This is a story about self sabotage...

What the hell am I doing, blogging about stuff that could get me fired, sued and make me unemployable? Why the hell am I burning so many bridges, and destroying my own reputation? Is this simply self-sabotaging behaviour?

If we look at the wider context of my story, the rat race has made me unwell. The boring office jobs propping up the instruments of capitalism so that an idle wealthy elite can ride roughshod over the proletariat, has made me unhappy. Compromising on my moral, ethical position, five days a week is not healthy. Working in an unstimulating environment that is unchallenging and uninteresting is a fate worse than death.

It's very easy to keep doing what you do because you fear change and it's the path of least resistance. I've been moulded into a certain career and industry sector. I'm the perfect guy to have join your massive corporation and quickly get up to speed with the bureaucracy, systems and processes. The bulk of the hard work in a big organisation is not the actual skilled thing that people are qualified to do, but just dealing with the crap that gets built up by a zillion little Hitlers all micromanaging their tiny empires they're building and trying to justify their pathetic jobs.

It's interesting who I'm friends with on Facebook, and who follows me on Twitter. In fact, with very little digging you can even find this vast cache of dirt, on Google. This is not about how important and influential I am, because I'm not. This is about public exposure. I took a decision to lay my soul bare, and I stand by that decision. But, for a moment, let's consider the kinds of people who I know or suspect have at one time dipped into my social media and online accessible over-sharing:

• Ex colleagues from JPMorgan
• Ex colleagues from HSBC
• Cohorts from a technology startup accelerator
• Two influential and well respected directors of startup accelerators
• Mentors from startup accelerator
• My accountant
• People who are influential and well respected in the technology sector
• Friends who work in tech and/or industry sectors that I work in

I've stopped short of actually tying my LinkedIn profile back in this direction, towards my blog. I've stopped short of in any way linking my limited company back towards this new alter ego of mine, although I did briefly get myself in a muddle over some suicide watch startup idea that I had. That was on September 21st... right when I started this journey of deciding to go public with every struggle I faced when I finally lost my grip on my career, my company, my reputation, everything.

For sure, I'm a nobody. However, people still talk. There is a rumour mill, no matter how small and insignificant you are. And people who work in offices are particularly interested in lurid tales of people who're doing anything that is out of the ordinary, even if that's losing your mind and ending up in the gutter.

By now, my tale of the toxic combination of stress, abusive relationship, mental health problems, heavy drinking, drug abuse (in that order) leading to suicide attempts, hospitalisation, homelessness, destitution and even police involvement, is well documented.

Well, I guess it's not that well documented, but it's out there in the public domain.

I have no idea how much was known before I decided to embark upon a mission of full disclosure, but I know that my abusive ex-wife was particularly indiscreet and insensitive. I'm sure that my friends did their best to save my blushes and protect my reputation as much as they could, but people still knew that I was getting more and more unwell.

Obviously, at times during my descent into melancholy and the infinite madness, I sabotaged my own reputation amongst my Facebook friends. I once shared a picture of some potassium cyanide that I had bought with the express intention of ending my life quickly and cleanly. The lethal dose is about 250 milligrams. I bought 2 grams of the toxic chemical: 8 times more than was strictly necessary.

Depression now has less stigma associated with it. We pretty much all know somebody who suffers with depression, and takes anti-depressant medication to help them with their low mood. These things are no longer taboo to talk about, and many people are able to still continue to hold down good jobs and be in positions of responsibility. Suffering from clinical depression is not a death sentence, certainly as far as a person's professional reputation is concerned.

Bipolar disorder has almost become cool to have. There are a list of celebrities and politicians as long as your arm, who have come forward and declared that they are living with the condition. Obviously, the ability to turn your hypomanic episodes into hyper-energetic flurries of productive activity, means that you can get shit done. In a way, we celebrate the person who has these mood episodes, because they can produce the 'overnight' successes we so revere in society.

Alcohol is everywhere, so unless you're swigging from a bottle of vodka hidden in your desk and reeking of liquor fumes as you breathe on people, just about any amount of drinking is socially acceptable. It's only if you declare yourself an alcoholic and have a stay in rehab that people start to stigmatise you. You can cover up your 28 days in The Priory, by saying that it was private hospital treatment for stress and anxiety.

Drug abuse is the last taboo. You pretty much don't want to put that one down on your CV. Cocaine use is widespread throughout London, and coffee gets stronger and stronger to the point where you're practically swallowing amphetamines. A few cans of Red Bull is the socially acceptable equivalent to snorting a couple of lines of some stimulant. Students are increasingly using Modafinil, Ritalin and Adderall to improve their concentration span and fact retention, as well as to stay awake during long revision binges.

If you think that these things feature in my daily life, you're wrong. These issues are simply incompatible with day-to-day existence. Depression robs you of the energy to get out of bed and face the day. Bipolar hypomania robs you of the contents of your bank balance, as it all gets ploughed into crazy schemes. Alcoholism is hard to hide, not that I've ever been physically dependent on booze, thank God. Drug addiction is all-consuming: there's no hiding it when you've lost the battle with addiction and it's taking you on a white-knuckle ride to an early grave.

So, if I've won the battles, why would I make it public knowledge that I fought them? Why would I take the time to declare, beyond all reasonable doubt, that I'm a flawed individual? Why would I spell it out, that I could relapse into any number of life-destroying illnesses at any moment?

Well, we could all succumb to these things at any moment.

I was 28 years young when I was knocked flat by clinical depression. I was 32 when addiction got its hooks in me. Just because I'd been a good student, a well behaved polite boy, a model employee, a career go-getter, and on the face of it I had a perfect little life, it doesn't mean that I was immune from anything.

But "it could never happen to me" right?

We believe that smart life choices will keep us safe. We believe that we have free will, and that therefore we would never choose to do something stupid. We believe that past performance is indicative of future results, even if the disclaimers always tell us the opposite.

There's something ugly about academic and corporate life, where we put a black mark against people's name if they fuck up even once. Screw up your school exams and you'll never get a chance to go to university. Screw up in your career and you'll be frozen out of the good jobs forevermore. Screw up in life and you'll be a dirty leper who nobody will want to know or to help.

This is the bleak outlook for so many people, who were simply unlucky or made a decision that was obviously regrettable, but life is continuously setting us traps and pitfalls. Why do consequences have to be so long lasting? Oh, you got in financial trouble? Here, let us help you by now charging you fines and punitive rates of interest, plus denying you opportunities and making the cost of living sky high because you have a poor credit rating.

The punishment for not having any money is that you have to pay more money. The punishment for your crimes is the deprivation of your liberty and the destruction of your future opportunities.

Apparently people are mocking those who have chosen to get a semicolon tattoo, but let's think about this for a minute.

I work in a big office and I see hundreds of people every day. In all likelihood they have seen that I have a semicolon tattooed behind my ear. If you were to Google "what does a semicolon tattoo mean?" then you will see that it's mostly to do with struggles with depression, addiction, self-harm and suicide attempts. I wonder how many people are thinking "why the hell did we employ this guy?".

When I did my interview, I sat so that my interviewers were on my right-hand side. The people who interviewed me never saw that tattoo, until soon after I started in my new job. I wonder if they'd have hired me if they had seen the tattoo.

Tattoos are actually uncommon amongst investment banking IT consultants. Certainly visible tattoos are even declared as not permitted, in many banks dress codes. I even thought about putting a sticking plaster over the mark on my skin, for my interview.

However, that's all I ever did for years and years. That's our whole approach to mental health and the problems that people face in their private lives: put a sticking plaster over it.

I've written at length about how angry I am that our first line of defence for people who are stressed out and depressed by their shitty unfulfilling office jobs, is to give them powerful psychoactive medications that artificially alter their mood so they can continue to work their dreadful jobs.

I'm angry that I'm so pressurised by wider society to cover up my problems, in order to retain a blemish-free reputation. I feel like the need to appear pristine and infallible to potential employers, fellow work colleagues and bosses, is largely to blame for why I had a massive breakdown and implosion, instead of things getting fixed before they got out of hand.

We are brainwashed to believe that we can't have any gaps on our CV that we can't explain. We are brainwashed to believe that we can't take our foot off the gas pedal for a single second. We are brainwashed to believe that a stain on our reputation will hang around for the rest of our careers.

You know what the problem is? It's our fucking careers. The treadmill. The rat race. It's making so many people mentally unwell, as well as causing physical health damage due to the sedentary nature of the work. No amount of standing desks or free gym membership is going to compensate for the problem.

I backslid into office employment because it was easy and I was desperate. My back was against the wall, and it made perfect financial sense to go and suffer another stretch of agonising misery back doing the shit that I'm most qualified and experienced to do, but it's fucking killing me.

It's important to be values-aligned, but it's also so easy to be tempted by 'easy' money. The cash rewards for doing the kind of mind-bogglingly boring work that I do are substantial. In theory, I only have to do this work for short bursts, and then I have spare time and cash to do whatever I need to do to balance the books, psychologically. However, in practice, all I'm doing is servicing debts that were built up just staying alive.

The welfare state took a dim view on my situation. Why do I need help, when I can go and get a job that pays fabulously well? Well, guess what? I tried it. I tried getting one of these shitty desk jobs that kill me, while I was homeless living in a hostel. And guess what? Working one of those jobs that made you unwell in the first place while you are still unwell really fucks you up.

This whole exercise of blowing my existence and private life wide open serves to document the ridiculousness of the mental health destroying lives that we are forced to live. If this whole experience ends up killing me, at least I've left the evidence: the smoking gun.

Nobody really cares when white middle class, well educated men in good jobs kill themselves. Why would they? Well, look around you. Do you see people getting happier? Do you see mental illness declining? Do you see suicide rates declining? Do you feel secure, fulfilled? Do you feel like the human condition is improving?

I look around and I see war and I see poverty. I see ordinary British people being forced into zero hours contract minimum wage McJobs, and still unable to afford basic amenities. I see loneliness and depression. I see a lack of real local community. I see families pulled apart by the need to go to large urban centres to seek your fortune. I see people locked into their own little world: headphones plugged in, eyes cast downwards at their smartphone, not talking to anybody face to face except to ask for their morning coffee.

Is this just a London thing? Is my view tainted because I'm struggling with depression myself? Actually, London is the canary in the coal mine. The sensitive people who have their head up looking around, sensing for danger, are usually on to something. Everything is pretty shit and fucked up right now.

And so, I am rejecting the conventional. I'm rejecting the sensible, rational and tried-and-tested. I'm burning the bridges that lead back to places I should never return to.

Yes, I might be making a fool of myself. Yes, people might be sniggering at me, safe behind their computer screens. Yes, important people are judging me and they have the ability to thwart me because of their prejudice, and make my life hard and even impossible. I could find myself unemployable, but not know why, because nobody has to tell me. I'm giving away all the ammunition you need to destroy me, and people are eagerly taking it.

But you know, who's the real winner? If you take what I gave you and use it against me, how are you going to feel? We're all doing that. We're all exploiting weaknesses that we discover in each other, in order to get ahead in the rat race.

How do you win a rigged contest? If everybody is cheating, do you cheat too?

The other option is to martyr yourself. For sure, you'll be hated and excluded. Nobody will thank you. But at least you can sleep at night, in the gutter.

Prisons can mean anywhere you feel trapped and your liberty is restricted

Tags: #career #london #computing #banking #depression #suicide #mentalhealth

This is a story about destiny...

I've been writing short stories all this week to fill my boring days at work. I wasn't going to share them, because I already share thousands of words every week, but this is one of my better efforts.

Anyway, without further ado, please allow me to introduce The Factory:

* * *

His mother had warned him that if he didn't try hard enough at school he would have to work in a factory, but this conflicted with Alan's day-to-day experience with his teachers. Alan's teachers always told him that he had amazing potential. Alan's teachers always told him that if he just applied himself, he would be a brilliant student. Perfect! No effort required then, until the exams actually counted for something. Why burn yourself out over mock exams and other work? Keep your gunpowder dry until the real battle.

Was it lazy? Was it arrogant? It seemed smart to Alan to not bust his balls on extra homework and every essay and assignment. School was going to go on and on for years and years, and then there was university after that. Yes, it was generally assumed that Alan would be going to university, because he was a sharp cookie. Just needed to apply himself. Just needed to try a bit harder. Why bother trying until the day of his GCSE exams, his A-levels, and his entrance examination for Oxford or Cambridge? Why break a sweat until then? Why get anxious about tomorrow's problems, today?

Whenever Alan did turn it on, concentrate, try hard, he found that he was showered with praise and good grades. His experience bore out everything that the world told him every day, except his mother's prophecy that he would end up working in a factory.

But now he worked in a factory.

In the factory, there were warehousemen who drove fork-lift trucks, ferrying pallets of supplies around the factory buildings, or loading the boxed up products being dispatched to the wholesalers. There were machine operators, who pressed oversized industrial buttons, to start and stop the various plant that mixed chemicals in huge vats, pumped liquid, or carried things on conveyor belts. The machine operators were responsible for hitting the big red STOP buttons in the event of an industrial accident, so they were slightly higher paid than the warehousemen, who only had to have a fork-lift truck driving license.

The lowest paid workers in the factory were those who performed repetitive manual labour that could not be easily automated. The manual workers took cans off the conveyor belt, stuck a sticky label on them, and then loaded them onto another conveyor belt. The manual workers picked out any cans with dents or loose lids, and put them onto large trolleys marked "Quality Control" which were wheeled to another area, where somebody else would check to see if the product could be salvaged or not.

There were the supervisors, who had risen through the ranks by doing one of the many jobs in the factory for 25 years or more. That was about how long it took to get promoted. If you had stuck it out for 25 years, and you'd managed not to make a fool of yourself, you were pretty much automatically promoted into a supervisor role. It was well understood, and it was the reason why many people were sticking with their low paid jobs, holding out hope for that promotion. The supervisors were paid marginally more than their colleagues, but the big bonus was that they didn't have to do any work anymore. The supervisors would march around, clean and smelling fresh, putting ticks on a checklist clipped to their clipboards.

Supervisors would escalate issues to management. Management were all the sons, daughters, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends and close friends of the family who had originally owned the factory, or another factory. To enter into management, you had to be born into management, or marry into management. There was a legend, often told, of the boy who used to sweep the factory floor who got promoted to be a manual worker, then a supervisor, and then a manager. This legend was the lottery-winning chance that everybody in the factory secretly hoped for, but of course it was a myth. Whenever new managers were needed, only people who were already managers would be eligible for the role. Can't get the job without the experience, can't get the experience without the job. That was the Catch 22 that kept the riff-raff out of the boardroom.

But, there had been a new role that had been created, that nobody felt qualified to do. Some of the managers had hired family members, friends, to try and do the role, but nobody had been able to perform the duties required. There had been several rounds of telephone interviews to screen candidates. Human Resources had then called in promising candidates to understand if they had the right cultural fit and commitment to the mission of the company, to be suitable. Then junior management had held some day-long sessions where candidates fought it out with each other, in some real-world scenarios that had been set as a test. Then, finally, there were several more face to face interviews with senior management, before at long last the CEO personally vetted the remaining handful of hopefuls, and selected a winner. A job offer was dispatched and the factory's newest recruit joined the team. However, every person they had recruited to date had left, soon after starting their new job.

It was time to try the open market. Jobs were routinely advertised on the open market, but invariably it would be somebody known to somebody else who would be recruited. You had to know somebody. Any candidate from the open market was there just to make up the numbers, and to pay lip service to the idea that there was some meritocracy to the process, but everybody in management knew that unless you were already in management, your face simply didn't fit: you weren't part of the club.

And so, the unprecedented step of hiring somebody on the basis of their Curriculum Vitae was made. Their aptitude and qualifications were actually considered on merit, and the interviewers actually mulled over the answers to the questions that were asked. The management team was getting desperate. It was time to hire somebody who might be capable of doing the job, rather than simply recycling the same pool of people who had been born into privileged positions. Management were out of ideas, because they had only ever taken their ideas from an insular pool of people with the same background. It was time to try an outsider.

Alan had been through the same gruelling rounds of telephone interviews, HR grillings and face to face meetings with various junior and senior managers. Alan had suffered the same dismissive attitudes, because he had never held a management role, because his family had never owned a factory and gifted him a job. Everybody who interviewed him let him know, subtly, that he wasn't cut out for management because he wasn't part of the club. However, begrudgingly they had been forced to recommend their favoured outside candidate. Alan had been chosen for his strengths, not because of nepotism. Management were not happy about this. This was not the way things worked.

Finally, the CEO had awarded Alan the job. The CEO knew that the factory had little choice. It had an unfilled role that was very important. Nobody from the pool of those with managerial experience had proven able to perform the duties. Of course none of the supervisors could be promoted. That would be ridiculous! Alan had good grades and had studied at Cambridge, so on paper he was a cut above everybody else that they had interviewed, except the one thing that would normally disqualify him from ever entering management: that he actually had to apply for a job, rather than just being gifted one by his family.

Alan's roles and responsibilities had been explained to him at length during the interview process, but now he had an HR meeting to discuss his salary and his final job description.

"There's been a slight change" said Sandra, the HR woman. "There's actually just one thing we need you to do" she explained. Sandra pushed a piece of paper with some text printed on it over the desk towards Alan. "Is this some kind of joke?" Alan asked.

The salary negotiations had taken a new direction now that Alan knew that his intended role had somewhat changed. Normally, candidates enthusiastically accepted pretty much whatever was offered in terms of remuneration by the time that they had reached the point of a job offer. The purpose of the interview process was to make a candidate so relieved when the stress and the anxiety of the whole awful ordeal was over, that they wouldn't want to risk losing the job offer when it was on the table.

"I want twice as much money" Alan plainly declared.

"Ridiculous!" Sandra had replied. "You'd be paid more than the CEO if we gave you that much" she spat, contemptuously.

"But look at what you want me to do" Alan pleaded. "What you're offering just isn't enough to do that".

Eventually, Sandra had backed down. She was shocked. She'd never actually had to negotiate with somebody before, and even when candidates had tried, she just held her ground and they gave in. She'd met people like Alan before, but she'd never come up against such stubborn determination. His attitude had seemed to change completely when she told him what his new role would entail.

Alan started his new job with something of a sense of happiness. He was going to be paid an obscene amount of money. He couldn't believe his luck. Even though Alan knew that the size of his paycheque bore no relation to his actual value as a person, he still felt special and appreciated to be receiving such healthy remuneration for his efforts. Alan was almost cocky and arrogant, knowing that he was the highest paid person in the factory. He was the highest paid person he knew. He calculated how much he was going to earn every hour, every minute, every second... it was a lot.

Three supervisors met Alan at the factory gates and gave him a brief tour of the facilities. Alan was soaking up his surroundings with glee. It was nice to feel part of something. It was nice to see the efficiency of everything, as cans and boxes, and crates and vats of liquid were ferried around the warehouses, and vast quantities of products were stacked up ready to be dispatched to customers.

Alan was shown to the testing room. Everything had been prepared for him.

The testing room was a cube in the corner of one of the cavernous warehouses, with a door labelled "TESTING ROOM" in bold black text. The testing room had a round silver door handle, and a piece of plastic that could be slid so that the words "IN USE: DO NOT ENTER" could be displayed, or hidden when the room was unoccupied.

"Yes, it's ready to go. Please start when you're ready" one of the supervisors said, gesturing towards the door.

Alan slid the plastic so that "IN USE" was displayed, and stepped inside the room, closing the door behind him.

Inside the room, there was black folding chair in the centre, and 4 blank walls. The walls had a slightly glossy shiny look to them. There was a sharp chemical smell in the air. An extraction fan whirred above, sucking away the fumes. Alan sat down in the chair, and begun to look at the walls.

After 12 hours, a loud whistle blast could be heard throughout the factory, including inside Alan's room. The factory workers queued up to clock out of their shift, and then disappeared out of the exit to the car park and bus stop. The supervisors jumped in their battered old cars and drove home. The manual workers queued up in the rain to catch the bus. Alan queued up for the bus too: he would have to wait for his first paycheque before he could think about buying a car.

The next day, Alan arrived and made his own way to the room. He opened the door and there were a couple of men in there who were just packing up their things. One of the men said "all ready for you" and then the room was left vacant. Alan slid the sign to show "IN USE" again, closed the door and sat in his chair, waiting for the factory whistle while looking at the glossy walls.

After 11 or so hours, Alan started to wonder if his eyes were playing tricks on him. Were the walls slightly less glossy? There certainly seemed to be patches where the walls looked somewhat more matt. There were areas that were still shiny and reflecting light, but there were large parts that seemed to no longer have the same sheen. Before he could think about this much longer, the factory whistle blew and everybody left for home.

Alan had a troubling night of sleep, wondering what he was doing. Had he made a mistake in taking this job? It was certainly very well paid, but it wasn't at all what he imagined he would be doing for a living. He started to think about the nice new car he was going to buy himself with his first paycheque. Yes, just focus on the money, he told himself as he drifted off to sleep.

The following morning, two men were just leaving the room as he arrived. They were carrying rollers, brushes and cans of paint. "Morning!" they cheerily called to Alan. "Morning!" Alan enthusiastically replied. It was nice to be greeted by his colleagues. They seemed happy to have him there.

Inside the room, it had been repainted in a wonderful bright new colour. This made Alan joyously happy. This minor change in his environment and routine was well appreciated and his whole 12 hour shift passed quickly. Alan felt noticed, cared for. Perhaps his doubts about this career were misplaced.

In the evening, Alan considered taking out a car loan. I mean, now that he had found a job that he enjoyed and was well paid, surely there would be no risk in taking out some finance to allow him to have a reliable vehicle to transport him to work? It would be a nice treat that he could have now, rather than having to wait until his paycheque. He would be able to drive to work rather than taking the bus. That would be a big improvement in his quality of life, not having to stand and queue for the bus in the rain.

Now the working week was nearly done. Alan felt really happy about the approaching weekend as he rode the bus on his way to work.

The painters were leaving his room again when he arrived, carrying their brushes and rollers. Wow! This was exciting, Alan thought. "What colour have they painted my room today?" he wondered.

Inside the room, the walls were the same colour as the previous day, Alan felt sure. What the hell? Were his eyes playing tricks on him? Was his memory fading? Maybe the paint simply needed a second coat, but it had looked pretty good yesterday, he thought.

Alan's 12 hour shift was spent pondering the conundrum of the paint colour. Strangely, he was almost but not quite able to enjoy watching the glossy sheen of the wet paint change to a matt texture, as it dried. He made a little game, of checking each of the slower drying areas intermittently, to see if they were still shiny.

Friday brought another almost identical day. The painters were leaving as Alan arrived, and the colour was unchanged. The only thing that was different was that Alan was now certain that no further coats of paint had been required in order to give even coverage. The walls had been adequately coated with paint the day before. This extra coat of paint was wholly unnecessary, for even the most diligent decorator.

Clocking out of his shift, Alan was troubled and locked into his own mind, questioning what he was doing and why. His eyes were glazed over and not engaging with the faces of his colleagues as they left the factory. On the bus ride home, Alan started to shake off his doubts and just enjoy the fact that work was over until Monday. It was the weekend and he could relax, knowing that he had successfully got though his first week, and he was a little closer to his first paycheque.

The weekend was overshadowed with niggling doubts. Alan had been planning on going to the car dealership to enter into a finance agreement and arrange to take delivery of a brand new car. Instead, Alan was almost in a daze, unable to shake off the feeling that his new job was not quite what he had bargained for. Were things going to change? For sure, on that day that the walls had been repainted, he had felt that things were going to be OK, but then the end of the week things had made no sense.

By Sunday evening, Alan had started to become quite anxious about the week ahead. If the colour of the walls changed again, that would be better, but it still didn't really answer the question of what he was doing there. If the colour of the walls didn't change, he would be forced to question what the purpose of his role was. He knew that it was important that he didn't ask difficult questions or voice his doubts, and he didn't want to risk that big salary. How long could he hold his tongue?

On Monday morning, Alan felt extremely tired even though he had not stayed up late or slept especially badly. He felt tense. His muscles ached. He felt butterflies in his tummy. Why would he be so anxious? His job was easy and he'd made it though the first week with no problems. There was no reason why he couldn't continue day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade. Think about all that money he could save up for retirement. Think how rich he was going to be.

Alan arrived at work with seconds to spare. He was almost late. The room was empty, but the walls were shiny and wet with fresh paint. The painters had obviously left shortly before Alan had arrived.

For the first three days of the new week, the paint remained the same colour but it was always freshly repainted. Alan never saw the painters again because he was arriving later and later to work, questioning what on earth he was doing and how he could carry on without understanding the purpose of it all. It was so meaningless, so purposeless, so lacking in rational explanation, so wasteful. He was the highest paid person in the factory, and yet he didn't understand the importance of his role. In fact, his role seemed pointless to him. He persevered, thinking about the money and the new car.

On Thursday, he was torn between just quitting his job or marching into the boardroom to demand answers from the senior management. He knew that either option would pretty much spell the end of his career.

Arriving exceptionally late, Alan turned the handle and opened the door of the testing room a fraction. Inside, the walls had been repainted a different colour. Alan was flooded with a disproportionate amount of relief that something had at last changed. It had been more than a week since the colour had been altered, and even though it had happened once before, he was now overjoyed that it had happened again. It had seemed like forever that he had lived with the same colour of fresh paint, day after day.

On Friday, the wall colour changed again, and now Alan was almost ecstatic. He felt giddy with the waves of emotional relief that swept over him. He was almost drunk with feelings. Everything seemed to make sense, even though they didn't. Everything seemed to be slotting into place, even though they weren't. Alan spent his whole shift daydreaming about driving his new car, and resolved to rush to the dealership first thing on Saturday and sign the car finance papers.

Alan's sleep was very disturbed with excitement about getting a new car. Of course, he would not be taking delivery for some time, but that's not what he was thinking about as he fitfully slept until the earliest possible opportunity he could get up and rush to the dealership when it opened in the morning. At the dealership, Alan borrowed far more money than he had originally intended. Buoyed with the optimism of last couple of days at work he'd just had, in stark contrast to his misery and anxiety at the start of the week, Alan felt that he must purchase the very best car that he could afford, in order to give everything some meaning.

Then, as soon as the door of the dealership had swung closed behind him, he felt a sense of regret, rising panic. What had he done?

Now his weekend was doubly anxious. What if he had another week where they didn't change the colour of the walls? What if he lost his job before he got paid? What if the new car was not as wonderful as he hoped it would be.

Alan tried to console himself in daydreams about him driving the new car. Alan tried to picture how much happier he would be, owning and driving a new car. It didn't seem to be quite enough to settle his deep sense of unease, that he was now trapped into his job in order to keep up the repayments on the car finance. The thought that he now had no option but to stay in his job, or else face both unemployment and insolvency, was a terrifying amount of pressure.

The following week was sheer agony. The colour of the walls remained the same every day, even though they were freshly repainted for all five days. Alan tried to lose himself in daydreams about taking delivery of his new car, and driving it for the first time. He tried to imagine the new car smell. He tried to imagine tearing off the plastic that protected the brand new seats, like tearing of wrapping paper at Christmas. But it didn't work. Time dragged incredibly. Every second felt like a minute. Every minute felt like an hour. Every hour felt like a day. Every day felt like a month. The week felt like a year. A year of pain. A year of staring at the blank walls, wondering what he had done, but feeling completely trapped by his finance agreement.

Alan made it through a second week that was much the same. He dare not arrive late, for his financial security depended on him keeping this job. He dare not raise his concerns with senior management, for he needed this job. He was locked in. He had to keep quiet and just keep doing what he was doing.

When he woke up on Saturday it was 3pm in the afternoon. He hadn't gone to bed late, but the stress and anxiety were exhausting. He was wrecked by the constant tension, the constant worry, the constant doubt. He was lolling around in bed, not really wanting to face the day because he was too emotionally drained. And then he remembered: he could collect his new car today.

Instead of joy, Alan felt trepidation. He procrastinated in getting ready and travelling to the dealership. There was too much riding on this. If he didn't enjoy his new car, his life was over. How on earth could a new car solve the misery of his day to day existence? No material object was capable of resolving his crisis, surely?

Arriving late, the car dealer was only just able to complete all the paperwork in time to let Alan have the car that day. Alan thought he was going to literally collapse and die when he was told that there might not be enough time before the dealership closed, and he'd have to come back another day. Perhaps the dealer had seen the grimace on Alan's face, and had been taken aback. Instead of being fobbed off, the dealership had pulled out all the stops to get Alan his car, while he sat exhausted in the waiting room.

At last, Alan was handed the keys and led to the car park where his shiny new car was ready to go. The paint colour wasn't quite the same as the one he specified and the dealer had forgotten the upgrade to the wheels that he had been promised, but he didn't care. Alan wasn't going to refuse to take delivery now, when he'd been working for so many years to get this prize; or so it felt. Alan signed his name and stepped into the driver's seat. This was finally happening.

It was certainly nice, like he had imagined, being in a brand new car with the smell of plastic and foam. Everything was unmarked, blemish free. Alan had to pinch himself to be reminded that this was not one of his many daydreams he had been having in anticipation of this day.

Driving to work, Alan drew envious stares from fellow work colleagues who he had previously taken the bus with. He apologetically cringed, knowing that they were thinking how flash he was, displaying his wealth so obviously like this. He felt like a traitor, having taken the bus with the ordinary factory workers, and now flaunting his privilege, while his co-workers were soaked from the rain. However, it had been a remarkably enjoyable journey to work despite the traffic. Alan arrived at his room feeling remarkably relaxed and happy.

Now, Alan spent 12 hours waiting to be able to enjoy his drive home. The anticipation of it almost seemed to make the time go slower, but at least he was carried through the first half of the day with a bit of happiness from his drive to work. He fantasised about perhaps going on a long drive at the weekend.

The week dragged, but it was not too bad. As an added bonus, the room had been repainted on Thursday in a new colour. Alan's week was almost tolerable. This could be sustainable, he thought.

Another couple of weeks passed with Alan's car getting a little bit dirtier, scratched and dented from the daily commute and people carelessly opening doors in the car park, or brushing past his vehicle with sharp protruding zips or studs on their clothing, damaging the paint. Inside the car, it was littered with discarded coffee cups from Alan's commute, which now seemed painfully slow as he queued in traffic. The bus zipped past him in the bus lane, as he sat fuming at the wheel. Driving to work was an added pressure, an added anxiety.

The same nagging doubt about what he was doing, became bigger than the novelty of driving to work, which had quickly become the norm. The changes in wall colour were as routine as anything else. Alan simply spent 12 hours sat in his room questioning his very existence, and trying to will himself to think about the money, which was very much less than before, because of his borrowing obligations. Working to pay off his car loan really did not seem to make any sense except in the context of his job, which also didn't make any sense.

In a way, Alan hankered for the days when he used to take the bus, because he didn't have the pressure of having to drive himself and the crippling financial burden of the loan he had taken out to buy the car. Of course, the car was now well careworn and uncared for and was worth a tiny fraction of what Alan had paid for it. He would never be able to repay his debts by selling his car. He would have to keep the job, in order to keep up his loan repayments. He was trapped, and it was destroying him, knowing that he was damned if he did, and damned if he didn't.

Alan started to drink heavily. At first in the evenings, to deal with his anxiety at facing the working day. Then he started to drink at the weekends, to deal with his anxiety at facing the working week. Then he started to drink in the mornings in the car park, so that he would be drunk at work and the day would pass quicker. Alan had no problem hiding his drunkenness at this stage, because he was inebriated around-the-clock. He would never let the alcohol levels in his bloodstream drop, because he would start to get the shakes and start throwing up. He had woken up in the night, soaked in sweat, when he had suffered an epileptic fit in his sleep.

Now physically dependent on alcohol, Alan's his body would complain with horrific withdrawal symptoms and seizures if he stopped drinking. He was also psychologically dependent on intoxication to be able to cope with the monotony of his job. Sobriety was barred to him, because he was unable to continue to work without alcohol, and he needed the job to pay for his loan. Alcohol numbed the stress and anxiety of the situation.

His mother had warned him that if he didn't apply himself at school, he would amount to nothing, and would be a manual labourer in a factory. He was now the highest paid person in the factory, and higher paid than even the CEO. He had a lovely car, and he was on top of his finances. His credit rating was sky high. He could borrow as much as he wanted, to buy a house, a boat or whatever he wanted. However, he was now wary of borrowing any more, knowing that it would shackle him more to the job that had driven him to alcohol. There was no way out. Material things brought temporary relief, but only at the expense of further tying him to a pointless job that denied him any sense of purpose.

People asked Alan why didn't he just retrain as a circus juggler, or a bricklayer? Perhaps he could be a flower arranger, or a concert pianist? Did these people not understand that those salaries would never allow him to service his debts? Did these people not realise that it costs money, on rent and tuition fees, to be able to retrain, and all Alan's money went on rent, debt and alcohol. "Why don't you save up some money and go travelling?" people asked. Saving money meant less alcohol, and it was only through alcohol that Alan could make it through the day. He was mortgaging his health in order to keep his job, in order to repay his debts. Couldn't people see he'd love to dream. Alan was not short of dreams and ideas, but how could he pursue them when he was so trapped?

Riding the wall of death, faster and faster, round and round. Alan had to keep drinking more and more in order to maintain his intoxication, as his body became more and more tolerant to the copious amounts of alcohol he imbibed. Three bottles of wine every day. Cans of super strength lager to keep him topped up. Then a bottle of whiskey every day. Then two bottles of vodka every day. Then he lost count. There were bottles in his gym bag, in his car, littered throughout his flat. He had hip flasks in every pocket. He lived in constant fear of running out of alcohol and getting the shakes, having a fit at work that would cost him his job.

Nobody seemed to notice that Alan was tanked up on alcohol the whole time. He was functional. He was turning up to work and doing his job just like he'd always done. He was reliable, dependable. He was uncomplaining. He didn't ask any questions. He was the perfect employee. Moulded to fit his job perfectly. He had filled his role better than anybody in senior management could have possibly hoped for. The CEO was overjoyed with Alan's appointment, and the work that he was doing. He was worth every penny of his salary, even if Alan felt worthless.

Knowing that he was an alcoholic and unable to function outside the narrow remit of his role, Alan was even more trapped than before. There was no way that he would find another job. There was nobody who needed somebody with such specific skills and experience. There was nobody who could afford to pay Alan the salary that he needed. There was no way that a functional alcoholic could hide their problem throughout the gruelling interview process. There was no way that a functional alcoholic would be able to start doing something new. He was just surviving on muscle memory, on practice and routine. Alan's brain was shot to pieces.

Alan wondered if suicide would be preferable to his existence. He knew that he was slowly committing suicide anyway. Soon his liver would be destroyed. Soon his health would fail completely, and he would quickly die. Wouldn't it be better to do it swiftly, before he got hospitalised and he painfully slipped away? Death would be unpleasant, as his organs failed one by one and his body gave up due to the ravages of alcohol. Surely it would be better to just kill himself quickly.

Stockpiling paracetamol from the chemist, buying boxes two at a time, Alan gathered hundreds of pills.

There was no moment of doubt when he did it, swallowing handful after handful of white tablets, washed down with whiskey. Alan had selected a fine single malt to end his life. Leaving no suicide note, he had however tidied up his flat and set his financial affairs in order. Everything would be found neat and tidy, when the police were sent by the factory to see why he hadn't turned up for work at all that week.

Of course, people were sad when he'd gone. "He could have been anything he wanted" they said. He had amazing potential. He just had to apply himself to something. The world was his oyster. There were so many opportunities.

Nobody saw how trapped Alan was, and he had known that he could never explain. People would never understand how he could be so trapped, when he was so well paid and so good at his job. He was steady and dependable. He never rocked the boat. He never complained. He just got on with his work.

His mother didn't mention her prophecy about the factory at the funeral. Many of his work colleagues attended the burial, and it would have been insulting to talk about factory work as undesirable. There was also a subtle point that Alan's mother had missed: he had ended up working at a factory, just as she had warned, but she had been proud of him because it was a prestigious role.

What Alan's mother had failed to understand was that the men who manually laboured in the factory felt like they made a difference. Every full lorryload of product that left the factory felt like some small achievement. Even a full day spent sticking labels on cans and transferring items on conveyor belts felt somehow useful.

However, Alan had never figured out what the purpose of his role was. He knew that he was well paid, and that he was a valued employee, but he didn't know why. Alan had been unable to place himself anywhere in the grand scheme of things. Alan had never been unable to get over the most basic reduction of his job description to the simplest possible explanation, which was now chiselled into his gravestone in commemoration of his great work: 

"He watched paint dry"

* * *

Tags: #writing #shortstories #alcohol

This is a story about admiration...

Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, we're told. I'm sure it's also a way to make somebody feel self conscious as hell, and maybe even feel great pressure to live up to expectations. People looking to you for inspiration, guidance and direction in their lives: it's a lot of responsibility. Thankfully I don't have that problem, being a complete loser.

While I haven't lifted a life plan straight out of any of my friends' lives, I've certainly borrowed parts of their life that I admire. The easiest thing to do is try and clone something of their digital persona. If they write a blog, you write a blog. If they tweet, you tweet. You read what they read, and try to understand where they're coming from when they make certain intellectual and emotional points: you try and empathise.

If you spend a bunch of time with a person, at school, at work, online, you start to get a sense of who they are, superficially. If you're a relatively sponge-like character like I am, you soak up mannerisms, certain phrases and even accents and colloquialisms. In a way, if you speak like a person, you start to think like them.

Well that got real creepy real quick, didn't it?

I was supposed to be writing a blog post to reassure some of my friends that they're not responsible for me. I was supposed to be writing to say that I'm sorry if it was all a bit too personal, when I alluded to how important your influence has been in helping me discover some of the pieces that make up my personality. However, it's all come out a bit like: I wanna be like you.

If you don't have any role models, how are you supposed to figure out what you want to be and who you want to be? I think you can admire somebody and want to be like certain aspects of their personality and do things like they do, but you're still very much yourself.

When I think about the things that an admired friend has done, built, written, I don't think "I've got to do that too". Instead I think about what was good and interesting and useful and inspiring about what they did, and I try to emulate their passion and industriousness, by reverse-engineering what I imagine to be the process that led them to arrive at their achievements.

Friends who are musically talented have not led me to learning the piano or the guitar. Instead I've looked at their passion for music and tried to understand how the pursuit of music became a passion, and not a skill simply to be acquired through practice and repetition. Sure, you can become good at something purely by imitating somebody. You can learn to play the guitar like Jimi Hendrix, including imitations of all his mistakes, but do you really feel the way that Hendrix felt when you play, or are you merely miming the actions?

There's no point in turning yourself into a best-guess clone of somebody, just because you like and admire them. There's no happiness or salvation to be found in learning to look and act like somebody, unless you wanted to be a professional impersonator. Instead, if you think somebody looks passionate and fulfilled by something, you've gotta understand the dynamic that's driving that.

Life can also throw some weird curveballs. Like, I didn't get the whole social networking thing. When I heard an old schoolfriend was developing a social networking platform, I was like "what's the point?". Then I got into kitesurfing, and through kitesurfing I got into discussion forums, and discussion forums are mostly built on phpBB, which is a social networking platform. Social networking inadvertently changed my life for the better, but if I'd tried to involve myself in the world that my friend was passionate about it, I would have been lost until I saw the value through my own experiences.

Now, when somebody tells me their social business model is like an existing business model, but social, I'm like "so you have a comments section and people can click a button to tweet your shit, right?" and they're like, no, it's also a community, and I'm like "so you have a popup that asks you to fill in your email address so you can spam them?" and they're like, yeah, pretty much that.

Through the clouds of the bullshitters who don't really get it. Through all the swarms of "me too" idiots who are trying to hit all the buzzwords, it's passion and a depth of experience and knowledge that really shines through. I can be cynical as hell with my friends, but I know that I simply don't get the things that they're passionate about, until I do, and then I neatly slot them into my worldview.

It might look like I'm patchwork quilt of stolen ideas, borrowed personality traits and copycat behaviours, but I still make everything my own because I too have grown to see the value in the things that my friends have opened my eyes to.

I apologise if the hero worship is an unwanted pressure, or makes you feel uncomfortable. I'm sorry about where our worlds collide and I might directly or indirectly make reference to your influence on me and the stuff I'm doing. For sure I'm doing a bunch of figuring out who the hell I am and what makes me tick, and that's meant revisiting everything since childhood. It might be a bit cringeworthy, but maybe I'll get somewhere.

Anyway, I hope I don't make you feel too self conscious, and I hope that your involvement in my story has not been unwanted.

Thanks.

Tags: #friends #socialmedia

This is a story about being in touch with your feminine side...

When I was a pre-pubescent boy, I read a book by Judy Blume about girls getting their period and having their first kiss with a boy. Before you boil over into a fit of inexplicable anger (as women are prone to do because they're completely ruled by their emotions) I'm not actually saying I know what it's like to menstruate, have boobs and to carry a baby inside me for 9 months and deliver it into the world through my vagina.

My education and upbringing was pretty heavy on the whole sex-ed thing. My sister was born when I was 10 years old, and so I clearly remember her birth and my Mum's pregnancy. My teacher at school was pregnant when we were being shown childbirth videos, and the schools in Oxford are actually pretty progressive. We were taught about the reproductive cycle in the first year that I went to middle school, when I was 9 years old.

Of course, I will never have the first-hand experience of having my cervix dilated by the large head of my child, to the point that it tears, and other painful sounding childbirth related stuff. I know that I would get yelled at with hormonal illogical female rage, if I was to suggest that other stuff that's happened to me has been painful. The muscle on the front of my calf was sliced in half, severing 4 tendons. The hospital in Oxford kept me for 3 days to re-stabilise my kidneys - no painkillers - and then sent me back home to London for the operation 2 days later. My whole journey on the train and across the capital was done without crutches or pain relief. My bandages were soaked with blood. I'm sure those 5 days where my calf had a muscle that was sliced in two down to the bone would give me no capacity to imagine having my vagina ripped to bits by a baby though.

I genuinely don't want to insult mothers. You're right, I'll never know what it's like to have a bad back from carrying round all that weight of a baby bulge for 9 months. I'll never know what it's like to have my internal organs being squished by the life growing inside me. I'll never know what it's like to be woken up by my unborn child kicking. I'll never know.

If you think I'm being flippant or sarcastic, I'm sorry, but I'm actually being genuine. I've often given consideration to the things I'll never know.

What man hasn't given consideration to how much fun they might have, if they got to swap bodies with a woman for the day. Of course, we'd like to play with our tits, but we're also fascinated to know what it feels like for a girl. There's a <blush> slightly kinky element. What does it feel like to be penetrated? Are multiple orgasms as good as they sound? Errr... did I just say that? Moving swiftly on.

Yeah, it's pretty shameful to admit this stuff, but I've made it my mission to vicariously experience what I can of the feminine. I don't think I'm one of those men who thinks that they're a woman who got born into a guy's body. I've just made it a goal in life to empathise. Empathise with everybody. Including the opposite sex.

When I was a teenager I read female erotic fiction. I tried to get into the mind of what women want. I tried to learn how to be a generous lover, so that I could please my girlfriends. I put a lot of effort into my 'research' and I have to say, I got a big kick out of it. However, I read an article recently where the author - a woman - was actually offended by how much of an ego boost guys get by knowing they've moved the Earth for their lover. Well, guess what? That's been added to the long list of considerations too.

So am I painting this picture of me as some sort of perfect guy? No. Don't be ridiculous. What I'm saying is that I'm an information gatherer, and I was born as a sensitive little soul who takes in a lot of what people say, how they feel and whatever I can divine from the media I have consumed. I guess I figured out from an early age that I wasn't going to learn everything I needed to know from pornographic magazines and videos.

It's laughable isn't it, to say that I empathise with women, mothers. and it's actually not true, I don't. I try to, but of course I fail on so many levels. You can't possibly know how much you don't know. Dunning-Kruger effect. Blah blah blah!

But, if you can have a tomboy, can you not also have a tamgirl?

I remember when a friend was talking about her hen do. I enthusiastically gushed "OMG! When is it?" without thinking that I would not actually be invited. I just kinda assumed that I would be. It was a strange situation, because she was a "one of the lads" kind of girl, and I'm a "comfortable with my sexuality" type of guy, so the gender exclusion of the event didn't even register with me.

So, why have I taken a wordplay of Mumsnet, turning it into something that's supposed to sound like The Social Network? Well, because I'm jealous. I feel like I'm missing out on something.

My same friend who I mentioned regarding the hen do was at one time (I'm not sure if she still is) an active contributor on the Mumsnet forum. I actually met her on a forum to do with kitesurfing, many years before. We were both active forum contributors. In fact, I think we competed for the top spot, quite often.

Another friend, a wonderful geek girl whom I very much enjoy the pleasure of the company of, is also another active Mom social networker, who I think also frequents the pages of Mumsnet.

The blogosphere is heavily colonised by mommybloggers, looking for some kind of activity to connect with the world in a way that fits with the demands of family life. Family members eagerly devour every last detail of life of the youngest members of the clan, and will scour the pages of every social media source in order to gather any updates and juicy pictures of the cute little kids as they grow up. Blogging about your family life is a natural extension of that.

However, I imagine that having kids can be a fairly bleak and isolating existence at times. Just as being single can leave you left out from all those couples events - who's going to invite sad Dave to dinner on his own? That'd be weird! - so the stressed out mom who's had to spend all day with fractious children is going to be overlooked by friends who don't want their peaceful child-free existence shattered by the arrival of mountains of childrearing equipment and tantrum-prone toddlers disturbing the peace.

Yes, unless you have a good baby circle of other moms who have kids of a similar age, it's kinda hard for anybody to relate to the particular struggles that you're immediately facing, whether that be teething and nappy rash, or the defiant "NO!" phase as the loveable darlings assert their own personalities. Which of your friends understands that they need to remove all the sharp, swallowable and fragile ornaments from the low surfaces? That bowl of potpourri looks terribly decorative on the coffee table, but to a parent of a young child, that's just a choking hazard. The worlds are going to collide.

And so, sleep-deprived moms get isolated, as social lepers because they're no longer footloose and fancy free. Not only must the children travel with mom, but also the changing mat, clean nappies, wet wipes, sterilising equipment, bibs, blankets, toys, teething rings, potties, spare clothes, medicines, high chairs, carrycots, pushchairs and every other bit of parenting paraphernalia to keep the tiny tots clean, comfortable, fed and watered, in the hope that they'll smile and giggle, not cry.

I have no idea if an Internet forum can provide some of the camaraderie that is necessary to make things seem a little less desperate, when Junior just won't go to sleep and he's driving you nuts with that noisy toy that grandma bought for him. I have no idea if getting together online, as moms who've been through it all too - they know all the shit that you're going through - in some way makes getting through the day a little easier.

I know that I miss my time being a top contributor on a forum. I know that I miss those familiar nicknames. I know that I miss the purpose and routine that it gave my life, trying to read absolutely everything, and make comments in the most active threads. I miss those virtual friends, who actually turned out not to be virtual at all. Some of the best friends I have, I made through forums. Some of the best experiences of my life, were when a bunch of us nerdy Internet dwellers met up, in the evening for drinks, for weekend trips away, or for adventures around the world.

The gender-blind part of me thinks that I should sign up for Mumsnet and join in the discussion and debate, but something tells me that might not go down too well.

There is a considerable hole in my life, without an online community to belong to.

Tags: #friends #socialmedia #sex

This is a story about the looking glass...

What do you see when you peer into somebody's life through the prism of social media and the mask they wear at work? How well do you think you really know somebody, from the things that they choose to tell you, and from the side they choose to show to the public?

What do you know about me? Director of my own company, lucrative consultancy contract, flat on the river in central London, under 40, own hair, own teeth, no obvious disabilities. Brilliant! Perfect! Spiffing!

I don't even want to ham up the whole invisible disability thing. It's true, you can't see my depression, anxiety, bipolar. You can't see what my childhood was like. You can't see what struggles I've had in the past, to reach where I am today. You can't see my finances. You can't see my family pressures. You can't see the emotional baggage I'm trying to deal with. You don't even know what my daily existence is really like.

I'm not saying whether those things are good or bad, what I'm saying is that you're in no position to sit in judgement.

It's not a competition. It's not like I need to show you videos of me as a little boy, being sexually abused by my uncle [not that he did that] just to prove to you that I'm a worthy cause. How can anybody really say who is struggling and suffering more than somebody else? There is so much that is invisible, imperceptible.

There is no way to measure our distress, and to gauge who is worthy and who is being some kind of spoiled bratty person who should just shut the fuck up and go away. Count your blessings! Just be grateful for what you have! Look on the bright side! Cheer up! Chin up! etc. etc. ad nauseam.

Do you really want to take the chance of browbeating somebody and making them feel guilty for being desperately depressed and overwhelmed by their situation, until the moment that they take their own life? Is that really your preference, that people should just shut up and try to count their blessings, force their chin up and put on a mask of fake happiness, until they finally crack and they're gone?

Oh yes, isn't this so terribly melodramatic. Oh isn't it so terribly attention seeking. Oh wouldn't we all like to complain about our lives, and our lot in life, and our stress and the competing demands for our time and our money, and how emotionally and physically drained we are, and how we can barely cope. Oh me too, and you don't see me going on about it blah blah blah.

Well go on then.

Go on. I'm not stopping you. In fact, I encourage you to speak up if you're having a hard time and I will listen. If you're really at your wits end, I will find you and I'll make time for you. I know what it's like. A cry for help is a cry for help. Would you ignore a drowning man? Oh! It's just a cry for help! If he was serious about drowning he would have sunk to the bottom of the lake and be dead!

Cry wolf. YOU LEFT A LITTLE BOY WITH WOLVES FOR FUCK'S SAKE!

You know what it is, when people tell people with depression and crippling anxiety to shut up? It's bullying, plain and simple. People are being bullied into not talking about their distress. The bullies don't like attention being diverted from their narcissistic selves, so they bully people who are in genuine distress, using insulting terms like "melodramatic" and "attention seeker".

You wanna know what's attention seeking? Demanding that attention not be shown to those who are crying for help. Implicitly, by saying "don't look at them" you are saying "look at me". Yes, that's right, you're saying "don't look at that person who is yelling for help, look at me instead, aren't I fabulous?".

Guess what? You're not fabulous for having your shit together and no problems. If you're fabulous and have got your shit together, then try helping others who are less fortunate than yourself. What is Facebook and social media for? "I'm so pissed off because you're filling up my news feed with all your depressing stuff" = "make room for more selfies of me having a wonderful time".

When somebody is casting out for connections on social media, they have probably reached the limit of isolation. Social media is the last toehold that a person has in the world. They probably don't have friends, family and other healthy relationships that they can turn to in their hour of desperation. There's a reason why they're turning to social media, and it's not because they're an attention whore, looking for 'likes' on their shit.

It's rather tragic that I even have to explain this, and I know that the people who I have in mind when I write this have already switched off, because they're not tagged in a photo of them, smiling in the sunshine in their perfect fucking lives.

Is this whole essay based on jealousy of those who made smart life choices? Is this whole essay ignoring the fact that there are starving African children? READ IT AGAIN YOU FUCKING A-HOLES.

Tags: #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #socialmedia

This is a story about dream jobs...

Why aren't nurses who work in geriatric care the best paid people on the planet? When humans are old and shrivelled up, senile, incontinent and are simply an inconvenience, getting in the way of children receiving their inheritance, geriatric nurses are there mopping up the poop and vomit, and generally trying to ease the suffering and discomfort of the age-ravaged creatures who are long past their sell-by date. On the face of it, palliative care seems a thankless task, and the low pay would certainly back that up.

But what about nursery nurses and nannies? These people also mop up the shit and puke of those who can't look after themselves, but the tiny tots that they care for are all cute and brand new. People who work in childcare are similarly badly paid, but maybe that's because it's supposedly fun and rewarding, playing with children all day.

How can this be? How can it be the case that somebody who looks after those who are dying gets paid badly, but then so is a person who looks after those who have their whole lives ahead of them?

Perhaps it's the case that anybody who deals with human waste is badly paid. Certainly when we examine the remuneration of garbage collectors and cleaners, we find that these people who scrub human stains from the world, are very badly paid. The people who unblock sewers and those who work in sanitation are hardly big earners, and might in fact be in a similar pay bracket to the people who look after children and old people.

You would have thought that having to deal with dirt, grime, death and bodily fluids would carry a pay premium that would see the people I just mentioned, amongst the highest paid there are, but this is not the case at all.

Hang on though! What about musicians, poets and writers? Sure, there are a handful of successful individuals who are paid mind-bogglingly humongous sums for the art that they create, but the very vast majority of people who have chosen music and wordcraft as their profession, will find themselves very poor indeed. Think how many struggling writers there are. Think how many people there are who play in bands, but barely earn a single cent for their trouble. How many people reciting wonderful poetry are able to call it a well paid profession?

So if writers and musicians are badly paid too, but they don't have to deal with bodily fluids and rotting trash, then what exactly is the common link?

Do you think it's time spent studying? Do you think it's qualifications? Well, many musicians will have spent tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours mastering their instruments. Music theory is not trivial. Music theory and harmonics are governed by discrete mathematical rules. Can you really say that a corporate lawyer or accountant is more qualified than somebody who has dedicated their life to music? Of course not.

So what is it? What is the rule that decides whether you will be well paid, or you will struggle to make ends meet?

Well, my theory is that the more alien and dehumanising your job is, the more you will be paid. Humans have caring and nurturing instincts built into them. We will naturally feel sympathy for those in discomfort and pain, and we will want to help if we can. Humans have a dislike for waste and mess, and we will want to keep things clean and ordered. We have evolved the instinct to not live in piles of our own filth. We have even evolved the social instinct to create art that binds us together. Whether it's trancelike-state inducing beats and chants, paintings on cave walls, or the telling of stories that are our very earliest form of preserving our history, myths and legends. It's human to want to perform, to sing, to entertain.

What innocent young child really can imagine that they would want to grow up and get a job massaging numbers in spreadsheets or editing the minutiæ of legal contracts? What the fuck does your bullshit job even entail? What the fuck is it going to say on your motherfucking gravestone? How the fuck would you even go about explaining what you do to your grandmother?

And so, we now have an army of the living dead who are, in the words of David Bolchover, switched off, zoned out. This is the shocking truth about office life. Nobody gives two fucks about their job or their employer. There is no job satisfaction. The jobs are alien, dehumanising.

What do these armies of disillusioned people do all day? Well, they read and they listen to music. Some of the most cultured art patrons that we are lucky enough to have in the world, are just bored people sat at their desks with glazed eyes, wondering what they're going to have for lunch.

But then what? What happens next?

Well, these people start dreaming about becoming musicians, writers, artists, poets and pursuing all manner of things that will connect them with the aesthetic and creative elements that their bullshit daily humdrum gives them precisely fuck all of.

What even is a journalist? Well, the clue's in the name: journalist. As in day. As in somebody who writes a journal every day. That's all it is. That's all it takes to be a writer. You don't have to be qualified to be a writer. Just write. Every day.

There's a myth that you can't do anything without studying, that has been perpetuated by the professions. It's true that you can't become a lawyer or an accountant without studying, but those are bullshit jobs with bullshit professional bodies whose job it is to limit how many people enter the profession every year, in order to maintain false scarcity and prop up their salaries.

It's utter bullshit. We don't need any lawyers & accountants. Without builders, there are no houses. Without farmers and fishermen, there is no food. Without weavers and seamstresses there are no clothes. Without lumberjacks and miners, there is no wood and coal to keep ourselves warm and to cook our meals. Everything else is just intellectual masturbation. Unnecessary bullshit made up jobs that add nothing of value.

So, as people are realising that the fact that they didn't go to an Oxbridge university to study English, or at least attend a creative writing course, but yet they can still write a blog and entertain their friends and family on Facebook and Twitter, the value of journalists has been completely eroded.

Yes, it's a shame that The Guardian and The Observer newspapers are going down the shitter, whether they add a paywall or not. Yes it's a shame that a lot of friends and people who I know, who are extremely talented and have dedicated their whole lives to the pursuit of journalism and writing careers, are finding that there's just no way that they're ever going to earn a decent salary doing what they love.

And that's just it. That's the kicker. That's the real kick in the teeth. As soon as you do something you love, you'll find there's no money in it. We all want to be footballers, singers, food critics, cinema critics, writers, journalists, poets and every other job where you fuck about doing nothing more than entertaining, informing, educating, inspiring.

We all love the thrill of the limelight. We all love dressing up. We all love exotic locations. We all love to seek new sensations. We all love to meet interesting people. We all love to talk and write about what we're passionate about. We all love to make art that expresses our deeply felt human emotions that can't be articulated using the blunt instruments of words.

If you do what you love and it's necessary, like nursing, then you'll be paid just enough to survive. If you do what you love and it's unnecessary, like art, then you'll not be paid anything at all. It's a race to the bottom. We can all stick a paintbrush on a piece of paper and produce something passably artistic.

The arts used to be the preserve of the aristocracy, but with the democratisation of the arts through the digital medium, my crude drawing of a penis can be reproduced infinitely many times across every computer screen on the planet. I can write a library full of books, and they're all immediately in print and available to be read by anybody, at any time, for free, because of the limitless power of the digital printing press that is the internet. Why the fuck would anybody pay anything for art anymore?

Of course, scarcity still has value, and a few super-high profile artists will continue to produce original artworks in the form of paint on canvas, art installations and live performances. These artists are the courtiers in the entourage of the plutocracy. You have about as much chance of becoming one of these people as you have of being struck by an asteroid, twice.

As the global recession deepens, the amount of people who are able to just about scrape a living as a freelance writer or a busker will drop away to nothing, and the arts will once again be the preserve of the sons & daughters of the very wealthiest, who have the monetary means to pursue things which society largely deems worthless.

The Huffington Post has shown the future for journalism, where an army of bloggers are leveraged to provide the same kind of re-hashed reporting of the stories that are churned out by a handful of news agencies who are still able to have people on the ground. Your dreams of being a war correspondent are over. Even your dreams of being a lifestyle blogger are looking pretty hopeless.

There is a vast oversupply of opinion and wordcraft and music and art and everything else that's fun to create. There is no longer any room to do something you love. As soon as you derive any kind of job satisfaction, that's going to be the last pay rise you ever get.

Don't you get it? It's a race to the bottom. See you there!

Tags: #writing #socialmedia #capitalism #career

This is a story about pets...

I love cats. Cats love me. My cat, Frankie, is so comfortable with me that I can zip him inside my jumper to keep him warm and he just happily snuggles up.

I read the other day that it took less than an hour to raise thousands of pounds for a cat that needed an operation at the vet. I've always taken the precaution of having pet insurance, because I would never want to have to make a cold hard financial decision about an animal that I kept as a pet, because I'm very emotionally attached - bonded - to Frankie.

A friend of mine has cycled thousands of miles across Europe to raise money to buy bicycles for impoverished families in Africa. These are not bicycles for leisure. They are an essential mode of transport for rural dwelling people, in order to be able to access education, employment and markets, without having to walk for hours and hours in blistering heat. Each bicycle can literally transform the prospects of an entire family overnight.

My friend who has so far covered about 2,000 miles, in over a month, has raised less than 25% of what the needy moggy managed to raise in less than an hour. I'm sure you'll agree, that cycling thousands of miles in some of the steepest parts of the Alps, surely shows that it is not through lack of effort that his fundraising attempt has not been more fruitful so far.

It's certainly not my intention to criticise or take anything away from his incredible feat, working so hard for such a good cause, to raise money for World Bicycle Relief by cycling across Europe. I'm totally in awe of what my friend is doing.

However, what saddens and disappoints me is how readily people will reach for their wallets when they think of a poor suffering furball, rather than a fellow human being.

Both my friend and I have been homeless. There seems to be an assumption that human beings are architects of their own demise, and animals are innocent creatures that need our protection. There seems to be an assumption that charity and governments are somehow working, to redistribute wealth and protect the needy and vulnerable. That simply isn't the case.

Why do people wait, until their friends and relatives are in hospital or dead, before they say "I wish we knew what to do, before it was too late" and "if we knew things were that bad, we would have done something"?

Frankly though, this is horse shit.

We have a culture where we believe we are engaged in a desperate struggle just to "look after our own". It's simply not true.

It might feel like a desperate struggle, to prepare the kids packed lunches and hang the laundry out. It might feel like a desperate struggle to think that you might not get to take 3 foreign holidays this year if you or your partner loses your job, which you're not going to. Things might feel like a desperate struggle because you've been reading too much damn tabloid journalism.

Until you've slept rough, barely been able to keep yourself clean, except with the occasional public shower, and barely been able to keep the clothes on your back from turning to dusty rags, you know fuck all about desperate struggle. However, even when you're homeless in the UK, you still don't tend to go without at least one hot meal a day: there are always soup kitchens and the Hare Krishna.

I don't know what it takes to trigger some empathy, and the goddamn impulse to get up and do something but I'm fairly outraged by the pocket change that gets stuffed into a charity collection bucket, simply to salve a middle-class conscience.

You've probably completely misread my own situation. I live in a flat that costs me twice as much as a hostel bed, which is totally excellent value. I work a job that brings in enough money to pay down the debt that I ran up supporting myself when I was sick. Yes, that's right. Instead of claiming incapacity benefit, housing benefit, council tax deductions and every other kind of government handout that I'm totally entitled to because I have major mental health issues instead I've funded it all out of my own pocket, and impoverished myself in the process.

Why would I do that? Well, because it's easier to get the money you need to survive when you have fur, whiskers and paws.

I mean, for fucks sake, Syrian children are having to print out pictures of themselves with Pokémon so that we give a shit about them.

Sorry for the condescending tone. I'm just a bit pissed off that our idea of "helping our own" is a few likes and shares on Facebook.

The end.

Tags: #charity #frankie #homeless

This is a story about Tower Hamlets...

Where I live, Muslims aren't 0.9% of the population like in the USA. Where I live, Muslims aren't 5% of the population, like in the whole of England. Where I live, the Muslim population is 46%. What do you think that's like?

Tower Hamlets is a place of huge socioeconomic divide. The council that governs this particular part of the UK, houses some of the poorest members of society, yet it is also the home to the headquarters of HSBC: the biggest bank in Europe, along with massive tower blocks for the likes of Citigroup, JPMorgan, Barclays, Fitch & Moody's, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and giant accountancy & legal firms like KPMG and Clifford Chance.

While I sit on the banks of the River Thames penning essays like this one, slightly inland there are deprived council estates that are the modern equivalent of the Victorian slums. This is London. While I go to the dry cleaners to collect my freshly laundered shirts for the working week, or do some food shopping in Waitrose, my neighbours - certainly those who you would recognise as 'English' - are in the betting shops or buying lottery tickets at the convenience store.

If you think I've wandered into snobbery, you're wrong. I'm simply an observer. It's true that I occupy a priviledged position, but anybody is capable of making similar observations.

You know, I don't feel at all safe, boarding an underground train in a sea of white faces at 6pm on a weekday evening. Canary Wharf is crawling with rich middle-class people, and the station is packed to the rafters. Often times, the escalator is carrying so many office workers down to the packed concourse that people start to pile up at the bottom, in a rather comic way.

But when I head away from the glistening tower blocks filled with middle and back office drones, I start to feel safe again. London never feels like real London when it divides itself. The private estate of Canary Wharf, and the protected enclave of the City of London, with its 'Ring of Steel' are just crying out to be attacked, because they are sending out a message of "no poor people welcome here".

It feels like no atrocity is ever going to be committed in the markets of Brick Lane, where hipsters flock because of East London's famous Asian community. It feels like no atrocity is ever going to be committed on the Commercial Road or on Petticoat Lane, where large courtyards are filled with people praying towards Mecca.

London's great advantage is not integration, but tolerance. Everybody knows that the Edgware Road is somewhere to go and drink tea and smoke shisha. Everybody knows that all the Aussies and Kiwis have colonised Hammersmith and Shepherd's Bush. Everybody knows that Clapham and North London are the places that young wealthy white professionals frequent, whilst Camden is for dope smokers and tourists. Curry on Brick Lane. Chinatown. Little Venice. The cultural divisions are manifest.

London is not in the least bit integrated, but that's its great strength. Rather than relegating the poor entirely into the undesirable suburbs, like with Paris, social housing has brought otherwise 'undesirable' people into the very heart of the city.

The scariest places are Canary Wharf and the City because they have no residential housing, so therefore, they are almost 100% white middle class, filled with guffawing hooray Henries who have absolutely zero idea about the life of an underpriviledged person.

I used to live a stone's throw from the UK's Foreign Secretary - Boris Johnson - but not in a multimillion pound Georgian town house. My landlady was illegally subletting her council flat while she lived a life of idle luxury in Spain. On the towpath of the canal that the back of my apartment used to overlook, I would be verbally abused by Islington and Hackney's less fortunate residents, for being a yuppie. That sort of shit keeps you humble.

Now, 'right to buy' has gifted wealth to a few social housing tenants, but the gentrification of London is a terrible thing.

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, so it's right that I should live in a community where nearly 50% subscribe to the Islamic doctrine. My life is certainly none the poorer for being mindful of important religious events, like Ramadan.

Britain and London's great victory was in diplomacy and tolerance. Our American-style anti-immigration and anti-Islamic rhetoric is only going to fuel tensions that were entirely imperceptible, until the USA decided to involve itself in Gulf conflicts in the early 1990s. We are paying a greater and greater price for the 'special relationship' with the US that affects our long-standing good relations with our Middle Eastern friends and allies.

Citizens of the United Kingdom would be well advised to remind themselves that Iraq, Iran and Syria had a thriving middle class, before their countries were torn apart by war, sanctions and CIA destabilisation.

You reap what you sow, and this anti-Islamic sentiment is completely undermining everything that I stand for as a diplomatic British Londoner.

Tags: #politics #london

This is a story about perspectives...

Relativity. The difference between different observers, for a given frame of reference. Who can say that the reality that I experience is more 'real' than that which you experience?

As if by chance, a friend of mine who I used to be homeless with - sleeping rough - in the London parks, visited me this evening. Now, instead of living destitute in a bush, I was able to entertain him in a luxury Thameside apartment.

Do you think that this disparity, this clear 'upswing' in my social status and prospects, makes me think "ooh! how terribly fortunate I am!"?

In actual fact, when the Government had ignored my doctor and psychiatrist's imploring letters to support me during a particularly vulnerable period in my life, and I had been denied welfare and housing, I felt liberated. I lived within a stone's throw of a Royal Palace and was relinquished of the responsibilities of attending demeaning ATOS assessments, completing form upon form of personal information, and digging through vast archives of paperwork to find bullshit documents to satisfy some blank-faced bureaucratic drone.

Do you think I'm glad not to be homeless? Don't be so ridiculous. Everything comes with a cost.

I'm really in no position to be working at the moment. I feel like I'm going through one of the most prolonged periods of depression that I have ever experienced, and the stress and anxiety of my situation is so unbearable that I am closer to taking my own life than I have ever been before.

The fact that I am working is very different from being able to work. The cost to me is virtually immeasurable. If this brief period of stuffing cash in a mattress appears to be a success for those who believe that work will set us free at bayonet point, they are probably ignoring the historical precedent and likely long-term outcomes.

I note that those who criticise me for being ungrateful for my position may be doing so whilst on holiday in Barcelona, or perhaps on a yacht in La Rochelle. This seems to be the ultimate in ignorant hypocrisy, when these people have probably never known the hardships of homelessness and destitution.

If you imagine that a homeless person should be grateful when they are finally off the streets and into a stable housing situation, you are a buffoon. Housing, food, hygiene and an opportunity to put your skills to productive use, are the bare minimum for human dignity. These are human rights.

Instead, I feel like a prostitute. I have sold my mind to the highest bidder. My analogy is probably insulting to those who are genuinely compelled to sell sex, but in this way, you might understand the lack of empathy that my wealthy friends have shown towards my own situation.

Get rich or die trying. It's not even that simple. There are so few ways to dig yourself out of a desperate situation. Prostitution of the body or prostitution of the mind. If somebody wishes to shoot me down for such a melodramatic analogy, go right ahead, I probably deserve it and I'm an easy target, but this is how I feel.

I have made a bitter choice: work for three times as long, and have a somewhat easier time of it, but know the whole time that I'm being underpaid for my skills. Or, to be highly paid but accept the very worst work. The most soul-destroying and de-skilling work that is wholly unsatisfying and only the hardest, meanest, most desperate mercenaries would tolerate in the interests of getting rich quick.

My days are a completely calculated gamble. I put my mental health on the chopping block, hoping that I can struggle by for long enough to put a few dollars in the bank before I explode with stress, frustration, depression and having been completely exploited by a ruthless industry intent on burning people out in pursuit of pure profit.

It's hard to express how hard it is to do something that you mastered nearly 20 years ago, and has now become excruciating mental agony, but also an extremely well paid profession. I'm paid to be professionally bored, stressed, anxious and unfulfilled. I'm paid to put up with stuff that would have most sane people running out of the office saying "fuck this shit".

Yes, the majority of people hate their jobs. Yes, the majority of us would not work given the choice. This is different. I can compare and contrast. I can tell you what the difference is being an electrician from being the manager of an IT project. I can tell you which one destroys your soul and your mind more.

You know the best job I've ever had? Delivering newspapers on Monday to Saturday for £10 a week.

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

This is a story about what people do when they think nobody is watching...

Integrity. What does it mean to have integrity? Let's explore a hypothetical example.

The year is 2011. I'm running a profitable tech startup called Hubflow, and we have just been through a 13-week TechStars network technology accelerator program in Cambridge, run by Jon Bradford and Jess Williamson. We have a bunch of investors who are ready to help us raise a seed round. Mike Butcher has written about us in TechCrunch. We are kicking arse.

The sticking point that is stressing me out is that my partner won't support me. My company needs to relocate to London, Cambridge or somewhere on the M4 corridor so that I can hire the talent I need and get to my customers and investors whenever I need to see them. My partner is a teacher. She can literally work anywhere in the country.

***

I financially supported my partner through her retraining to be a teacher. She had a huge income drop, when she left the investment bank where we both worked, but I made sure that she still enjoyed the 5-star luxury lifestyle that she had gotten used to with me.

Even when I quit my salaried job so that I could build my startup, I had substantial savings and profits, to allow us to maintain the same standard of living. I had bankrolled her when she wanted to make a career change, and she'd never had to tighten her belt or compromise.

This was now my turn to shine. I had done it. I had built a profitable company with a good valuation that was ready for investment to take it to the next stage. It was now time to leave the sleepy little seaside town where we lived and move things closer to the action.

My co-founder had left his pregnant partner behind in his home town, to come and live with me in Cambridge for several months, while we built our business together and got ourselves ready for investment. He had made sacrifices and compromises with his growing family. Now it was the turn of my partner to step up and make a small compromise herself.

However, she wouldn't budge an inch.

I could have left her. And perhaps - in hindsight - that's what I should have done. She had never been very kind or supportive. In fact, she was pretty mean spirited and selfish. I don't know why I stayed loyal to her. I'd had opportunities to fool around while I was working away from home, in Boulder, Colorado, in London or in Cambridge, but I stayed faithful. I stayed faithful because I have integrity.

I then got very depressed. She had refused any kind of compromise. I had to leave her, or my business was screwed. There was no way that me and my co-founder could make it work over such a geographical hurdle. We needed to be together, on the ground, raising money and winning more customers. And we were so close. It was heartbreaking.

By the time Christmas rolled around that year, I had gotten so depressed and suicidal that I was hospitalised. My unsupportive mean ex had instructed my parents to come and take me away, and had involved my doctor, all against my wishes. This was an incredible betrayal. Now she wanted me removed from my own home, that I had bought and paid for. This was a horrible act of selfishness.

Before I was literally dragged away by my Dad, I decided to install a keystroke logger on my personal laptop, which was running my personal account & password. This was clearly an act of paranoia, due to the fact that I was extremely mentally unwell, having recently been released from a mental hospital. Clearly I was out of my mind.

I was driven away from my home, my business, my friends, my possessions, to a village where I had never lived since the age of 4, where I have no friends. Miles away from any cities where I had business contacts, investors, customers. I had just been totally fucked over. This was not in my best interests. I didn't even have a doctor or a psychiatrist nearby.

So then, was my partner interested in my wellbeing? Did she call to see how I was? Was she concerned about me getting better?

I thought it rather strange that she wasn't at all involved in trying to 'help' me, now that I was out of the way. In fact, it was rather strange that all the 'help' was simply to tell people to remove me from my own home. Must have been more paranoia though, right? I was mentally ill, remember?

I levelled my accusations about being dumped like this, and dragged away from everything I held dear. My partner and parents conspired to keep me trapped in this shitty village in the middle of nowhere. They even involved the police "for my welfare".

Anyway, after about a week of this shit, I decided to see if anybody had been using my laptop with my username and password. Strangely enough, and totally co-incidentally, they had been.

On examination of the logs, it looked like somebody had used my laptop and username to set themselves up an online dating profile and start messaging men. How strange. How curious.

Surely this could not have been my partner, for if she was using a computer at all, I'm sure it would have been to research the best possible treatment available for me, or to better understand what had happened to me, so that she could be as loving and supportive as possible, no?

My partner continued to treat me like utter shit and told me that any suggestion I made that she was not acting in my best interests, was purely in my imagination and fuelled by mental illness, paranoia.

Finally, I showed my hand, and she back-pedalled rapidly, begging my forgiveness and swearing that it was all a misguided mistake. She suddenly became nice as pie and started treating me with a tiny fraction of the respect and decency that I deserved.

I then had a brief taste of how I should have been treated all along, and it was nice. My stupid mistake was to then marry the evil *****. A leopard never changes its spots.

Be careful if you get mentally ill with a vindictive, selfish, mean-spirited little **** of a partner, because they might just try to chuck you out of your own house and replace you.

Tags: #divorce #mentalillness #startups #career #suicide #computing