This is a story about how people respond to incentives...

The last time I was in the Accident & Emergency department of a general hospital, I got a ticking off from the consultant. It was almost as if he didn't understand that the threat of kidney failure and early death was no disincentive to the path through life I was taking. It shouldn't have been a surprise to him: I hadn't gone to the hospital through choice, but instead the police had taken me there.

This was my life for a while: being passed from pillar to post by people who didn't understand what I was going through or how to deal with me. One thing that everybody seemed to agree on though, was that tough love was probably the best option. I should be ridiculed, shamed, talked down to and ostracised until I "saw sense" and decided to change the course of my life. Why would anybody choose the life that I had?

Actually, the police were excellent, seeing as they deal with society's dregs day in and day out. The well-to-do Royal Free hospital on the hills of London's exclusive Hampstead, was perhaps less used to dealing with those who have lost their way in life. Certainly, those who were struggling with drink and addiction, that I met, were sent to more central hospitals, like UCLH on the Euston Road.

I certainly don't see hospital as the first port of call, to rectify issues, and I bandaged my own massive leg wound and would have tried to avoid hospital, had paramedics not insisted that I was admitted, on another occasion.

It is only with regret that I have consumed NHS resources, but I certainly don't feel that there was any choice in the matter. When I injured my leg one night on London's streets, alone, I pulled out the broken glass and let it heal as I lay in agony in a bush for several days, with the blood-soaked wound sticking to my torn trousers. It needed stitches and I needed antibiotics to avoid infection, but I was lucky. I saved the NHS some money and I've got the scars to prove it.

Passing the buck, and driving somebody away from their home, family and friendship groups... making somebody feel ashamed, turning them into an outcast, demonising and villainising somebody... that's ridiculous!

I picked the wrong life partner: somebody judgemental, violent, abusive. That's my fault. I wasn't equipped with the life experience to know that I should walk away. My own parents relationship was full of verbal abuse and psychological warfare, but they stayed together: commitment to a partner was all I knew. I was naïvely optimistic that things would finally work, if only I tried hard enough.

When depression worsened and became bipolar disorder, when bipolar was overshadowed by addiction... things were chaotic, and consumed my sanity, temporarily. I was heavily dependent, trusting, of my partner and my Dad, and my GP. They acted with ignorance and without consideration of my wishes. Later, my partner would act with spite and selfishness.

It's hard to recover if your partner is working against you, and has your Dad in co-operation too. But, I'm going over heavily trodden ground. I don't mean to re-iterate this. I mean instead to talk about another approach: carrot, not stick.

I was dealing with something, in technical terms, called a clusterfuck. A combination of mental health problems, an unsupportive partner, unsupportive and even obstructive family, sex addiction, drug addiction, having to find a new home, new friends, new job... it's too much to ask of somebody. A breakdown, a major relapse, becoming completely dysfunctional: this was made inevitable by the circumstances around me.

Only the police acted with any restraint. The police see lives ruined, and people enter into the revolving-doors of criminal justice. The police know that slapping a criminal conviction onto somebody makes their life harder, rather than improving their chances of rehabilitation into society, so they are reluctant to condemn somebody to that fate. However, many in the rest of society are keen to label and ostracise and destroy their fellow human beings.

We are living in an increasingly isolated society, where we are mistrustful of each other. We avoid listening to anybody's personal story, lest it instil some sense of sympathy within ourselves. To view every stranger as a potential murderer, rapist, paedophile, thief and dirty junkie, is easier than just seeing other human beings, and feeling compelled to hesitate in the rat race for a second and give somebody a hand up.

We are all competing with one another so fiercely, that we believe that it is only with intensely selfish and self-centred actions, to the detriment of society as a whole, that we can get ahead, that we can succeed. We believe that we are helping our family, by turning a blind eye to the beggars, the homeless, the poor and the addicts and alcoholics.

The welfare state is being dismantled. The sympathy of society and the basic human instinct for care and compassion is being eroded. Instead we have a culture of "every man for himself" and we'll allow incredible human suffering to be perpetrated in our names, because we are sold good vs. evil fairytales by a wealthy elite, intent on turning us into scared, isolated consumers.

I feel with certainty that the depression that I feel - the dissatisfaction with what I see in the world - stems directly from an unpleasant attitude that's prevalent everywhere I look: the collapse of social bonds, and the mistrust of strangers, neighbours, fellow human beings.

I've paid over £30,000 just to be treated like a human being, by some kind and compassionate, non-judgemental people. That's all it takes to help somebody on the road to recovery: just don't be an arsehole to them. Be consistently nice to each other, and the world won't be such a shit place that people get depressed in, want to get intoxicated and want to kill themselves.

Yes, it's true that when my life is absolutely appalling, I will probably run to drink & drugs. What's the alternative? The razor blade and the noose.

They feed you in hospital. You could try starving people, to punish them for getting sick, but seeing as that's how I ended up in hospital I can't see why that would work. Carrot works. Stick doesn't

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

This is a story about an inevitable crash...

If you're under too much pressure for too long, eventually you'll crack, you'll crash & burn. Making hay while the sun shines is all well and good, but when you enter a cycle of boom & bust, it's very hard to restabilise things.

My school year was one of the first to do the dreaded SATs exams. These exams turned out to be incredibly important for the next set of exams that followed hot on their heels: my GCSEs. My SAT results pretty much decided which stream I would be in for Maths, English & Science. Being in the 'top set' was important, to not get dragged down by those who didn't want to learn.

Education and a corporate career is just unrelenting. The mindset of continually challenging people with arbitrary measurements never goes away. Whether it's A-level exams, University or your performance reviews at work, life is one continuous game of sorting and sifting, presided over by little hitlers who want to confine everybody into neat little boxes.

I never felt particularly stressed about exams and getting good grades, at the time, but there was a heavy culture I was being indoctrinated into, which I didn't realise until it was too late, and I hit a brick wall and could no longer continue on the same bullshit path.

We tell our kids that they need to work hard at school and get good exam results so that they can continue into further education, get a better job, have a better lifestyle. It turns out that's simply wrong. Society certainly benefits if we are all unthinking slaves, simply parroting the same identical bullcrap, and unquestioningly following our allotted route: KNOW YOUR PLACE is what's drummed into us, for 40 or 50 hours a week.

Playing the game, playing by the rules, believing in the value of pieces of paper above talent and experience, believing that there's a place for everybody, and that if you try your best, you can do better than your peers, and it'll give you and your family a better life. At some point, the bubble bursts, you become disillusioned, you see that it's all a lie.

I felt cheated out of my childhood, with such an unhealthy fixation on academic achievement placed ahead of playtime and social activities. Nobody would ever tell me off for reading too many books, completely isolated in my room, but playing games with my friends was not a good use of time, apparently.

My parents pulled me away from my peers at every opportunity. Whether that was visiting their friends all over the country, or spending weeks at a time in a dilapidated house in a tiny French village. I did make a friend in this village eventually, but he was younger than me, and I was criticised for being "immature" and the effect this friend had on me.

Some of my parents friends had children too, and I tried to be friends with them, and indeed I felt closer to these children than I did with a lot of my schoolfriends. I was kept away from schoolfriends so often during weekends and holidays, when there was less emphasis on homework, but I could never get close to any group of friends before I was dragged away.

I started to value material possessions above social bonds, because I had been taught that social bonds were not something I would ever be allowed to cultivate. I changed schools 6 times, instead of just once, because of my parents' lack of care about how my social development was being affected. In the end, I gave up, and saw friendships as totally transient, meaningless.

It's a real tragedy, when somebody is taught not to get attached to anybody, not to make meaningful bonds, not to value friendships. I fixated on career achievements and money, believing that there was no value in staying with my peer group, having a group of friends, being socially bonded.

It was quite by accident that I ended up with a group of kitesurfer friends. For me, the appeal of kitesurfing was that it was a loner sport. Most people who have been socially normalised enjoy team sports. It's the camaraderie of the sport that is most of the fun, rather than the sport itself. That brotherhood (or sisterhood) between team members is something I never experienced growing up.

Given that I was socially under-developed, and even cynical about friendship and human relationships, it was easier to develop relationships through technology, the internet. I started to read and contribute to an online discussion forum, about kitesurfing, and from this I got to know the online nicknames of a lot of people, as if they were people who I knew intimately.

As my confidence with kitesurfing grew, I started to get more outspoken on the online discussion forums, and this developed into arranging to meet up with people at the weekends, to go kitesurfing where the wind and the tides were best. There was a social meet up every Tuesday night, at a pub in central London, which was popular, and cemented a lot of real friendships.

Having access to a group of friends, a peer group that I felt bonded to, was something that was very new and alien to me at first, but it completed me: I felt secure and happy for the first time in my life. For the first time in my life, I was living for more than just exam grades and good feedback from my bosses at work. It was healthy, it was stable, it was sustainable and it was happy.

Sadly, my underlying mindset was still one that placed ambitious career goals and risk-taking ahead of valuing the social group that I loved and who gave me great joy and security, a deep-seated sense of wellbeing, of connection to the world. I didn't miss it until it was gone.

I was driven to find a girl, to fall in love... having been so socially insecure, awkward, such a late starter, I hadn't had the opportunity to meet that special lady, and I felt like that was the most important thing I had to do, since I had become happy in the rest of my life. I put all my energies and efforts into trying to make it work with every girl who I thought I was madly in love with.

There are few words to describe just how immature I was, in some very vital and 'normal' areas of life. You can't bully and pressure and cajole your kid into being an academic bookworm without damaging them as a rounded person. Who gives a shit if they're grade 8 on the violin if they had a miserable childhood and can't relate to their peers or find any happiness in the world? Who gives a shit if they've got a first-class degree from Oxbridge, if they're shy and awkward and depressed?

It seems inevitable that I would go astray, with no peer group, no group of friends to compare notes with, to keep each other safe.

I cannot possibly express to you just how isolated and alone I am.

I walked the tightrope for a long time, believing that good qualifications and work experience would lead to a stable life, but as soon as I looked down I realised that there was no safety net

Tags: #bipolar #childhood #parents

This is a story about tl;dr...

Creativity loves constraints, although I have gotten rather carried away recently, with my average post length stretching out from under 1,000 words, to now pushing 3,000 words. If you write 3,000 words a day, you're churning out nearly 2 novels every month. It's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) on steroids.

There are lies, damn lies and statistics, but I must admit that I have been gathering browsing data from my website since January. I know, for example, that the average amount of time per day, that a person spends reading my website is 4 minutes and 25 seconds.

On a more interesting note, I can also see the kind of things that people search Google for, and end up finding my website. Here is one wonderful poetic example:

"i want to go to london soon dont worry i dont want to do anything stupid no big hand outs just want to book into re hab strait away or as soon as poss get my teeth sorted and be human again please dont block me might got replys when i am sorted want to leave this funiv life for good want to see my favourite wife i always think of her i went back in hotel but she was gone i wish i had of spoke" -- anonymous

That is, word for word, what somebody typed into Google, and found my website.

Here are some other delightful highlights:

• "methylone made me think wife was cheating"
• "london people fucking on sister"
• "legal highs that make you randy"
• "i do not argue with imbecile i respect myself and my profession"
• "i bully my granny to have sex with me story"
• "fucked my sister wjen (sic.) she was hospitalised"
• "sugar mummy fucking themself"

I think that the person who was searching for a story about bullying a granny to have sex with them is my personal favourite, for some sick reason. I don't like the idea of the story or that kind of perversion, but I like that something so corrupt and awful brought that person to my website. Sucker.

I can see from the statistics that most of my traffic comes from Facebook and Twitter. You would have thought that 6,000 Twitter followers would bring you a lot of readers, but it's only 35% of the total.

Direct means people who have bookmarked or typed in manicgrant dot com. I love you guys & girls... you're my regular readers, who remember my website and keep coming back ♥︎

Organic search is all the screwed up weird stuff that people type into Google... with some of the most precious examples listed above, for your amusement.

Referral is links from other sites, like Reddit. I haven't done much link building, because I like writing, not promoting my website. I write it for me, mainly, to keep friends and family informed secondly, and thirdly, I write because I'm developing a body of work that I hope will at some point become useful for people suffering from Bipolar Disorder, depression and substance abuse.

I like writing on my own website (although it's powered by Known, created by my friend Ben) rather than one of those free blogs that you get from Wordpress or Blogger.com. I like and respect bloggers, but they make up the bulk of your readers when you blog on one of those mainstream websites. I have no idea where my regular readers found me, or why they choose to read my stuff, but it sure as hell isn't one of those "choose random blog" buttons you get on the free blogging sites.

Writing on the public internet feels a little bit like shouting, not whispering your secrets into the hollow of an ancient tree, in a very crowded park. You have no idea who's listening, and how they're reacting to a complete stranger's private life, being brain dumped onto these webpages.

It's only because some individuals have been kind enough to comment and email, that I have any feedback at all, and I know that people beyond my immediate circle of family and friends are getting something out of it.

For all of us, we face off to parents, brothers & sisters, friends, work colleagues, more distant family members and even the public to some extent. We are in the eyes and ears of all these different people, who each perceive something different, and have a different recollection of events.

The reconciliation of the version of your life, imagined by everybody and anybody you ever come into contact with, is a rather impossible thing, when people come and go at different times, and they only know snippets of your story.

Of course it's totally self-absorbed to be a normal regular Joe, who isn't famous for anything, to write something that is so biographical. We think of autobiographies as things that are ghostwritten so that they can be bought as a Christmas present for somebody when you can't think of anything else better to get for them. How completely absurd that a nobody like me should document parts of my life like this!

In a very large way, this is my anti-Facebook. Instead of trying to appear as successful, happy and having my shit together as possible, with lots of photos of me smiling and doing nice things like going out for meals with friends and going on holiday with pretty girls... this is my answer to the fake world of the perfect social media identity.

Of course, I'm playing with fire, using my real identity to write about real events in the most honest and unflinching way that I dare. Naturally, I have had my fears about employers and work colleagues reading this stuff, but the experiment continues.

Frankly, I'm through having to wear a mask, and hide my true colours in order to be considered grey, bland, boring and corporate enough to be allowed into the inner sanctum of bankerland. I'm glad that I lost my last contract, because I was too outspoken about a moral and professional duty to the shareholders.

Now, as I look for a new contract, I do so with less fear than ever before.

The last year in a single graph

Tags: #bipolar #career #mentalhealth #depression #addiction

This is a story about an unholy trinity...

At a hotel I was given a voucher to connect to the internet. As you can see, it was foe pawn. I'm not sure if I used it foe pawn, but I possibly used it for porn, amongst my other general internet browsing.

Let me tell you about something that's a fairly irresistible combination: drugs, pornography and masturbation. Drugs and sex - i.e. chemsex - are bad enough, but there's a limitless supply of pornography out there on the internet, and given a limitless supply of drugs, you can get seriously messed up.

People who are dealing with the chemsex crisis talk about an unholy trinity of drugs: GBL/GHB, Crystal Meth and Meow Meow (M-CAT). These drugs are endemic amongst a group of promiscuous homosexual men, seeking to reach unimaginable highs from drug-fuelled sexual congress.

What happens when the secret is out? What happens when the wider, mostly heterosexual community finds out that having sex on drugs is many, many times more enjoyable than sex or drugs on their own?

Let me tell you, from bittersweet experience, that once you have tried chemsex, your ideas about pleasure and sexual ecstasy will be irreversibly corrupted. You can't un-experience things like that. You can't forget what you know. You can't un-feel what you felt.

Of course, 99% of people know that drugs are bad, and dangerous and will kill you just from looking at them, right? Well, unfortunately, people are discovering that the hard-line propaganda just isn't true, and the warning message is somewhat lost in the prohibitionist bullshit. So every cautionary tale is regarded with suspicion, or completely disregarded altogether.

In actual fact, there is so much taboo around drugs, sex, homosexuality, masturbation, fetishes... even just feeling horny is something we don't talk about openly. We are almost stuck in the Dark Ages when it comes to feeling guilty about our sexual desires, and the fact that we are inescapably driven to satisfy them.

At the end of the day, you can't fight hunger, you can't fight thirst, and you can't fight your libido. Those are the 3 things that ensure the survival of humanity as a species of animals. I know a small handful of us try to rise above the level of beasts, and act a little less like animals by using our higher brain functions, but we'll still die if we don't eat and drink, and we will actually devolve if the intelligent members of humanity don't reproduce.

Masturbation and drugs are the ultimate ways to thwart nature though. Once an animal has found something it prefers to eating, drinking and fucking, it's pretty screwed in terms of its survival prospects, and the likelihood of it passing on its genes. You could see this as a good thing: eventually addicts and wankers will die out. However, evolution is ridiculously slow, and chemistry is ridiculously fast. Checkmate, humans.

The above picture is an advertising campaign, suggesting that people don't try Crystal Meth "even once". The advice is quite reasonable. Meth is highly addictive, and the best way to not become addicted to drugs is to never take them in the first place.

By the same token, beating addiction sounds fairly simple. Just don't take drugs "even once" and hey presto, your addiction is cured. But things aren't that simple, unfortunately.

The brain is amazing at making connections between things. I would hope that everybody is familiar with Pavlov's dog, that started to salivate whenever a bell was rung, because it knew it was going to get fed. The brain had connected the sound of a bell ringing with getting food, and something that is normally completely unconnected with food and eating, became linked in the brain of this dog.

I would hardly consider eating food to be an orgasmic experience, but small amounts of dopamine - the pleasure chemical - are released in the brain every time we eat. It's natural that we should have evolved a brain that teaches us to eat... eating is what keeps us alive. Eating food is a kind of addiction, if you like. We eat because we get a pleasurable reward from doing it. We are satisfying a craving.

Sex and masturbation are a bit easier to understand. We get a much bigger dopamine hit every time we are sexually stimulated in a state of arousal, and another big hit of dopamine if we achieve an orgasm. It's much easier to see that sexual behaviour is the same as any other addictive behaviour. We feel a craving for pleasure: we get horny, we want to fuck or masturbate. We then satisfy this craving, with sexual acts, and then we are rewarded with pleasure.

However, the brain has natural systems to curb our enthusiasm for round-the-clock eating, masturbation and sex. After food or orgasm, a protein called prolactin is released from the pituitary gland, which signals to the brain that it's time to take a break from those pleasure-seeking activities. The amount of dopamine that's released if you continue to eat or fuck, is virtually nothing... you get no pleasure out of it, until the prolactin levels drop again.

The problem with drugs is, that they're almost always rewarding, provided you take enough of them. Sure, a tolerance builds up in your brain, but you can usually take bigger and bigger doses, and still get high.

If you combine drugs with sex/masturbation, you've got a problem... just like Aaron on his injected Crystal Meth, you might want to fuck or masturbate until the drugs wear off.

Now, if we imagine that Aaron is like that dog that salivates whenever the bell is rung... poor Aaron is going to want drugs whenever he gets horny, or he's going to get horny whenever he gets high on drugs. It's a vicious circle.

The only way that you're not going to feel horny is if you have your sexual functions interfered with, by medication or surgery. Castration for a man, removal of ovaries for a woman... the elimination of the sex hormones: testosterone, oestrogen and progesterone. That goes some way to eliminating your libido, but then, what are you if you're no longer a sexual being? You're certainly no longer human.

Drugs produce a temporary and mostly reversible effect, but the longer that you abuse drugs for, and the more of a link that is made in the brain between drug-induced pleasure and other actions, the harder it will be to undo those drug cravings, given the same stimuli.

When the stimuli is your own libido, you probably don't fancy becoming a eunuch. The only option is to de-link sex and drugs. That means having a lot of mediocre sex and joyless masturbation.

Once you start to realise how the brain works, you can start to disentangle why you do the things that you do. Why do you drink coffee? Because it contains the bitter plant alkaloid called caffeine, which causes dopamine to be released in your brain, which is pleasurable, rewarding. Why do you smoke cigarettes? Same reason. Why did you copulate for 30 seconds and produce a screaming shitting incontinent midget that can't even feed itself? Same reason.

If you truly want to elevate yourself above the level of the beasts, you would have to make yourself asexual and release yourself from the tiresome bother of having to eat and drink. However, you'd probably get so engrossed in some interesting area of research that you'd forget to eat and die of starvation. Plus, you wouldn't have any kids, so you'd just die in obscurity as some kind of eccentric hermit.

Of course you don't have to take things to the other extreme, and test the very limits of human ecstasy, pleasure... to get as high as it's possible to get. I really don't recommend it. It's bad for your health and probably pretty deadly. Everything else in life will be compared to that gold standard forever afterwards, and it's hard to get over the disappointment that nothing in your life is ever going to be as enjoyable.

This is a cautionary tale, but it's more an honest conversation that people are running screaming away from, because they're prudish, repressed, uptight, shamed by taboos and social norms into a culture of silent guilt about normal, natural human things that every person feels.

But there's another reason why some people go down the path of hedonism, while others go down the path of quiet family life: oxytocin. The bonding hormone is released when you stroke your dog or your cat. The hormone is released when you see your kids, and give them a cuddle.

Oxytocin is responsible for curbing our urge to seek pleasure, by giving us a warmer, longer-lasting kind of pleasure. If the dopamine hit you get from an orgasm is like injecting Crystal Meth, then the opioids that are released due to oxytocin are like injecting Heroin. You're happy to sit around, monged out in your pyjamas all day with your kids, because you're wrapped up in the cotton-wool opiate hit of a Heroin-esque oxytocin ride.

Nature wants you to change modes once you've reproduced, from the pleasure seeking fuck machine, into an obedient servant to your helpless infant(s). As a parent, your life is over. It's time to concentrate on stuffing calories into the greedy mouths of your offspring until you finally expire from exhaustion. It's a marathon, not a sprint, so having your brain calmed down and full of satisfying all-day pleasure chemicals while you're fulfilling your parenting duties works perfectly.

The most tragic thing is when these world collide. When children are conceived in the middle of a period of drug abuse fuelled sexual activity, it's going to be nearly impossible for your brain to switch modes. The amount of pleasure you get from your shitting, vomiting, snot-covered offspring is not going to be able to compete with powders and pills.

It might sound unpalatable, but if you're going to be a drug addict, you should be gay or be a wanker. Becoming a parent might provide an incentive to get clean and sober, but you're going to have a tough job kicking a habit and bonding with your child. That tiny bit of chest-swelling warm fuzzy feeling you get when you put your tiny baby on your chest... yeah, you're not really going to notice that if you're on a massive comedown.

It might seem like I'm a reckless risk-taker, and that I've come dangerously close to ruining my life, but that's the whole point: I've got no dependents. I've actually been really careful. The main thing to be careful about is to not spawn any offspring you're in no position to look after, because you're struggling with addiction.

But this isn't a lecture. This isn't me being holier-than-thou. Actually, it's me saying that I understand why families fall apart, why parents don't love their kids enough, why babies get born to junkies and hopeless drug-addled fathers.

One of the main reasons I have such a high metabolism, I believe, is because my Mum wasn't expecting to get pregnant with me, and when she found out she was pregnant, she then decided to lay off the booze and the fags. The withdrawal from nicotine and alcohol while I was in the womb would have meant that highly elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, would have passed into my developing body, through the placental blood.

As an organism, whatever advantage we can get in our environment would have been crucial to our survival in a world that was out to kill us, 10,000 years ago. A baby that is going to be born into a world with little food and many predators should have a completely different metabolism from a baby that's going to be born into a land of plenty. You can't run away from the wolves very fast with a big fat blubbery baby, and there's no point in having a baby that's really good at storing energy in fat reserves if there aren't any excess calories around.

Addiction is just the same as hunger or thirst, and so, babies that are born to mothers who are recovering addicts will be affected as if they were starving: low birth weight, and the epigenetic expression of genes that cause features to create a skinny scavenger, constantly in a state of nervous tension, high alertness.

While it's easy to look upon me with ignorant, stupid eyes, and assume that my life has been directed by my choices, in actual fact, so much of what we think and say and do, and how our body and brain responds to circumstances which are very much out of our hands, is a result of a chain of causation that is far more impenetrable than a trite oversimplification.

What does it tell you that I've been able to take drugs like Cocaine, Heroin and Crystal Meth and not become addicted? What do your simplistic ideas about drug abuse tell you about that particular fact?

Drug addiction is a more complex relationship than simply a person and a chemical. Drugs are social. Drugs are sexual. Drugs are societal. Drugs are cultural.

Yes, it's true that the right combination of a drugs and activities associated with drug taking can form a nearly unbreakable bond in your habits, behaviour and actual brain programming, to the point that escaping addiction will be virtually impossible.

However, only a fool would write people off and say that somebody can never change. One thing is for certain about the brain: it's a plastic organ, that can adapt itself in amazing ways. One thing is for certain about humans: they're adept at handling almost anything the world can throw at them.

To stigmatise a huge group of people, to ask them to hang their heads in shame, to ask them to shoulder other people's guilt, to pay for crimes they're not responsible for, to be the black sheep, to be the scapegoats... it's a horrible thing to do, to sit in judgement over somebody who is 99.5% identical to you.

Ok, so you bought a dog, and a house, and copulated and made some kids and now you feel all smug and fulfilled, and you'd like to tell other people how they made bad choices and you're morally superior. Well, guess what? You're made of the same stuff. You'd respond just the same as the people you're judging, if you were put in their situation. Your brain works in exactly the same way.

You should really learn about how to lead people back to the right path, rather than trapping them onto the path they're on, which can only lead to their early death... a death that you share collective responsibility for.

I had to complain to the manager of this coffee shop that I couldn't see my veins in the toilet. Caffeine good, Heroin bad, right?

Tags: #drugs #sex #addiction #parents #childhood

This is a story about feeling bad...

The person who is my harshest critic, puts the most pressure on me, never lets me relax, is always on my case to either be working, or feeling bad about not doing anything productive... is me.

For the best part of 6 months my life revolved around 2 rooms: my bedroom and my lounge, and I didn't even spend much time in my lounge. A combination of winter, plus depression, plus a gap between contracts, meant that I've been in a heightened state of stress and anxiety, not allowing myself a moment to relax.

I can tell you, it's pretty exhausting being hard on yourself 24 x 7. People tell me to go easy on myself, give myself a break, but it's not really been part of my upbringing. Naturally, after I got my first job and left the family home, I carried on the established pattern of being harsh with myself: pressuring myself to be a high achiever, reach career goals, feel that I'm being productive and useful with every waking second of the day.

It's pretty hard to unwind, when you're under that kind of pressure, whether it's coming from your parents, a partner or yourself. I would say that it takes two weeks in order to gain just a few days of proper rest & relaxation. You also can't do it at home, where you are surrounded by the piles of paperwork and other reminders of things you're supposed to be dealing with.

When it's simply the rigours of your job and commuting that you need a bit of a break from, I remember that a couple of weeks in the sunshine used to do the trick. When it's the near-lethal disintegration of your entire life leaving you destitute and homeless... yeah, you kinda need a bit more than a day at the seaside.

I'm going through a staged recovery. I had the job, but nowhere to live. Then I had the home, but no work. The next stage will be to have a home and some work. With the combination of all the elements that most people would call a 'life', I take a step closer to stability, to recovery.

If you're looking for an idiot-proof guide to when my recovery is complete, it looks like this:

• Place to live
• Paid employment
• Safety buffer of savings (rainy day/emergency money)
• Friends
• Outside interests (i.e. hobby)
• Exercise (e.g. riding my bike to work)
• Holidays & weekends relaxing

Do you know how long it's been since I've had all those pieces in place? Do you know how many times that somebody has taken away one of those pieces just as I've managed to get another one in place? It's been like nailing down a bent floorboard: when you nail one end down, the other end springs up.

Anyway, this isn't one of those "poor me, poor me, pour me another drink" blog posts. I just thought I'd share some of the reasons why people lose their will to live.

There's a picture of me hitch-hiking for the first time in my life, age 36. I never had a gap-yah (gap year, to those who don't speak in the spoilt brattish posh voice of the middle class Home Counties types) or took up the University places I was offered. When I eventually ended up at Cambridge University's Institute for Manufacturing, I was working 100+ hours a week. No extended student holidays for me, for 3 or 4 years, while I fart-arsed around getting into debt.

The point is not that you should feel sorry for me, but merely that you should understand that I've never taken my foot of the accelerator pedal. I've had that pedal firmly jammed to the floor of the car for as long as I can remember.

My parents might tell you that I was lazy or whatever, but I always got good exam grades and I was in the top classes. I got a good job and supported myself... what the f**k more do you want from a son or daughter? I think if you're looking for the lazy ones, I'd say that'd be my parents, who didn't work hard enough to provide comparable opportunities for my sister and me, versus our peers. Too much money spent sat on their arses, intoxicated on alcohol and drugs, would be my verdict.

Recently even my own sister criticised me going to San Francisco, on a business trip to see people from the startup community. She thought it was a holiday. If you think that I slept for 7 hours on the floor of New York JFK airport, and 5 hours on a bench at Seattle airport, for just a few days in the USA, then you've got a funny idea of what a holiday is.

I must confess that I did have 4 nights in Tenerife, nearly 2 years ago. I even went kitesurfing. This, I do count as a holiday, although it was a pretty short one. I'm not complaining though. It was sunny and warm, and I only had to wear a shortie wetsuit in the water. It was relaxing and I had a great time. Didn't have work or a place to live though, at the time.

I'm not sure why anybody would begrudge me just about any joy at the moment, when I spent 14 weeks in hospital in 2014, plus I was hospitalised twice in 2015, and then I decided to attack my veins with a razor blade early this year. I'm not owed a holiday, or indeed anything at all, but why sit in judgement over me and my lifestyle, when it's quite clear that things have hardly been going swimmingly for me in recent years.

I find it hard enough to be kind to myself, so anybody else who feels like criticising my decisions can pretty much back the f**k off. I'd prefer it if you actually lent a hand, actually. Some words of encouragement certainly don't go amiss.

You know, I've adopted this general "let it go" attitude to life. I'm owed quite a lot of money by friends, but I don't pile pressure on them to repay their debts. Some people have damaged my expensive stuff, or taken it without permission, but I haven't made them give it back, or to pay to have things repaired.

What's the point in just bickering with each other? Are you so perfect that you can sit in judgement over other people's lives? Is it worth damaging the relationship with friends and family, because you put money and possessions ahead of those personal connections?

From what I can see, my parents have put sitting around in a house that's way too big for their needs, bickering with each other, with no friends, in an alcoholic stupor, ahead of the happiness of their children and grandchildren. My Dad has put personal financial security ahead of making my Mum feel loved and cherished. Even my sister has fallen foul of sending me an extremely unpleasant email, despite the fact we barely have enough contact as it is. All of this is about money and possessions. What a load of bullshit. Surely family relationships and being a kind compassionate human being has to come before greed?

So, I'm making every effort to not feel guilty about allowing myself to recover, to regain my mental health, to regain strength and stability in my life, to regain my will to live. If you don't like that, tough shit.

Here's to all the haters

Tags: #depression #mentalhealth #parents

This is a story about the best advice you can get...

Why write to your younger self? You won't be able to act on that advice. It seems like that letter could be concealing regrets, and things you'll never be able to change. That younger version of yourself has gone, and is not able to receive mail anyway.

So, I've decided to write a letter to myself, today. Nobody knows me better than myself. I can't even fully remember what I was like 5 or 10 years ago, let alone 20 or so years ago. I can probably offer some pertinent advice, from a very well-informed vantage point, to my present self, so that sounds more rational to me.

So, here's my letter:

Dear Nick,

Don't freak out, but this is a letter from you, to you. I mean, it's from me, to me (you). Oh, you're smart(ish) so you can probably figure out what I (we) mean. I'm going to write it from me (you) to save confusion, otherwise this letter is going to get very silly.

I'm writing to you to give you some advice, because I'm probably the best placed person to advise you, given that I know everything about you, even your darkest secrets and innermost desires, which are probably one and the same thing.

I know there's this trend of writing to your teenaged self, but you're quite different from 12 or 16 year-old you. You really went through quite rapid changes around age 19, and then another load of big life changes in your early to mid twenties, so writing to that earlier version of yourself doesn't make much sense.

While your childhood shaped who you are as an adult, to some extent, it's not who you are today. You already managed to overcome your shyness talking to girls and your tendency towards introversion and isolation is now something you recognise as unhealthy, which is good.

Your handwriting sure has improved a lot, although it looks to me like you're cheating and using some font that looks a bit like a person has hand-written this. Actually, I know that your handwriting is still terrible, but in the age of computers, smartphones and tablets, who really cares? You're right to not be swayed by dying traditions, like mainstream education & dogma, physical books and rote-learned facts.

You used to be very ruled by insecurity, and it's good that seems to have gone now. You were really trapped into situations that made you very unhappy in the past, because you feared being alone, but now you just seem to go for what you want. It's good that you cut away the things that aren't working for you, although you're still too hesitant to do it, and then you do it in quite a quick and brutal way. Try not to get yourself involved in things you really don't want, and then have to later extract yourself from those situations.

I know you really want to feel loved and like you've got friends there for you. I think you still feel unworthy, and like you have to go to extraordinary lengths to get people to take an interest in you. You're not a jester or a clown, and you don't need to bribe people to like you. It's up to them: if they can see the value in being your friend, you're a rewarding person to know. Getting used by people and then feeling resentful, and acting out passive-aggressively is not a healthy way to get rid of klingons.

You probably need to tone down the way you talk to people at times. I know that you have incredible empathy for people from all walks of life, and you're very mindful that other people might not have had the same life opportunities as you, but you still seem to have this way of making people feel insecure, inferior. I don't know what it is about you, but you can be quite intimidating, even though you don't mean to be.

Frankly though, you're a half-decent guy who tries hard to please everybody. I'm sure you'd benefit from not being so hard on yourself, so self-critical. There's a queue of people around the block who'd like to take their turn telling you what a bad person you are, or criticising your life 'choices' when they don't know their arse from their elbow, so you don't need to join in their ignorant bullshit... be kind to yourself. The world certainly isn't going to be kind to you, even though you try to be kind to people.

Certainly, judging people by your own standards is a disaster. Just because you trust people, try to give people the benefit of the doubt, try to give people chances, try to contribute rather than just taking whatever you can get... that doesn't mean that anybody else is living their life that way. You need to protect yourself.

You're actually pretty vulnerable. People recognise that vulnerability, and try to take advantage of it. I know that you've decided that you don't really care, and you'd prefer to live your life properly, rather than being another mean, selfish, grasping, horrible idiot making up the seething mass of a disgusting majority of people. Make sure you don't turn bitter though. Don't give away more than you can afford to lose. Nobody is ever going to repay those favours or that kindness. Reaping what you sow is bullshit when it comes to being kind and nice to people. The only bonus is that you can sleep at night knowing you tried to make the world a better place.

I'm sorry you haven't had a great deal of luck in recent years in hanging onto a group of friends who you see on a regular basis. It's really not your fault that your supposed support network dropped you in the shit at a critical point in your life, and you sank into depths that put you in a position that not a lot of people come back from.

There was always going to be difficulty in rising back up from a place that nobody expected you to recover from. It's other people's shame that they let you down that is the problem that means you're having to rebuild your life from scratch, not anything bad that you did to them: you owe those people who let you down absolutely nothing.

It's a hard thing, rebuilding your life and making a new group of friends in your mid thirties, and not having any family support. Remind yourself that it's impressive how much you have achieved virtually entirely on your own. Remind yourself how strong you must be as a person to go through hell without a support network close to you.

Try to forget about the pressure you're under to magically become "steady Eddie" again. I know that your family are expecting you to magically become the reliable and dependable member of the family again, in the regular job and doing all the travelling to see everybody plus not requiring any support yourself. I know that your family expects that a magic wand gets waved and everything in your life goes back to normal, and that's an enormous burden, but just forget about them... they're just living in their own selfish little bubble and looking out for themselves. Your life is so perilously fragile at the moment, so you don't need that kind of bullshit.

You know you're lucky to be clinging onto a few things with your fingernails, and you are extremely fortunate to have another chance at getting back on your feet, thanks to a couple of very kind people who've been there for you during your hour of need. You need to make sure you don't screw up that opportunity, even though you're under extreme pressure and stress, sorting everything out in your disintegrating life.

There are a couple of things you've got going in your favour that you didn't have a year ago, and summer is coming soon, so there's a slim window of opportunity. Don't self sabotage!

I know that nobody else understands just how much pressure and stress you're under to fix all the things that got very broken, because you were simply under too much strain. Forgive yourself for breaking down, for cracking under that load. It's not your fault. Anybody in your situation would have reacted the same.

Try to ignore those ignorant idiots who talk about life 'choices' and bad decisions and things like that. They are just smug c**ts who simply have a more comfortable existence and better luck than you. We are all a product of circumstances, rather than good vs. evil. Forget those moralising, judgemental little shits and get on with doing your own thing. You know in your heart that you've always tried your hardest and done the best you could in the circumstances.

If people don't want to hear your story, try to empathise, walk a mile in your shoes, then they're unworthy of your love. They can't sit in judgement over you, when they're no angels themself, and they're just being unpleasant and unhelpful. Why would you want them anywhere near you? Why would you want somebody like that in your life? Good riddance, I say.

Surround yourself with nice people who are kind to you and you value the opinion of, because you know it's not driven by judgemental ignorance. You know deep down that your gratitude and deep drive to reciprocate the love and support you receive means that you're a good person, and you deserve to have friends, companionship, care and some attention.

You're right to keep reminding yourself to be humble, and making sure you don't become too self-absorbed. I know you always think about things in context though, and you do care about what other people are going through too, but just remember to keep it up. You know that it's not a competition, and on the grand scale of things, you've been lucky. Don't fall into the trap of feeling too sorry for yourself, and painting a picture of yourself as some hard-done-by character who's had a really hard life: it's not entirely true, although you have had some shitty stuff happen to you.

People might say "grow up" and "get a life" and "stop going on about old news" or "stop living in the past" but it's OK to go through some stuff, as long as it's part of moving on, developing, letting go. Don't hold onto grudges about the shitty way you've been treated. Just let those people go out of your life, and find positive, inspiring, kind people to replace them. Try and forget about everybody who has trampled you, badmouthed you and written you off... you don't need them.

There are a lot of people out there who feel very entitled. They think about what they want and what they can get and what they need, and don't put any effort into understanding those who are easy targets like you. I know you take things to heart when somebody jumps to the wrong conclusions about you. Forget about those people. They're just trying to destroy other people's lives in order to make themselves feel self-righteous and improve their own self-esteem at the expense of others. You've wasted a lot of time and energy on those narcissists and leeches, and it's time to forgive yourself for trying so hard to be nice to them, and make a relationship work.

You need to learn to be a little more selfish, self-protecting, guarded, while at the same time, you should also remain as humble as you can, grateful for those who have stuck by you, and those very few who are close and have actually stepped in to help you. You need to spend less time and energy trying to convince horrible people of your worth and trying to make them see how much they're using you and hoping that they'll act with some common human decency... it's a waste of time. Try to forget... don't even bother forgiving: they certainly have no forgiveness in their dark little hearts. Instead, concentrate on being positive, and building on those few green shoots that you're really lucky to have. Those people who are kind and care, you should keep close to you, and try to build on that with those who are still there for you, to some extent, because they still care and haven't judged you. They understand, they empathise, they sympathise, they actually care about you as a person, no matter where they are in the world.

I know it's hard, living in this day and age when everybody gets scattered far and wide around the globe, but you're an interesting person who's kind and caring, so you should find people to be in your close support network, wherever you go. Just remember to not turn bitter, not to feel entitled. Remember to keep giving back, feeling gratitude. And don't let insecurity get the better of you. When you find something good, don't grip it too tightly.

Try to slow down a bit. Approach things with a marathon pace, not at a sprint. Everything will get sorted out in the fullness of time.

I know it's frustrating, to have had it all and then lost it, and you want to get back to that happy place you were in age 24 or 25, when you had the friends, the job, the girlfriend, the hobby... your life was quite fulfilling and you felt secure and happy.

You can't fix everything overnight, and even when you start to get things back together, it's going to take time to get back into the rhythm and routine of normal life, and start to build up a safety buffer, to protect you from bumps in the road.

There are going to be setbacks, and I know that you're really fragile and it wouldn't take much to completely wreck your life, but you need to just have faith and act in a positive way, instead of throwing in the towel when you're faced by insurmountable problems. You've added to your own problems when you've decided that everything is ruined, and that you're going to kill yourself as an act of spite.

Everything has been ruined, several times, but you can see that something fairly miraculous has happened every time, but it's dumb to keep deciding that everything is over. You should have learned by now that somehow, everything kinda works out. You are worthy of help, and help does eventually come... even if it is rather late, and not from those people who supposedly love and care about you.

If there's one thing you should have learned from 36 years on the planet, it's that life will always surprise you. Stop trying to second guess, to imagine what the future holds. Even when your future looks bleak as hell, you should know by now that you can turn a corner almost overnight.

Killing yourself would be really stupid: you won't get to find out how the story ends if you do that, which would frustrate the hell out of you.

I know that people think you're attention seeking and stuff, but just forget about those idiots. It's totally like you to do something just to prove people wrong, but you won't exactly be able to say "I told you so" when you're actually dead. Sure, they're total c**ts for calling your bluff and being unfeeling, selfish horrible arseholes, but hurting yourself to hurt them is not a great plan.

If you do end up killing yourself because existing with a world that just wants to be mean and cruel and selfish and ignorant and generally descend into base animal bullshit, where people are just rutting and raping, stealing and generally acting like a bunch of prehistoric beasts... I forgive you, and I understand why you did it. I'm certainly not happy with what I see in the world either. Somebody has to take a stand, and I applaud you for thinking about the big picture. Keep doing that, but try to act in a positive way. You can't actively improve things if you're not around to play a part.

I know you want to make a grand gesture. I know you want to make a big contribution to society, to humanity, but try to do it in a positive, constructive way. Protest suicide, hunger strikes... people are becoming so heartless and beastly that quite possibly nobody would give a shit. It would be a terrible waste of your life, your talents, your energy, your creativity.

You go a little mad at times, and start imagining grand schemes that are maybe a little crackpot, but there is good stuff in there. You'll find a project that is important, and was made for you. In time, you'll make a difference and feel like you're doing what you were made to do. You'll find your true calling, just give it time.

You're impatient, and that's OK because I do understand that you need to rush at things, because certain parts of your life are on fire, or like a ticking time bomb. You only have a short amount of time to shore things up, to lay the foundations and make sure that things are strong enough to withstand the inevitable problems that will crop up over a longer stretch of time.

It's frustrating, I know, dealing with people who don't understand the urgency of making repairs and getting a safety cushion ready, so that you can keep moving forwards. Don't waste your energy chasing any help from those who don't understand the fragility of your situation. Don't waste your breath on people who aren't really going to help... they just like to pretend they're there for you.

It's a tricky time, but remember, if you can do it, you've got plenty of happy contented life ahead of you, and a big chance to achieve something, to make a difference, to make a contribution.

Don't let guilt or judgemental bullshit get in your way. I know you want to be everything to everybody, and you'll have your chance to be there for those people who have helped you, supported you. You have a sense of debt, of karma, of right and wrong. You will make everything right again, and more besides, if you can turn those green shoots into a mighty oak again. But it takes time, don't rush at it.

It's a shame I'm not from the future or anything, otherwise I'd just give you the lottery numbers for tonight or tell you who's going to win the Super Bowl or something useful like that, to give you a buttload of money to solve those cashflow problems.

I think it's good that you're comfortable with everything that's happened up until today, and accept that it's shaped who you are, so it would be ridiculous to wish to change history. It's good to want to be who you are, not somebody else, because it's impossible to change who you are. Keep telling people who think you made bad 'choices' to go fuck themselves. The illusion of free will and all that, yeah?

I like you. I think you're interesting and funny and you try hard. Keep up the good work.

Lots of love,

Nick

Tags: #childhood #parents #friends

This is a story about getting things in perspective...

When you're climbing a mountain, you can't think about the summit too much. You have to take things one step at a time. If you are much too fixated on reaching the top, you will feel disappointed every time you reach a false summit. You will feel disheartened when you see how far there is left to climb.

I'm quite familiar with mountainous tasks. I started my full-time career at age 17, and I had my challenges with immaturity, but also with age prejudice. I sacrificed a huge portion of my teens to learning programming, so I was pretty ready to start work, unlike some of my peers who had done non-computing degrees at University. However, my youth held me back for many years.

Around the time I turned 30, I built a couple of cashflow positive businesses. Taking something from the idea stage to the point where you're taking customers' money is not something that should be underestimated. It's easy to do one deal, and just keep dealing in that same way, but it's quite something else to put together an established business, with multiple customers, suppliers, and create a trusted brand.

Then, as I've written about at length, my mental health started to be the mountainous task in front of me. Or rather, I was at the bottom of a deep dark pit and had to climb my way out. Facing a collapse in your sense of wellbeing, your ability to cope... that's a fairly big thing to tackle, when you've had nearly 30 years of steady stability.

Most recently, dealing with drug addiction is probably one of the hardest challenges a person is ever likely to face in their life. Addiction can consume a person so quickly. It's like a fire. If you don't put it out fast it will spread, and if you leave it to develop into a raging inferno, it will be virtually impossible to extinguish and it will just consume everything with its flames until there's nothing but charred remains.

It seems really stupid to me, how long we let people flounder and struggle for. We just turn our backs and pretend stuff isn't happening. We just hope for the best, hope that the person doesn't bother us, hope that some miracle happens, hope that the person who's in trouble sorts themself out, hope that somebody else will deal with it so we don't have to.

There's a really nasty streak of "look out for number one" going around more and more. People live their lives in an increasingly isolationist manner, critical of other people's choices, and only thinking about their own wellbeing. We are encouraged to trample on each other in order to get ahead. We hoard and do not share.

People can't see the wood for the trees. They fail to recognise that pushing their kids to get good grades at school just creates an arms race. Pushing your teen to think about 3 or 4 years University education when they're just a child. Pushing your young adult kids to get a good career, a profession, when they're just developing their own identity, deciding what they want to do with the next 40 or 50 years of their life. Can't people see that at every stage of this funnel, things are getting more pressured, more competitive?

I received an email today from somebody who is already struggling with the pressure of University. Think how much pressure that person already endured to get the exam grades to get that University place. Think about how many exams they have had to sit, in order to stay in the system, and be allowed to continue with some hope of getting a well paid job at the end of it all.

We're tested, and then we're tested some more, and then we're tested again and again until the end of our days, nowadays. Now that we have established this over-competitive bullshit arms race of a life. There are too many lawyers, too many doctors... too many of all the professions that are desirable. An exam might look like an ordered, disciplined, academic thing, but we might as well have our kids duking it out with pointy sticks in the middle of a jeering snarling crowd of bloodthirsty onlookers.

In the zero-sum game that we have invented, for every winner there's a loser. That means that whenever a kid gets a bunch of "A" grades and a place at an Oxbridge University, some other kid has to leave school without any qualifications and be considered unemployable. There are only a limited number of places for the elite: both in academia and professional life.

We're not building a longer table, we're building higher fences. The pressure on kids to not make a single slip up, from the moment we start pressuring them to beat their peers throughout a gruelling school, college, and University life. One black mark can derail your entire future. Screw up one set of exams, and you'll be tossed into the 'undesirable' bucket, and find it very hard to rise above your peers ever again. You'll be trampled underfoot.

Schools can only give out the same limited percentage of "A" grades each year. Universities can only give out the same limited percentage of firsts and 2:1 degrees each year. Companies can only afford to hire a small number of entry-level people - the very best - each year. We drive huge amounts of people into a funnel that's just way too narrow.

Opportunities just suck right now for young people. It was pretty sucky when I was a kid, and there was always hell to pay whenever my teachers spoke to my parents, even though I was always in the top sets and getting good grades. There were plenty of sharp-elbowed pushy parents who ruined plenty of childhoods back then... today it must be bloody miserable and awful. No wonder we are seeing a spike in teen suicides and self harm.

And for what? Do you think your kid is going to get a good job after they finish jumping through those academic hoops... doing all those exams and essays and dissertations? Do you think your kid is going to happily couple off with some lovely partner, buy a house and start raising a family of their own? How the hell could they afford to? Have you seen the disgracefully low wages and the sky-high house prices?

You can do a 180 degree turn and still take a step forward. You don't have to feel like it's a backwards step to admit you're wrong and start going the other way up the dead-end alleyway that you led your kids and grandkids down. OK, so school and work was OK for you growing up, but that doesn't mean it's working for your kids and grandkids.

What worked for a world of 2 or 3 billion people doesn't work for a world of over 7 billion. There are just too many people competing for a finite amount of bullshit qualifications and jobs. We've set our young people up to fail, and it's not because they're stupid or lazy. It must be incredibly stressful and hopeless, being young today, with so few prospects and such a hard struggle to get ahead of your peers.

At the moment, the human condition is not being advanced. The ship is being steered by a rudderless drunk of a captain, in selecting our political and commercial elite from the greying middle-aged nostalgic fools who've had it way too good for way too long.

The current set of elitists kowtow to the pensioners, because everything is owned by institutional funds: every company is majority owned by pension funds. The grey pound is the only pound. The kids don't have any money. The corporations worship those who are in God's waiting room, just hanging around for their time to die. It's a system that's leading the whole world to its death.

We should be looking down, to those little kids and their energy and optimism, and thinking about their future, not looking up to the heavens and thinking about our death. You might have a comfortable retirement, but you'll be riddled with disease and old age. Would you not be more comfortable knowing you left the world a better place for your kids and grandchildren?

Build no store of wealth on this Earth.

I feel sorry for working class people who have worked hard their entire life, and they've still been cheated out of a living pension, but their health is failing. Their voice is silenced by the deafening boom of the ones who've had a cushy life with a golden parachute final-salary pension at the end of it all. We can't see the wood for the trees

Tags: #politics #childhood #mentalhealth #capitalism

This is a story about the hungry tide...

Humans are supposed to live near water. It's so essential to life, that I think that we find tranquility when we are near the source of something we can drink, wash with and watch life go by, carried by the currents.

Growing up in an area of Oxford called Jericho, the canal was a moat-like border, to the West. There was a footbridge and one road bridge, but those were the only ways of getting across to the far bank, besides swimming.

A short walk up the canal would bring you to Port Meadow, where the river Thames snakes its way through the flood plains of the flat valley bottom. Although it's the second longest river in the United Kingdom, it's quite a different beast in Oxfordshire than it is in London.

By the time the Thames reaches the Isle of Dogs, it's close enough to the river mouth that the tides affect it in quite a pronounced way. At low tide, there are some fairly sizeable beaches that are revealed, accessible from ladders and steps down from the riverside footpaths.

Growing up in central Oxford, the only discernable change with the Thames was when the river burst its banks and Port Meadow flooded. Then, a huge area of green field became a massive lake. One year the lake even froze, and you felt OK walking on the ice, because you knew there was a grassy field just beneath: you weren't going to fall through and get sucked under by any river current.

The Oxford canals froze too, and although we hefted bricks and stones onto the ice to try and smash it, it would have been fairly crazy to try and walk on the ice. I do remember driving my radio controlled car on the ice, and how much fun it was to make the little toy spin doughnuts and do huge drift slides.

Presumably dogs and ball games could only take place in Mill Quay if the water is frozen over. I hate these signs that basically say "NO FUN". Growing up in the 1980's in central Oxford meant lots of playing on the streets, in the parks and on Port Meadow. Usually involving water bombs, smoke bombs or other incendiary devices.

In London a strange kind of separation of society exists, where big groups of kids hang around near their high-rise social housing, but they are more than unsupervised: they are completely ignored by the entire adult population. This is completely reciprocated. As a white middle-class thirtysomething person, you're completely invisible to huge groups of teenagers, hanging around doing their own thing. The impoverished kids and the wealthy professionals co-exist within metres of each other, but neither group acknowledges the existence of the other.

The Isle of Dogs is in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, which is one of the most deprived areas of the UK. You only have to step one street inland from the riverside apartments, to see a totally different side of London to the gated communities that line the Thames.

There's something nice about not feeling totally surrounded. Here is a city of 8 million permanent inhabitants, plus the millions more who make up the commuters, tourists and those who are unofficially living here. When you're in a basement, with several flats above you, surrounded by houses and offices on all sides, it's easy to feel rather hemmed in.

By reaching the very top of a skyscraper, so there is nothing but the open sky above you, or by reaching the water's edge, so there is nothing but an expanse of water on one side of you, you can turn your back on the chaos and overcrowding of the city, whenever it pleases you.

Sure, there's the occasional ferry, canal boat, pleasure cruise or whatever, but water represents enough of a barrier to most ordinary folks caught up in the rat race that it's nice to watch the boats go past in a way that can't be said of watching stressed commuters scuttle down underground passages.

What the hell am I doing, living in a riverside apartment I can no longer afford, since my last contract ended? Well, if you've never had to sleep rough or in a hostel, you should try it sometime, with your work clothes and all your worldly possessions. Try commuting to the office from under a bush or after spending the night in bunk bed with one bathroom and 13 other dormitory friends, in different states of alcohol and cannabis intoxication.

Homelessness, poverty... these things tend to connect you with chaotic environments that do not exactly improve your mental health and capability to rebuild a life, return to work, get back to health, wealth and stability.

When I was working, I was getting up at 7am to take a run by the Thames, and pulling some fairly serious hours spent working on an extremely stressful project. Do you think that's possible when you also can't sleep and relax at home, and it takes ages in a cramped tube, overground train and bus to get back to your miserable hovel?

When we talk about standard of living, what do we really mean? If you choose a job you love, expect to be underpaid and overworked. If you choose a job that pays well, expect to be bored and stressed. If you choose to be working in 2016, expect to have little job security and for your cost of living to be vastly more than it would have been for your parents, at the same age.

We just don't have the spare time. Our partners are not at home doing housework, and come and pick us up from the station at a reasonable hour, and we have some time at home to play with our kids, eat, even do something else with spare time. Now we get home just in time to kiss the kids goodnight, and then we shovel whatever we can into our exhausted mouths before collapsing into bed, before all too soon, the alarm goes off and we start all over again.

We're enslaved to fixed core working hours, and the idea that we can ever reach some imagined future sustainable state, by pushing ourselves to the maximum output that we can manage. Working 80 hour weeks in the hope of getting enough pay rises to be able to slack off a bit in our greying senior years.

When was the last time that you took the Thames Clipper to work, even though it takes longer than the tube? When was the last time you walked to work, across one of London's many amazing bridges, just to admire the beauty of the architecture, even though it would add another hour or two to the length of your working day?

If you look really carefully, you can see a rainbow in the clouds above The Shard, created by sunlight refracted through glass at the very top

Tags: #london #oxford #childhood #capitalism #politics

This is a story about dress sense...

I'm interested to see that the BBC are running a series of programmes about identity. It's a topic that I think about a lot.

While watching a documentary recently, a man who was being interviewed said that he never realised that children were just little people, with their own unique thoughts, tastes, opinions. feelings and experiences. It wasn't until his own children had grown into adolescence and adulthood that the penny had dropped that they weren't dollies or toys.

Occasionally, I worry that men who have owned dogs may become frustrated with children, given that a child has human genes, which don't predispose it to respecting the alpha of the pack, like a dogs genes would. Once a dog knows its place, it goes wild for praise and affection from the top of the pyramid, or will lower its head and tail in shame, if the alpha is apparently displeased with it.

To the dog owner who has taken time to establish the pecking order with their dog and train it somewhat, children look unruly, argumentative, difficult, badly behaved. We're talking about a fairly major species difference though. A dog may feel like a surrogate child, in that it invokes a caring, nurturing response from you, and the release of the bonding hormone, Oxytocin. Children are far less likely to jump on you and try and lick your face or hump your leg. They'll probably wander off to play with their toys once they've been fed.

Parenting must be incredibly difficult, and especially so if you haven't studied evolutionary biology to even a basic level. It's probably not until you're outnumbered by your offspring that the penny would drop that you are just a blob of trillions of cells, all expressing the same DNA. The blob constitutes an organism designed to replicate copies of genes. Once you've reproduced more than a couple of times, it becomes clear that your purpose is spent. You've carried out the will of your genes, in making more copies of them.

There are some wasps that can inject a psychoactive substance into a spider, to get the spider to weave a home for the wasp, before becoming a tasty snack. In much the same way, every gene in your DNA sequence is most likely to be there because it increases the probability that you as an organism will make a home for some genetic clones, and then become the food provider for your offspring organisms that carry your genes.

I remember when families used to wear matching tracksuits (or 'shell' suits as they seemed to be known then) and it's still uncommon to find families wearing matching outfits. I believe it's quite a common trend in the United States.

We quite like belonging to family, clan or tribe, as social animals. It's a more complex form of group behaviour than the wolf or dog pack, and all wearing the same identifying clothes can increase your security, your sense of belonging to the group.

And so it is, we might continue to wear the family shell suit, while it suits us to belong to the family. Getting your meals provided, a roof over your head and maybe your shell suit washed is a big bonus when you're a child without the means or maturity to support yourself. However, certainly as a young adolescent male, you're going to have to get pushed out of the childhood bosom of the family and tribe, in order to maintain genetic diversity and avoid the risk of incest.

A girl who stays close to home, and maintains strong and close family ties, is quite normal, and fits with everything else we see in nature. However, boys should at some point become men, and become more distant from their blood relatives in the interests of finding a mate and starting their own family, and hopefully a long bloodline in a clan or a tribe. This is what we are evolved to do.

Jumping ahead to the modern day, we are still governed by the same genetics and evolutionary advantages of organising ourselves into families, clans and tribes, but we have much extended the period of childhood and adolescence, as well as making the gene pool vastly more diverse, especially in cities. Road travel, rail travel and air travel have meant the intermingling of people from all continents. The transition from village living to commuting or city living means the modern tribe is all but extinct in the wealthier nations.

However, boys still need to become men at some point, and this requires the acknowledgement of a unique identity. You can't choose your son's clothes and dress him forever. You can't expect your son to live at home forever, despite the financial convenience.

In some ways, dress sense is a measure of maturity, or at least how long that person has been allowed to develop their own identity, free from parental influence. I know that the idea of giving gift vouchers is vulgar to some people, but the idea that somebody could know the subtle nuances of my tastes and pick out an item of clothing that I would select myself seems highly unlikely.

Because of highly unfortunate circumstances surrounding the collapse of my marriage and subsequent divorce, I have had to go cap in hand to those with money in order to bridge gaps in my income. Does it seem right that creditors would dictate how a 36 year old man dresses, or where they live, or how they furnish their home? Aren't those things part of an adult's identity, and wholly unique and owned by that individual?

It might seem ungrateful to not want to live back in the family home, and be fed and dressed by my mother, and have my lifestyle under the close scrutiny of my father, but I can't stress enough how destructive that is, when you're in a house in a village where you don't have any of your own friends, where you've never lived, where you've never worked.

There should be gratitude to just have a roof over my head, clothes on my back, right? Is it pride that keeps me from capitulating, and regressing to a state of childhood adolescence, turning up at my parents door, destitute?

I've barely been able to afford more than a pair of new shoes, in my non-work wardrobe in the last year. A relatively vast sum of money was expended on getting myself a flat, even though it represents excellent value for money in London, where the jobs are. Do these things seem like profligacy to you? Does it seem arrogant, spoiled, greedy, to expect to have a home (or a share of a home) I can call my own and to dress in a manner of my choosing?

I bought my glasses with money my parents gave me as a housewarming gift, for which I'm incredibly grateful. The T-shirt was a birthday present from a girl nearly 2 years ago. The bicycle is on loan and the fact I'm in San Francisco is a business expense

Tags: #parents #childhood #oxford #london

This is a story about a desire for privacy...

I've pretty much given up on the idea of having any personal privacy and instead swung to the other extreme of making most of my life completely public. Our family has never had any locks on bathroom/toilet doors and finds the notion of knocking before entering another family member's bedroom to be a baffling concept.

It might sound odd, but this issue grew and grew to become psychologically traumatic for me, and when I'm unwell, I can become obsessed with the idea of people bursting into my bedroom or bathroom at random, leaving me feeling vulnerable and under threat. I appreciate that this is not exactly rational thinking.

My ex-wife had demanded that my parents take me away from the home I owned, the bedroom that my parents put me in had one half of the door lock, but not the other half. I fashioned something that would fit in that lock from a roll of sellotape and had made myself a crude 'front door lock'. Something I was quite used to having from 7 years as a homeowner, and several other years with my own flat.

When my Dad came to randomly burst into this bedroom, he found that the door would not immediately open. Instead of saying, "Hello, can I come in?" or even "Hello", he marched downstairs and phoned the police. It was me who tried to initiate a conversation with him, which he roundly ignored. It wasn't until the police arrived that I found myself having a normal human conversation.

For anybody struggling with the concept of human communication, it goes like this:

• First, greet or otherwise attract the attention of the person you wish to communicate with, using their name or saying "Hey!" or "Hello!" or some other form of greeting or conversation initiator. This avoids saying things when nobody is expecting to be addressed or otherwise communicated with - they might be distracted or busy talking to somebody else.
• Secondly, once you have succcessfully established a dialogue, you may then raise your topic of discussion: ask a question, make a statement.
• Finally, if a response was expected, you should receive one. Otherwise, after a reasonable wait, you may ask if you were heard and understood correctly.

It doesn't seem that complicated for the vast majority of the 7 billion souls who crawl over the surface of the planet every day.

Also, there are fairly universal taboos that are not times when communication normally takes place, throughout this large human population: when a person is bathing or showering, when a person is getting dressed or undressed, when a person is having sex or masturbating. Those are normally not acceptable times to expect to hold a normal conversation or interact in a communicative way.

I honestly don't think that it was the fact I didn't grow up in the Swinging 60's that means that I follow the human communication protocol and respect the taboos of most people. I'm fairly certain that most people would have some problem with my parents entering your bathroom while you're taking a shit, for example.

You might have heard about acid flashbacks people get, when they have a really bad trip on LSD. One example might be feeling like ants are crawling all over your body, and then that imagined event might occur again, purely psychologically with no drugs in your system, simply because it was so traumatic when it happened.

Similarly, now I'm in my own flat again, and I have a lock on my en-suite bathroom door, I still have attacks of paranoia about people bursting in randomly, unannounced. This has led me to screw 6" screws into the door woodwork, and other acts of keeping my bedroom door physically closed. This has become obsessive and frantic, at times where my underlying psychological trauma has been exacerbated with drugs and lack of sleep.

My flatmate is actually the first person I've ever met who can calm me down and get me to realise that there is no threat, and it's all imagined, and put down my tools and whatever else I'm fashioning a barricade out of and start to relax and feel safe in my own home again.

I don't think it takes a professional psychologist to understand that if somebody feels under threat in their own 'safe' space, it only takes fairly limited reassurance that the human protocols of knock before entering are going to be observed, before the distressed individual starts to feel better.

That's the view looking down from my attic in my old house. As you can see, there is no ladder or steps lowered to ascend or descend. I climbed into the hatch without the aid of either. The more you shout at a person and corner them and traumatise them and use the police to do the human part of speaking to somebody, knocking, talking etc... the more you drive them into a state of complete psychological trauma, fear, madness.

The psychological damage can be repaired, and the self-protection response doesn't have to be triggered to the full extreme, and it gets better over time. My friends Will & Jess, who had let me stay in their guest bedroom, pretty much left me alone until my leg was mostly healed and I was sat in their lounge, before having a normal human conversation about how it was probably time I started looking for my own flat. They were very delicate and considerate with my feelings. They were kind and considerate. They helped and repaired psychological damage.

I have no idea how 5 people can co-exist with a total loony in the same house, and nothing was really said, but they were very discreet and I'm sure they were kind enough to tell a few white lies to save my blushes. I can't thank them enough for doing that for me, although just like applying the brakes on a supertanker, it takes some time before a person can start to feel safe and unthreatened after a long period of trauma and stress.

You certainly won't get an aggressive response back from me, however you choose to deal with me, but you may find me trying to burrow my way under your floorboards or pretending to be a pair of curtains or something else equally bonkers, as an absurdly twisted response to the extreme threat that I wrongly perceive.

Aggresssion rarely solved any problems in the world.

Direct action might be disruptive, but you can never be sure that the consequences will be positive, and not simply drive behaviour underground and close off open and honest dialog. You can also never be sure whether a person is trying to disrupt/interrupt their own behaviour, unless you really know what you're looking at, when you peek into their private world.

Tags: #addiction #mentalhealth #friends #divorce #parents #london #oxford #police