This is a story about challenging your reasons for doing things...

If somebody said to me that Bipolar was an excuse to do whatever you want, whenever you want, I would find my position a little hard to defend. However, to fall into line, to fly straight, to conform, to bend my mood by sheer weight of will... that's not possible.

I'm a fairly liberated character. Since living with daily threat to my life and livelihood, my risk profile has rather altered from that of a normal rational individual. I tend to leap before I look, and certainly with very little premeditation.

To an outside observer, things look erratic, out of control, recklessly dangerous. To me, things look pretty much the same, but my actions do fit onto some kind of macro plan. Even when I backslide into something or somewhere I really don't want to go, it's a bit of a calculated gamble. It happens when there appears to be little else going on of importance, little other opportunity.

So, have I deliberately sabotaged my own life, at times? Yes, I probably have. But you might be surprised to learn that the motives are not always clear cut. I have become quite an uncompromising character, who finds it near impossible to live in a situation where my values, ethics and professional standards are being infringed.

When you have pushed yourself to the limit and beyond to deliver projects, to create cashflow positive businesses, you know the upper bound of what is possible, both personally and for a software team, and what the reward feels like. You start to get a sense of whether it's worth pushing yourself that hard, or not.

When you have sunk to unimaginable depths, in despair and abandonment of everything, you know the lower bounds of what is survivable. You know how low you can go before you will either shuffle off your mortal coil, or some shred of self-preservation instinct is finally activated. You know what it feels like to literally make a life or death decision. You start to get a sense of whether you really want to die, or not.

Above is a picture of me, 24 hours after having been discharged from the psychiatric ward of a hospital. I had been body surfing in Cornwall. Those powerful waves and strong currents. That thrashing violent cold winter sea.

There's little doubt that this extreme environment activated my self-preservation instincts far more effectively than a week-long stay in a locked Mental Health ward, where nurses checked on me every 30 minutes to make sure I hadn't topped myself. That's not to say I'm not extremely grateful to everybody in the NHS who helped me.

Teaching my friend Klaus to surf in Bude, I drifted into the river mouth, where a deeper channel has been cut into the sea bed. The water flowed faster there and I started to be pulled by a strong current, well out of my depth and into the path of breaking waves. I knew that it was going to take time, a load of stamina, and a certain amount of calmness, to swim out of that channel and back into safer waters, and body surf my way back into the shallows where I could stand on the sea floor again. I had no floatation aid, no surfboard of my own.

Drowning in the sea would be a much more unpleasant way to end your days than, say, clattering into the hard ground at 125mph from an aeroplane or a tall building, or slowly losing consciousness as your blood leaked away out of ruptured blood vessels. However, I still find it interesting that I was making game plans to save my own life. Was I going to try and attract the attention of the lifeguards, who would see that I was out of the safe swimming area and come and pick me up? Was I going to try the riskiest but less energy-consuming tactic of swimming for nearby rocks that waves were breaking onto?

It's weird how you can find yourself messing around with Sir Clive Sinclair's latest invention in Cambridge one minute, so full of passion and energy, optimism and enthusiasm. Then your mood seems to suck all the life out of you and you're not sure where or when it's going to bottom out. You're not sure if you're on a ride all the way to oblivion, or whether you'll pull up out of the nosedive at the last possible moment.

That's my true reaction to my moods, to pressure, to risk, to addiction, to unhappiness, to discomfort, to instability: I will do something extreme. I will actively seek out something that will challenge me to my very limits. I will push myself until I find the true edge of the abyss.

Sometimes you feel like you've tried your hardest, that you can't go on, that something's not possible. You've reached the limits. I'm regularly surprised by what reserves we seem to store up, as human organisms. The disparity between perception and reality is most pronounced, when it comes to strength, stamina and depression. When you come close to those limits, you realise that your fear is giving you a safety margin, a buffer, that keeps you a safe distance from the true edge.

However, my brain has been somewhat corrupted, warped, miscalibrated. I had little hesitation in attempting to climb up on a ledge on the 48th floor of a tower block, where there is a little outdoor area. It's only that my colleagues pulled me back that prevented me from standing there, on the ledge, eyeing up the drop.

As you can see, the ledge is quite wide, but there's still something that isn't quite wired up quite right in the head of somebody who would climb onto it, 48 floors above the pavement.

None of this quite compares with riding through central London, on a black bike, dressed from head to toe in black clothes. No lights, no helmet. Frankly, drivers quite often don't spot the cyclists who are wearing high-vis vests and covered in lights anyway, especially in the wet when London's many lights, and the reflection in puddles, make it virtually impossible for a driver to see what's going on around them.

I took an almighty tumble when a taxi driver who was indicating left and pulling over changed his mind in a fraction of a second, and decided to do a U-turn right in front of me. My rear brake was loose because of a buckled back wheel, and I was so quick and hard on the front brake that I went over my handlebars and busted my ribs, hip, ankle. The taxi driver didn't even see me. I jumped up and back on the bike, and carried on, and then this huge surge of pain hit me.

That could be a metaphor for my life, since losing my grip on stability in 2008. I take massive risks, but I jump up and carry on cycling after being completely obliterated. I push through the pain, knowing that stopping will only make it worse.

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