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 brain damage...

Look at me, eating brains for breakfast. Actually, it's obviously porridge, but I've clearly lost the plot. I'm a few sandwiches short of a picnic. I'm a few cards short of a deck. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, at the moment.

I've been job hunting again this week, after a lengthy hiatus, and it's remarkable how badly affected by stress I have been. In the grand scheme of things, 4 or 5 months out of action is really nothing at all, but having to jump through the recruitment hoops is my idea of hell.

It was only a little over a month ago that I was completely bat shit insane and life was headed down the tubes, so I guess it's natural that this first week back in the swing of things should come with some trepidation.

I wonder how I will answer that question, in an interview: "what have you been doing with yourself since Christmas?". I wonder how well it would go down if I told them I had mainly been locked in my en-suite bathroom, suffering extreme paranoid psychosis, out of my head on bath salts, or in a slurring semi-comatose state induced by legal benzodiazepines, that meant that it took me 15 minutes to explain to a friend that I was eating a slice of toast. Another friend thought I had suffered a stroke.

Oh, I'm making my family very proud, eh? But what can you do? There was really very little hope for me after my brief efforts to keep the wheels of the machine turning, ended up being blocked by the holiday season. Faced with a cashflow crisis and the slow January job market, I backslid, I relapsed, I self-sabotaged.

How much damage does it do, to get so messed up for 3 months? I mean seriously messed up. At one point I believed that window cleaners were spying on me at 11pm at night, on a bank holiday, with horrible winter weather lashing the building.

You only have to look back to some of my blog posts from around that period to see that the whole bath salts & pink/blue pills from the internet combo wasn't the greatest thing for my mental health. You can see the disjointed thinking, but yet my mind had failed to stop whirring away, so instead the complete garbage running around in the hamster wheel of my brain was just spewing forth onto the pages of this website.

In a way, I'm tempted to go back and edit what I wrote, or even erase it from history. However, it's an interesting record of everything that happened to me, in 8 months and counting. Here's a brief recap:

• I was living in a hotel
• I was working a contract for HSBC
• I was really enjoying my work
• I was well liked and respected at HSBC, and a valued member of the team
• I wasn't drinking any caffeinated drinks
• I wasn't taking any drugs (i.e. bath salts) and hadn't taken any since June
• I decided to quit alcohol for 100 days
• I got a flat, and said my friend John could live with me rent free if he did some work for me
• After 30 days without any alcohol, I became suicidal, unable to cope with extreme stress
• I went into a secure psychiatric unit of a hospital, voluntarily, for my own safety, for a week
• My friend Klaus and me did a Man on a Mission scouting mission to Devon/Cornwall
• I then went to San Francisco and caught up with one of my oldest schoolfriends and some of my startup friends
• I then threatened to whistleblow on HSBC because their Customer Due Diligence project was being completely mismanaged
• Naturally, HSBC then terminated my contract
• I then travelled round London, doing my #notanonymous thing
• I went on a load of political demonstrations
• I started doing my advent calendar, leading up to the deliberatly ironically named Cold Turkey on Boxing Day
• I sliced both forearms open with a razor blade, along the length of multiple veins
• I did 101 days without alcohol, then relapsed heavily onto bath salts and benzos (sleeping pills) and pretty much destroyed my bed and generally made a right mess of myself and my bedroom/en-suite
• I got better (or did I?)

Perhaps I should put this website on my CV and link to it from LinkedIn. I've obviously given a great deal of consideration to who is likely to read this. I expect that at some point, some people from JPMorgan, HSBC and my startup days have read things that must be quite eye opening for them.

I remember on the first Friday at my most recent contract at HSBC, a couple of the guys took me out for a beer and the conversation was steered onto the topic of drugs. I had my game head on, so I didn't go into exquisite detail about my colourful past, but I did later fall asleep at the bar and get told by security staff that I couldn't take a nap on my stool. I wasn't on any drugs at the time, but my alcohol tolerance was quite low.

It should be remembered that I wasn't abusing drugs for that whole time I was working at HSBC, and I was actually sober for the whole of October, as the first 31 days of my 101 day sober challenge to myself, which I achieved.

Well, that's not strictly true. After a week at HSBC, I realised that my cashflow was completely screwed and living in a hostel whilst working on the number one project was not going to work, but I didn't have any money. I mean no money at all. I wasn't going to be able to travel to work, eat, or even afford to pay for my hostel bed anymore.

What a ridiculous situation. I was earning many many times more than the average wage, but yet my cashflow was in bits. I was employed doing some very very important work, but I couldn't afford to get the tube to work or buy a sandwich. The money was there, but it was trapped in the system: waiting for my invoices to be paid.

Can you imagine that? You were living in the park, then you were living in a hostel bed, you start work with your one suit and your one pair of shoes, and you don't have any money, but you're working on the number one project for the biggest bank in Europe, and the CIO names you in front of the entire team, at the townhall meeting, as the guy responsible for a certain important piece of work... but you haven't got two pennies to rub together.

So, I ask you, where do you think some of my 'madness' comes from? Is it all due to genetics, to a disease... or do you think some of it comes from the extreme stress and pressure, and the lack of a proper safety net? How hard do you think it is, to fall between the cracks, and try to rescue yourself from destitution? How much of a toll does it take on your body and mind to have to fight your way back from the brink of death and dereliction?

I pretty much slept at the office, because there was nothing for me to go home to

Tags: #career #banking #bipolar #addiction #depression #suicide #homeless

This is a story about the value of life...

According to my anecdotal observations, people are taking more and more unnecessary risks with their lives and health. I've been heavily involved in this trend, since my teens, when I fought a fairly cowardly childhood with some fairly extreme stuff.

Everything from adrenalin sports to body modification seems to be going through exponential growth. The limit of what is survivable by a human seems to inspire a new generation of people who are pushing the envelope further than ever thought possible.

Let's talk about extreme sports, firstly. The guy who taught me how to rock climb had himself learnt using unimaginably dangerous equipment. The ropes had no stretch to them, and a fall could break your back just from the hard shock of the rope stopping you so suddenly. A lot of the equipment was improvised: large engineering nuts were threaded through with a bit of thin rope. People didn't even use harnesses to abseil and belay a lot of the time, they just let the rope slip around their bodies.

Kitesurfing might look extreme to you, but 15 years ago you basically hooked yourself up to an enormous kite that you couldn't release in an emergency, and you couldn't 'de-power'... that is to say that you couldn't let the wind go out of it in a strong gust, you were just yanked into the sky or dragged along.

I can't really talk about skydiving too much, as I've only done 21 jumps, but I was pulling my parachute at 5,000ft... plenty of time to pull my reserve parachute if I had a malfunction. Special care was taken to ensure that every skydiver was far apart from each other in the air, and it was scary when somebody fell past me and then opened their parachute only a few hundred metres away. If somebody crashes into you at 125mph, thousands of feet in the air, it's not going to end well.

Now we have climbers who will happily jump off a suspended platform and fall the whole length of their climbing ropes, just for the thrill... like a bungee jump. They trust their equipment so much that they actually choose to fall. Most of what I was taught as a climber by my old-school mentor was simply "don't fall".

Now we have kitesurfers who are jumping over hard objects that could kill them. One of the UK's best known kitesurfers famously jumped over Worthing Pier. I've had two close encounters with a pier myself, one of which destroyed my kite, and the other involved a jet-ski rescue of a friend's kite. When I learnt to kitesurf, the idea was to stay away from rocks, cliffs, buildings and anything hard that you might be splatted against by the pull of your kite.

Now we have skydivers who are wearing wingsuits and flying within a couple of feet of rocks, trees, cable cars, bridges, roads, houses... just about anything on a steep mountainside. When they open their parachute, they have barely enough time to unzip their arms from their wingsuits so that they can grab the control toggles, let alone pull the cutaway and reserve handle... but the reserve parachute would never open in time if they had a malfunction anyway.

Given that a parachute will malfunction every 10,000 jumps, and there's hard data that supports that statistic, then you can precisely say what the probability is of you dying from a BASE jump or wingsuit flight with a low canopy opening.

I've known people who've had accidents climbing, kitesurfing and skydiving, so why would I continue to do these dangerous things? Well, there has been incredible improvement in the quality of the equipment in just the last 15 years. However, I think the main reason is that us adrenalin junkies never think that an accident is going to happen to us... we tell ourselves that we're too skilled, too careful, too lucky... accidents happen to other people because they made a mistake. We all think we're infallible.

By my mid twenties I had experienced plenty of close calls, but thankfully never been hospitalised.

Getting into the extreme difficulty grades of rock climbing starts to be a game of russian roulette. The 'protection' that you can place to save your life if you do end up falling, starts to be very inadequate in certain parts of the climb. You have to accept that injury or death is going to occur if you fall in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Pulling off the hardest kitesurfing tricks can actually injure you pretty badly, even though you're doing them on water. One of the first times I tried to do a 360 degree spin, I accidentally looped my kite and hit the water going at about 40mph. It doesn't sound like much, but it could have easily broken a rib. The higher you go, and the stronger the wind, the more chance of you crashing into the water at high speed, and the more the water acts like a solid surface.

Waves are probably the biggest danger to a kitesurfer though, and without your kite you can be in big trouble. I once got pummelled into the seafloor down in Brighton, catching waves that had reached the size of houses. It was only because my kite pulled me to the surface and onto the beach that I didn't drown. Sadly, somebody we used to kitesurf with in Southbourne was not as lucky when he lost his kite and perished trying to swim to shore in big waves.

For a skydiver, you can obviously calculate the risk of having a double parachute failure, but most injury and death seems to occur when trying to land, when your parachute is actually open. At the place where I learnt, there was a motorway, a high-speed railway line, loads of buildings and trees and all sorts of other hard things that you could fly into, that would injure or kill you.

The very first time that I jumped, my lines were all twisted up. Not exactly a malfunction, but sometimes people have to cut away from their main parachute and open their reserve because the line twists are causing them to turn in a tight spiral downwards. Why was it not more off-putting that I actually had a problem with my parachute to sort out, while dangling in a harness, thousands of feet above the hard ground?

As you can see, I'm above a fairly major road junction, and heading towards a nearby town. The ground is approaching at over 120mph. I chose to jump out of the plane. Nobody made me do this. I decided to take the risk. An accident will never happen to me, right?

What I can say about all of this, is that personal experience is a very poor way to judge risk, but it's an unavoidably human thing to do... to base our perception of danger on our own individual lives, rather than looking at the wider statistics.

I've had a lot of hospital visits during my recent troubles, but I have no lasting health damage. Obviously, I never died. I didn't even feel much pain or discomfort that I can remember. To all intents and purposes, life has taught me that no matter what ridiculous risks I take, I seem to be immortal and virtually indestructible.

If I look at all the times I've put my life on the line, put my head in the lion's mouth, as it were... statistically I shouldn't be around to tell this tale. I should be more mindful of the fact that I'm one of the lucky ones... the one that got away, by the skin of his teeth. However, that's not how my psychology works. For every brush with death, that just seems to reinforce my belief that I can get away with unimaginable risk taking.

Why should it not be that way? For every harrowing event that you survive, why shouldn't it make you braver, less risk-averse. To all intents and purposes, the Universe seems to be speaking to you... that your life was spared, that you escaped catastrophic injury or death, just proves that you're special, you're different... you can put your life on the line and get away with it.

Here in the UK there are no predators, no wars, no unavoidable hazards. The biggest risk to your life is a road traffic accident. So, does it therefore seem logical that my latest adrenalin sport is playing in traffic? Deliberately dodging black cabs, red double-decker busses and Toyota Priuses driven by people who can barely drive.

I sawed my bicycle's handlebars down to the same width as my shoulders, so that I can fit through ridiculously small gaps, provided I keep my elbows in and ride like hell. Occasionally I see a gap, and then decide to abort at the last minute because I sense that something's not quite right. The sensible thing would be to avoid those touch-and-go situations altogether, but more often than not I'll lay my life on the line simply for the thrill of it.

I never really think that living on the edge like this is disrespectful to those who haven't been as lucky as me. I do feel guilty about wasted NHS resources where I've been treated in hospital, but when doctors have told me how close I came to dying, it doesn't really have the intended effect.

Trying to scare somebody into taking less risks doesn't work, as we have seen with smoking. Printing "SMOKING KILLS" in big bold letters on cigarette packets looks particularly ironically ineffective, when a smoker is reaching into that packet twenty times for a 'cancer stick' before discarding the empty wrapper, and purchasing another box of fags.

I mentioned body modification, right at the start of this blog post. People are willingly submitting themself to the tattoo artist's needles, or the plastic surgeon's knife. These procedures are not without danger, but they are also painful, uncomfortable, as well as producing irreversible bodily changes.

You would have thought that people would have seen tattoo disasters, or had one of their own, and decided that making a permanent alteration to your body is a foolish thing to do. However, we find the opposite... once people have one tattoo, they often get more, and some people are going further, with piercings, stretched earlobes & lips, subdermal implants, deliberate scarring of their skin.

Ok, so London is gritty and urban, but there's a whole subculture where huge tattoos are totally normal and accepted. In every hipster cafe and trendy bicycle repair shop, you're likely to be served by people who have whole arms covered in richly coloured tattoos, necks, hands... these aren't the kind of thing you can cover up.

If you earn shit wages as a coffee shop barista or whatever, and there is literally zero hope of you ever being able to afford to buy your own home, why wouldn't you do something with your money that feels good? Blast all your cash on booze and tattoos. Money is just fun tokens... it doesn't buy you a lifestyle anymore, for most young people.

The long-term hopes of people have been dashed. There's no career ladder anymore. There are no good jobs full stop. There's just student debt and some low wage, and whatever you can do to fill the empty void. The idea of saving money for a rainy day is just insulting, when it's a hand-to-mouth existence.

This counter-culture of piercings, tattoos, beards, moustaches, vibrant hair colours and extreme haircuts. This fixation on image. So many selfies... I can empathise. I feel that I know where it's coming from. What have you got, other than the skin you live in, and the clothes on your back? Feel good in your own skin, because you'll never have a home to call your own, to feel good in.

You might as well get that big tattoo on your neck, because you're never going to work in an office, hoping to get that big promotion, like your Dad did. You might as well spend all your disposable income on alcohol and drugs and expensive coffee, because you're never going to be able to afford to settle down and start having kids in a nice big family home, as a housewife, like your Mum did.

The extreme sports are pretty much banished for those on a low income, so extreme drinking, extreme drug taking, extreme risk taking on your bike in traffic, extreme sexual behaviour... extremely short-term decisions. That's the only life opportunity that's offered. People have to get by however they can, and part of getting by is seeking reward, pleasure.

I don't think we're living in an era of hedonism at all. In fact there's a certain bleakness to everything. There's a certain amount of sorrow that is being drowned. Young people's lives are harder than you think, and those lives are very sparsely punctuated with what few highlights they can afford.

What was once a subculture, something extreme, something for the minorities, something for those who were excluded from the mainstream, is actually now becoming the mainstream. The "jocks" who are flawlessly good looking, fashionably dressed and are following the prescribed path of academic and sporting prowess, followed by a great career in a big company... these people are the freaks now.

I forget who it was who once said "if you want to be different, to stand out, then don't get a tattoo". Those words are ringing very true today.

I chose to get into extreme sports because I was bullied and ostracised a lot at school. Now it seems like anybody who's got the money is an off-piste snowboarder, kitesurfer, skydiver or whatever. It's no longer an exceptional thing to risk your life in pursuit of your little moment of happiness in an otherwise bleak existence.

A strange thing starts to happen when you pressurise and threaten somebody who has spent a long time contemplating life and death decisions. Instead of being bullied, cowed, pushed and shoved in the way that you want them to, they double down: they will raise the stakes.

As danger approaches, I find that I run towards it rather than away. I don't try and make the last few pounds in my bank account last as long as possible... what would be the point of that? To disappear off the face of the planet with a whimper?

I'm a very bad person to play chicken with. If you think that risk of death, or anything inbetween is going to instill fear in me that will control my decisions, then you're very stupid and deluded.

If you think I'm the stupid one, you're wrong. Obviously I avoid pain and discomfort. It's actually the smart thing to do, to avoid the unwinnable battle, but at the same time to not submit yourself to a life of sustained misery. I'll avoid the fistfight with somebody who just enjoys the thrill of violence, but yet I'll use the very last of my energy, money - whatever I've got left - in some final roll of the dice that will leave me far more beaten and broken than any battering I could receive from somebody's fists.

You think that decisions like that are stupid? Well, you simply haven't calculated the odds. What do you do when you're dealt weak cards? Go all in. Push all your casino chips into the pile with an icy calm. Fortune favours the brave, and a life of cowardice is no life at all.

Some people are able to eke out a life, continuously looking over their shoulder in fear. Some people are able to live under Damocles' sword, with a continuous threat of redundancy, bankruptcy, mortgage default, reposession... not being able to feed and clothe their kids, not being able to pay the bills. Even though this miserable existence was once possible, the route is now barred. Why would you want it anyway?

Do I hanker for a time when I was drawing a regular salary, hoping for a big pay rise and bonus every year, paying my mortgage, trying to save enough money to put me ahead of the game? It's bullshit, you're never going to get your nose in front. You've been set up to fail from the start.

My instinct to nurture is rather unfulfilled, especially now that I no longer live with my cat, Frankie. However, I've got no skin in the game besides my own. There's absolutely no incentive to curtail my risk taking. There's absolutely no incentive to be subdued, beaten down into submission, and to accept an intolerably miserable existence. Of course I'd rather die.

It's not even about depression or mental illness. It's just a response to the world, to circumstances, to my environment. It's sane and rational to consider the final solution: a premeditated suicide.

Actually, when I think about my quality of life, I wouldn't give up the last few years for anything. I've had the ride of my life. If I skid into an early grave as a crumpled mess, then at least I lived. I know that "live fast, die young" is such a horrible cliché, but I 'get' it now. Having had both lives, I choose the one with extreme risk every time. Dying a long drawn out death of anxiety over whether my pension fund is big enough, is my idea of torture.

I wonder whether those young people, with their complete fixation on the short-term, share my lack of fear of death. I wonder if they have also made a rational decision to reject a life of constant anxiety over an unknowable future filled with pathetic threats... torturous death by a thousand cuts.

Why on earth would I want to be wealthy in my old age, when I'm stalked by cancer, cardiovascular disease and other age related shit that's going to make an active lifestyle increasingly improbable? I'm glad that I've lived and loved and lost, and now life hangs by the slenderest thread.

Am I being melodramatic? I don't care what you think, actually. You can call my bluff... I can't lose. I might end up without any fun tokens left, but that's all part of the thrill, the adventure... the joy of living your life, rather than waiting to die.

Cut the thread, and I'll fly

Tags: #adventure #kitesurfing #climbing #capitalism #career #suicide

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 engaging your mouth before your brain...

Most of what I write is not stuff that is ordinarily shared by people. We bottle a lot of stuff up, and perhaps with good reason, but what happens if your general demeanour means you're a fairly open book?

Sure, it's true that some of my life experiences - mental health problems, drug abuse, homelessness, being arrested by the police - are not things that your ordinary middle-class professional will hopefully ever experience. It is therefore logical that I should keep all these things hush-hush. Pretend they never happened.

I don't think that privacy and anonymity is necessarily helpful, judging by the direction that life is headed for many people who I speak to. We know there is a mental health epidemic, with millions of people laid low with depression, anxiety and a huge spectrum of illnesses affecting the mind. If we don't talk about this, and share our experiences, we suffer in silence.

It seems to me as if Psychiatry has failed. Pills, powders and potions have failed to cure the ailments of our very souls. Something is wrong, broken, with society, and medicine hasn't yet come up with the cures... probably because we are treating symptoms, not root causes.

It's been a theory of mine that we were never evolved as a species to live in such close quarters with one another. Open plan offices and tiny cramped apartments in overcrowded cities certainly make me feel like a lemming: compelled to throw myself off a cliff. It really doesn't help that so many service sector jobs are so soul destroying. Moving paper or electronic money around for the mega wealthy is most of what we do in the rich nations. It's not growing carrots or building houses.

Sure, some of us are tortured artists and entertainers. Some of us create organic artisan jam, or dog's milk yoghurt, or run a creative digital agency where we wear unfashionable clothes and stupid facial hair and ride fixed-speed bicycles to work. These, most surely, are the last days of a dying civilisation.

They say you should never get too close to an iceberg, because they can flip over unexpectedly. You might be rather pleased to be part of the top 1% or even 5%, but while you're sticking up at the top, there's a huge mass under the water beneath. Sooner or later, the massive body of ice that's been held underwater rises up, and the top of the iceberg is plunged into the freezing sea.

The motto of Über is "everyone's private driver" but how can we all have a jet-set A-list celebrity lifestyle? There simply isn't enough landmass to create enough helipads for everybody to be flying around by private helicopter, chauffeur driven around the place, pampered and flattered at every turn. Technology can't make us all rich, famous and able to have an impossibly high standard of living, despite its promises.

With our MacBook Pro and our high-quality digital camera etc. we all feel like a writer, a photographer, an artist. Facebook gives us the impression that people love looking at photos of us, so we must be glamour models. Twitter turns us all into bloggers, preachers, with our followers... our congregation.

There was a time when you could quit your job and probably make a good living selling cup cakes, setting up a trendy delicatessen or being a life coach. I'm not sure if those people who followed their dreams and quit the rat race are happy, but there's certainly not any opportunity to do it today. Things are so competitive. How many cup cakes have you got to sell, in order to have a salary comparable with somebody who shuffles paper around their desk and tries to look busy and important in the office, but is just a tiny cog in a big wasteful machine that doesn't actually produce anything of tangible value.

I'm mortgaging my privacy. I'm selling my soul. By making public every little tiny detail about my private life, including my massive f**kups, I'm potentially headed up a one-way street. If I achieve any kind of infamy, then I'm basically screwed, in terms of re-entering the world of the wage-slave drones.

So, I've got the best part of 6,000 Twitter followers in the space of 6 months. Do you think that translates to pounds in my pocket? Do you think that taking the unprecedented step of writing nearly 200,000 words about a fairly spectacular life implosion, would change my life significantly? Well, the ship has sailed for anybody hoping to get an easy ride, I'm afraid.

I like what I've written. I would defend it, to some extent. It serves as a permanent public record of not only what I've been through in the past, but more importantly, there is a subtle recording of what I was going through during the whole time I've been blogging. You can read my emotions, my moods, the challenges, the stresses... in-between the lines of what's written down.

I'm starting to be accused of being self-indulgent, self-absorbed, but why shouldn't I have this? Why shouldn't I be allowed to scream and wail and tantrum a bit, if I had to be the sensible grey-suited career guy, with the good job and an impressive CV, who had the mortgage and saved money for a rainy day and got married and did everything by the f**king book like I was supposed to. I deferred gratification like a son of a bitch, and there was no f**king pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The cake is a lie.

How many people are discontented? How many people are struggling? Not only struggling with stress and poverty and unpleasant things happening in their lives, but also struggling with the injustice of things, the pointlessness of some make-work wanky job that's completely useless to humanity. Or perhaps the work they can get is just so completely degrading and poorly paid it's not even worth working at all. You might as well just get off your head on drugs and alcohol and dribble while you play computer games or watch terrible trashy TV.

How many kids are getting smashed out of their skulls on cannabis, skunk and legal high smoking blends? How many kids are consuming dangerous amounts of cheap alcohol, simply to become highly intoxicated? What is it about life that these kids want to escape? Why aren't they sharing the anguish, the inner turmoil? Why do they retreat inwards, under the heavy sedation of intoxicating drugs and alcohol?

Now Microsoft and Facebook are hitting headlines, saying they're working on chat bots. The iPhone has Siri, which is supposed to be a kind of artificially intelligent digital assistant, that can understand what you ask it to do, and try and help you. People are delighted when it turns out that you can ask Siri to beatbox, and it will kinda do it, in a weird kind of way.

Why would we be wasting our time talking to computers, when we could be talking to each other? I wrote before about us sharing 21% less on Facebook, in the space of a year. Do we not keenly feel the loss of that connection with real people, who can get in contact and try to make us feel less alone with our problems and our existential crises?

No person is an island, and the isolating existence of interacting more with apps and websites and software in general, instead of with each other is a worrying trend. Ok, so I'm bucking that by providing a veritable brain dump of sharing, which is much akin to verbal diarrhoea, but at least it's putting stuff out there, where there's a chance I can get some help from my friends.

There's obviously a bystander effect, where nobody knows quite what to do when somebody starts having a public meltdown. People just aren't supposed to act like this. Where is my stoicism? Where is my stiff upper lip? Where is my shame? Where is my embarrassment and my intense desire for total privacy?

Nobody wants to be first, and people also worry that they're going to end up feeling responsible. Everybody feels they're already struggling so much to keep their own shit together, that anybody else bleating on about their own struggles should shut the hell up. Look after number one and keep yourself to yourself. Don't you think that could be the root cause of this horrible isolated existence that causes so much damage to our happiness, our sense of wellbeing, our mental health... leading to depression, stress, anxiety, breakdowns, self harm and suicides?

We're in such a hurry to label, to judge, to jump to conclusions. We like to bracket people and problems as quickly as we can. Somebody becomes known as a drama queen, or we tire of their depressed demeanour, the dark clouds that follow them around. We start to stop inviting the killjoy out, or generally interacting with them. Let them wallow in self-pity, right? I'm sure social services or somebody from a government service will step in before they do something stupid. It's somebody else's job. Not my problem. I've got enough going on with my own stressful, meaningless, empty, unfulfilling life that I hate and I'm depressed about.

I'm just typing now. The taps are open and the words are flooding out. I have relaxed my anal sphincter and a torrent of liquid brown verbal diarrhoea is jetting out of my arse and into the toilet bowl of the internet, and nobody gives a shit, because we are all sinking with shit up to our necks. There is a whole World Wide Web of shit out there, and we're all just pumping out this useless effluent into the cesspool of human emotional pain.

Do you think I'm going to look back on this frantic period of writing and recoil with horror when I read it back? I certainly expect that I will be cupping my face in my hands, saying to myself "what the fuck was I thinking?" but it must be about as close as it's possible to get to knowing what somebody's thinking, reading this shite.

I thought to myself that I won't hold back, I won't censor, edit or filter, because I can always tear this down with a click of the mouse. A stroke of the keyboard, and all this is gone and I can deny all knowledge that it ever existed. It's the digital photo that you deleted off your camera or smartphone... those shameful ones and zeros are gone forever.

But you know what? I've not felt the urge to take anything down. I've not felt the pangs of regret at sharing stuff that makes me look really bad. I've given the world everything it needs to pigeon-hole me, to categorise me, to bracket me, to judge me, to dismiss me with a label or an over-simplification of my entire existence.

That's what we want, isn't it? Computer credit scores, and computerised personality profiling, and a computer simulation of a real person, that responds in a predictable and easy to understand way. We don't want real lives, with all their messiness and unfathomable complexity. We don't want to get to know each other, but have to live with the fact that we still don't really know each other. We don't even know ourselves, even if you're an irritatingly self-absorbed little prick like I am, who self indulgently wallows in a world of introspection and deep self-examination.

Show me some more videos of funny cats. Distract me from the banality of my existence. Please don't remind me of the humanity that my fellow Earth residents possess or incite any kind of sympathetic or empathetic response in me. I'm quite wrapped up in my own world of pain and disappointment, boredom and stress. I want to pretend like technology and the advancement of civilisation is going to wave its magic wand and even though I'm fornicating with a person I'm nearly totally revulsed by the more I get to know them, in a filthy home in an overcrowded town, on a hopelessly poisoned planet, everything will be fucking rosy for the screaming brats that end up getting spawned.

What the hell is this anyway? This is what happens when the filter gets switched off. This is my life, with no filter.

I think I was born with no filter.

Look: I bought new socks. I'm sharing the private details of my socks life. Every time I have socks, I'm going to post it up on social media. Socks is supposed to be a taboo subject. Always practice safe socks.

Tags: #privacy #depression #mentalhealth #suicide #career #socialmedia

This is a story about warped perceptions...

The world in which I inhabit is vastly different, depending on the state of my broken brain. Mood fluctuations cause me to interpret things very differently than a supposedly 'normal' healthy individual would.

I've written a lot this year about drug abuse, but I'd like to talk about a time before drugs even entered the story and made the water muddy. I'd like to talk about what it was like from 2008 through to 2012, when my brain was just doing its own thing, without drugs or medication.

If you're a person of prejudice, it won't surprise you to learn that drugs mess you up, but you might be surprised to learn that my mental health problems predated any drug abuse. You might also be surprised to learn that people can recover too, and go back to ordinary life, with nobody any the wiser as to your dark past.

But this really isn't about drug abuse, remember? We're talking about a period of 4 years that predated any psychoactive substances making things all messy and confusing. We're talking about when I first went to my doctor, because I was struggling with my mental health.

I spent just over a minute of explaining to my doctor that I felt completely exhausted, overwhelmed and unable to face friends, family, work or anything... I had drawn the curtains and switched off my phone, and retreated under the duvet, and could barely make it to the doctor's surgery.

"Have you heard of Fluoxetine?" my doctor asked. I said that I had, and that I knew that the trademarked name that it was more commonly known as was Prozac. I said that I had read very bad things about emotional blunting and ruined sex lives of those people who were taking Prozac. I had read Elizabeth Wurtzel's biography, Prozac Nation, where she didn't exactly speak highly of the 25 year old medication.

How sad that the National Health Service (NHS) would be offering some cheap generic pills after only a minute of getting to understand a patient's problems. It takes 6 weeks before an anti-depressant SSRI medication like Prozac takes effect, and it's a fairly serious decision, to put somebody on long-term medication. I think it's a little ridiculous that we don't offer more talk therapy, as a first line of defence.

So, I was diagnosed as having Clinical Depression, within just a few minutes. Something I also knew, but didn't have the time to discuss with my doctor, was that SSRIs can be very bad for people with Bipolar Disorder. I knew my moods fluctuated up as well as down, so I had my suspicions that I was Bipolar, and that was another reason to avoid Prozac.

When you're depressed, everything seems hopeless. I had decided that I was useless at my job, that I hated working in offices, that I hated computers and software, and that I couldn't handle a career in IT anymore. I also lost interest in going out, sex, food... I pretty much just slept, or lay in my bed feeling anxious about the fact that I was off work sick.

After a couple of months feeling like this, I hit upon the idea that I was going to write a computer game for the first generation iPhone, to be ready in time for the launch of the App Store.

Although I had decided that my office-based IT career was over, the idea of programming on my laptop in my garden in the sunshine didn't sound too bad. I knew that the early limitations of the first iPhone meant that I could make a fairly basic game, and compete with other developers. I decided that if only a few people bought my game, it was still a fun experiment.

And so began a period of intense activity. I would work for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, in order to capitalise on those precious early days of the App Store when there were hardly any apps on there. It seems incredible now, that there were only a few hundred or few thousand apps for the iPhone. There was no Android. There was no iPad. There was just one smartphone that created a billion dollar market, overnight.

When we look at that crazy period of my life, when I was churning out apps, it's pretty clear to see that my mood had swung to another extreme. I didn't have time to explain things to people. My thoughts were racing, speech seemed like a frustratingly slow way to communicate, eating and sleeping were an inconvenience, certainly I didn't want to do anything other than work on my apps. I was single-minded to the point of obsession.

In economic terms, things paid off. I got a couple of my apps to number one in the charts, briefly. One of my apps was downloaded 8,000 times in a day once, and another one racked up 500,000 downloads in a month. This was clearly a brilliant gold rush.

I knew that the quality of the apps being released was increasing steadily, and the opportunity for one fast burning out dude in his garden were rapidly diminishing. I started to really hate the work anyway. I had a whirlwind affair as an indie games developer, and it happened so fast that I started to hate it, just like you start to hate any job that you've mastered and has become easy.

Possibly this was a sign of my mood turning again. I had managed a period of several weeks, working at a ridiculous level, and what goes up inevitably must crash down. I hadn't been able to exert myself to such an extent since the school holidays in childhood. There's no way you'd ever be given 6 to 8 weeks to concentrate and just get on and hammer out a project, in a corporate environment.

My mood started to alternate between depression and hypomania (as described above) and I would turn each episode of frantic activity into a period of opportunism, to make money or produce something tangible.

Getting myself back into an office environment and doing some IT contracting re-stabilised me a little bit, and getting a boat so that me and my friends could go wakeboarding was something I was passionate about, and consumed my lunchtimes, after work in the summer, and weekends. My life got back to normal, for nearly 2 years.

During that first depression, I had set certain wheels in motion, however. One particular scheme was retraining as an electrician, while I was working as a programmer still. When I had finished my training, I quickly quit my job.

Going back to an unstructured form of making money, I started working too hard again. Building a business from nothing, to breakeven and hopefully to profitability is not quick and it's not easy. I managed to start getting good clients and increasing my turnover very quickly, through some shrewd partnerships and advertising choices. However, I was extremely inexperienced, and took on way more work than I could manage, sustainably.

I got my new business to the point where it was profitable, and had paid back the initial capital expenditure on training, van, tools etc. but I was burnt out again. I had lived and breathed my business, and only because it was hard physical work, had it lasted slightly longer before my brain was finally frazzled.

Depression reared its ugly head again in 2010, and I realised that I had made a mistake in cutting away from the easy money that a career in IT had to offer. I failed to recognise the importance of a stable working environment though: restricting your hours to 40 or 50 a week, giving yourself weekends off, having the occasional holiday, working with other people who share some of the responsibility and workload... those things are important.

My hypomania started to get a bit more extreme. After reading an enormous pile of books on Particle Physics and Quantum Mechanics and other theories & models of theoretical Physics, I started to read huge amounts of academic papers from Cornell University's online library.

Some of the academic papers that I read were extremely interesting to me, and I emailed the authors to ask them questions. To my surprise, most of them responded, and we started to correspond via email.

Spurred on by this, I started to believe I could author my own paper and get it published, and I developed a hare-brained idea of my own, around a thought experiment that was particularly hard to test in the real world. I eagerly sent my paper off to several academic journals. A couple of the journals even responded... unsurprisingly to say that they wouldn't publish something that hadn't been peer reviewed.

Obviously, it's on the border of a delusion of grandeur to imagine that you might have anything of merit to contribute to a field, after only a few months reading the literature and educating yourself about the deepest mysteries in the Universe.

These delusions are something that I've always been wary of, and I try to be self-aware, but it's fairly clear that there was a progression in the difficulties that I was having with Bipolar Disorder, and the regulation of my moods. I wasn't imagining that I was the next Einstein, but I was having to say to myself "be careful, you're not the next Einstein" and give myself regular reality checks.

I still cringe when I think about some of the emails I sent to very important academics, and how, even though they indulged me, it must have been with slight tongue-in-cheek, to respond to a complete layman such as myself.

After yet more time lost in a pit of despair and hopelessness, where I did very little except for mow the lawn and feed the cat, the iPhone App gold rush cropped up again. This time I decided to sell picks & shovels.

Depressions are very similar to one another. You sleep a lot, you don't do much, everything looks shitty and you hate yourself. My depressions were clearly getting worse, as I started to think about suicide more and more. I started to accumulate more and more paraphernalia with which I could kill myself: inert gas, razor blades, Barbiturates, Cyanide etc. etc.

Periods of hypomania are easier to tell apart, because I can tell you what I was obsessed about in each one: iPhone Apps, boat, megashed, electrical business, physics and then my picks and shovels for the iPhone App gold rush.

I formed another company - Roam Solutions - which was later to become MePublish.com and Hubflow.com. I talked a couple of friends into joining me on my mad escapade, and generally threw everything and the kitchen sink at this particular endeavour.

My new company put on an exhibition stand at London Olympia, Learning Technologies conference, only months after I first conceived the idea for the service we sold. Delivering eLearning was something I knew nothing about, but that wasn't going to stop me.

By the time the winter was over, I had managed to get the company involved with the TechStars network, and we relocated to Cambridge in order to do a 13-week technology accelerator program, where we would be introduced to billions of dollars worth of investors.

13 weeks is just longer than the sweet spot for one of my hypomanic periods, and I was really struggling by the end of the program. Suicidal thoughts were quite intrusive, and I was drinking like a fish. I hated myself, and what felt like lies that I was telling to potential investors. It was a struggle to keep going to the end of the program.

I feel bad that I let 2 co-founders and 11 investors down really badly, when I imploded in September 2011. I never got back on my feet, because of relationship problems and a number of things that eventually led to very bad life choices and a whole world of pain, destruction, devastation.

I don't feel too bad because I'm clearly unwell and because nobody risks their money and a stable job unless they want to try and get rich quick. I genuinely didn't pull the wool over anybody's eyes. There was a big opportunity there, and I'm only partly to blame for everything going tits up. The biggest part, perhaps, but still only partly.

Writing code for iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry, as well as the back-end (serverside code in PHP, Linux administration, database etc. etc.) plus rebranding, raising money and everything that goes with a startup is a hell of a lot to fit into 13 weeks. A crash was inevitable for me: I was too close to the detail, too close to the coal face, too close to the customers, too honest with the potential investors.

At the end of the day, I got my arse handed to me. I was completely spent. I've never experienced such hard work and stress and pressure in my life, although there was a lot of fun too, and I had an incredible time meeting some of the most inspiring people I have ever had the good fortune to cross paths with.

The main lesson I learnt though, was that I really can't ignore my mental health. Even if I avoid clinical labels, like Bipolar Disorder, I definitely have a predisposition to mood instability if I make bad choices. I can't ignore the number of times I've swung between extreme depression and extreme 'highs' which are characterised by massive productivity, and increasingly delusional hopes of being rich and famous.

Things are obviously still very 'up and down' for me, but there is seemingly no end to things that spur on my hypomania. Most recently I ended up working on HSBC's number one project, and being made responsible for a really critical part of that project, by the CIO at the project townhall, in front of the entire team. The facts as they are presented to me, do little to discourage a kind of boom & bust lifestyle.

I guess I could reshape my life around working for 3 to 6 months, and then taking 3 to 6 months as a break to recover from my over-exertion, but I don't think it's very healthy. I'm now faced with the challenge of how to manage my own mental health in a more sustainable way, before I really run out of luck and tread on some toes that get me in super big trouble.

Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.

I really didn't sleep very much while I was at HSBC. Naturally, this started to be detrimental to my mental health. Eventually, I was very sick indeed, and it was hard to continue... I had to go into hospital

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

This is a story about social media sharing...

Apparently we are sharing our own words and own photos 21% less on Facebook, in the space of a year. How much of your wall is filled with professionally created content that you have 'liked' and shared, with two clicks of the mouse?

I made a conscious decision to use my own words as much as possible on social media, to the point of writing "like" in the comments instead of just pressing the convenient 'like' button. I've started unfollowing and leaving groups that churn out content that is purely intended to be spread by people sharing on their walls.

The endless lists of things instead of proper articles, the clickbait "when she saw what happened next... she was AMAZED!!" that is intentionally lacking in any further detail, the copy-paste status update, the rebranded memes and quotes and every chain email and internet hoax you've ever seen in your life.

The cat, dog and baby photos are in declining numbers. So, unfortunately, are the status updates that give us a little window into the inner world of our friends, or at least somebody who we spoke to for a few hours several years ago.

Professional content producers whine about ordinary people drowning out their talent and creativity with a wall of noise. The internet should be a library of the same content as would have been found in bookstores, concert halls and theatres, they say. The media columnists say that the internet is OK for conversation, but the articles being discussed should be written by journalists and authors.

When Facebook decides to show us our most liked photos, in an attempt to re-invigorate our interest in the platform, some of us are swayed. We get a flood of birthday messages from friends around the world, because Facebook has told everybody that it's your birthday... according to the date of birth that they have stored. Anyway, it's still nice to feel popular, in that moment.

If we share some content and it gets liked or shared a lot by our friends, we feel proud, like we made a contribution, even if that content wasn't actually created by us. The sad thing, for me though, is the loss of the platform as an actual social tool for staying in touch with friends, and staying abreast of developments in people's lives.

I'm a bit of an oddball character though. I was even writing in newsgroups - a really old part of the internet - using my own name, and back in 1998 I made a real-life friend and climbing partner through a newsgroup. Putting your life in the hands of a stranger from the internet must be the ultimate test of faith in humanity.

We fell out, kind of publicly, when he accused me of putting the life of his child in danger, in the comments section of a photo of some Potassium Cyanide I had bought, that I had posted onto Facebook. I sarcastically reminded him that I had bought it to commit suicide, not to poison toddlers.

[Note: as an aside, I kept the highly toxic substance inside 3 thick layers of airtight nonreactive plastic, and that inside a locked steel box, in my megashed - not even in the house]

I was hurt that some friends chose sides during my separation and divorce from my wife, and I did quite an aggressive purge of friends who I thought were not acting with impartiality. I probably ended up unfriending people who were actually still my friends, but I will perhaps never know.

One of the reasons for starting this blog was because I disappeared into my shell for quite a long time, especially while my ex-wife was vociferously slandering my character. She went on quite a mission to demonise me, certainly not sparing my blushes for any mistake or wrong turn she could possibly turn to her advantage.

But the point of the blog is no longer to embarrass and shame, as I have attempted to do with a certain amount of bitterness and resentment towards those who have judged and acted in ignorance of the full facts, or simply in a way that was unfair, unkind, unpleasant, incorrect.

The reason for the blog has been to walk people through the dichotomy of the wayward geek. The unremarkable guy who was politely spoken, with good manners, who turned out to have developed a dark side during the years when he should have been developing a beer belly and more grey hair.

Social media can be abused by the attention seekers, the sensationalists, apparently. Obviously, I didn't swallow that Potassium Cyanide, nor did I jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, but I did slice down my forearms with a razor blade, along the length of my veins. I don't see any friends on a regular basis, so social media is just about one of the only routes I have to share some of what I'm going through.

It's pretty much madness to put some very personal stuff up in a very public way, to wear my heart printed on my T-shirt, baseball cap, coffee mug and mouse mat, not just my sleeve.

However, I've personally benefitted from the support and kind messages I've received from friends, as well as keeping many more people informed of what's gone wrong in my life and why I disappeared from people's lives quite abruptly. Obviously, I still need those friends in my life, so in a way the telling of this story is the precursor to improving those long-neglected friendships.

Another unexpected thing, that suggests there is good reason to share personal stuff on social media, is that it's prompted a few friends to get in contact and tell me their stories of similar stuff that happened to them. It's kind of made me feel less of a failure, as well as to have deeper, more meaningful friendships with those who want to be emotionally connected, honest, open. The truth about how you're feeling, and bad shit that happened is a good thing. Feeling terrified of anybody ever finding out I ever made a mistake was unhealthy as hell.

Finally, sharing stuff completely publicly, on the open internet, on Twitter, Reddit etc. sounds completely off the wall insane, but to have feedback from complete strangers, to know that somebody who I've never met or talked with in my life has read my complete blog, from start to finish, which is the equivalent of about 3 novels... that's pretty mind blowing.

I'm not sure I've hit the sweet spot yet, in writing stuff that is interesting and useful to a big group of people who are going through hell and feel like they're the only one in the world facing such problems, and therefore a failure somehow, a bad person, defective... they're the people I want to give hope to, as well as collecting lifelines for myself.

I guess if you're friends with me on Facebook, I could be polluting your news feed with unwanted spam, just like the suggested posts and those friends who are using Facebook to promote their product or service to their friends & family a little too enthusiastically. I could just stick to Twitter and Reddit, where only those with a direct interest can 'opt-in' to see my content.

Anyway, I plod on, bucking the trend of contributing original content to social media.

Tags: #socialmedia #friends #suicide

This is a story about self destruction...

This little machine has allowed me to rise to a level of mastery of a profession where I could command in excess of £200k (gross) per annum for my skills, walk out of one job and into another, and generally enjoy a period where I didn't have to know my bank balance or save up for anything. This statement is vulgar, I hope people don't think boastful, but it's certainly distasteful.

I now live in an apartment with panoramic views of the Thames. I can see Heron Tower, The Gherkin, Tower 42, The Cheese-grater, The Mobile Phone, Tower Bridge, The Shard, The London Eye and a number of iconic London skyline icons.

This would be sustainable, but since the age of 19 or so, I figured out that it doesn't matter if it's torpedos fired from a submarine, or Credit Default Swaps, traded in the front office of an investment bank... it's all the same fucking 1's and 0's.

Some pudgy, piggy-eyed, adenoidal little pricks have carved themselves out little fiefdoms where they have constructed such impenetrable balls of mud, that no sane programmer would venture in.  They take pleasure in having made themselves key-person dependencies.

I like to think I'm ethical, and it's only because I was being whipped so hard by my bossess to deliver DTCC that I didn't think of the ethical impact of Credit Default Swaps and Collateralised Debt Obligations on the world economy. JPMorgan processed 70% of that toxic waste, and that equates to $1.16qn of money that was circulated, while the real collateralised securities and precious metals were moved into the accounts of those who knew what was really going on.

I wrote the system that confirmed those trades. I saw the data flow through. I saw live production data, and I couldn't believe the notional values that were being traded.

I feel like I could have stopped $1.6m of 'fake' money, for every man woman and child on the planet, from being pumped into an economy that was only ever supposed to last as long as the 'smart' money moved their assets. There just isn't enough precious metal, fiat currency, property and securities to collateralise all the derivatives that have been printed. The paper is worthless.

I can't see how it can be propped up. As it starts to crumble, I'm going to feel more & more responsible.

I feel like ground zero.

I don't want to wake up tomorrow.

Tags: #banking #suicide #career #london

This is a story about living with a mood disorder...

Type II Bipolar Disorder took a long time to diagnose, despite a fairly obvious pattern of moods that can be easily traced back to adolescence. Of course, we all have mood fluctuations, but it's the extremity of those moods that qualifies something as a disorder.

I would say that hypomania was the more obvious one of of my pathological moods. Being able to concentrate and work with great intensity, with little sleep & food and a refusal to be diverted from my task, an irritability for distractions, hypersexuality, spending loads of money, risk-taking. Talking seems too slow to express your thoughts... the speed that you're thinking is too fast to explain to anybody else, to put into words. You're just a blur of activity.

It felt like driving with the hand-brake engaged for a lot of my life. I was always waiting for the next slim window of opportunity to work on something that I loved. Whether that was the Design & Technology at school, where there was never enough time to finish what I was working on before the end-of-class bell, or the lego model I was making, before it was mealtime and playtime was over.

Of course, we all have to work within a timetable, and we all have to eat & sleep, but these things always made me feel like I had to rush at everything I did as fast as I possibly could, in the hope that one day, I would complete one of my projects. I also grew incredibly frustrated with the limitations of timetables, mealtimes, bedtimes.

Switching to the world of work, there wasn't actually very much to do. Most people did very little. I ended up searching around for extra things to do.

The computer network at my first full time job ran like an absolute dog. That was because AppleTalk traffic from the office Macs and their printers was polluting the Ethernet traffic from the Sun SparcStations. I managed to talk my friend Lucas into helping me to rewire all the cables one evening.

I wish I could show you the actual images, but we weren't even supposed to be in the server room. This was a Ministry of Defence prime defence contractor with a high level of security clearance. The two junior programmers aren't supposed to go and fix all the networking problems in the office without any authorisation.

The next morning, everybody was commenting how amazingly well the network was running. Lucas & I obviously couldn't claim any credit, because we had acted without authority, but nobody was going to do a witch-hunt when everybody was so pleased that the most major problem affecting everybody in the office had been solved overnight.

That's pretty much how a person with Bipolar Disorder hides out in a corporation. You bumble along, bored, depressed, coming in late, demotivated... and then you suddenly pull something out of the bag that nobody else would risk their career to do, let alone the lack of sleep and unsociable hours.

Bosses seemed to just accept my erratic working patterns, knowing that when there was something that needed doing with an impossible deadline, that's normally around the time I'd wake up and start hacking something together.

It all kind of hung together until I started at a new company in 2008 and the project they were asking me to do was so huge, I didn't know where to begin. I was just entering a depression, which was bad timing. There was also a cultural problem, where their in-house IT staff built everything using Microsoft Excel, and any 'proper' software was built by Oracle consultants or bought off the shelf... but nobody liked those big expensive systems.

My depression got so bad I couldn't even get out of bed or stop crying randomly. I knew I wasn't going to bounce back quickly from that one. After a couple of months I quit that job and started making iPhone games in my back garden. 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. I couldn't go fast enough.

And so began a completely unstructured phase of my life. I would take on a project or interest, completely immerse myself in it for as many hours as I could stay awake, and stay obsessed with that single task until I burnt out. Then I would be depressed, and with no reason to even drag myself out of bed and go and be miserable at work, I would just be depressed all day in bed. I stopped answering my phone. I stopped answering the door. I never opened the curtains.

Being self-employed after 11 or so years of 9 to 5, Monday to Friday structure and routine, is kind of a red rag to a bull, if you have a tendency towards mood instability.

I relished those periods of hypomania. I wrote a series of iPhone games. I built a wooden summer house. I read a huge pile of books on Theoretical Physics and had lengthy email conversations with professors around the world, I wrote a mobile eLearning system and launched it at Learning Technologies conference, I decided that I wanted to be a startup founder and applied for TechStars, I learnt all about Bitcoin, bought Bitcoin miners and started mining in my summer house, I traded Bitcoin for profit, I wrote my own virtual CPU so I could attack algorithms like SHA-256, I started investigating security loopholes in things like internationalised domain names and the Google and Facebook developer platforms.

It's not long before you stray into legal grey areas though, so a lot of my projects have been shelved and I've had to go on raiding missions back to the corporate world, to stay afloat financially. These are normally timed with my hypomania, so a company gets 3 months of incredible productivity, and then a month or two of me being depressed, and then we normally go our separate ways.

My depressions have gotten worse and worse. They seem to last longer, and I've actually started to harm myself more & more. It's strange, when you emerge from a depression and enter a period of hypomania though... you can't remember just how dark those previous days were. There's no rational voice that says "hey! slow down, or else you're going to crash again!". Instead, the voice says "better go as quick as you can, because we know a crash is coming again soon".

So how do we know that depression is the pathological mood at the other pole from my hypomania? Well, I sleep. A lot. Sometimes 16 hours a day. When I'm awake I have very low energy, low motivation. I have no interest in things I'd normally find enjoyable. I don't want to see or speak to anybody. I generally think that everything is pointless, broken, useless, hopeless. Lots of negative memories keep coming into my head, and make me think "I can't believe I said/did that" with extreme regret, embarrassment, shame. I think the world would be better off without me. I start to do pros & cons of living lists, either in my head or written down. I start to think of ways to kill myself, and what affairs I would need to set in order before I committed suicide. This goes on for weeks, months.

I've written before about trying mood stabilisers and antidepressants. The side effects just aren't compatible with good quality of life. You might think that risk to life outweighs quality of life, but it doesn't, especially when you have the waves of hypomania to surf, before crashing onto the rocks of depression.

My body and my mind seems to have decided to adapt itself to this world, to this society, to this environment. We applaud the kid who busts their balls to study for their exams, and can then collapse in a heap during the school holidays. We applaud the employee who pulls the all-nighters and comes in at weekends when work is behind schedule. We applaud the 'overnight success' stories, when an impressive project is unveiled, seemingly created out of thin air, as if by magic. There is no magic. It's just an unsustainable burst of energy, focus, determination, single-mindedness and a touch of madness.

I'd like to go back to the routine I once had, pre-2009. Only I don't seem to be able to retrace my steps, yet. I know the formula that used to work, and a very dear and trusted friend urges me to take a permanent job, and he's probably right to some extent. However, if it all goes horribly wrong again, I would have earned a fraction of what I would have done in a contract.

I'm hoping I can find my little niché. Somewhere I can deliver more value than keeping a seat warm from Monday to Friday. Somewhere where the bosses are more interested in results than headcount in their empire. Pretentious? Moi?

I don't really care whether you think I should cheer the fuck up or calm the fuck down... my moods seem pretty intent on doing whatever they want to do. I've been fully aware of the calamitous consequences of not keeping my mouth shut at the right time, or not getting out of bed and doing some urgent crap. It doesn't really feel like I'm choosing even if it does look like a choice to you, as an outside observer.

This looks like a load of angst-filled teenaged immature self-centred selfish drivel. It probably is. I call it my life.

I'm probably more self-aware than you give me credit for. If you're thinking "oh my God, can you even hear what you're saying? Can you even hear yourself?" the answer is yes, yes I can. I spend a lot of time cringing and wishing things weren't so, and indeed wondering why I'm like a moth to a flame so often. I can see the train wrecks before they happen. I've plotted my mood and activity data, and the patterns are as clear as day. So what?

I'm sure there are days when you'd really like to be a bird, just soaring on the air currents above the ground, looking down on people & buildings. It doesn't matter how badly you want to be a bird. It doesn't matter how rational it seems, to become a bird and just fly right over that traffic jam that's getting in your way, it's not actually possible. That's a bit like those days when I would really like to feel normal. I can want it, but it's not actually possible. Anybody who tells you that you can stop worrying or be happy just by choosing is full of shit. You have my permission to punch them in their smug mouth.

So, I'd say my experiment with abstinence was a failed one. We need a little alcohol to calm our nerves. We need a little caffeine to perk us up. We know when we need it, and most of us know our limits. We're pretty adept creatures at tweaking our own moods. We probably need a pet for a bit of soothing oxytocin. We probably need a girl/boyfriend for a bit of serotonin and a squirt of dopamine. Other than that, we just need something to keep our minds occupied as a distraction from the inevitability of death and decay. Not God though. God is for crazy people.

Anyway, that's my two cents, on my two poles: Type II Bi-polar Disorder.

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

This is a story about getting airborne...

In startups, we talk a lot about runway. That is, how much money you have left to pay all your bills before you go bankrupt. The thing about doing a startup is, you don't make money from day one. You raise some money, build a product then try to get the revenue up higher than the bills... and you need to do all that before you run out of runway.

Most ordinary working-class folks know a lot about runway. They know that they have to pay their rent, bills and then make the remaining money last for things like food and transport, until payday. Every single month there is uncertainty about whether they're going to be able to get to work, if their money runs out before payday. That's called running out of runway.

A lot of low-paid jobs pay weekly. That's useful for something called cashflow smoothing. It means that your cashflow looks like lots of little peaks that aren't very high. If you got paid the same money on a monthly basis, you'd see a massive spike on payday, and then cash would slope down, down, down for a whole month, before spiking again.

If you run a limited company or a public company, you could pay yourself wages, weekly, monthly, whatever, but wages attract income tax. Income tax is 45% for people in the highest tax band. So if I wanted to do some cashflow smoothing, it's going to cost me 45% of the money I worked hard to earn. That's quite a waste of money if there's another way to pay myself that doesn't attract such high taxes.

Generally, I have to work for a month, then I can invoice my client for the days worked. My invoice is payable within 30 days, but it basically takes a whole extra month to get the money into my limited company.

Ok, great. Now I can pay myself wages... but I'll have to pay 45% tax and loads of national insurance. On the one hand, I really need some cash, because I've already lived for over two months without a single penny of income, but the main person who's going to get rich out of that arrangement is the taxman.

So I work another two months, plus the month for the invoices to be paid. That means that I have three months worth of invoices paid into my limited company. Now it's time to pay myself a dividend. Limited companies can pay dividends from their profits once every quarter. So, to maximise your dividends, you need to have 3 months of invoices paid into your limited company.

But that means that you've been working for 4 months, and not been paid a penny. Harsh man. However, the tax savings are considerable. This is not about me being a tightass with taxes. I always paid full taxes, and then when I got sick, there were no state benefits available to me, despite being under the limit for savings etc. etc. The state safety net just didn't exist when I was homeless and penniless, so fuck the government. I now save the tax and try and set it aside for when I'm sick.

Now, OK, you have your dividend... 3 months pay. You're feeling pretty rich, right? Well, if you've been living in a hostel, you might like to now get a flat. That'll be 6 weeks rent as a deposit, a month's rent in advance, and probably about £500 in estate agent fees. There goes £6,000 of your hard-earned cash.

What about how you lived for those 4 months with no income? How did you do that? I guess you probably had to borrow money. So, you use your remaining dividend to pay off all those debts you ran up, staying alive.

So, what now? Well, you'll have to work for another 4 months, and then pay yourself another dividend, and live off what's left after you got yourself a flat and paid off your debts. Oh, there isn't anything left? Oh dear.

The thing is, the system is fairly well tuned to fuck you. I can borrow money more cheaply than the tax, but the interest is compound, so it works out about the same. I could take a wage and pay the tax, but then I'll have less money left to pay off the debts. Between the banks and the taxman, you're f**ked.

It's true, each quarter things get a little better. I was planning on working for about 9 months, and then I would have been quite nicely sorted, but if you think that it's stressful waiting for payday, try waiting for 4 months for payday.

That's the life of an IT contractor. I'm an IT contractor. That's what I do, for a living. Yes, I could bake bread, stack shelves or work in a warehouse... are you fucking stupid? There's nothing wrong with those jobs, but if I wanted to burn money surely it would make more sense for me to do some IT contracting and then literally set fire to £50 notes. Jeeps, you must have a degree in Economics from Oxford if you think that it's a smart idea to not work the highly paid job I'm qualified and experienced to do, and instead work a job that doesn't cover my cost of living and is stopping me from getting the highly paid job that I'm qualified for. I'm sure that you'll be getting a tenured professorship any day now, with original thinking like that.

My cashflow is lumpy, and I don't have much runway, but at least this time I have the flat already, and a friend who can count higher than the 3 deformed stumps on their retarded hand has helped me to make sure I don't end up driven to suicide by the stress of being let down by liars again.

My plan was to start the contract hunt in the second week of January, when people were coming back from their holidays. I'm over 2 weeks late and sick as hell, but it'll be OK. I somehow got the HSBC job looking like this:

Yes, that's a hospital wristband. Arms are pincushions as usual from double canula and providing a gazillion blood samples (June 2015)

Tags: #career #london #computing #hospital #nhs