the scale I judge myself on.

I'm no working-class hero.

I'm not from particularly humble origins.

I can't claim to have suffered dire poverty or incredible deprivation - my grandparents simply wouldn't allow it.

However, I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth either. If I speak with a posh accent and have a certain way with words, then all the credit for that is due to my school-friends in Oxford, who had professional and academic parents who were well educated and hard-working.

I'm in awe of my friend who's achieved so much more with so much less.

We all sit somewhere on the scale, with the extremes being the starving African orphan, versus the billionaire son of a billionaire who lives exclusively on a diet of prize-winning bullock semen or champion racehorse stallion semen, drunk out of a freshly cut rhino horn.

We all tell ourselves stories about how well we've done in life, or how hard our journeys have been. "Our life as a pair of hateful antisocial sponging co-dependent drug-addict alcoholic lazy layabouts was wonderful until this entitled baby came along, ruining our buzz" is what my parents say, even though contraception and abortion have been universally and easily available for their entire fucking lives.

I feel a bit guilty about wanting to have secure housing, financial security, employment security and a reasonable standard of living, but at least I fucking work for it even though I've sold my soul and become a wage slave. My work is relatively easy and I'm certainly highly rewarded for comparatively little effort. For sure, there's no justice in the world. There are people who work far harder than me in much worse conditions, who are paid a tiny fraction of what I earn. There are people who don't work at all and who have a fabulous standard of living, which I don't begrudge them, provided they haven't perpetrated some terrible crime against humanity in order to gain their enviable wealth.

If you want to categorise me as a spoiled, entitled shit, who has no perspective at all, you can use the presented evidence selectively to build your case. If you want to applaud me as an example of great success against the odds, you'll be able to use different parts of the same set of evidence to build a completely different case.

I really don't know what to tell you, because I can see the advantages I've enjoyed but I've also had to struggle through adversity. My aspirations seem normal enough in many ways, but in other ways what I want seems to be an unreasonable expectation. Do I want an unrealistically high standard of living?

The beauty of my situation - you must understand - is that I do not perpetrate the vile consequences of my selfish choices against any children who did not ask to be born, and I have exercised every opportunity to prevent pregnancies and maintained the backstop of pregnancy termination, although it's not my choice to make - at least I have made worst-case-scenario plans where necessary. Can you criticise me for my choices, when I have no dependents?

I think about my sister, of course, but the first 10 years of my life were spent alone... so very alone. When I think of childhood, I think of loneliness, bullying and neglect. When I think of childhood, I think how much my parents loved drugs and alcohol; I think how much they used to love lying around drunk, high or both, doing fucking nothing; unproductive and idle. How dearly I wanted to be loved and cared for properly. How dearly I wanted the security and protection that parents are supposed to deliver, but they were too intoxicated to give a shit about anything than their substances of abuse and their selfish wants.

Why the hell am I writing about this stuff?

I wanted to write something short.

I wanted to write something fun.

I guess I was scared I was going to write something smug.

My life is going alright at the moment - pretty damn good - and I'm wary of getting carried away. I could quite easily lose perspective. I'm scared that I might forget how hard it's been to get here, because it's also been easy in some ways. My life has ludicrous contrast and comparing myself to my friends often does little to inform my judgement.

Sorry if I seem smug and entitled in the coming months. I hope you've followed the story and you feel pleased that my life is very different from how it was when everything was fucked up. I hope you see I've worked hard to get where I've got even though I was never a starving African orphan.

Tags: #friends #childhood #parents

This is a story about drug dependency...

This is how I function. This is how I normalise myself. This is how I comply with society's demands. This is how I cope with social jet-lag. In our fit-in-or-fuck-off culture, this is how I conform. These are my crutches. I might appear functional and unimpaired. It might be somewhat insulting or offensive to describe myself as struggling in any way - perhaps I should instead talk about my wealth and privilege and acknowledge that since being born with a silver spoon in my mouth, my life has been uninterrupted gilded luxury; I've never known pain; I've never known suffering.

Think about the starving African children.

I comparison with the 8 or 9 bottles of red wine I was consuming every week - drinking alone - my use of a few sleeping pills and tranquillisers seems relatively safe and healthy.

This is all I have left.

I've had to eke out my dwindling supplies for far longer than I'd expected to. My opportunities to "re-up" have been constricted and constrained. I've been forced into drug withdrawal, which mercifully has been bearable because of my successful rationing strategies.

Insomnia has been the price I've paid for economising; suddenly cutting back on the medications I've become dependent on. Hypomania has been a very real and tangible consequence of the brain chemical destabilisation.

Perhaps I shouldn't meddle with my mind? Perhaps I should put my faith in the medical community? Perhaps there are people who know what's best for me?

Ironically, I'm using these medications - obtained on the black market - to plaster over the cracks and blend in with the very people who are specifically tasked with deciding what's best for you. I'm a member of the paternalistic elite. One should always remember that the people dishing out the advice and prescriptions are just as fucked up as everybody else.

My hypomania constantly threatens to boil over and create a disaster. My hypomania is a constant threat to all the health and wealth I've managed to accumulate this year. My hypomania is almost impossible to conceal, constantly attempting to sneak out from under the cover and camouflage I've carelessly draped over it, in the hopes of it being ignored and not talked about by my discreet, polite and extremely civilised colleagues.

Unable to sufficiently bludgeon my brain into submission to society's demands, using powerful psychiatric medications, my mask slips.

Exhaustion from the toll of 11.5 consecutive months desperately attempting to re-enter civilised society has reduced me to surviving on my instincts. I speak without thinking. It is only my well-practiced and well-rehearsed routines which allow me to continue to appear functional, when my mind has crumbled and descended into outright insanity internally. If I could only sit mute in my office chair at my desk, I would be fine, but unfortunately stuff pops into my head and pours out of my mouth before I have a chance to hold my tongue.

My medication dependency is a cruel mistress. My anxiety skyrockets in the late afternoon and evenings as my short-acting tranquilliser wears off. My insomnia robs me of refreshing and energy-replenishing sleep, leaving me almost paralysed by panic attacks about the simple task of getting out of bed, having a shower, getting dressed and going to work. Unless I take the right amount of pills at the right time, my mask of sanity quickly slips. The illusion of a functional productive member of society quickly evaporates, the moment that I skip a dose or start reducing my medication.

Of course, I'm hopelessly dependent. I admit it. So what?

My life revolves around my regular medication doses. So what?

Doesn't anybody's life revolve around cyclical things? Life and death, sunrise and sunset, summer and winter, weekdays and weekends, work and leisure, awake and asleep, hungry and satiated, horny and spent, love and loss. Some of the cycles are societally and culturally enforced to remain the same year-round, when it's clear that it's unnatural. Why the hell don't we sleep more in winter, when the days are shorter? Why the hell don't we sleep more when we're tired? Who the hell invented the fucking alarm clock and the 9 to 5 office job anyway?

I am quite literally tyrannised and oppressed - abusively coerced - into compliance with health-damaging social rituals, lest I be excluded from society; marginalised. It's in my rational economic self-interest to comply, but it's in the interests of my mental health to refuse to comply. Non-compliance will be met with harsh and intolerable economic sanctions.

Of course I seek out and consume the pharmaceuticals which 'normalise' me and allow me to cope; to function.

You might be surprised that I'm a junkie who needs his fix so that he can work a boring office job. You might think that junkies take drugs to feel pleasure and otherwise get high, but my drug dependency is mandated by the otherwise unbearable awfulness of the 9 to 5 grind.

You might think that people get rich off drugs by selling them. You might think that drugs will ruin your life, my drug dependency has been a mandatory part of repairing my life. Do you really think that it's humanly possible to achieve the kind of comeback - the recovery - which I've managed to complete during the past 11.5 months of turning up at the office and acting normal, without access to the full range of pharmaceutical options?

I've done the impossible: gotten off the streets, where I was sleeping rough, gotten out of the hostels, gotten off the terrible drugs, gotten out of the psych wards, repaid unimaginably huge debts, got myself a place to live of my own, got myself a respectable good job, held down that job, impressed my colleagues, delivered high quality work on time and on budget.

You think that was possible without performance enhancing drugs? Are there laws that say I can't use the very best of medical technology to allow me to function at my very best in a workplace environment? I'm not an athlete. I can use whatever the fuck I want and I have done.

It might seem logical to presume that I must now have a massive drug habit, because I've leaned so heavily on unhealthy coping mechanisms to get me to the point I'm at today.

I use the word "dependency" very carefully.

It's true that technically I am dependent on medications. It's true that abrupt cessation of the 2 or 3 medications I use on a regular basis would be catastrophic for my career, my reputation, my finances, my stability and all the other things in the house-of-cards which constitutes my life.

However, the doses I take are laughably negligible.

Instead of being in a horrible mess, the dose which maintains me in a functional and stable state is totally reasonable and acceptable. The problems I've stored up for the future - by becoming dependent on medications for normal day-to-day functioning - are pathetically tiny insignificant problems compared with the goddam mountainous obstacles I've had to tackle to get this far.

It concerns me that my stash is now critically low, because my whole happy healthy wealthy future hinges upon the continuation of the well-established routine for another 6 to 12 months, at the very least. If I can carry on with my dirty junkie medication dependency for another 18 months I will be rich as fuck compared to the struggling masses, which would be an unexpected result for anybody who's been brainwashed to believe that junkies like me are no-hope losers.

I don't go to the doctor. I don't have a psychiatrist. I don't have a psychologist. I don't have a community mental health team (CMHT) or a crisis team. I do what the fuck I want.

My experiments with being completely medication-free earlier in the year were a total disaster. I do hope that one day I'll be able to quit the pills, but I don't see how I'll ever be able to do when my health needs directly contradict capitalism's need to exploit me as an expendable commodity. There is a fundamental incompatibility between human needs and corporations' needs. There is a systemic inability to cope with anybody who deviates from the top of the bell curve.

I'm different, and I no longer expect society to accomodate me. I accept that I must alter myself - with pharmaceuticals - so that I can accomodate society's inflexible demands for homogeny and conformity.

I swallow a sleeping pill so that my social jet-lag is medically corrected. I swallow a short-acting tranquilliser so that the existential dread of working a pointless bullshit meaningless office job is bearable. I'm not overjoyed or happy to be doing it. In fact, I'm not happy at all about any of the situation. It would be fucking weird if I was artificially happy all the fucking time, because there's not a lot to be happy about during the death-throes of late capitalism.

You know what makes me happy? Spooning. Kittens. Holidays. Sex. Dreaming about going to live in a cabin in the woods. Delicious food. Binging on mindless entertainment. Extreme sports. Writing.

Should I be attempting to live the dream? Should I be trying to have it all? Should I mix work and pleasure?

Yes, I'm going to do all those things but you have to pay to play and it costs a fuckload of cash to make dreams come true.

I'll leave you with this quote:

"The power of inclosing land and owning propriety, was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murther their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or theeve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand, by the power of the sword; and so you justifie the wicked deeds of your fathers" -- A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England, Gerrard Winstanley

It's up to the reader to decide whether I'm a Lord of the Manor, born into wealth and enjoying inheritance from my ancestors who plundered and stole. The fact that you've persevered reading this text in English using a computer or smartphone puts you into a certain socioeconomic set and suggests a level of academic achievement, which might suggest you might have benefitted equally from "the power of the sword" although you did not "kill or theeve" yourself.

All I can say of myself is that I'm trying to play by the rules in a rigged game. Nobody said I wasn't allowed to use performance enhancing drugs. This isn't sport, it's survival.

Tags: #medication #bipolar #mentalhealth #sleep #insomnia #career #addiction

This is a story about sustained effort...

I like to concentrate on one thing at a time. I like to be hyper-focussed and blinkered, and to devote all my energy and attention towards achieving a single goal. I like to live my life in an artificially simplified way, by aggressively cutting away anything which seems superfluous; a distraction from my main task.

Unfortunately, I have several concurrent tasks:

• My work
• My debts
• My writing
• My love-life

There are more - such as friends, family, health & fitness, hobbies etc - but I'm not listing those, because I've deemed them temporarily nonessential.

In fact, I had deemed dating to be nonessential, but my life had become too lonely and austere to be bearable. I was torn between investing in my [nonexistent] social life and looking for love. I chose the latter, because of how long it had been since I'd hugged or kissed anybody. Intimacy is important.

My work is arguably a task which will never be completed, but my debts have almost been dealt with. The sum total of my savings is £30,000 and the sum total of my debts is £29,000, so I'm finally 'in the black' although it will be some time before I'm able to release the money and free myself from the bonds of usury. Then, the question is how much money do I really need to live a happy life? I have to decide about this thing people call "work-life-balance" which I always thought was a myth. Without the millstone of debt around my neck, suddenly I gain enormous freedom of choice.

My writing has been the casualty, of late.

Hypomania was rearing its ugly head, threatening to destroy all my hard work building a good reputation in the office. I got a cold and my brain was horrendously sluggish. I suffered alcohol abuse, bad diet, lack of exercise and general neglect of everything in my life, because I was so single-minded in my mission to pay back my debts. My mind was telling me how brilliant I am, that I've managed to rescue myself from a dire situation, successfully deliver some software projects, impress my colleagues, work hard and generally function in society pretty well. I've been getting up early and going to the office. I haven't been taking time off sick. I haven't had much time off on holiday. I've just worked and it's paying off, but I'm so exhausted that I'm going a little crazy. It's hard to deal with the reversal of fortunes; my boom and bust real life triggers psychological problems.

During 3 years of writing my blog almost daily, I never start writing a blog post on one day and then finish it on another. My mind races so much and my feelings change so violently that the tone and content of what I'm writing can veer from one extreme to another, faster than I can pour out words onto the page. One reason for writing so much so quickly, is to capture the variety of my moods and give myself a fighting chance of being able to spot more general trends. In fact, I rely heavily on my regular readers to spot those trends - they're a far better judge of whether I'm swinging into a high or low episode, than I am myself.

To have skipped days of writing really upsets me. I feel really bad when I neglect my writing and my readers.

I have no idea where my writing will take me, especially when I suffer major setbacks such as a sudden loss of thousands of Twitter followers. These things shouldn't matter, but they're psychologically damaging. My digital identity does serve as a substitute for a lot of the things which are presently missing in my life, such as a group of local friends, social engagements and a healthy relationship with my family.

That my life is so damaged should come as no surprise when you consider the magnitude of the tasks which I've been set. Divorce, drugs, alcohol, homelessness, debt and all the accompanying loss of status, stigma and family estrangement - the sense of failure, disappointment and "letting everyone down" - can each be fatal on their own. In combination, those things are a toxic whirlpool; a quicksand which nobody could ever hope to escape from. I could be very upset and depressed about all the things which are broken in my life, but instead I struggle not to get carried away with the minor miracle which has happened: I've bounced back and re-entered civilised society, seemingly without any permanent damage.

So many parts of our society are set up with the optimistic presumption that people are capable of turning their lives around and being rehabilitated, but it very rarely happens. While those who work with addicts, criminals and the debt-laden are very keen to see lives transformed for the better, the reality is that most of the stories do not have happy endings. Most of the stories have sad predictable endings, which are quite tragic.

I'm terrified that I'm going to hit a glass ceiling soon. I will have a mental illness until the day I die. I will always suffer from social jet-lag and a personality which is incompatible with the rat race. I can't change the past - the stigma of addiction and the paper trail which got left in my wake, during an unfortunate period of my life, will follow me around forever. There is no limit on what the organisation I'm presently involved with is able to see: they have access to a vast database of unflattering things, which can never be deleted. My mistakes can never be expunged from the archives.

I could delete this blog, but then where is my reply to the opinions of me expressed upon records kept by organisations who I unfortunately came into contact with?

I would be so much more vulnerable to stigma, prejudice and discrimination, if I allowed other people to lazily sum me up in a few short sentences. Human lives are so much more messy and complex than any amount of words on a page could ever possibly express. It seems like the most natural reaction to being pigeon-holed, to do something like this: to create a document so large that it doesn't even fit in a goddam pigeon hole.

It might seem obvious that I'd be quickly identified as a nut; a crackpot; a madman. That seems like an easy label to attach to me.

However, my long and successful career, the vast sums of tax I've paid, the wealth I've generated for the economy, the tangible products of my labour and intellect - all of these things contradict any attempt to lazily dismiss me as a ranting madman, of no use to anybody, who should be quietly nudged towards the fringes of society until I'm completely marginalised.

My writing is the only thing in my life I have complete control over. I can write as much as I want. I can publish as much as I want. Every act of writing and publishing is an act of rebellion - a protest at the excessive burdens of life - as well as an addition to a growing cache of proof of my productivity and usefulness. I write because it will frustrate and contradict any attempts to write me off.

On paper, I was a write-off.

Nobody would touch me with a barge pole.

If you were presented with a list of all the unflattering things about me - my mistakes; my debts; my problems - as a bullet-pointed list, then you'd have dumped me straight onto the "no hope" pile.

Technically, I don't exist, because my existence is too improbable; my problems were too insurmountable. I should not be alive. I should not be debt-free. I should not be clean. I should not be working. I should not be housed. I should not have money. I should not be out there in the big wide world, walking around like I'm a regular normal member of mainstream society.

I could place put my faith in those who have sworn to make decisions without prejudice or discrimination. I could entrust my whole future - my happiness and my livelihood - to people who've never met me, who will judge me based on a few bullet points. That seems pretty risky to me though.

This is what I anticipated would happen. I knew that sooner or later, if I kept telling my story, I'd reach a point where the rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags cycle would either conclude - in my suicide - or else I would finally get a chance to have a liveable life. This document contains a vast number of mistakes and unflattering things about me, but it also charts the course of a stupendously unlikely journey, which was almost certainly doomed to failure. If somebody in a position of power is going to thwart me, I want them to do so with a guilty conscience, because they were too lazy to consider all the available information. I'm so much more than a few bullet points on a page. I cannot be dissected with a 66-page form.

Of course, it's terribly teenage angsty to think of myself as a misunderstood character. It's horribly conceited and arrogant to think I'm special and different. I try not to concern myself with such judgements and instead to concentrate on my continued efforts to produce tangible things: to create.

Lots of people have written lots of novels, journals, diaries, blogs, newspaper columns, magazine articles and all the very many other works of printed words. There are quite a lot of prolific writers, who have churned out vast quantities of prose. Does that mean I shouldn't bother? Does that mean I shouldn't even try?

I haven't been very productive during the past couple of weeks, but it doesn't matter because what I've produced is cumulative. Every little effort is slowly adding up to create some big achievements. It's painfully slow, but the progress appears to create sudden overnight success. Nobody really notices all the hard work and nobody can see where it's headed, until one day a huge milestone is reached and everything all makes sense.

The relief of having more-or-less reached one of my most important goals, is highly destabilising and is triggering hypomania: it's hard not to get carried away with the perceived magnitude of my achievement. It's hard not believe my own bullshit - that I'm invincible and that I can overcome any obstacle. It's tempting to act recklessly, believing that I'll always be able to rescue myself from disastrous situations. It's hard to keep reminding myself that my luck will run out eventually, if I keep tempting fate.

I've missed this blog and I've missed writing. I've been destabilised, but I'm going to force myself to continue with my routine, because I think it's very healthy and stabilising for me.

Sorry for the gap in my regular writing.

Tags: #writing #debt #career #privacy #socialmedia #relationships #sex #alcohol #addiction #drugs #homeless #bipolar #suicide

This is a story about self-esteem...

The idea that we should be able to happily exist without external validation was concocted by smug twats who enjoy an abundance of ego-massaging. It's all very well and good saying that it's needy and insecure to require compliments, praise, flattery, applause, positive feedback and sexual advances, but people who say that we shouldn't need those things in order to feel attractive, valuable and cherished, are morons who completely take for granted the privileged position they enjoy.

I was one of that small group of kids who get labelled as the bad weirdos. There are good weirdos - everybody loves the outrageously camp kid. Everyone loves the goth kid. Everyone loves anybody who is a cool weirdo. Nobody likes the handful of kids who are freakishly cerebral. In fact everyone hates those fucking know-all boffin geeky nerds. "Fuck those guys" says literally everyone in the whole goddam school. "Let's make those kids' lives sheer uninterrupted misery for their entire childhood" everyone says.

Away from school, where my reputation didn't precede me, I was able to lose my virginity at 15 and snog tons of girls. Away from school, I wasn't held back by the label attached to me by all the ill-considered things my parents did to single me out. At school I was fucked over very badly by my parents insistent and completely selfish decisions to make me a marked man. Example: sending me to school on a girls' bike, with obvious and predictable end results, completely in line with any reasonable person's expectation of what would happen, and completely ignoring my protestations. I had no other means of transport available over a considerable and unwalkable distance, so I was quite literally forced into a situation which any parent with a smidge of care, compassion or empathy for their child would never dream of doing to fuck their child over in such an extreme way, with lasting and traumatic consequences.

Net result: ostracised child, bullied every day. Extremely bullied every day.

If I was ever going to struggle with self-esteem, I was bound to struggle doubly because I was a pariah at school. I went to 8 different schools. At the penultimate school I attended I had managed to make friends over the summer months, in places away from my parents' life-destroying fucked up selfish cuntishness, and I was enjoying popularity and attention from girls. I went away to Reading music festival and enjoyed the attention of girls. I went dancing - underage - to nightclubs and enjoyed the attention of girls and even managed to lose my virginity.

When school started - school number 7 - I had no option but to ride the only bike which was capable of the journey on Dorset's steep hills, of many miles to the school. My dad had stolen the bike. It was a girls' bike.

Wouldn't you just buy your kid a decent bike, if you were going to expect them to ride to school every day from the stupid house you've bought in the middle of fucking nowhere with no other option, to travel the fucking miles to get to school. The only life lesson I learned is that my parents are fucking cunts.

My paper round brought in a weekly income of £10 per week. My washing up job at the local pub brought in a further £10 a week. Theoretically, that's enough to save up enough money to buy a mountain bike or a road bike with high enough quality gears to be ridden every day on extremely steep hills for many miles, but by the time I'd saved enough money the damage had been done.

Perhaps, you might say, I should have kept my bike out of sight and walked the final mile to and from school, but you have to understand also, that my route to school passed the boarding house, and the children who were boarding were driven by minibus past me cycling as they were ferried by minibus to and from school. Some of the boarders also walked, instead of waiting to catch the minibus. There was no fucking way I could avoid some degree of exposure of this life-destroying single example of my parents cuntishness.

You could say I was "cock blocked" by my parents.

The friends I had made over the summer remained friends, but had to publicly distance themselves from me at school, lest they become bullying targets themselves. You might say that they're not very good friends for doing that, but you fail to appreciate just how fucking awful it is to be hated by 1,200 kids.

I was ostracised; I was an outcast; I was an untouchable.

My self-esteem was decimated.

I did not have a normal childhood. I did not have a childhood sweetheart. I did not have girlfriends. I did not have anything, until I finally escaped from my parents cuntish meddling, by getting the fuck away from them and their selfish deliberate actions which ruined my childhood.

I then embarked upon a crusade to have as much sex as possible as a reaction to the sex starvation of my adolescence.

I fucked everyone I could, as much as I could. I fucked even when I really didn't want to fuck, because every single time I had sex, I felt like I was winning. I felt a desperate need to catch up. I felt like if I could have enough sex, I'd feel better about myself; I'd feel attractive and sexually desirable.

I went to gay clubs and I absolutely adored having my bum pinched and men wanting to dirty dance, try to kiss me and make indecent proposals. So many men asked for my number and said flattering things. I felt good about myself.

Every time I feel lonely and want a cuddle. Every time I wish I had somebody to kiss. Every time there's no hand to hold or significant other to tell my good news, and my bad, then I'm transported back to my unhappy adolescence, and by extension my entire ruined bullied childhood. I don't care about the bad decisions I made when I was 18+. I care that my opportunity for a childhood sweetheart and normal adolescent development was denied to me. I care that my self-esteem was so badly damaged and my childhood was such misery, because of things which were entirely preventable, if only my parents weren't so fucked up on drugs and alcohol: I expressed clear and well articulated opinions. My needs were simple and I explained the drastically negative consequences of their selfish cuntish fucked-up shit that left me no recourse to salvage any shred of dignity.

This was a long time ago.

Why am I writing about it now?

Why is the bitterness re-surfacing?

All parents fuck their kids up, don't they?

On balance, my life is not the most fucked up it could have been. At least my parents didn't peel off all my skin and pour salt and lemon juice on the bloody flesh, huh?

I have to live with the consequences for the rest of my life so it's up to me to say how terrible things have been.

One of the consequences has been my extreme prudence with contraception and a great deal of thought and effort put into the handling of any so-called 'accidents'. One of the consequences has been my decision to behave in a way which absolutely guarantees that I'll never become like my parents. It's not one single decision. It's a decision which gets made over and over and over, ad nauseam. It's physically nauseating and painful to deny a fundamental part of my humanity. It's easy to go along with the crowd and do what everybody else is doing. It's easy to be one of the herd. It's hard to make an ethical decision, and a decision which goes against every gene in every cell of my body. Every physical part of me screams to reproduce, and I have to overrule that innate instinct using my fucking brain because it's obviously the only way to guarantee I'm 100% nothing like my father.

Sure, I could fall in love and be talked into almost anything, while my brain is flooded with serotonin and oxytocin, but my normal childhood development was so fucking messed up that I have no idea what a normal healthy happy relationship looks or smells like. I have a gaping big hole in my life, where most people have happy childhood memories and a set of formative experiences which govern the way they approach love, romance and sex. Sure, I adore my childhood friends - the nerdy geeky bullied outcasts - but each tiny handful children who were my friends, were snatched away from me during each of the unnecessary school changes and house moves thrust upon me by my selfish fucked-up druggie alkie loser work-shy cunt parents.

Why such vicious, clumsy words?

Why such bitterness?

I felt like I'd managed to shake off the stigma of being the nerdy geeky bullied kid and re-invent myself. I felt like I'd managed to escape my past. I went to London and re-invented myself. I got far far away from anybody who might seek to undermine my newfound self-confidence, in a place where nobody knew me and I was free to forget the things which were perpetrated against me, forcibly and inescapably.

I had fucking won.

The reasons why I suffered a major financial setback, and indeed ended up without major pieces of my life again, are beyond the scope of this self-pitying essay. I can easily analyse the root causes and trace the origin of my insecurities, hangups and damaged self-esteem back to childhood trauma. However, my life philosophy and personality drives me to look forward and achieve positive things, as opposed to living in the past.

Working very hard to rebuild my wealth has been a slow and painful process - which still continues - and it denies me the coping mechanism which I developed as a young man: yes my childhood was fucking shit, but I'm rich now so it doesn't matter. Ergo, if I'm not rich, then all I'm left with is a shit childhood. The bitterness is inversely proportional to my wealth.

I have a very money first mindset, which assumes that if I get rich first, then everything I want and need in life will follow. My life experiences have reinforced this worldview. Where the hell would I find the self-confidence to date without a wad of dollars in my fat wallet? It sounds very vulgar, but we must consider how dreadfully damaged my self-esteem was in childhood, and how I've compensated using money.

To be heavily reliant on a steady flow of sex and money to prop up my fragile ego is not at all pleasant. Masturbating in isolated poverty is an insufferable cruelty, salting the wounds of childhood, which feel as fresh as ever. It shocks me that I can be plunged back into angsty teenaged hatred and resentment of the injustice of my situation, by something as trivial as a temporary setback in my finances.

This is the vulnerable exposed throbbing pulsating nub of my insecurity. This is the thing which anyone can easily prod and poke at, cynically and sadistically, to make me wither and collapse. If you're the kind of sicko - who I've encountered far too many of in my life - who enjoys making a person writhe in torment, then you'll find that you'll be richly rewarded if you choose to bully me on this topic.

Why do I write about this at such length?

I own the story now. I expose my most vulnerable things, so that nobody else can threaten to do it and have power over me. I have agency.

Tags: #sex #relationships #childhood #parents

This is a story about heartbeats...

The view from my bay window this morning epitomised my tightrope walk. Living by the seaside with a beautiful picturesque commanding vantage point is a rare privilege. It's churlish of me to mention having to get up at - quite literally - dawn and drive to some godforsaken place where I'll live out of a suitcase during the working week. It's vulgar for me to talk about my perilous existence when I occupy an enviable situation, such that my income exceeds my expenditure and I am potentially able to free myself from the tyranny of capitalism.

Having talked about ending my life so frequently and for such a long period of time, it seems reasonable that any time I break from my usual routine should be cause for concern.

Purposefully, I have tried to write with regularity such that the alarm would be raised if I ever went AWOL.

At the moment I have no concrete plans to kill myself and the factors which tipped me over the edge last year are well managed. My finances are improving, my employment situation is reasonably good, I'm not mixed up with drugs or unhealthy relationships. These might seem like trivial superficial things but if you've ever tried to exist without sufficient money for day-to-day life, you'll soon realise that no amount of worthless platitudes are a substitute for cold hard cash.

I still refuse to relinquish both the option to kill myself and the hope that I might be restored to a state of good health and wellbeing, also known as wealth.

I see no reason why I might be prompted to commit suicide.

However, I've often been blindsided.

Who knows.

Who knows what's going to happen next? I can definitely sense the problems which have cyclically surfaced in recent years during this autumn/winter season. There is a very real and tangible change in my mood which moves towards arrogance, argumentativeness, overconfidence, impulsiveness, hopelessness, impatience and a whole host of other things which have come about as a result of a whole year of hell, followed by some long-overdue success.

Things are going well.

Too well.

I have plenty of reasons to suspect that I'm about to be dealt a violent blow.

For now I'm alive and well and I feel pretty much fine. However, I have a deep suspicion and a load of built-up experience which tells me that this particular time of year is when my harshest setbacks arrive. I'm anticipating some major setbacks.

The people who've followed my story and believed that I'm worth supporting deserve particular credit for persevering with the rollercoaster ride that I've taken them on.

It's hard to know if I've gone quiet because I'm dead, or because I'm uncharacteristically busy for once.

Not dead yet and I have no intention of unfairly and unreasonably making anybody feel uncertain about the safety of my life. I'm not attention seeking. I'm not attempting to emotionally manipulate anybody.

Should I declare myself safe? That would be untrue. Should I warn you that I might kill myself at any moment? That would also be untrue.

Tags: #suicide