This is a story about image...

I have completely forgotten that people perceive and judge me, often by the public persona which I present. I have completely forgotten that people read what I write, who are my friends and work colleagues. I have completely forgotten to present a mask; a fake artificial image of how I want to be perceived, through an entirely fabricated story, which never really happened.

Without alcohol as a crutch, I am almost entirely reliant on a daily dose of writing, as catharsis for the overwhelming thoughts and feelings, which have no other outlet.

I sit down in front of the blank page every day, and I write as if nobody is reading, but it's not true: there are people reading.

My brain has been impaired, more than usual, because of extremely low blood sugar. I've consumed an average of fewer than 300 calories, on average, during the past 4 days, which is a ridiculously low amount. Of course, I've successfully managed to drop a kilo of weight (2.2 pounds) in under a week, but I've put my already fragile mental health under extreme duress.

Thinking about what I've written from the perspective of a hypothetical person who I want to like and respect me, it seems as though my words have been regrettable. I've launched into various tirades against the whole of humanity. I've ripped ordinary folks to pieces, with long grandiose delusional rants, written in a state of temporary mania.

In fact, my mania is not-so-temporary. It seems as if my mania can last months, if not years. I suppose the kind of mania which more traditionally manifests itself - spending money, taking risks, being sexually promiscuous, gambling, drinking, taking drugs, having grandiose delusions - is pretty clearly not present, but I know that I'm quite cunning at hiding my 'true' mood. Of course, there's no hiding how I really feel, because it's all documented here, but that's by design. On average, most of my work colleagues won't be reading this, so on average, most of my work colleagues won't know how utterly insane I am; how mentally ill I am.

I've thrown caution to the wind, somewhat, and started writing whatever the hell I want, without thinking about the consequences, insofar as my professional image and reputation. I don't think it's deliberately self-sabotaging behaviour, but I certainly don't feel like I'm desperately clinging to my source of income, terrified of getting booted out of my client's organisation because of my madness... which is a big change from the preceding couple of years.

Of course, I've not yet earned enough money to retire, so any loss of income would be pretty catastrophic. There's no good reason for me to burn and bridges, and in fact there are many good reasons to preserve whatever reputation I have painstakingly built. However, I'm also really tired and in desperate need of a holiday.

I've lost all control over what comes out of my mouth, and what gets written down on this page, at least in terms of a well thought-through plan, or in terms of some in-depth thought into the possible consequences. My mouth has already run at a million miles an hour, and whatever stupid stuff I was thinking has already been heard or read, long before I've had a chance to consider the implications and regret it.

I would quite like to repair my image, and to even possibly enter a new era, where I'm perceived positively; where people once again think of me as a reliable, dependable, likeable, useful sort of person, instead of a maniac who has to be tolerated, begrudgingly, until the earliest opportunity to boot me out.

It doesn't feel, day to day, as if I'm skating on such thin ice, versus the conflict I was going through before, and the regrettable way that I was acting, but my perceptions are exceedingly wonky: I am no doubt spewing a near-continuous stream of reputation-damaging, insulting, aggravating and otherwise regrettable things, which are rapidly destroying any goodwill which I had accidentally accumulated.

There are so few working days now, for me to limp through, before I take a long-overdue holiday, but that's no reason to think that I can't totally screw everything up.

Tags: #bipolar #work #career

This is a story about irresponsibility...

I did something which I knew was wrong. I looked at my website visitor data and it went to my head. I acted irresponsibly.

I'm just one guy, writing in my spare time.

Even if I worked full-time at this, there's a very finite limit of what I can offer people one-to-one.

With the power of the internet, I can reach vast numbers of people, but there's not a lot I can do for them as individuals. The power of a website is to broadcast, and the ability to meaningfully reply is a problem which hasn't been solved by technology yet: there is no machine which can pass the Turing Test, let alone provide effective crisis counselling.

I never promoted myself as a crisis counsellor, but I did very vociferously talk about the need for people to be able to talk about their suicidal thoughts, without being shouted down with "YOU'VE GOT SO MUCH TO LIVE FOR" clichés. I did write, at great length, about the vast numbers of people who can't find anybody to talk to who's going through what they're going through, and isn't some well-meaning busybody whose misguided good intentions are actually driving some suicidal people away. It's undeniably true: people are searching for stories which aren't bullshit fantasy make-believe nonsense about how everything's going to be OK and "this will pass soon" because people know that's not true: they've lived with suicidal thoughts for so long, that they know that it doesn't pass, a lot of the time.

However, I am not equipped. I am not equipped to read and respond to vast amounts of people's tragic stories, all day, every day. I very badly want to be able to, but my mood and energy fluctuates wildly, and so does my ability to read and respond. I can't promise to always be available to chat. I can't promise to always be able to read and respond in a timely manner.

I'm not sure if I ever made a promise to anybody, but I suppose I got carried away, and I had increasingly encouraged people to write to me. I don't discourage it, but I think it was irresponsible of me, to be reaching so many people in crisis, but yet to be so ill-equipped to deal with that deluge... it's heartbreakingly tragic that there are so many people out there in the world, searching for the "easiest" way to kill themselves.

I'm not a wishful thinker. I'm not an idiot either. Although I applaud those who say "if I just save one life, that's enough" and indeed that attitude is theoretically enough to save everyone who needs to be saved, if we all adopted that attitude... unfortunately, the statistics and data points that it is not enough. That's not to say that those who volunteer to work on crisis counselling phone lines aren't working hard enough. It's a simple statement of fact: whatever we're doing in the world of suicide prevention, is not working.

So, I'm taking an unorthodox approach. I'm writing about my struggles, without trying to create any Disney Hollywood fairy-tale fantasy happy ending. There's no happy ending to my story. My story doesn't have an ending like: "and they all lived happily ever after". Nope. This is not a rags-to-riches story. This isn't a story of recovery. If you came here looking for that, you came to the wrong place. In fact, I know why people came here, and they are not looking for saccharine-sweet sugar-coated false hope, because there's plenty of that already in the world. So many people write to me to tell me that they're so glad that they found somebody writing with honesty in a relatable way, that I'm never going to stop doing that.

My mistake; my irresponsibility... that's been in getting greedy and actively trying to get more readers. My crime is in letting the huge number of readers go to my head, and starting to think that I was doing anything more than simply telling a relatable story, with honesty.

In short, I'm sorry. I don't have anything other to offer you than my story. I'll stop being so arrogant and pretending I'm anything other than an ordinary guy, telling his own story of depression and suicide attempts, for anybody who wants to read it. I'm sorry I got big-headed and thought that I might be making a different. I'm sorry for my delusion of grandeur.

I'm going to now delete one of the blog posts I wrote, which was definitely straying into the territory of delusional; written when I was thinking that I was making a difference, in some way... when I thought I was doing something useful. Now I see that it was irresponsible.

I'm sorry.

Tags: #suicide #depression #anxiety #mentalhealth #writing #socialmedia

This is a story about professional reputation...

I had a game plan for this year, which was to write eye-wateringly boring things about my mundane existence, such that the history of my chaotic and traumatic life would be safely hidden behind a wall of impenetrable tedium. Unfortunately, I have not stuck to the plan. However, I have arrived at the conclusion that the best place to hide is in plain sight.

I once attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting - or similar such thing - which annoyingly was in a building immediately adjacent to my workplace. As I predicted, while I was in the process of leaving the meeting and saying goodbye to people in the street, a work colleague emerged from the office and also greeted me; that was my worst nightmare realised: that my private world and my work world would collide.

Today, I can count at least one work colleague amongst my readers, and over the years there have been a large collection of both present and former work colleagues, who have read some of what's published here, publicly for all to see. Most of what I write is frank, brutally honest and candid, and none of it is the stuff which can or would be discussed in a professional context. Sometimes it troubles me, being exposed in a professional reputation sense, but I doubt I do a very good job of concealing my madness in the workplace.

One thing, I hope, is quite apparent to my work colleagues, versus my readers: that I am highly productive, and making an undeniably useful contribution, with just about enough sanity to spend 40+ hours a week in close quarters with people who, presumably, have no plans to call the men in white coats to take me away.

I'm not so stupid as to think that it's not quickly obvious that I'm mentally ill, if you spend a little time with me. I'm not so stupid as to think that my colleagues don't consider me odd; abnormal; different. But, I'm used to being the odd-one-out and I've got over the initial paranoia, which was caused by mistakenly thinking that I had successfully integrated and been accepted as 'normal' when I so obviously am not. I had begun to believe that I had shaken of my miserable childhood and re-invented myself; that I had integrated with normal mainstream society. When the mask slipped, it destroyed me, because I had worked so hard to hide my flaws.

Retrospectively, I see that the effort I put into making myself as homogenous and unnoticeable as possible - the effort I put into fitting in - was essentially wasted.

People. Just. Don't. Care.

Unless you're actively going out of your way to be a problem, most people are too busy with their lives to acknowledge your existence or take any interest in you. Unless you're a massive pain in the backside, and you're annoying everybody, nobody really knows or cares who you are.

Conversely, if you make an effort to be 'different' you are equally uninteresting. Sure, you might think that your carefully constructed identity, with your weird haircut, purple hair colour, piercings, tattoos, and deliberately unusual fashion choices, is something which makes you stand out. No. In such an individualistic society everybody is attempting to stand out, so you are conforming and fitting in by attempting to do so.

Are you damned if you do, and damned if you don't?

Well, I'm very glad to have made a friend, who's a work colleague, somewhat thanks to this website and my writing. The friendship makes an almost infinite amount of being ignored by the world, pale into insignificance. I'd like to say that I don't care when I have a day with fewer readers, but it would be a lie: for sure, I want to be noticed; I want people to be aware that I am, at present, alive, having thoughts, experiencing feelings.

The massive folly that I have built - millions of words written and published - is utterly disproportionate to the number of readers and amount of income that I make, as a direct result of my effort. However, over the years, the effort has brought me some of the best things in my life.

I don't discourage anybody from going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, if they want to, even if they're not an alcoholic... I too, am not an alcoholic, nor am I a recovering alcoholic, nor have I ever been an alcoholic. My relationship with alcohol is entirely controlled by me, not a higher power, or a bunch of anonymous people meeting in a dingy basement, spilling their traumatic stories out to each other. I'm doing the opposite: publicly broadcasting every innermost thought, and most shameful trauma, and here I am... seemingly as normal as anybody. No need to label myself as anything other than "me".

Tags: #writing #socialmedia #career #work

This is a story about labour...

A reasonable test of whether or not you love, or even like, your job, is to ask yourself the question: would you do it for free? Personally, I wouldn't willingly choose to participate in ordinary organisational office life, which is not to be disparaging of my colleagues, but there are so many better, more humane ways, to organise ourselves versus large hierarchical organisations, with life revolving around going to a building for the majority of days each week, for a substantial percentage of your precious waking hours.

The part of my work which I will keep doing, whether I'm paid to do it or not, is technology. I have rejected technology a few times in my life, in an attempt to live a life which is more connected and in touch with the tangible: to see my work in physical form. The 'weight' of the entire internet, is estimated at little more than a tennis ball, if you add up all the electrons which are storing and transmitting data, across all the computers, networks, smartphones, tablets, telephone wires, airwaves... the whole shebang adds up to barely a whole lot of nothing. Some kind of massive solar storm could potentially burn out transformers and other parts of the electrical grid, but almost all the physical cabling would survive, along with most of the electrical devices. Conversely, data is mostly so ephemeral, that it barely exists physically, as evidenced by the tennis ball example.

The thing which I do so much of for free, that it might be worth considering whether I should figure out a way to make it pay, is writing. Of course, everyone wants to be a writer, or some kind of artist. The world has no shortage of writers. Plenty of people will do it for free. The same could be said of tech though: the world is full of tech hobbyists, and by my own admission, I would still be doing some kind of tech for free.

I think the vast investment in writing is paying dividends. A former work colleague often spoke of a force-field which he called simply "too much typing" which was the barrier to entry for most people wanting to get anywhere in tech. People are very happy to click a download button, or copy-paste something, but somebody, somewhere, sometime or other, has to do some damn typing.

I freely admit to having been pretty lazy for a lot of my career. Everything I've ever done in tech has been very easy and unchallenging, so there's never particularly been a need for a lot of typing. I'd be lucky if I wrote as much as ten lines of code per day, on average, during many long boring and unproductive days, employed by organisations who wanted to own me, as an intelligent ornament; to ensure that no competitor would have me, but keeping me for no other requirement except to deny others my labour. As such, I too couldn't be bothered to do much typing, because there were no interesting challenges.

It's strange how the job of fiddling with tools but never actually making anything seems to be the pitfall of so many. I was building something for a friend today, and I thought that there were a vast number of things I could be doing, which were attractive alternatives to doing the job in hand, which most other people I've worked with would have done instead. I built something pretty damn ugly and inelegant, but it worked and it delivered interesting and useful results, which the shiniest of shiny things never do. 'Perfect' systems do exist, but they don't do anything: as soon as systems come into contact with the real world, and are forced to do real, useful stuff, then the perfect imaginary world collapses, and the system turns into a big tangled mess. This is why engineers prefer to tinker and polish their tools, and never actually make anything; to stay in the safe make-believe imaginary world of perfection which they've created, bearing no resemblance to reality.

Similarly, I think now, I enjoy writing and publishing, but mainly I enjoy not having to debate or reason with unreasonable people; I don't have to persuade anybody or listen to dull, uninteresting and unintelligent opinions. I am, however, living in a fantasy world in which I can create 'perfection' so long as I don't have to come into contact with reality. That's just fine with me though... I'm doing this for free, so I can do whatever I want.

Tags: #writing #computing #career #work

This is a story about assisted dying...

Having spent an extraordinary amount of time thinking and writing about suicide, as well as receiving a massive amount of emails from strangers in crisis, contemplating killing themselves, I don't claim to be exactly the same as a doctor who has specialised in euthanasia, or a crisis counsellor, but it's quite possible that we might have spent the same number of hours contemplating the same subject. My ignorance is not better than anybody's knowledge, but we are, after all, talking about the unknowable. Anybody who claims to know the unknowable is a charlatan.

The original charlatans would have been witch doctors and shamen, I suppose, claiming to have magical powers. Later, with the decline of magic and the rise of organised religion, the charlatans were, and indeed still are, priests. Debatably in modern times, there are [some] doctors who are charlatans. Anybody who says that doctors are scientific and evidence-led, has not met [enough] doctors, and truly understood their role and behaviour in society.

Of course, it's incorrect to say that the practice of witch doctors, shamen and medical doctors can be dismissed as equally groundless. In fact, we can ignore the obvious stuff - surgery, effective treatment for infection, life-support techniques - and look instead at what's common between the voodoo conjurers and your family doctor: neither of them will save your life, or the life of your child[ren], but both enjoy high social status, and we believe that they possess a power which they do not, which perversely can have a positive effect on our superstitious human psychology.

We must, for a minute, acknowledge that it is better to be soothed by a priest, telling us that we don't have to be afraid of death because we are going to heaven, or indeed soothed by a doctor who is telling us that everything is going to be OK because 'medical science'. Neither, in fact, possess the means to ease the burden of mortality, nor any knowledge to transform the human condition, beyond assistance in invoking a person's own capabilities of inducing a delusion: namely that life is anything other than a meaningless, godless existence, which ends with pain and terror.

Most of us will be so frantically pounding on life's treadmill, that we will scarcely have a moment to contemplate mortality, and if we do, it will be in the context of soothing the anxiety of our elderly relatives, and young children. The contemplation of our own individual mortality is a rich-man's hobby, and therefore something which only a very small percentage of the earth's inhabitants will ever have the wealth and privilege to do.

I might be such an idiot that I'm unable to correctly perceive and comprehend the depth and breadth of my own stupidity and ignorance, but, you would be foolish to deny that I have not had a lot more time to consider things than you, given that I have not been spending the majority of my waking hours attempting to shovel baked beans into the face of my grubby progeny.

It's banal and routine to ridicule first-semester philosophy majors, in the North American parlance, for thinking they just solved all philosophical problems at the first attempt. However, once you've figured out that we all end up as worm food, and all of human history and evidence of any human existence, will be obliterated so completely it will be as though humanity never existed, frankly, then at that point, all philosophy starts to look the same; equally absurd and meaningless.

Of course, subscribing to a certain life philosophy, or indeed a collection of different bits of philosophies, can make the difference between bearable or even very pleasurable periods of existence during a short mortal life, versus the unspeakable horror of experiencing the futility and meaninglessness of everything, raw and unfiltered, until you finally, gratefully and gladly expire.

Human inventions, like the wheel, sprung up independently in different times and places. No one human can ever claim to have a monopoly on, for example, a particular philosophical thought, because that thought can be arrived at independently.

To claim that religion and medicine - or at least, doctors who don't practice any medicine, but merely occupy the high-status role, dispensing ostensibly worthless advice - are totally and utterly without value to humanity is entirely wrong: they are valuable. The church keeps a great deal of humanity occupied with futile pursuits, but we must ask ourselves if it's truly futile, if it occupies people when they might otherwise become, like me, preoccupied with their own mortality. Many medical doctors practice a new form of religion, where we worship them and elevate them well beyond their capability to forestall or otherwise arrest our inevitable death, but is their value over-estimated, if our irrational belief in them eases the passage of our lives.

I wish, very often, that I was stupid enough to believe in god, or doctors.

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about a stream of consciousness...

An alternative title for this essay which I considered was "why you shouldn't invite me to your WhatsApp group" which might have been very true, at one point in time, but I don't think is fair, true or accurate now, today. As the title suggests, I'm writing today very much in the vein of my usual stream of consciousness as I am wont to do. Of course, this writing style is heavily over-utilised by me, but I shall explain...

I've often written about the 'creative' process of mine. I put 'creative' in inverted commas, because obviously I'm not totally utterly ridiculously stupid: I do know that there's very little 'creative' about pouring out the contents of my mind onto a page. However, thinking of a topic to write about, choosing a photo, thinking of a title, thinking of an intro, and then churning out hundreds, if not thousands, of words on that topic... it's hard not to consider that a little bit creative. I am, after all, creating content for people to read. I am well aware, of course, that the content might not appear particularly good or interesting or original or indeed hard to create, but you try doing it every day for 5+ years and see how you get on.

Anyway, I have a list of writing prompts: things which I thought "I must write about this... soon" and then made a note of, so I didn't forget. I go to my list of writing prompts whenever I can't think of something to write about.

The list doesn't always work.

Today I went to my list, and I thought "there's nothing on the list that I want to write about today". So, what do I do when I don't want to write about anything on my list, and there's no other thing which I want to write about? Well, I write about writing, obviously. Sorry about that. Sorry about this. Sorry about everything.

Another part of my daily writing process, is as already described: I try to choose an appropriate photo. This photo choosing process has changed substantially since I cleaned up my laptop, such that I now have to choose the photo on my phone and send it over to my laptop for editing. I had become very used to searching through my photo library on my laptop; familiar with the chronology of the photos, so I could easily skip to certain points in time and find a particular image which I had in mind. Now, I'm using AI to search for particular things which are in the photo, in the hope of finding something which seems - to me - to be appropriate for my chosen subject.

A real artist would keep their creative process mysterious, and create deliberate ambiguity, never correcting anybody on their ridiculously incorrect interpretations of the artworks. "I think the artist was trying to express the juxtaposition between man's fear of death, and the sublime beauty of delicate natural entities" some public schoolboy wanker art critic might say, talking about another public schoolboy wankstain's 'art', when they both know it's all just a stupid game everyone's playing instead of getting a real job, because they don't need jobs... their trust funds and family wealth mean they can waste eye-watering sums of money wafting around being "aesthetic" and otherwise not contributing to society.

Ah yes... I promised to let you know what's on my mind, didn't I.

Work is front and forefront of my mind. Hunger is a big part of my existence at the moment, as I'm on an extreme diet. I've been very tired and irritable, so I've been thinking a lot about how rude and impatient I've been with people; considering what damage might have been done, what repair needs to be done, and how I might better manage foul mood and suchlike in future. Various mundane things are on my mind, often: tax return, personal finances, cleaning the house, some correspondence I need to decide whether or not to deal with. I think about current affairs a lot, and I have a selfish reason for taking more of an interest with pandemic developments, because I plan on taking a holiday in the not-too-distant future. I sometimes worry about the damage inflicted on my house by my cats, which will need somewhat remediating next year, I imagine: some new carpet, a hole in the wall to plaster, plus some other bits to hide as best as I can, like clawed curtains. All pretty boring stuff.

I've over-shot my daily word count limit, which I've set for myself to stop myself from rambling interminably. It's a slippery slope: once I start writing thousands upon thousands of words every day, it makes it very difficult for any regular readers to get any sense of what I'm blathering on about.

Anyway, there it is: a brain dump, as best as I can manage within the word count limit I've set [but exceeded by 20% oops].

Tags: #writing

This is a story about being drained...

I suppose I made a mistake. I wrote that people who were reading my stuff about suicide should write to me. Many did, and I managed to respond to pretty much everybody - sorry if you're still waiting for a reply, but I will get to you - but it was a foolish thing to say. If had set anybody up to expect a reply, which I did try to avoid, but it might still have happened, then perhaps I could have been the difference between life and death. Obviously, anybody who wants to speak to a crisis counsellor just phones one of the very many well-funded crisis counselling phone lines, which are very well known and very well advertised. Obviously, anybody needing crisis counselling would just do that, however it was still infinitesimally a microscopically small subatomically remote improability, but still a non-zero probability that me being busy when somebody in crisis contacted me, could have been the difference between life and death.

This is what I'm thinking, now, with hindsight.

Anyway, whatever, the well-funded crisis counselling websites have moved in and flooded the zone, further shutting out anybody who wanted to actually have an honest conversation about suicide, and not be bombarded with the usual "don't do it! you've got so much to live for!" trite clichéd nonsense which I am legally required to say that You Should Totally Seek Help From The Professionals™.

It was foolish of me to think that I was serving my readers as well, when the numbers reached many thousands per day, versus back when it was a fraction of those numbers. It was arrogant to think I could stay on top of everything. Worse than arrogant, deluded, naïve or whatever, those well-funded crisis counselling organisations will say, predictably, that it's dangerous. "What about the starving Africans?" they will ask. Oh, well, not that... but predictable words along those kind of lines anyway.

Meanwhile, suicide rates continue to climb. People are as desperately depressed and anxious as ever, and the global economic situation worsens every day; debts spiral out of control, companies are laying vast numbers of people off, and there's no jobs. Anybody doing anything about that? No. It's business as usual.

I thought it would be useful to be honest with people, and so many people have written to me to tell me that they're glad that I've written what I have - that they were able to find some content which wasn't the usual "don't do it! you've got so much to live for!" - that I know that it's been a useful exercise, writing about suicide without the usual "don't do it!" bullcrap.

It turns out that it's quite hard work, corresponding around the clock, on top of a full-time job. I'm not complaining at all, but I set up this website expressly because it was so exhausting, corresponding with individuals. Like any good engineer, it seemed obvious that it was far more efficient to write things once in a place where any interested party would be able to read, instead of responding to countless individuals, who are all asking more-or-less the same stuff. It's far better that I should broadcast this stuff in a way where people can come and read it whenever they want - a one-stop repository with everything written down - than to suffer the exhaustion of individual correspondence.

I kinda forgot why I set this website up. I kinda got drawn back into talking to people individually, instead of ploughing that energy into a broadcast medium, which saves vast amounts of time and energy.

I did take a break from writing, because I feared that writing would cause me to endlessly ruminate on a static and unchanging situation, making it worse. That break from writing wasn't intended to be replaced with other writing - private writing - but it was. The need to write never went away.

I'm writing again, in case you hadn't noticed.

I'm writing, and that means that my writing energy goes into the pages of this website. I don't have much time or energy for other writing.

If you write to me, I will do my very best to read and respond. I do try to respond to everybody. It's very kind of you to write. Thank you for writing.

It was foolish of me to style myself as some kind of alternative to crisis counselling, although I don't think I ever did: I made it pretty damn clear that my inbox was open, only in as much one guy can handle on his own, and only in terms of being a non-judgemental silent ear; somebody who'd listen and not interrupt or tell you how to live your life. I can't quite remember how I positioned myself, but of course you can email me if you want or need to, and I'll do my best to get back to you, but no promises. Of course, it goes without saying that if you're in crisis You Should Totally Seek Help From The Professionals™.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia

This is a story about hunger...

I've only ever been on a diet once before in my life, about a year and a half ago. I was going on a beach holiday and wanted to get thinner, for reasons of vanity, which must pretty much be the main reason anybody ever goes on a diet, surely. I remember that it was pretty easy: the weight came off quickly. This time has not been so easy.

I wanted to avoid talking about things which are long and difficult, lest it become boring and repetitive. The combination of lockdown, sobriety, dieting, exercise and various other health-related activities - or more specifically, non-activities - was going to make for pretty boring reading, so I shied away from writing altogether.

My diet is, I'm told, quite extreme. I've been aiming to eat a maximum of half my calorie need, every day: 1,250 calories. In reality I've probably been eating closer to 1,500 calories per day, but it's still substantially less than the bare minimum needed to maintain my weight, which of course is the whole point. I don't want to bang on about the hard numbers, because it's very boring.

Psychologically, I wanted to cross a threshold quite quickly, to get below a certain weight because it then seemed like I was the 'right' side of a bad number instead of the 'wrong' side of a bad number. Ultimately, I'm trying to get my BMI down into the 'healthy' range again, but I've had to set myself some milestones along the way.

I've never owned a set of scales. My reason for dieting the previous time was that I wanted a flatter tummy. My reason for dieting this time is the same, but I bought some scales thinking it would be good to have some hard numbers. I WAS WRONG. I was in for a big shock when I stepped on the scales for the first time. I had let things get pretty bad, even though I was kidding myself that things weren't that bad, and it wouldn't take long to sort the problem; wouldn't take long to lose the weight.

I think I'm about 5 weeks away from reaching a healthy weight, which is not bad at all. I have the motivation of a holiday, which helps.

It's a fairly tough regimen, not drinking at all, trying not to snack, calorie counting... I'm not used to it. I had always been able to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, but lockdown has tipped the scales, as it were... I've been fighting a losing battle. I didn't think it was difficult or even necessary to watch what I ate; I didn't think I'd ever find myself in the position of dieting. I was wrong.

I wouldn't say I'm hungry all the time, but I am cold all the time, and I am tired all the time. Low blood sugar is playing havoc with my mood and energy levels, and also my ability to think and concentrate. There are lots of times I notice that I'm craving sugar. This could, of course, be as much my sobriety as much as my diet: for sure, being teetotal should be taken into consideration.

The reason for my sobriety is obvious: alcohol is so calorific; so fattening. Also, when drunk or slightly tipsy, I make poor decisions about food - I get takeaways, eat snacks and generally lose self-control. It's not unheard of for me to eat an entire can of Pringles, or suchlike, when inebriated. It's an easy way to cut a lot of calories, by simply not drinking.

In absolute terms, I've lost 3.5kg (almost 8 pounds) in 4 weeks, which is OK; pretty good. I want to try to lose a kilogram (2.2 pounds) per week, just for easy maths, and also because psychologically, it seems like a good milestone. However, there's no way I can reduce the amount I eat without putting myself through hell. Having used food and alcohol as coping mechanisms, life's very difficult without those crutches.

My clothes are looser and my tummy is flatter, but according to the scales I have a long way to go. If I can keep it up though, I will be looking nice and slim for my holiday.

I know this diet stuff is a bore, but I wanted to tell you about it anyway.

Tags: #diet

This is a story about devastating blows...

My break from writing was precipitated, not by the second lockdown, but by the need to purge spammy comments from my website, and wait for the search engine(s) to re-index all the content, such that I'd no longer be consigned to the dustbin of spammers, along with those pedalling illegal drugs, controlled medications and suchlike.

Now, I have to start rebuilding my reputation again. Not with my readers, but with the search engine(s) which had kinda blacklisted me, because there were so many spammy keywords all over the comments section, in a desperate attempt by Chinese and Indian sweatshops to generate links to their clients' websites, in order to try to improve their page's ranking in search results.

Obviously, I spend a significant proportion of my time, lovingly crafting some well-written prose, for no other reason than that I want to freely share the contents of my brain, lest it prove useful to some soul out there on the interweb.

I spent a lot of time cultivating, creating, crafting my content, and all that hard work was paying off: I was getting many thousands of readers every day, and many of them were writing to me to say that they were grateful that I took the time to write and share. Mercifully, I still have a reasonable number of readers; all my hard work hasn't gone to waste. People still write to me to say they're grateful that I spent the time writing and publishing what I did.

Nobody would ever spend 5+ years of their life writing every day, seemingly getting nowhere, if they were fixated on how many readers they had: it's a thankless task with pitiful progress, to begin with. There's an enormous amount of very high quality content already out there, so why would you think that your content wouldn't just get lost in the noise? You're right: most of your content will get lost in the noise. Only the most dedicated will survive, and the rest will litter the interweb; the interweb is mostly composed of people's abandoned creations... except nobody much sees that content. Part of the whole advertising eyeball-driven business model of the commercial interweb, is driving the content creators to push stuff out on a daily basis, to habituate them and their content consumers. If you're not publishing regularly, you will be harshly penalised.

So, having played the game, succeeded, then lost - almost to the point of being buried into obscurity - I now need to dedicate myself 7 days a week, to the challenge of writing and publishing, once again. I need to build, again. I need to create, again.

I've really really missed the daily writing habit. I've really really missed having the opportunity to express myself. I've really really missed the security it gives me, knowing that I've composed my thoughts on a page, publicly, for all to see. It's a life insurance policy: that I'm about as close to not dying misunderstood, as anybody could ever possibly be. Of course you can hurl predictable insults at me - narcissist, egocentrist, self-centred <expletive> and whatnot - but who gives a shit about your jealous tantrum? Who gives a shit that you're too stupid, lazy and cowardly to write and publish your thoughts and feelings? I'm doing it and it's allowed; it's OK. It's useful for me to write and publish, so nobody's going to stop me. It's useful to a lot of other people, that they can read my thoughts and feelings, so I'm going to keep going.

Winter's a particularly bad time for my mental health, and I've been struggling without my writing crutch. It's been pretty bad, not being able to tell this blank page about how I'm feeling. It's been really hard to cope, without my daily writing habit, which has become so central to my healthy habits and routine.

Anyway, I'm back, writing again. Hello, welcome back.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia

This is a story about information overload...

This is why we can't have nice things. I've written more than 1,100 high quality essays, most of which have undergone some kind of proofreading, and some light editing, amounting to an aggregate total well in excess of 1.3 million words. Those words were not written by a machine-learning algorithm at the click of a button. No. They were written by me, by hand. Every. Single. One.

Some of my readers were kind enough to leave comments.

A lot of my readers were kind enough to leave comments.

There was a time, before I got beaten by the spammers, when I was able to read all of those comments, and reply to most of them. The battle is lost. The spammers have won.

I have removed the ability for members of the public to comment, although you can still reply to my content on Twitter or Facebook if you want your comment to be public, otherwise email me or direct message me. I promise, I do read everything that reaches me, but it was very hard to see the real comments, lost in amongst the vast quantity of spammy rubbish.

I find it regrettable that I've had to disable public commenting, because in just a few short months some half a million people - many of them in crisis - have been brought to my website looking for information relating to suicide. Many of my readers write to me and tell me one very important common thing: my writing is honest and authentic, and relatable, in a way which so much of the "stop! don't do it! you've got so much to live for!" clichéd stuff out there, causes a bunch of suicidal people to immediately ditch that site and move onto the next.

I'm not so big-headed, egotistical and suffering from delusions of grandeur, to claim that I'm offering anything other than what it says in big bold letters on the carton: I have a mental illness and I'm plagued by suicidal thoughts, which I write about; I have attempted suicide several times, which I write about. If you came here looking to be saved, you should try crisis counselling. The number for suicide crisis counselling appeared when you searched on Google. It was literally the top hit. If you didn't phone them or click the number one Google suggested website, that means that you know what you're looking for, and it is not somebody saying "don't do it!" over and over and over and over again, ad nauseam.

You've heard it all before.

Anyway.

Sorry. I had to turn off comments. I had to hide all the spammers comments. I had to get rid of that horrible load of spammy crap. I should have done it sooner, but I was putting it off. I put it off for too long and the situation got out of hand.

I know which posts were the spammers favourites, and it really makes no sense.

I seriously don't advise you read these, but I'm going to list them here, because I need Google to realise that they should re-index the pages, and they should hopefully see that all the horrible spam is now gone.

The kind of stuff that they were spamming with was mostly harmless, but there was a lot of illegal stuff, and immoral stuff too. Basically, it was a bunch of bad people, trying to leverage my 1.3 million word artwork for their own financial reward, which sucks.

The posts, which I really don't advise you read were:

Day nine of my attempt to write a novel in a month, while publishing the draft manuscript live.

The fourteenth day of that novel writing attempt.

Something I wrote while I was on secure psychiatric ward, five years ago.

Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and other parts of the well known acronym.

My profile... although people are probably just clicking that. I have no idea if it's the spammers or not.

Some stuff about being a sensitive soul... who'd have thunk it?

Day thirteen of that same half-finished novel.

Some weird rantings from five years ago... the day before I lost my job

Typical political dross as you might expect to find anywhere on the internet.

Some stuff about burnout. I write a lot about burnout.

... etc etc ...

There are about 500 of these, which have been spammed in the last week alone. I should painstakingly go through all 400 of them, and link to them somehow, so that our friends at a well known and popular search engine know to go take a look: the spam has gone now. The horrid people trying to peddle their illegal, life-wrecking wares are gone from my website now. The horrid people who profit from human misery are banished forever, at least from this little island in the swamp of excrement.

I don't know what else to say or do.

To give you an idea of how bad the problem appears to have gotten, it seems like the average number of comments on my 1,100+ essays is somewhere in the region of 2,000, which is a total of 2.2 million spammy comments. I presume that when my 1.3 million words, lovingly crafted by a prose-smith (me) were vastly exceeded by a tsunami of spam, our chums at the well-known tech giant decided - algorithmically - that enough was enough and they shouldn't send me any more readers. For sure, there are very good reasons not to send people to a den of nothing but spammy illegal crap. For sure, I understand why it happened. For sure, I blame myself for being too lazy, tired, depressed and otherwise consumed with my chaotic and often suicidal life, to deal with some spammers.

This website is a lifeline for me. Writing is a lifeline for me. If I hadn't started writing then I wouldn't have had friends from all over the world, frantically contacting emergency services, which saved my life... in which case, you wouldn't be reading this. I'm not saying I'm glad I'm alive because I'm not, but I'm glad that I have my friends, my readers, my writing, my website and many things. Spammers robbed me of a whole load of readers, which I'm frustrated and really upset about, but I'm working as hard as I can on rectifying the problem.

Please, if you came here feeling suicidal, check out everything I wrote about #suicide by clicking on the tag, or check out the previous thing I wrote on the homepage, and follow links from there. I guess that's what a spammer would say, but I promise you that a spammer would not spend 5+ years of their life pouring their heart and soul into a writing project, as a not-for-profit venture and half-assed attempt at creating a work of art.

Thank you, readers, for persevering.

Normal service has resumed.

Tags: #suicide