This is a story about demon drink...

Drinking champagne, meant for a wedding. A toast to the bride, a fairytale ending. Those are some of my favourite song lyrics.

I'm not alcoholic because alcoholics go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and they can't stop drinking. Alcoholism, by its very definition, is the inability to curtail your consumption despite the damage to your health, wealth and relationships. I don't abuse alcohol and I can stop drinking for long periods whenever I want, so I'm not an alcoholic. Quod erat demonstrandum.

I can go lengthy periods without alcohol. Currently, I've not been drinking for the last 76 days, and I'm going to do 101 days, just because I can. Yes, you might have the odd 6 days off drinking, but I bet you've never done 8 days. I bet you've never done 28 days. I bet you've never done 90 days. The chances are, if you tried to quit, you'd find that your 'willpower' is very weak indeed.

Alcohol is brilliant for treating anxiety. It calms the nerves. It's like Diazepam (Valium) in a bottle from the supermarket, with a hangover. The two drugs - alcohol and Diazepam - have exactly the same effect on the Central Nervous System (CNS)... the brain. They both cause the release of a neurotransmitter called GABA, which calms the brain. Alcohol is a GABA agonist which means it causes GABA to be released in the brain.

If you flood your brain with GABA, you will be more relaxed and somewhat disinhibited. People incorrectly say that alcohol is a depressant but it's actually a CNS suppressant. That is to say, it suppresses a certain amount of brain activity. It makes you chilled out and stupid. It does not make you depressed, but if you are depressed, those feelings may come to the forefront of your mind, because you are disinhibited.

You can get happy drunks, angry drunks and sad drunks. All that is happening, is that the person's mask is slipping and you're seeing what they're really like behind their public persona. Alcohol is almost a truth serum. In vino veritas, means "in wine, truth". The Romans knew a lot about wine.

Why do I keep quoting latin at you? Well, it's because I'm challenging your shorthand notation for a person's life. I think I overheard somebody describe my reason for not drinking the other day as "because he's a recovering alcoholic"... that's outrageous! I have elected not to drink through choice. If I was an alcoholic, I would be alcohol dependent, and therefore unable to choose to stop drinking despite my desire to save my liver and bank balance from being decimated.

In actual fact, stopping drinking has cost me staggering sums of money. I was working on HSBC's number one project - Customer Due Diligence - which was an incredibly stressful project requiring very long hours of sustained high pressure. The only way to cope was with alcohol. When I quit drinking, I could no longer cope with the madness of that failing project.

I had decided to quit drinking for the Go Sober for October charity event, which would give me an excuse to resist the relentless peer pressure to get drunk with my colleagues. I lived and breathed the project I was working on, and I live and breathe banking, which means I lived and breathed drinking culture. It's very hard to be a sober banker, especially on the number one projects.

Alcohol carried me through JPMorgan's DTCC project (their number one project that year) and we delivered it on time and on budget with a green offshore team of Accenture developers. I was the Development Manager. Just about the only way to cope with the pressure and stress of that project was with copious amounts of alcohol... oh and some very cool bosses who just let me get on with my job.

I've had the good fortune of working with some very brilliant people. Most of whom have been massive drinkers. I've started to lose friends to liver damage though. Alcohol abuse catches up with you eventually.

Is it some health scare that caused me to stop drinking? Well, so far as I know my liver is OK. I had an ultrasound a couple of years ago, and my liver was torn from blunt trauma and damaged by hyperthermia, but it wasn't cirrhotic. Alcohol didn't cause the damage because I wasn't drinking at the time (or eating, but that's another story). My liver has been fully recovered for quite a while now. It's one of the few organs in the body that can repair itself, if you give it a chance.

So, what's the short answer? What's the shorthand? What's the soundbite? Well I'm afraid there is no shorthand. You can't label me as an alcoholic because I don't abuse alcohol. I don't even drink. Q.E.D.

Did alcohol abuse cause me to go homeless? Did alcohol abuse put me in hospital? Are those events connected to alcohol? No.

No, sorry to disappoint you. I wasn't drinking at any of the times when I have been hospitalised. I know you're hunting for something to point your finger at. I know that victim blaming is convenient. We like to label people. We like to pigeon hole people. Sadly, I don't really fit inside a neat little box. Nobody does, despite how much easier and less scary life appears to be when we imagine that we can pre-judge everybody.

Nothing good ever came from prejudice.

That's a photo of the last alcohol that I consumed, on the 25th of September 2015. A glass of port with some shrooms. Not magic mushrooms, containing the psychedelic chemical Psilocybin, because that's a Class "A" drug. Nope, those shrooms contain ice cream. Those glasses contain port wine.

Since then, I've had a fall-out with one of my oldest friends who's now not talking to me, I lost my job and I've been in hospital for a week. I also nearly threw myself off the Golden Gate Bridge, due to suicidal thoughts. All in all, not a great case for sobriety. My wealth and mental health have been severely impacted by my 101 day experiment, but I've started so I'll finish.

Conducting this in-vivo experiment has been extremely unethical. To risk your life and livelihood in order to discover the link between alcohol, anxiety and depression, is not something that any medical professional could sanction, condone. I've had to ignore the advice of healthcare professionals in order to uphold my commitment to discovering what happens when you quit drinking.

I'm not completely reckless. I know that for dangerous levels of alcohol dependency, quitting drinking abruptly can kill people. Having a seizure due to the sudden drop in the alcohol levels in your bloodstream can kill you. In a treatment centre for alcoholism, they would give you Librium and taper your dose down gently, to prevent you from having a fit.

Despite not having a physical alcohol dependency, it has still been exceedingly unpleasant to quit drinking. The elevated levels of anxiety that you experience, due to the conditioning of your body to expect alcohol as a coping mechanism for high stress levels, makes life fairly unmanageable. You have absolutely no idea how much of a crutch alcohol is in your life, because you've never quit boozin' for months on end. You just haven't done it. Period.

I really don't give a toss whether you want to carry on drinking or not. I won't judge you. I'm not preaching to the world about the few benefits of being a non-drinker. I'm not expecting people to go teetotal like me. In fact, I really don't think you can do it. It's too hard for most people. Most people are addicts. They say "I can quit anytime I want" because they can not drink for 6 days and not have tea/coffee/coke for 2 days. Those are not long enough periods of time to make any pronouncement about your addiction. Those short periods of time prove nothing, except that you can fool yourself into thinking you're not substance dependent.

It takes time for cravings and withdrawal to kick in. The headaches and cognitive impairment associated with stopping caffeine use takes at least 3 days to kick in. You will have terrible cravings after a week or so. You don't know this stuff, because you never go for long enough without a cup of tea or coffee, or a can of Coca-Cola.

The anxiety associated with alcohol withdrawal is something that creeps up more gradually. Your body is conditioned to know that there's always a bottle or a glass handy when you need it. Just knowing that alcohol is readily available actually makes you less anxious. Just knowing that stress relief is available on tap actually makes you less stressed. You will feel relief from your anxiety, flooding your body from the very first sip of an alcoholic drink. That's not possible. The alcohol can't enter your bloodstream that quickly. Your brain has simply learnt to release the GABA, in response to the smell of wine, beer & spirits. It's a conditioned response.

I'm sorry to report that you're no different than Pavlov's Dog. Yes, you respond to the ringing of the bell for last orders at the bar, by salivating for more alcohol, with just the same conditioned response as a dog slobbering for its meat chow, when the mealtime bell is sounded.

You might think you're high & mighty, because you can use your higher brain functions in order to pass judgement over other people. But under your pseudo-intellectual skin, you're the same animal as anybody else. You simply aren't well educated or well informed enough to be aware of your own ignorance, when you pass judgement over people.

So am I a functional alcoholic? Well that's a contradiction in terms. Killing yourself, damaging your health and wealth... surely that's dysfunctional behaviour, by its very definition? The fact that I can start and stop drinking at will, whenever I want, for however long I want... surely that undermines the whole concept of any kind of alcoholic, functional or otherwise?

I will probably start drinking again, after 101 days. For my next trick, I'm going to have a glass of red wine every day, and no more than that. I'm going to show that I can exercise self-control even with the disinhibition of the intoxication from a dose of ethanol. Yes, it's obvious that impaired judgement associated with ethanol intoxication is a reason why people drink more than they planned, but the rational brain never gets put to sleep entirely. We can still exercise a degree of self control.

None of this is very hard for me... because I'm no longer homeless. I have the threat of homelessness hanging over me, because I lost my job (because I stopped drinking). When you're homeless and you have no hope of a better life, drinking helps to anaesthetise you from the cold. The cold of the weather, and the cold shoulder that friends, family and society shows to you. You become untouchable. You are considered a tramp, a bum, a loser... you are shunned.

There is a vicious cycle associated with homelessness and alcohol abuse. People never consider chicken and egg. They never consider the reasons why somebody started to abuse alcohol, and whether those reasons are still present. Alcohol abuse is a symptom, not a cause of somebody's problems. People don't drink to excess unless they're very unhappy about something.

Alcohol abuse is a form of self medication. Alcohol is not inherently the problem. It's a symptom of a problem. Treat the root cause of the issue, and the alcoholism goes away. Plenty of people drink to excess, but they're not homeless and destitute. We applaud Hooray Henrys who throw wild parties and drink with gay abandon. Those glittering socialites are heros.

Drinking £700 of sparkling wine that was meant for my wedding should have been a warning sign, but I was too intoxicated to see what was really going on. Self medication numbed me to the fact that I was trapped in an abusive relationship, and had taken to the bottle to be able to cope with it, and a super stressful job. It was more than any human is capable of handling, without chemical assistance. My medication of choice was alcohol, for a long time.

Am I confessing that I was an alcoholic? Let's repeat this once more: alcoholics are people who are unable to stop drinking despite detrimental effects on their life, and the lives of those around them. I can stop drinking at will, whenever I want. I'm an expert on not drinking. I know far more about not drinking than you do.

Perhaps I should do 9 months of not drinking, or however long it is that good mothers don't drink for. But we already know that stress, anxiety and depression in pregnant women and new mums is a huge problem. So there's already a good data set to prove that quitting alcohol is hard on the minds of women, despite the elevated oxytocin levels associated with childrearing. That's pretty damning evidence about the long-term psychological/brain damage that alcohol abuse does.

It's very controversial to be writing this stuff, but there is heaps of data and anecdotal evidence around to support it. We just need to be good scientists, and observe what we see in the world around us. Conducting in-vivo experiments is dangerous and unethical, but it's yielding interesting findings.

Roll on 101 days!

You've structured your life around addictive substances like alcohol and caffeine more than you will ever possibly know unless you do a lengthy period of abstinence (September 2015)

Tags: #alcohol #addiction #notanonymous

This is a story about clinging on for dear life...

When you are hounded to the edge of the abyss, you will fall to your death if you allow yourself to be pushed one single step more. You shouldn't push people that hard. You shouldn't be so harsh, critical, judgemental, presumptuous. You don't know how close somebody is to the edge, until they're gone.

I don't want to go on about this, but I'm dealing with suicidal thoughts on a daily basis. If you think that's because I'm mentally ill, you're wrong. My brain has correctly judged the circumstances, and it's telling me that I have very few options. My brain is correctly informing me that I'm on the edge of a precipice, and the other side is a jeering snarling crowd who don't care whether I live or die.

People accuse suicidal people of being attention seeking, or selfish. It's actually neither. You have all the time in the world to hurl those accusations at a gravestone when they're gone. They won't be receiving any attention or anything for themself when they're gone. They won't even be stealing a single precious breath of your oxygen anymore, so how can it be selfish?

I've got a life insurance policy that covers suicide. My family are literally better off if I'm dead. That's cold hard cash in their pockets, rather than the rather draining task of repeatedly telling me I'm not good enough and I'm selfish. Yes, it's hard work to have to keep telling somebody to keep taking steps towards their demise, to keep hounding them until they're dead.

In Oxford, I'm pretty sure I came up with the term pushy parents. It kind of stuck with my friends, and their parents, and the phrase entered the popular vernacular. There were a lot of high-achieving kids at my schools in Oxford, and living nearby. My parents had big plans for their only son. They were going to make me achieve everything that they had failed to ever achieve, by force.

We all want our kids to do well, to get ahead, to achieve their greatest potential, but you have got to realise that they're still children. If you push them hard their whole childhood they won't thank you for it, if you push them beyond their limits and make them sick. You will struggle to judge how hard they can work, and how much stress and pressure they can handle, because you are a mature adult, and they are a developing child.

A child's attention span is different from yours. A child's knowledge and experience is different from yours. A child's ability to express distress and protect themself is different from yours. A child's capacity to experience daily stress and pressure and bullying and coercion is different from yours.

You might think that you are bringing up baby Einstein, but in fact you might be twisting that child's personality into somebody who's very bitter and resentful about being kept in from seeing their friends in order to study more. You might not be aware just how deeply etched childhood experiences are in that child's memory. You have no idea what is important to that individual child, especially if you don't listen.

Why am I bitching and whining about this stuff? Well, let me remind you: I'm living with the desire to commit suicide. I can only act on this once, and then I have no further opportunity to tell you who I really am, to tell you what makes me tick. This is a time capsule. It tells you everything you didn't want to know about me when I was alive.

This is the inconvenient truth. This is the smoking gun. This is the postmortem analysis.

I read a few books that were posthumously published after the author's death. The anguish, the distress, the emotion of the authors, thinly concealed behind passive agression and satire, oozes out from those works of literature. The words are soaked with emotion. Every sentence packs a punch, swung wildly at an unseen enemy.

I was systematically re-programmed to believe that my life was worthless, which is why I take huge risks. It's not selfishness if the self has no value. The more that you tell a person that they're shit and they're a burden and they're not good enough, the less risk-averse they become. They will go to great lengths to prove themself or to feel some connection to life.

I don't care what anybody says. Extreme sports are not stupid... they're brave. I can barely express to you just how cold, hard & rational you have to be to step into an extreme environment. You are literally weighing life & death with your every action. You are making decisions that can barely be comprehended by somebody who hasn't willingly laid their life on the line.

My Dad's a real coward. He's abusive to me and my Mum, and he won't admit he's in the wrong. He's such a coward that he hid behind his front door and got the police to deal with me when I went to confront him. He won't even face his own son, on the level, like an adult. He's never done anything brave in his life. He's a real disappointment to me.

I'm actually very calm and rational. I realise my Dad's an old man, and he's good to my sister and my niece, so I wasn't going to risk his life by pulverising him. I just wanted him to stand and face his own son, and confront the issue of him abusing me and my mum. I wanted him to admit he was wrong, to my face. I didn't demand it, but I felt that only a coward would shy away from an honest face to face conversation about his wrongdoing. I was right. He's a coward.

My Mum gave me life, and actually helped save my life and give me hope when I had my back against the wall, but my Dad is poisonous. He actually talks my Mum out of helping me. He probably thinks he's being a protector, a hero, but he's wrong. He's protecting nobody. My Mum will be hurt when I'm dead, and his son will be dead. My sister won't have a brother, and my niece won't have an uncle, and he won't accept any responsibility.

Yes, responsibility. Let's talk about responsibility.

On a daily basis, I'm responsible for my own life. I need to eat, sleep and not throw myself off a tall building. Yup, that's pretty much my entire existence at the moment. I'm trapped at the edge, and the route back to safety is blocked by my Dad, the 'protector' so I'm desperately trying to find another route back to safety, while my Dad is busily telling everybody not to help me.

I have no idea why somebody would step in and tell a caring person not to help a desperate person. I have no idea why a Dad would tell a Mum not to help their child. It's really upsetting. It's upsetting for me, and it's upsetting for my Mum, to have my Dad driving wedges in-between family members. Why can't we all just get along?

I'm not a defective toy, and you can't just return me to the store. I'm not broken, you just have to accept that I'm a human and I have my own identity, and I have identical needs to any other human. I need glucose, water, oxygen, salt, protein, fat, fibre and emotional sustenance. Cutting me off from my own mother by trying to poison her opinion of her own son, to compensate for your own shortcomings, that's patently disgusting.

I can have a lovely conversation with my Mum. Then, the next time we speak, her views will have been completely tainted by my Dad. I have no idea what his big problem is, but I suppose I should try harder to get to the bottom of it. It's no longer the case that I should assume that his 30+ years more on the planet means that he should be the more mature one.

Yes, I've always wanted to look up to my Dad. I've always wanted him to be a role model for me. I've always wanted him to lead by example.

My Dad doesn't really follow through though. He's a quitter. He's never had a career like I have. He's never achieved anything academically like I have. He's never been able to provide enough for his family. He's a real failure. A drunk and a drug addict, he's a bit of a loser, and I guess he feels pretty bad about himself.

Yes, he took his parents money and squandered it. His parents were wealthy and sent their kids to private school, and he messed up his chances of achieving anything of note. He mucked about with drugs and decided that was his priority in life... to take drugs. Even after the arrival of his son, he decided that the pursuit of drugs was still the most important thing in his life.

One of my best friends was a drug addict. When his son arrived, he cleaned up his act. He got himself a mortgage and a steady job. He quit drugs and smoking and keeps himself fit and healthy for his son. He's my role model. I look up to him. I admire what he's done. He's the gold standard that I aspire to emulate.

Men need father figures in their lives. They need masculine identity, which is about strength, leadership, trust, providing for loved ones, consistency, resourcefulness, reliability, dependability. You can't depend on a drug addict. The only thing they love is drugs.

My Dad actually destroyed his health with drugs, and had to go to hospital for a series of operations at around the time that my niece was born. I'm not sure whether fear of death or the arrival of a grandchild was the reason why he cleaned up his act, but he did finally quit drugs, in his sixties.

Nobody preaches louder than a convert, and I imagine that my Dad is very pious now that he's no longer abusing drugs. I don't drink or take drugs, but my Dad is pretty insufferable about many aspects of my lifestyle. He assumes that because I live in London I'm high on cocaine all the time. He assumes that because I have high earning potential, I spend it all on drugs. He's completely wrong.

Because he's a fuckup, he assumes I'm a fuckup too, but he's wrong. Because he's made mistakes in his life, he assumes I've made the same mistakes. Because he let people down, he assumes I'm going to let people down too. He applies his own guilt to me. He makes me carry the guilt for his wrongdoing.

I've got a brilliant title for a blog post lined up for December 26th, so I can't tell too much of my story at the moment without spoiling the surprise. There aren't actually any surprises. Everything is here, somewhere, but I'm going to spell things out for the world. It's extremely frustrating that I have to pace myself, to tell things little by little, but patience is a virtue.

I'm currently writing 2,000 words a day, and it's already swamping people. Hardly anybody is still engaged with my writing. It's gotten a bit unbalanced, and there are themes that are beginning to be a bit like a broken record. I'm actually dragging things out a little now, because I picked some milestones, and I'm making sure I don't give away enough to allow people to think that they can extrapolate and guess how the story ends.

I'll tell you how and when the story currently ends, according to my plan: I kill myself on New Year's Day, having told my tale but without the energy, support or resources to be able to continue living. It's exhausting being beaten for your 'sins' which are actually a result of taking abuse for somebody else's guilty conscience.

I'm going to tell you how somebody gets driven to extremism. Extreme risk taking. Extreme behaviour. Extreme moods. Death, which is at the other extremity from birth.

When a child is born, you write their future, based on the opportunities that you offer them. Choice is an illusion. Free will is an illusion. We can only play the cards that we are dealt.

Tags: #childhood #suicide #parents #depression

This is a story about life support...

I was in a metaphorical coma for 4 years. I was virtually on life support for the first 2 years, and then I woke up to find my wife and parents trying to turn off the 'machines' that were keeping me alive. Shame on them. I gave up on life and spent the next 2 years at death's door, in and out of hospital.

The first 2 years, there was nothing anybody could do. Having suffered 6 years at the hands of somebody so unfaithful, cruel and abusive, my body & mind finally gave out on me. I cracked, collapsed, capitulated. The crash was inevitable. You just can't abuse somebody for so long and expect them to just suck it up.

Two years might sound like a long amount of time to 'care' for somebody, but if all you're doing is going on dating websites and taking holidays using my money then it's not all bad. I don't even care about the money. I'm open hearted. I pay it forwards. If you take and you don't give back, then I know that you pay a debt of guilt. I know that if you have a moral bone in your body, you know what the true balance of karma is.

Actually, not a lot of caring went on. During my first hospital admission, my ex-wife didn't even ask about visiting hours, the phone number to contact me or bother making any plans to come visit. The moment I was admitted to hospital, she jumped right on those websites and started arranging to meet people. What a c**t.

Oh, sorry... I'm not supposed to be bitter about stuff. Yes, I'm supposed to be the punchbag. I'm not supposed to have feelings. I'm supposed to be a pincushion. If you prick me, I'm not supposed to bleed. I'm supposed to be inhuman. But insofar as I can tell, I'm very much human. Sorry about that.

I suppose she's human too, although it's hard to imagine when she treated me so inhumanely. I suppose she was probably a sex addict or something. Definitely some psychological problems, but who am I to judge? I'm just the guy who was nearly killed by her narcissism and selfishness.

I wonder how you can move on like that. Destroying somebody, putting them in hospital, and then just immediately thinking about the next victim. I wonder what kind of callousness, lack of empathy, psychopathy, allows you to expend a human life and move on as if it was nothing.

I suppose if you've decided that you want another boyfriend or husband because you don't like the one you've got, the best thing to do is probably abuse them until they kill themself. It's a lot quicker and easier than just breaking up with them. I guess she had moved on, which is why she thought it was OK to go on dating websites while I was fighting for my life.

What difference does having a supportive partner make anyway? What difference does having supportive parents make? It can't be very much. The parents should just support the partner who's going to be bereaved and help to finish off the sick and weakened person. Yup the sick person is a lost cause, so it's a good idea to hurry death along a bit.

My parents initially refused to help at all. They refused to help either of us. Then they started abusing me too, but I can see that it was probably an ill-advised attempt at 'tough love'. Well guess what? I'd had my fill of tough love having my face smashed in by my partner.

Then my parents did what she wanted, which was to get me out of the way so she could go on dating websites as if she was single and had managed to buy a house on her pathetic salary. Yes, she quite liked the house that I paid for. She did let me have the deposit back when we divorced, but only because my solicitor fought for it. I just wanted my life. I told her to take as much as she wanted, and horrifyingly she wanted it all, including my life!

Perhaps this horrible treatment had something to do with prolonging the first terrible 2 years. I was a bit like a car running on 3 cylinders, spluttering and coughing, kangarooing down the road. There were opportunities for recovery. There were periods of improvement. However, the toxic atmosphere still persisted. You just can't recover when your partner wants you dead and your parents are co-operating with them.

I'm pretty canny. I know how to choose my battles wisely. I knew that it would drive me insane if I tried to battle the abusive shits head-on. You just can't win a battle where you're outnumbered and weakened. If you want to live, you need to curl up in a ball and protect your vital organs, and wait for the blows to stop being rained down on your head. You need to play dead.

So my ex-wife took her loot and ran for the hills, leaving me bruised and bloody in the gutter. I don't begrudge her taking her share. She paid into our joint finances, and took far more than that, but it's not her fault that she's so sick that she can't do the basic maths. She felt entitled, to damages perhaps? But it was me who was damaged. It was me who was left fighting for my life. It was me who was nearly dead.

I just wanted her out of my life after she said she'd rather I was dead and marked my suicide note in red pen, with loads of abuse all over it (she's a teacher, you see... so that's OK, right?). She was homocidal. I'm not saying she's a murderer (that I know about) but it's pretty worrying behaviour. Certainly a breach of the "in sickness and in health" marriage vows we made to each other. What a c**t.

Oh sorry, almost a bit of bitterness there. Except it's passing now. Now that I know that I'm free, and I'm alive, and I'm somewhat recovered from where I was 2 years ago, when we finally separated. It was a very close call. Apparently probate is a lot easier than divorce. That was her preference anyway, to be widowed rather than divorced. That's what she said to me. What a c... oh, hang on, I'm now starting to feel pity for her, rather than bitterness.

Yes, I'm wondering what could drive a person to have such careless disregard for a human life. It's rather worrying. She must have had some pretty horrible stuff happen to her as a kid. Yes, I really pity her. What a sad messed up person. What a shame. She is very smart and I found her very attractive, although a lot of people wouldn't fancy her. I was totally in love with her, even though she was very hard to love.

I really hope she learnt some stuff from our relationship. I know that I did. When a recent ex-girlfriend started throwing abuse and plates and knives at my head, I dumped her immediately. She was a feisty Italian lovable little thing, but there's no future for me with somebody who thinks that kind of abuse is acceptable. When another girlfriend started using abusive language towards me, I told her I didn't like it and asked her politely to stop, and she did. That seems more normal to me, more healthy.

I think alcohol and drugs can be dangerously disinhibiting. I don't think my Italian ex was drunk at the time but she was probably high on drugs or on a comedown. I have no idea. It's just an excuse anyway. Those things are not changing your character, they are just revealing what lurks beneath the surface. They are showing you what that person is really like, under the surface.

When you get drunk or you get high, you are testing yourself to the limits. You are effectively putting yourself into an extreme situation that would never occur in normal life, except during exceptional circumstances. You are switching the mode in your brain to a state that it would normally only enter because of a response to something very unusual.

By taking drink or drugs, you are going to trigger fight or flight responses in yourself. When I got very upset with my ex-wife, I used to get in a taxi, or drive to an airport. I'm a lover not a fighter, so it's the flight response, not the fight response, that gets triggered in me. I left our joint birthday party in 2006 because she was having a tantrum and saying she was having a horrible time.

I called the cab for both of us, but she was having such a horrible time that she wanted to stay, so that everybody could see how horrible it was for her, having a massive party. What was horrible for me was seeing the girl I loved very upset. I was trying to take her away from a situation that she was telling me was horrible for her.

Another time, she was having such a horrible time, sitting on a sofa with my friends, with me excluded for some reason. It was so horrible for her, having all these friends around her, caring about her. It must be so horrible to be loved by somebody who cares and wants to make you happy and protect you from horrible things. That must be horrible. I drove to Gatwick Airport, because I didn't know what to do. The flight response.

Yes, I fly, I don't fight. I can fight, but I won't. I will take flight. Fighting doesn't achieve anything. Flying gets you out of the situation of conflict and stops anybody from getting injured. It's the more evolved response to a stressful situation.

I flew us around the world many times. That was my solution. I paid for tens of thousands of pounds worth of flights, to keep her happy, to keep us happy. She was very hard work, and had very expensive tastes, but she was worth it and I don't regret it. I loved her to bits.

It kind of works, having 5 star holidays all over the globe. I remember her having an absolute meltdown every time something would go wrong with our travel arrangements, and I would just have to quietly move her a safe distance away, and then go and use a charm offensive to repair the damage caused by her sour face and tantrum, before negotiating what she wanted.

Holidays were very stressful. She wanted a camper van when we went to Hawaii. The poor people who ran the camper van company just wanted to have a relaxed Christmas break, and when their camper van broke down, there wasn't a mechanic on the island of Oahu who fancied fixing it during the holiday season. I had to bust my balls, and theirs, just to keep her from throwing her toys out of the pram. It was hard work.

That's just one example. Every holiday, she was very demanding, and I was her personal tourguide, smoothing things over with the locals. Yes, she was very organised, officious, but that's not the way the world works. Things go wrong, and things don't run like clockwork. I remember getting wound up when taxi drivers would stop in the middle of the road and talk to each other in remote windswept locations that hardly any Europeans ever visit, but then I realised that it's important to embrace local culture. It's important to go with the flow. I learnt some patience, some humility.

Yes, you can go to a place and splurge your cash and expect to be chauffeur driven around by a man-servant. However, when I asked her, she said she wanted the authentic experience. As her personal tour guide, I delivered what my client asked for, always. I think she really liked the local bus we caught in Egypt, packed full of farmyard animals and cargo, with the passengers who just wanted to discuss English Premier League football with us.

Travelling is hard work, and it's stressful, when you're the one who has to figure stuff out on the ground and actually deal with the language and cultural barriers. Getting stroppy and telling people that you're disappointed and "it's not good enough" really doesn't get you anywhere. Tact and diplomacy are the order of the day.

I hope my exes enjoyed their holidays. I really poured my heart & soul into making sure they had a lovely lovely time.

13,796ft high, at the summit of Mauna Kea. Trip of a lifetime. Was she grateful? The fact she wanted me dead would suggest not (December 2012)

Tags: #divorce #suicide #depression #mentalhealth #bipolar #frankie

This is a story about burying your head in the sand...

The gravy train has left the station. The party's over. The song has stopped. If you haven't got a place to sit you're out of the game of musical chairs.

The middle classes have been very busy playing musical chairs with their make-work jobs in bloated service industries that contribute nothing to the real economy. Meanwhile, in the real world, climate change and poverty have been largely ignored.

Sadly, a large swathe of older middle class people are very lazy. They sit at home in their big houses, watching TV, reading newspapers and criticising everything, but never lifting a finger to do anything. Many don't even vote or destroy their ballot paper.

Today, at the climate change march held in London, I saw many grandparents who are very concerned about the world that is going to be left for their grandkids. Sadly, my parents have no concern for their children or grandkids. You can't make a difference to the world by sitting around taking drugs, sorry Mum & Dad... the world doesn't work like that.

My parents have sucked a great deal of money out of the state to pay for illnesses relating to their abuse of alcohol, drugs and smoking, but they give so little back. It's really embarrassing. When they were contacted because I was in hospital with a 30% chance of surviving, they decided to wait for the call from the coroner... they decided it wasn't worth the 45 minutes or so to travel from Oxford to London Paddington.

Okay, so I'm not doing a great job of changing the direction of my writing yet. I'm trying to move it from the angry rants into some more positive stuff, and finishing my own story. However, I had to deal with my parents earlier in the week, and I just found it incredible that they would sit there and tell me that London is too far for them to visit a gravely ill son or daughter in hospital. Today I saw many thousands of pensioners who are far older and in much worse health than them, out in the wind & rain, protesting against man made climate change.

My parents live not far from David Cameron's constituency home, and I think that they epitomise the Conservative mindset of out of sight, out of mind. Because these ridiculously selfish people never actually see suffering and pain first hand, they can smugly sit there in their multi-million pound Cotswold houses and do nothing except criticise the victims of the world's cruelty.

That's an injury that was inflicted on me by my own father. He seemed to think that treating his own son like a human was somehow optional, and it was OK to perpetrate an act of savagery against me. I really don't think there could ever be any justification or reasonable explanation for somebody of sound body and mind doing something like that to a person, so I'm not even going to go into the circumstances surrounding it. I'm totally appalled by the way that my parents speak to me and treat me, and the things that they have done to me. I'm over it. They're pretty much dead to me.

There's a simple formula for looking after a human life: be kind. That's it. It's not hard. If you're hitting humans, abusing them, telling them they're bad, calling them names, criticising and undermining them, humiliating them and generally robbing them of self esteem, disrespecting them and treating them like utter shit... yeah, that's not good. That's probably going to fuck them up.

The National Health Service (NHS) was kind to me. After I bandaged up my leg with sanitary towels and a dressing gown cord, I came back to London. The Royal Free Hospital repaired 4 tendons and 2 nerves in my leg, so I could move it and have feeling again. God bless the NHS.

I've always looked after myself and it's ironic that the first time I needed an operation is because my own parent attacked me. My dad has actually had to have a few operations because of his poor lifestyle choices. Drinking and smoking and taking drugs f**ks up your body and it's the NHS who have to pick up the pieces.

It's better to build happy healthy children than to try and fix f**ked up adults. Surely it seems to make more sense to hug your kids and make them feel loved and cherished, to look after them, rather than just dump them on the state? I don't believe in this difficult child horse-shit. Kids respond to their upbringing. Be nice, and your kids will be nice too. It's that simple.

I've been trying to get all of my travelling and entrepreneurial ambitions out of my system, and I know that drug-taking in front of children is a complete no-go. I have even delayed fatherhood while I figure out what's going on with my mental health. I take the responsibility of parenthood very seriously. If you don't alter your lifestyle at all for your children, you're a terrible person.

So my friend Klaus keeps reminding me that "your wound is your gift" and I think he's right. I look at the huge scar on my leg, and I'm reminded just how toxic even my own parents could be, and that I need to be kind and compassionate and work hard for the benefit of humanity. I'm reminded just how irrelevant such terrible people are in my life, in the lives of the ordinary people of the world and in the future of the planet.

Such horrible selfish people need to be outed from their positions as moral authorities, and stopped from gaining any kind of political influence. If you don't have empathy, kindness, compassion... what the hell are you doing having any influence over children and grandchildren? You don't deserve anything more than to sit and rot in your home in lonely misery.

So where is my own empathy, compassion? Well, I'm very beaten down, but when my parents are eventually as weakened and old as the oldest and weakest member of the climate change march that I saw today, then perhaps I will approach them again with the olive branch of peace. Until then, they are far too vicious and cruel and ignorant and horrible to be approached. Let them stew in isolation for fear that their toxic ideas might permeate.

I'm very jealous of friends who have good relationships with their parents. I would like to have a loving, caring family with close ties between us all, but my parents are so toxic that they have poisoned many of the relationships between our family members. They spend a lot of time cultivating their woe betide me tales of their own suffering. Yes, it's called karma. If you drink and smoke and take drugs and treat your kids like shit, then you'll be sick and miserable and you'll deserve it.

Weirdly, I do still love my parents. I guess this recurrent feeling of feeling unconditional love for somebody who treats you like shit could be the basis for a mood disorder. Always trying hard to please a parent, and receiving an unpredictable response dependent on their state of intoxication with drugs or alcohol can create a lot of uncertainty in a child's life. It can shape a personality into one that has issues with boundaries and healthy forms of self-expression.

Communicating my distress via a blog looks like really strange behaviour, but believe me, I've tried all the other ways, and the above scar is my reminder that the result is never good. I had successfully managed to keep my parents at arms length for many years, much to the benefit of my health and happiness, but sadly my ex-wife managed to screw that up with some kind of bullshit story that brought my dad and his heavy-handed aggression, violence and woeful ignorance into play, with disastrous results for me.

When your back is against the wall, when you're cornered, when there is a lynching mob out for your blood, whipped into a frenzy with lies and ignorance... you have to resort to unusual tactics if you want to survive. I'm not really sure if I want to survive. I'm very exhausted by death by a thousand cuts, and everybody wants to put the boot in. However, unfortunately the survival instinct seems to prevail even though I'd love to just curl up and die.

So, I'm lashing out again. Sorry about that. Maybe you shouldn't corner and cruelly torture somebody who has been so badly beaten and bruised. They say that an injured animal is the most dangerous.

I'm trying to redirect my energy into more positive things though. I'm trying to be heard again, not in the hope of saving myself, but in the hope that somebody else who's in a similarly dark place can see that they're not alone. I'm hoping that somebody else who's going through hell might read my story and feel a little bit less alone in the world. I'm hoping that anybody who can relate, feels a little bit less like an unwanted freak.

I'm going to continue on my path of brutal honesty. I'm not out to name & shame anybody. This is my unedited story. There's a lot more to come, and a lot of it is going to be shameful and embarrassing for me, but I'm going to tell it anyway. I'm going to tell it because it needs to be told. People need to know what happens when you bully and abuse somebody. People need to know what happens when you repress and oppress and humiliate and exclude and destroy self-esteem and take away somebody's hope and reason for living.

I also want to try and keep going on a positive path of recovery, and discover if there's a path back to happiness and light. If the story has a message of hope in it that is emerging, that's a good thing. It might help somebody else who's going through hell, and then it was worthwhile me sharing and facing my fears of ridicule and shame.

I'm trying to do good deeds.

You can take the boy out of Oxford, but you can't take the Oxford out of the boy (November 2015)

Tags: #politics #parents #childhood #london #nhs #injury

This is a story about home...

I always wanted to live at the water's edge. Now I do. If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room.

Getting myself off the streets and into a flat was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back though. It wasn't even my idea. Working 12 to 14 hours a day 7 days a week was not really possible while homeless, but equally I don't need such a great place to live. I have been living to work, so all I really need is a bed, somewhere I can prepare food and a shower.

When an aeroplane cabin loses pressure, oxygen masks will automatically be deployed. If you have ever listened to the safety briefing that the cabin crew give, you will know that you should put on your own mask before helping others. I haven't really applied that advice in day to day living.

I did a Hack-a-John where I spent a couple of weeks training a friend who is an idle gambling addict, to be able to get a job. I then got him an interview at the biggest bank in Europe, for a position on the #1 project. He messed it up. The reputational damage that I personally sustained kinda sealed my fate on that particular contract. I was a marked man for doing something so audacious. John, however, doesn't seem to see things in the wider context, and has gone back to sitting on a couch, gambling. That's ingratitude for you. I can lead a horse to water but I can't make it drink.

I then went to a Hackathon to try and help with the refugee crisis. There I met an extremely capable and lovely guy called Klaus. I wanted to get involved helping refugees. I ended up helping Klaus - the tidy Kiwi - who urgently needed a place to stay. He now sleeps on my couch, enjoying the above views.

Life in London is pretty hard. You might think that I sit around swilling champagne and eating in expensive restaurants, taking taxis and wringing my hands as I read The Guardian but in actual fact I'm far too busy trying not to die.

My life is minimal beyond belief. All the clothes that I own in the world are in my floordrobe (the pink and grey boxes on the floor) plus I have a single suit, single overcoat and a single pair of dress shoes. I do also own 10 smart work shirts - 5 at the dry cleaners and 5 ready to be worn for the working week... which doesn't quite work when you are in the office 7 days a week.

For years, I've been trying to tell my friend Posh Will that investment banking hours are unsustainable and not productive. However, I had to do yet another horrible banking project in order to try and save my own life. I needed the overtime to get myself off the streets and into a home.

Bizarrely, I kind of regret it. I was surviving quite well as a homeless person. I think I was given about a 30% chance of surviving one particularly bad hospital admission, but I pulled through. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Life is much easier when you're just concentrating on staying alive, rather than worrying about any dependents.

I'm not really sure how I ended up with dependents. Why did my friend John end up relying on me - the suicidal homeless guy with mental health issues - to get him a job? Why does my friend Klaus get to go to the gym, and yoga and spend all his time talking to his friends & family, when I'm the one paying for the roof over his head?

Yes, I really need to learn to look after #1... and I don't mean the #1 project in the biggest bank in Europe. I need to learn that it's important to put on the oxygen mask before helping others.

So I'm really at the end of my tether. I'm at my wits end. I've got nothing left to give. However, if I'm going to be a better leader, there's no sense in getting angry with the people who I have carried - they were just smarter about being selfish, looking after themselves at the expense of others. That's the way to win the rat race.

London and our adversarial culture really does encourage us to trample on each other. I think absolutely nothing of clattering into some thoughtless person who would rather that I stepped into the road, into the path of a bus or a truck, in order to get out of their way. I really don't bother with good manners if somebody is standing on the left hand side of the escalator, or decides to stop and have a chat with their companions in a really inconsiderate location.

We have run out of patience and we don't have time for asshats in London. This sprawling metropolis is already creaking and groaning at the seams, and Londoners really don't have time for gawping tourists who left their own sense of good manners at home. Perhaps I should come to where you live and just stand in the road causing a traffic jam because I want to admire something interesting without having to think whether it's appropriate in the wider context.

I would say that London is not dehumanising, as many people believe. It's actually the complete opposite. It's overwhelmingly humanising. You see all of humanity's very worst traits in evidence. You see people starving on the street while people pay £6 for a coffee and croissant, barely a few metres away. You see people shouting and fighting, but you pretend that you didn't, and you just scurry down a dark hole, underground, to go and be forced to invade each other's personal space in the interests of getting home a little quicker.

The calm serenity of living by the Thames is really unsettling for me. It feels like I have left London. I can feel my body, my soul, mourning the loss of humanity. It's really fake here in Canary Wharf. There are no beggars, no homeless people. This rich enclave has excluded the undesirable members of society from the private estate.

It might look enviable, and perhaps you are even enraged that I have become depressed in my current situation, but I'm not going to lie to you. I was happier living with homeless people and at the moment I feel like I'd rather go back to living on the streets. I just can't handle the pressure of those who think I'm a hypocrite, and those who want to ride my back.

I don't feel very true to myself at the moment, true to my values. I always believed that when you have surplus, you should give it away, but it's never enough for some people. I'd rather just be responsible for myself again. My life felt much less in danger when I wasn't carrying any ungrateful fools and dealing with jealousy and accusations of hypocrisy.

If I'm going to continue my journey with authenticity, and without hypocrisy, I may have to give up the material distractions that other people struggle to see beyond. People probably see my home as a status symbol, rather than simply a place that I can eat, sleep and wash.

"Been there, done that" is what many travellers do, when they're racking up pins on the globe or any other kind of stamp collecting. People can be very boastful about the experiences they have racked up. They have cultivated an entire personality, their whole self-esteem system around their travel tales and photographs. Perhaps I'm the same, but it's literally life and death for me, rather than simply a means of impressing dinner party guests.

I love cooking and I love hosting friends. I used to throw huge garden parties for loads of people. I used to thrive on it. Has it really helped me today? No, not really. Everybody else just moved on with their lives, and a single guy who's still living like a bachelor I don't really fit into the rhythm of my old friends lives now they have wives and kids. Lots of my friends left London to get sprogged up.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes, and London seems to be so much about drinking. Drink all your wages, and spend whatever you have left on meals out and foreign holidays. I don't really do that. I haven't been drinking for 62 days and I haven't had a holiday since October last year. Even my meals out have a business purpose. What you see is not what you get with me... my brain is always in work mode. Even my flat is basically a co-working space.

The line is being blurred between work & life to the point where I literally never stop working, even to the point that my dreams are filled with work stuff. I'm a total workaholic, but what else am I supposed to be living for? You tell me if I can afford to take my foot of the accelerator. I don't think I can... the world is too highly leveraged. We haven't made allowances for people who need to stop and catch their breath.

So I desperately need to go to Ireland again. I desperately need to decompress. I desperately need to get away from the relentless pressure to provide for everybody, to prop them up and help them keep their dreams alive. I need some time out for me.

Not sure if I'm going to get that time, because I need to make hay while the sun shines. There is work available, and my bank balance could sure do with a boost to make sure that Klaus has a couch to sleep on while he's doing his gym and yoga and stuff.

One day I'd like to do yoga. Maybe when I'm dead.

That is all.

I need to go back to Ireland and be a culchie for a little bit, as I'm not getting to be much of a culture vulture in London (February 2015)

Tags: #london #career #ireland #homeless #mentalhealth #depression #suicide #friends

This is a story about my best friend...

The first 10 years of my life were pretty lonely. Then along came my best friend in the whole world.

Naturally, my parents were harshly critical of me for not being some male nanny, perfect parent type figure. I was, strangely, more of a brother to my sister. That was a disappointment to them. They thought that having more children meant more free time to get drunk and take drugs.

Anyway, let's ignore my parents. They were very much of the Victorian mindset that children should be not seen and not heard. Maybe it would have been better if children were not born, but I'm very glad that my sister was. Having a sister is the reason why I'm clinging onto life with my fingernails.

Having a 10 year age gap is a bit strange, but I think it's kinda got advantages. My parents can't be bothered to imagine how hard it is being a young person today, and they get a particularly warped view because I was always very independent and a high-earner from the age of 17. Sadly, the opportunities for the majority of young people are rather bleak.

Yes, the challenges faced by me and my sister in day to day life are really chalk and cheese. While I battle with my mental health, in order to be able to work, my sister also has to battle a highly competitive job market and low pay. While I have to ensure that I earn enough during my hypomania in order to survive during my depression, my sister has to stretch her budget beyond any feasible limit.

Yes, our parents generation really screwed things up, and life is very hard for my sister. I went through a horrible divorce that nearly killed me, but that was due to a single vicious and mean person who had not a care in the world for human life, and couldn't act with a single shred of decency. My sister not only has to deal with a horrible divorce, but her rent & bills as a proportion of her income are totally unmanageable. That's not her fault. She works 6 days a week.

So, tomorrow, during the Chancellor's Autumn Statement, tax credits and other benefits are going to be cut. People like my sister are going to be horribly affected, and there's no way she could possibly work any harder to fix her own finances. She rents a very modest property for her & my niece, she works 6 days a week, she's very dedicated to her job, there are no better paid jobs... she is being shafted by politicians and society.

As a working mum, who did nothing wrong and is doing everything right, why should she have even more financial woe and stress heaped on top of her? She's working her arse off but she is being destroyed through exhaustion and stress, by a government that just doesn't care about the wellbeing of its citizens.

The net result is pretty much what the Tories want. My parents will have to work for longer and have less money in retirement, in order to support their daughter and granddaughter, despite the fact that they've worked hard all their life and their daughter is already working 6 days a week. That's bullshit.

Our family has not racked up huge debts buying crap. Our family has saved money and bought property and done all the things we were supposed to do. We've played by the rules of society, and my parents and sister have ended up diddled by the system. They paid in, with their income tax and their national insurance and their council tax... they're not acting like they're entitled.

My parents just want to have their pension. My sister just wants to work. My niece just wants to be a toddler. It's outrageous that my parents' pension goes to pay my sister's bills. My sister's 6-day-a-week job is not enough to pay for her bills. My niece hardly gets to see my sister because she's working so hard. Is that the kind of society you want, Tories?

Throughout Britain we see examples of how people are being asked to fend for themselves. While the richest members of society contribute a pittance of their net wealth, so many are having to dip into their life savings, their pensions, just to survive. I actually phoned JPMorgan's pension scheme administrator to ask if I could have any money released for hospital treatment I desperately needed, when Camden council bungled my case yet again.

I've managed to limp through and get myself to the point where I have survived an ordeal that would have killed most people. However, I had to borrow money to do that. Why am I borrowing money to pay for lifesaving treatment, when I have paid staggering sums in tax and National Insurance? It's all been pissed away on tax breaks for the wealthy.

Why should the National Health Service be facing a funding crisis, because we wanted to line the pockets of the super-rich? Why should state schools suffer? Why should our brightest children be cutting short their eduction and looking for crap jobs because we wanted to make the rich richer?

We are asking each generation to work a lot harder than the last. Our grandparents lived through a war, so they knew about austerity. They knew about make do & mend. Unfortunately, too few of those people are in positions of authority now. Their kids - my parents generation - think that life is easy, because they lived through the post-war boom. They are wrong. Life is hard.

So, take a note of the date and remember that today was the day that the government went too far. They cut too deep and they hurt people who were already hurting. They scapegoated the wrong people.

Anger will rise up. It will start with the young people who have been frozen out of the job market, who are marginalised and demonised by the media. It will spread to the hard working mums who are struggling to balance the books already, struggling to stretch their budgets. Then it will hit the grannies who are providing free childcare and cash handouts from their pensions in order to keep their kids and grandkids afloat.

There will be a groundswell of public opinion against being told how to live our lives with more frugality from some vintage wine swilling toffs who like nothing more than to admire each other's art collections, and ponce around the country telling the great unwashed masses to stop complaining. Let them eat cake, right?

Things are a lot worse than you can see from within the echo-chamber. Get your head out of the statistics. Get your arse out of your Tory party circle of friends. You're out of touch with reality and it will come and bite your ass.

The problems in society are being masked and things will come crashing down quicker than you can say "Poll Tax Riots".

That is all.

Tags: #politics #childhood #parents #civildisobedience

This is a story about chronic fatigue...

Smart bosses have figured out that happy employees are more productive. If you don't have the right culture in your organisation, you will make people very sick. You will be burning people out in order to achieve your unrealistic targets.

Forward thinking organisations are letting people have dogs at work. They are promoting more flexible working arrangements. They are seeing their employees as people and not just numbers in a spreadsheet.

I wrote an IT Roadmap for a company which had just been spun off by its parent company, and sold. I took one look around the little company, and I knew immediately that they had got the culture spot on. I wrote my roadmap with this culture as the guiding principle.

I urged the new CEO of the spin-off company to preserve the culture, in order to maintain the high productivity and excellent morale of the staff. I tried my best to pursuade him of the benefits of investing in technology that would support the staff, that would preserve the brilliant working environment. He ignored my advice.

I quit that job, because my opinion wasn't valued. You can't pay me enough to rubberstamp the wrong decisions. If you're looking for a "yes" man, a sycophant, then you've got the wrong guy.

So, after I left, the culture was destroyed, money was burnt on stupid vanity projects, all the good people left. The profits dropped 90% and naturally, the CEO was fired. I take no pride, only sadness, in saying "I told you so".

But one cool thing happened. At a conference a little over a year later, the CEO of the parent company presented my ideas. They had implemented them. Ideas are worthless, and the implementation must have been very hard - although I had done a proof of concept with my team - so I can take no credit. But it was so nice to be vindicated that I had to pinch myself to see if I was dreaming.

I've been bumping along like this for quite a few years now. The problem is, that I'm exhausted. I've got enough energy to do the job, but not enough energy to endure the idiots. I tend to get the important stuff done, and then I have to bow out and allow the sacking of the egotistical dead wood to happen.

Fundamentally, I burnt out in 2008, working on JPMorgan's #1 project. Instead of going off work sick, I decided that I needed to change jobs and as soon as I did the wall of exhaustion that I had been holding back hit me like a steamroller.

I was so flattened by it, that my doctors thought I might have AIDS. We tried every test under the sun, but fundamentally, I now believe that I was simply overworked. I had worked hard and played hard for far too long. My body & brain just couldn't cope anymore.

I was a bit of 'swan'... looked very serene and calm on the surface, but my legs were going like crazy beneath the surface of the water. During some 'time out' I remember playing golf, trying to putt with my phone jammed to my ear while I attempted to resolve some issue a team member was having.

I am so passionate about my work that I tend to dream about it. I even have 'eureka' moments sometimes and wake up and start writing code or an email. There is no switching off when I'm in the 'on' position.

My commute to the office (September 2007)

It's not very healthy, but my parents, school, partners, lazy friends, bosses, society and the surrounding culture has driven me to this unsustainable level. People say 'take it easy, slow down' but as soon as I do back off the gas, they soon start complaining. People get used to a certain level of contribution. They start taking you for granted.

What am I living for, if it's not for work? Nothing is ever good enough for my parents. I haven't had a nice caring kind girlfriend for far too long. I haven't got any kids. What's the point of life if it's not to make some kind of epic contribution?

It's not about heroics, and I really don't expect anybody to get the violins out and say "ooh, poor you". It's literally that work fills an otherwise empty void in my existence. Without work to dedicate myself to, do I really exist? My day to experiences would suggest not.

Yes, I know that work is a dangerous addiction that is damaging my health, but it's the only place that I ever hear "well done" or "thank you". My parents and ex-girlfriend/ex-wife would never sink so low as to actually show me any respect. It's expensive, apparently, to show somebody some appreciation.

During seemingly interminable periods of fatigue, depression, you can obviously reflect and see that you are repeating the same vicious cycle. It doesn't mean that you can beat it though. Nobody stops the world so that you can get off the rollercoaster.

So, everybody will be very relieved when I'm 'recovered' from a crash, but the fact of the matter is that recovery actually only starts when the exhaustion and depression have passed. All that time in bed is not recovery... it's staying alive. It's surviving, not thriving.

Yes, I'm surviving, but I'm not thriving. Nobody will let me get that far. When I have an opportunity to thrive, everybody says "Oh, you're fine now. We don't need to help you, we can go back to taking from you" not that I really receive help anyway.

My friend Klaus brought me a bag of stuff in hospital. That was one of the kindest things that anybody has ever done for me in a couple of years. Does that mean I owe him a favour? Well, he was already living rent free on my couch so I guess we can call it quits!

I do keep a very careful eye on my karma balance. I have paid it forward big time, and I always want to run a net karma surplus. If you do your accounting with some surpluses, with contingency, then you don't have to sweat the small stuff.

There are some people who feel hard done by at my hands. My friend John who thought it was OK to use me for free rent, spending money and as a personal life coach to help him over his gambling addiction and general idleness, for example. When life became unmanageable, I chucked him off my back to save myself. Am I supposed to be sorry about that? Why was I carrying him in the first place?

I don't really understand why I attract klingons. I guess it's because I'm a kind and generous person who gives off an aura of success and I make what I do look quite easy, so other people think there's not much effort required to achieve the same things. That's the thing about being good at what you do. You make it look easy.

I certainly have suffered from the "I could do your job" mistake. When CxOs and managers have been fired because they didn't listen to my expert advice, I certainly wouldn't want to take their place. I'm not trying to steal anybody's job. When I was younger, for sure I thought I could do my manager's job, and do it better. The fact that I have proved it, does not actually mean anything... I hated doing those managerial jobs!

Yes, management really is not for me. Somebody else can have the pressure and stress and responsibility. I think it's a vocation, not a job title. I think it's a demotion not a promotion. Those who can, do. Those who can't, must depend on others to do for them, and must be more organised themselves to compensate for the fact that they can't both be both organised and productive.

So, I'm exhausted by having to design, build, lead, argue with idiots who don't know what they're talking about and make dead wood losers look good.

I'm laid low with depression, fatigue.

Sorry about that, klingons.

That is all.

Frankie loves being tucked up warm in bed. We all do during winter. Fatigue and depression are much more serious. I'm suicidal and I can barely get out of bed (November 2007)

Tags: #career #banking #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #frankie

This is a story about cat & mouse...

Catch me if you can. But why are you chasing me? I'm not a bad guy. Trying to prove someone guilty who is innocent is a bit ridiculous. Perhaps you should consider your own guilty conscience.

So, I'm well aware that I have rattled some cages pretty hard. I'm also aware that the slow, lumbering and dimwitted sleeping beasts that I have awakened, will take a while to kick into gear and mobilise against me. I'm aware that my privacy is being infringed (using back doors) in the name of so-called justice.

What the hell am I talking about? Well, as a matter of professionalism, I told my end-client - HSBC - some hard truths that they didn't want to hear, about the fate of their #1 project. Plausible deniability is rather hard to maintain if a highly paid consultant is giving you their expert opinion. Also, my ex-wife, who said that she'd rather that I was dead, has recently received the rather disappointing news that I'm still alive.

I don't actually wish either my ex-wife or HSBC any ill will. I want the biggest bank in Europe to succeed with their #1 project and retain value for the shareholders, and remain as a profitable entity that employs 245,000 people. Those jobs are important: many families are depending on the income from those employees. I want my ex-wife and me to be able to both move on with our lives.

My occupational health doctor at JPMorgan urged me to try and make an ally out of my ex-wife. Sadly, she said that she would divorce me if I accepted life-saving hospital treatment. It's a bit hard to make an alliance with such a person. She marked my suicide note in red pen, with many abusive remarks written in capitals all over it. I'm a good diplomat, but that's kinda hard to deal with.

So, my ex wrote to me and said that she wanted to deny all knowledge that we had ever had a relationship. That's going to be a bit impossible, given that the record of our marriage is in the public domain, and so is our divorce. Anybody can look those things up in the register of marriages, and the court records.

Denying history, like pretending there was no holocaust in World War 2, is not going to work. Pretending that things didn't happen, is not going to lead anywhere good. Her guilty conscience will always follow her around, and there's nothing I can do about that. It's not my fault that she acted in an immoral way. I can't absolve her of her sins, although I do forgive her.

Fundamentally, this is about forgiveness. I always turned the other cheek. I have absolutely no idea why she is violent and aggressive and abusive, but I forgive her. I have no idea why she wants me dead and buried so badly, but I feel sorry for her. I pity her.

So am I bitter? Am I hanging onto things that I should just let go of? Am I agonising over things that were said and done so long ago, that my feelings are invalid?

Actually, it can take a long time to surface things, when you have been abused for a long time. She will claim that she is the abuse victim. Yeah, that makes sense... when I'm the one who was self harming, suicidal, couldn't work, was totally isolated from my friends and family.

She used to boast about hitting ex boyfriends. When she started hitting me, I didn't know how to deal with it. I trashed our flat. Then I started cutting myself. I was going to kill myself. It didn't really fix things.

She has been very quick to forgive herself, to excuse herself.

Frankly, there is no excuse for perpetrating violence and abuse against somebody. I feel very guilty about the times when I have lashed out. It's driven me to the brink of suicide. For her, it seems to have made her cultivate a holier-than-thou fake self image. I don't buy it. Start with kindness and go from there. If you're not kind, you're not a good person, in my opinion.

Every part of me feels like not publishing this. Every instinct tells me not to share these inner demons. That's why I'm going to do it. I'm going to keep pushing myself to share more and more of my inner turmoil.

Obviously it would be really easy for me to just bring out the big guns. It would be really easy to lay out all the evidence that I have collected of the years of abuse that I endured. That kind of character assassination would just be sinking to the same level as my persecutor though. I don't think that's the right thing to do.

Fundamentally, I could just say that I was victimised, and use that as an excuse for what happened later. I didn't do anything to defend myself for a very long time. I got battered but I turned the other cheek. It was beaten into me, to expect violence and abuse to be perpetrated against me, as a passive and kind, soft, caring, innocent confused and trapped victim.

However, my reaction was wrong. I should have been stronger. I should have walked away. I didn't. That makes me an accomplice. That makes me complicit. I helped to perpetuate what was going on, by not removing myself from the vicious cycle.

So, guilty people can be pretty sneaky. They will collect 'evidence' that will support their warped worldview. They will prepare their ammunition for the day that karma catches up with them. They will try and build a base of support, and cultivate an image of guilt-free innocence.

I'm guilty. I'm guilty of sticking around and trying to fix things. I'm guilty of caring too much. I'm guilty of not protecting myself. I'm guilty of letting my defences down. I'm guilty of making mistakes. I'm guilty of hitting back.

Don't let anyone tell you that I'm an abuser. Don't let anyone tell you that I'm out to control anybody. I'm a kind person. I'm a caring person. I'm a loving person. If somebody is telling you a negative narrative about me, you need to consider what their ulterior motive is. You need to consider what guilty conscience is being covered up.

Yes, I'm no saint at all. I'm guilty, not innocent. I'm exposing my conscience to the world. I'm very disappointed with myself about the way I've acted, in a whole bunch of ways. I could tell you all the reasons why I am who I am and why I acted the way that I did, but it's probably better if I just say that I accept responsibility for my actions. I know that there were better ways of going about dealing with things. I know that I would do things differently today. I feel guilty about a bunch of mistakes, even though I know that it was impossible for me to act differently in the circumstances at the time.

If anybody wants to blame me for things, be my guest. I'll even help you. I am going to provide the world with all the evidence and an open account of my wrongdoing. My gut instinct is to start with the rationale behind things, the reasons, the circumstances, the pressures and the stresses. However, that might seem like I'm trying to justify my actions.

Hurting somebody is always wrong. I'm sorry if I've ever hurt you, whoever you are. I really didn't mean to, and I do feel guilt and empathy. You can come and take your pound of flesh if you think it will help. I'm beating myself up, but if you want to inflict even more blows against me, be my guest... I'm used to being a punching bag.

So, is this self-pitying drivel? I have no idea. It's the beginning of a journey for me. Either there will be liberation or there will be death.

That is all.

Frankie the cat lives with my parents. He's pretty much the only living reminder that their son is still surviving, somewhere in the world. Please don't take that away from them (November 2012)

Tags: #divorce #career #banking #suicide #privacy

This is a story about being a better person...

There's really no excuse for not being nice, polite, kind. These small things make a big difference. This 'mutual grooming' affects the whole of society. If you think you are exempt from the need to treat people with decency, you need to take a long hard look at yourself.

Why would you not strive to always be polite, courteous, kind and considerate in every dealing with another human being? Why would you not always seek to address and communicate with a person in a respectful way? How can you ever justify being unpleasant, horrible, towards one of your fellow human beings?

What have you got to lose?

I'm rather baffled by people who snarl and bark and yelp at me like an animal. Why do they think that would get results, when they have not tried a human approach? Why would you start with aggression and unpleasantness and then go from there?

I have studied Game Theory so I'm aware that it might be a form of low intelligence that causes a person to always play the lose:lose strategy, in the hope that somebody will just hand them the reward that they demand. No. Doesn't work like that. You have to speculate to accumulate. Sorry, idiot, you can't just take take take.

If you are a leech, you will either destroy society or you will eventually be excluded. You might think you are cleverly getting away with things, but it somehow shows on your face, if you're a wrong'un. You might be telling yourself that you're a good person so much that you believe your own lies, but be careful because that won't wash with the world.

I'm going to continue exposing my own guilty conscience. That's an important part of my public life laundry. If anybody thinks I have been blaming anybody for things, they're wrong. I've been explaining why I think and act the way I do. I've been explaining who I am, and how I became me. We are all animals that react to our environment, our nurture (or lack thereof).

I'm sick of people talking about choice. Why don't you go and corner a rat and berate it for its choice when it bites you. Why don't you trap a scared dog, and then call it a dangerous animal when it attacks you? The animal should choose more wisely, when it's tired, hungry, stressed, upset, beaten and abused, with no escape, right?

The photo above is a meal I received in hospital. It's funny how hospitals and the NHS and all the superbly talented and caring people who work to save lives tend to try and be kind and help people. It's funny how that works. It's funny how being abusive, mean and unpleasant to people puts them in hospital. It's funny how being kind and caring makes them better. Funny that.

If you want to kill somebody, you can murder them, or you can rob them of their dignity, self esteem. You can attack them. You can take away everything they have to live for. You can isolate them. You can tell them over & over again that they're a bad person and they should blame themselves. Yes, if you do all those things, you will quite often kill them. It's funny that the NHS doesn't do those things.

I've tried to shield myself from toxic people in my life, and every time I do that, my life gets better. My recovery and wellbeing is a direct result of excluding the toxic people who made me sick and made me blame myself. My sickness is directly proportional to whether people around me care about me living or dying.

What sickness is it, that means that people would put their own prejudice, hatred, bitterness, unpleasantness, selfishness and general lack of human decency, ahead of killing somebody? What's wrong with people?

Imagine this: there's a knock at the door, and when you open it a man clutching a wound to his stomach falls into your hallway. He gasps "phone me an ambulance, please". What kind of horrible person responds "you are getting blood all over my carpet you selfish scum, get out of my house"?

That kind of response baffles me. In fact, it alarms and disturbs me. Where did the humanity go? Was that person born without an empathy gland? Was their ability to feel an emotional connection with anything but their own selfish f**ked up world, somehow not present due to a birth defect or genetic condition?

How do some people sleep at night?

That is all.

Tags: #nhs #mentalhealth #divorce #parents #bullying

This is a story about relativity...

So, there are children starving in Africa. That's sad.

There are lots of things that are sad in the world. It's sad that so many people are being shot. It's sad that so many people are being blown up. It's sad that most people have so little, while a handful of others have so much.

Sadness is not really relative. Neither is depression. Once you are suicidally depressed, you can't get any more depressed. You just kill yourself and then it's over. That's the limit. That's the maximum that you can be depressed.

 As a child, I wasn't allowed to cry at the sad parts in movies. This was apparently because I should have been more sad about starving African children. I was sad about them too, but there weren't many Disney movies about starving African children, made for kids.

My Dad was pretty determined that I should have a lot of stuff on my conscience, as a small child. I needed to be responsible for my part I played in the decadent lifestyle of the West, as a bourgeois infant. How thoughtless and irresponsible of me to not have martyred myself for the plight of the developing world, at birth.

So, if you don't believe I think about my blessings and how lucky I was to be born into a relatively wealthy advanced civilisation... you're wrong. It's been smashed into my skull for as long as I can remember. It's been rammed down my throat with menace.

Perhaps we should teach children about consequences, not that their feelings are wrong. If a child is genuinely selfish and unwilling to share, or even worse, if they steal and perpetrate violence against other children, then those are the antisocial traits that we would want to re-educate that child about. It's impossible to teach a child to not have feelings that they already have.

I don't think that education really needs to start with children. There are plenty of adults who are ignorant and are passing on their vile views to their children. Let's build good role models in the world.

If children see adults - who they look up to - killing each other and badmouthing each other and generally being vile, what are those children going to do? Monkey see, monkey do.

If you want the world to be a better place, stop glorifying soldiers and war, stop saying racist things, stop sitting in that chair reading crappy newspapers, watching dreadful television and ranting about a nonexistent past that never existed. Nostalgia is a lie.

You only perceive things from a totally ignorant, hypocritical standpoint. Put yourself through a little hardship so that you might empathise with the refugees, starving and marginalised people, who grew your food and made the mass produced goods that allow you to sit idle in comfort, while all the atrocities in the world are perpetrated.

If you say I'm the hypocrite, you're wrong. I'm prepared to go to jail or be locked up in hospital in support of my views. I'm not a criminal, but I am prepared to rock a boat full of fat lazy hypocrites, even if I'm going to get wet myself.

I've come from nothing, so I've got nothing to lose. I don't have the fear that you have.

This is not about me. It's not about the UK. It's about the world's suffering people who we should be sad about, because we are all responsible.

If you have children, then don't tell the developing world to stop having babies.

If you feed your children, then pay more for your groceries so that the developing world's farmers can work their way out of poverty.

If you drive your children around in a car, or take them on holiday in an aeroplane, then you might as well just drown them now, as that's what you are doing to the world with uncontrolled release of greenhouse gasses.

If you send your children to school, then don't complain about the cost of school uniforms, books and tuition fees. Education is the route to family planning. It's a gift that should be shared, not just kept for the elite.

If you give your children a roof over their heads, then don't expect refugees to live in a tent. Or maybe you'd like to live in a tent so that a bigger family than yours can make better use of the world's limited resources?

If you think that I have no sense of perspective, it's you who is totally mistaken. I would happily live in a tent or a large hostel dorm again. I feel that the world I live in is sterile and far removed from reality. It doesn't sit easily with me. I'm way more unhappy than I've been in a long time. The rich-poor divide is something I find very hard to live with.

I'm easy to discredit: I've given away all the ammunition. The tried and trusted ways of rubbishing an opponent are openly on display, here in this blog, and I plan to give you even more sticks and stones, with which to break my bones.

I've been bullied and abused so much, I'm fairly impervious to personal attacks and below-belt blows now.

I have died a thousand deaths, and I fear not one more.

That is all.

Here is a picture of Frankie, who is a happy cat wherever in the world he finds himself, provided there are no guns or bombs (December 2007)

Tags: #politics #parents #childhood #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #frankie #homeless