This is a story about protecting the fruit of your loins...

I wouldn't blame you for jumping to the wrong conclusions about whether I'm safe to be around your family. You're programmed to protect. You're programmed to be paranoid, and act irrationally. The chances are that there isn't a Sabre-Toothed Tiger lurking outside your front door, but your DNA doesn't change fast enough for you to not at least subconsciously check for vicious predators outside your cave.

The assumption must be that everywhere I go, I leave a trail of used hypodermic needles infected with HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis, even though I've never injected drugs and I don't have any infectious diseases.

Perhaps my bags and coat pockets are full of highly toxic drugs and medications, which are not in child-safe containers? Perhaps your inquisitive child may go through one of my unattended bags or pockets and discover something that looks like sweets, only to be fatally poisoned. No, I don't carry things like that around with me.

But what about my influence? Perhaps I'm 'soft on drugs' and my laissez-faire attitude to narcotics will somehow rub off on your tiny tots, and just being within earshot of me will lead them to later experimentation with powerful narcotics, addiction and death. Well, actually, one of the main reasons for writing this blog is as a warning klaxon, to those who might venture up the same dead-end alleyway where I unfortunately found myself stuck.

I hope that nobody thinks I'm glorifying or making light of my numerous brushes with irreversible health damage and death, that I have sustained over the last few years. In fact, it's only been because of the published memoirs of some other unfortunates, that I've not abandoned all hope on the assumption that my own fallibility is some indictment of my character.

Certainly, it's easier to divide the world into good and bad, light and dark, virtuous and evil. Certainly, it's easier to condemn a character. Certainly, it seems somehow safer, prudent, to keep bad apples away from the rest of the harvest, lest infection spread.

However, that's not how human nature works. If you make something taboo, then you make something more interesting to people, but they will hide their curiosity and feel guilty for feeling drawn into a forbidden world, even though it's totally natural to be inquisitive. For the outcasts, the misfits, the eccentric family member who has been excluded, is shaped by the imagination of those unhappy children, into some kind of folklore figure. The family freak, the black sheep, can end up being far more influential than you had ever intended, just by your very refusal to acknowledge their existence.

Anyway, I'm soon going to reject all the labels, which I have been urged by most Psychiatrists and Psychologists to not apply to myself anyway. I push more and more of the actions of the past into the annals of history. To judge my character on a few select moments from 36 years on the planet seems like the real madness. To condemn my entire future based on some ageing evidence that is entirely outweighed by a mostly normal healthy life, is not exactly very fair or very kind, is it?

You would be shocked to learn that the whole private psychiatric/psychological treatment setup is driven to protect your professional image. You are encouraged not to use clinical labels. You are encouraged to maintain medical secrecy, privacy. I can see why, but I'm enjoying playing with people's prejudice. I'm enjoying seeing how close to unemployable I can get, before I step back from the brink of reputational ruin.

So, if you're keeping me at arm's length, at a safe distance, I do understand. I forgive your instincts to protect your family. It's only natural.

You should know that I would never venture anywhere near you or your home if I was in a mess though. I have no fear of living on the streets again. I choose suicide and destitution ahead of putting any of my friends or my sister and niece in any danger.

I choose suicide. I choose destitution.

Tags: #suicide #mentalillness #depression #addiction #bipolar #drugs