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#NaNoWriMo2016 - Day Ten

10 min read

Poste Restante

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

 

10. Waiting Room

"Do you want me to come and see the doctor with you?" Lara asked.

"No, it'll be difficult for you to take the time off" replied Neil.

"I don't mind. It's important. I can do it if it will help" she said.

Neil was now in his third week off work and he was starting to get anxious about returning to his job.

"I just wish I felt better, but I think I feel worse than I did a few weeks ago" he complained.

"Try not to stress about things. Go and see the doctor again and see what they say" she said in a comforting tone.

He'd left it almost to the last minute - Thursday - but Lara was now coming home expecting to find out what had happened at the doctor's. Neil was sat on the sofa as she came in the front door and hung up her coat. There was no new prescription on the coffee table in front of him.

"So, how'd it go?" she asked.

"They're referring me to a psychiatrist."

"Well that's good. You'll get a specialist's opinion" she said.

"Yes, but it could take weeks, months even before I get an appointment to see a consultant."

"What's the plan for the interim?" she asked.

"The doctor's signed me off for another two weeks. I said I was getting very stressed and anxious about going back to work. He said I should contact my HR department who can involve occupational health."

"He?"

"Yes. I saw a different doctor this time."

"Doctor Hughes?" she asked.

"I can't remember. It'll be written on the sick note, I guess."

"How do you feel about things?" asked Lara.

"I'm anxious about what it's going to be like, going back to work after five weeks off. It's a long time, you know?" he replied.

"People get sick. It happens all the time" Lara said as reassuringly as she could.

"Yes. But not me. And hardly ever anybody else at work" said Neil.

"Everybody will be happy that you're feeling better again when you go back to work. It'll be fine" she soothed.

"We agreed I would keep taking the same antidepressants. It's too early to tell if it's going to have a positive effect yet. It could be weeks before it helps my mood improve" he said. "I've got enough to last me a couple of months now" he continued.

"You refilled your prescription?"

"Yeah. I felt embarrassed in the chemist. All those pills. All those sick people and then there's me" he replied.

"Lots of people have to take medication for all kinds of reasons. There's no shame in it"

"Yes, but I still felt ashamed. I didn't want anybody we know to see me, walking home with that paper bag full of pills from the chemist" he said.

"Awww. You'll feel better soon" she said, pulling his head into the crook of her neck and cradling him slightly. His eyes were downcast and sad.

"The doctor said to keep an eye on things. Go back if there's any problems. There's not going to be any follow-up appointments or anything. I've just got to wait for a letter with an appointment date to see the psychiatrist" Neil said with a resigned tone.

Psychiatry. Lara's only real first-hand experience with psychiatry was helping patients with their prescriptions when they were on the ward. The patients were often quite difficult to deal with, but not because of behaviour that she understood as classical mental illness. She would be pestered all the time by the patients - "Nurse, it's time for my medication" - who would get extremely upset about the disruption to their normal routine. There were endless arguments about their prescriptions.

On the ward, the nurses would do three medication rounds per shift, plus respond to patients who were allowed a certain amount of pain medication on request. Unless otherwise indicated in the patient's notes, Lara could only dispense small doses of paracetamol, taken orally. The patient's own medications were usually locked away in a bedside cabinet that only the nurses had the key to. Any medication that the hospital's doctors had prescribed would be dispensed by the nurses at set times and that was when they usually unlocked the cabinet if there was something else that the patient was taking.

Psychiatric inpatients had their usual medications meticulously recorded in separate notes. Although the patients often knew which pills they had to take and how often, Lara had to follow the notes to the letter. The routine of the general hospital was different from the psychiatric wards the patients were used to and they could get very agitated if they felt they were overdue getting their pills.

It was surprising just how many medications some patients had to take each day. There were mood stabilisers and antipsychotics. There were antidepressants and anxiety drugs. There were sleeping pills and tranquillisers. The night shift would start with two hours of hell, as patients begged for their sleeping pills. The first dispensing round of the night shift wasn't until 9pm, so the nurses would get no peace until then. Mercifully, the psychiatric patients were often knocked out cold until the next morning though, which meant they were less trouble through the night than the others.

When on night shift, trying to sleep during the day was hard. Slamming car doors, traffic noises, people yelling in the street below, children screaming in the back gardens. The world was set up for the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday worker. Nearby builders and roadworks could mean a week with barely any sleep at all. Lara often longed for some sleeping pills herself and she knew that some of her colleagues did use medications to help them get some quality sleep during the day.

The few psychiatric patients Lara came into contact with were the most extreme. She saw the aftermath of self harm, suicide attempts and psychotic episodes. However, on the general ward the patients were heavily medicated. They were dazed and confused, with cloudy minds. They shuffled around. Some of them had uncontrollably dribbling mouths and involuntary tics.

She knew that Neil was going to see a psychiatrist - as an outpatient - but Lara made no association between him and the kind of extreme cases of mental illness she occasionally encountered at work. Neil seemed perfectly healthy and normal to all outward appearances, although she could tell that he was lethargic and more anxious and negative than she'd ever known before.

Later that Thursday evening, Lara attended an engagement party for a couple they distantly knew through other friends. Lara had started to socialise again, but on her own. She could see an expression of exhaustion and stress spread over Neil's face when the topic of going out was ever discussed. It was clear that he really wasn't up to socialising yet.

"How's Neil?" asked Katie.

Katie was Russ' new girlfriend. She was still slowly ingratiating herself with everybody and Lara felt sorry for her, as she struggled to become included in the group. Katie was young and pretty and the other girls treated her as if she wasn't worth getting to know. "She'll just be another casual fling" the girls said behind Katie's back.

None of the other girls had really asked about Neil. They had decided to just ignore the issue. If anybody else had asked, Lara would have dismissed the question with a cheery "he's fine". However, Katie was somehow disarming and approachable. Lara drew her to one side. The rest of the group were engrossed in their usual comfortable conversational routines.

"He's ever so depressed. It's sad to see him like that. I don't know what to do" Lara confided.

"There's not much you can do. Don't beat yourself up. Is he taking anything?" Katie asked.

Lara was taken aback by Katie's directness, but it was good to talk to somebody who seemed to immediately understand what the couple were going through.

"He started antidepressants a couple of weeks ago" said Lara.

"Well, it can take time to find the right one. Don't lose hope if you don't see any quick improvements" said Katie.

"Do you?..." Lara tailed off, worried her question was too personal.

Katie gave a little chuckle.

"It's fine. You can ask. Yes, I've been on antidepressants for a few years now. They do help, when you find the one that works for you" said Katie.

"But you seem. You seem so..." Lara stumbled, not knowing how to finish her question.

"Normal? Happy?" Katie said, grinning.

"Yeah" said Lara, nervously.

"Well, I have my bad days like everybody, but life is mostly OK now. A few years ago I just closed the curtains and didn't get out of bed for what felt like forever. I couldn't face the world"

"That sounds like the stage Neil's at" said Lara.

"Well, it does get better; easier. Recovery can be slow and nonlinear. Or it was in my case, anyway" said Katie, with as much reassurance as she could muster.

"He's just so desperate to get back to work, but at the same time I can see he's anxious. I know he can't face it at the moment. He's barely left the house in weeks" said Lara.

"There's no rushing these things. Tell him there's no rush. It can be a long road"

There was something harsh and brutal about this, even though it was spoken kindly. Katie spoke directly, truthfully, sympathetically. Lara had read things like this on websites, but it hadn't sunk in until now. There had been a sense of denial; there had been false hope.

"Look. Phone me. We'll meet up, just the two of us. You need support. You need to think about yourself too" said Katie.

Lara felt strong emotions welling up inside. She had been holding it all down, holding things together, acting like everything was going to get back to normal overnight. She was worried she was going to cry but she didn't. She was stronger than that.

Katie reached down and squeezed Lara's hand and made a sympathetic face. Lara was grateful to have made a friend who talked so openly, so freely, so directly.

The party was starting to disband and Russ was making his way over to the girls. Katie's face immediately switched to the bright happy expression she usually wore. It didn't seem fake to Lara. It made sense, to present a front and avoid discussing things that most people wouldn't understand.

 

Next chapter...

 

#NaNoWriMo2016 - Day Two

10 min read

Poste Restante

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

 

2. Invisible Illness

The sense of dread and impotence had followed Lara around for her entire shift. Neil had showed no signs of improvement when she left him at home in bed, earlier that morning, to leave for work. She felt sure that he would still be in bed when she got home. He had turned his mobile phone off and she knew that he would let the landline ring until the answerphone picked up. There was no way of knowing how he was doing, but she had the sinking feeling that he wasn't improving. This was the fourth day in a row that he hadn't gone to work, and now she was starting to worry on his behalf about his job.

Lara had made a career switch to nursing, having previously worked as an office administrator. She was naturally caring and liked helping people. The office politics and limited scope to make a tangible difference in anybody's life had ground her down in the medium-sized company she used to work for, with its bloated management structure, endless bureaucracy and red tape. The National Health Service was no picnic, but working directly with patients and other front-line staff made the job far more rewarding than her previous career, where she had never met any of the company's actual customers.

Neil was a well respected and valued employee at the company he had worked for since leaving college. He was a CCTV and intruder alarm engineer, who travelled throughout the country, installing new systems, doing maintenance and repairs. Over the years, he had built up a lot of technical expertise and was now considered one of the most senior members of the team. He'd had the option to move into staff training or management, but he'd always preferred to remain "on the tools".

Most of Neil and Lara's circle of friends had originated from Neil's job, with Lara befriending the 'significant others' of Neil's male-dominated engineering friends. There had been a spate of weddings recently amongst the couples they knew and on Valentine's Day, Neil had proposed to Lara. They were engaged to be married some time the following year, although they had not yet started to plan the wedding.

Lara had received text messages from her female friends asking if Neil was OK, because their other halves hadn't seen him at work for a couple of days. What could she say? She knew it was unusual for Neil to be sick, but it wasn't at all clear what was wrong with him. He just seemed very fatigued and hadn't been able to face getting up or even phoning in sick. Lara had phoned his boss for him, while he buried his head under the duvet and pretended to be asleep.

It was easy to be sympathetic with Neil, because he was evidently going through a hard time due to something but the frustrating thing was that it was neither identifiable, nor would Neil go to the doctor to ask for a diagnosis. Through her own medical training, Lara knew there was nothing obviously wrong with Neil: no fever, no pain or discomfort, no nausea. In fact, no symptoms beyond the fact he looked tired, drained, stressed and somewhat afraid, in his facial expressions. She knew that he wasn't the type to complain about a bout of man flu.

The first couple of days that Neil was off work, she had attributed to the kind of duvet days when she herself would phone in sick, if she really couldn't face another boring day in the office. By the third day, she could hear her parents' derisory words about "yuppie flu" ringing in her ears, from her childhood in the 1980's.

The burden of having to phone Neil's boss each day had now escalated. He had politely but firmly reminded Lara that Neil now needed to go to the doctor and get a sick note, because he'd been away from work for more than three days. Neil knew this too, but hadn't acknowledged it. In fact, he'd made it subtly clear to her that he just wanted to be left alone. He didn't want her to open the curtains for him; he didn't want her to bring him food; he didn't want her to arrange for anybody to visit to make sure he was OK during the day. Little changed in his withdrawn demeanour from when she left in the morning for her 12 hour shift, to the moment he barely acknowledged her when she returned from work, except to say he was OK and he didn't need anything. The most animated that she'd seen him in four days was when she offered to phone in sick for him, which he said he'd be really grateful for if she did. She didn't seem to be able to do anything else to help. It was frustrating.

The drive home from work was very unpleasant for her. She knew the house would seem lifeless: no lights on. She knew that she would go upstairs to the bedroom in order to get out of her work clothes and see the motionless shape of Neil's body under the duvet, in much the same position as she'd left him in the morning. She'd know from the rhythm of his breathing that he was awake, but she would have to speak first. He would be polite, pleasant even, but somehow clipped and formal. The subtle cue was for her to leave the bedroom, turn off the light, and leave him with whatever he was struggling with. It cut her up to feel shut out, unable to help.

All of their normal rhythm and routine had suddenly disappeared, leaving a gaping hole in Lara's life. Their usual discussions about evening meals, cooking and eating together, watching videotaped television programmes or films, exchanging stories about their working day, planning the next social event, or talking about an upcoming holiday: all of this was suddenly gone, and Lara found herself eating on the sofa, alone, watching whatever was on TV at the time, but not really paying any attention to it.

The hardest thing was having nobody to talk to. Her parents had made their views about "work shy" people vociferously known and she didn't want to get into an argument, where she felt defensive about Neil having to take some time off sick. Most of their group of friends all knew each other, and she knew that by talking to even one friend, word would soon get around that something was wrong with Neil that was out of the ordinary. She dreaded to think what would be concluded in the speculative gossip at the dinner parties at each others' houses.

Lara started mentally preparing herself for friends dropping by the house to see if they were OK and if there was anything they could do. If there was nothing she could do, what could they possibly do? It would be easiest just to make excuses and try to shoo them away from the doorstep without even inviting them in. What would she say? How could she be polite and maintain the impression that their usual relaxed open house policy was in full swing, but at the same time swiftly get rid of any would-be visitors?

Despite a salary drop for Lara, the couple had still managed to get a large enough mortgage to purchase a modestly sized terraced house near the town centre that had plenty of space for entertaining guests. Under normal circumstances, Lara and Neil had a gregarious and welcoming nature and were given to spur-of-the-moment gatherings in their home with their friends. Several couples lived within walking distance, and impromptu cheese and wine, cards or board game nights were a common occurence.

The house had an attractive Victorian façade with a modern interior. The brick archway above the front door stated that the house was built in the 1870s. The previous owners had extensively renovated, building a bright open-plan kitchen diner extension at the back, and preserving a cosy but surprisingly spacious snug at the front of the house, with a cast iron fireplace and wooden fire surround. Furnished with carefully chosen second hand furniture that mixed shabby chic with pieces that could be mistaken for iconic vintage design, the house was punching above its weight for the meagre budget of Lara and Neil's income.

Decorating and furnishing their home had been a labour of love for Lara and Neil, and they were extremely house-proud and meticulous in how they had planned each room to accentuate the available space, light and few remaining period features. This hiccup in Neil's health was certainly no part of a master plan which had seemed to be going perfectly for the couple, up to that point.

Entertaining guests held a certain amount of desire for their friends to see their home improvements, and to show off their excellent taste in interior design and home-making. It was showy without being unpleasantly in-your-face. It was hard to dislike Lara and Neil as they weren't a couple obsessed with status symbols and oneupmanship.

Behind closed doors, the relationship was far from perfect. Neil's reluctance to turn down overtime and work fewer hours had led to Lara's desire to find a more rewarding career of her own. Financial pressures and resentment over each other's strong desire to satisfy their own needs and find fulfilment at work, had overspilled into many unpleasant arguments. Most of their friends chose to accept the happy, smiling, front that Lara and Neil presented at face value. Those who were closest to the couple could see the mask occasionally slip. The occasional unpleasant jibe; the twist of the knife; the obvious hints at an unresolved argument. There were issues that were festering, unresolved.

Nobody could say that they weren't a fully committed couple. They had been together a long time and had managed to come through a rather tempestuous and fiery initial period, before reaching a kind of uneasy truce. When in the company of friends, they were in fine spirits - and this was no act - but too much time spent alone with each other and trouble would inevitably erupt.

Neil was not self-indulgent in his convalescence, but he was completely unaware how isolated this left Lara, given the interconnected web of friends and connections to Neil's work that existed. Neil had no idea how burdened Lara felt, defending Neil's spotless record as a dependable hard worker, and as a sunny upbeat happy-go-lucky likeable social character. The man under the duvet in the dark bedroom upstairs would not want anybody to see him like that, and Lara knew it.

Whatever regrettable words had been spoken before, it was water under the bridge. Lara would not betray Neil in his hour of need.

 

Next chapter...

 

20-8 Days Later

2 min read

This is a story about the undead...

Sick

I got sick. I stopped blogging. I'm sad I broke my daily writing routine. I would have hit 365 blog posts by now, if I had kept going just a little longer.

When people say "keep going, you're doing really well" the sentiment is lovely. Keep going where though? Have I been there before? Is it a good place to keep going to? Also, what does it mean to be doing really well? Does it mean superficially? Is the most important thing to look like you're doing really well, on the outside? Are you doing really well even if it's all an act?

I'm no faker; no actor.

I do however have to do something that I can keep going with, while genuinely doing really well. My last contract could not keep going. I was not doing very well.

Perhaps getting sick wasn't an inevitable consequence, but it takes more than letting off steam through personal writing to harmlessly neutralise the 'toxic' build-up, due to months of stress, boredom, lack of stimulation, lack of social interaction, no new challenges, no creative outlet etc. etc.

Equally, my solo hack-a-thons have been challenging and creative, perhaps a little over-stimulating, and have made me sick through social isolation and stress.

There must be a cool project with a team here in London that ticks the other boxes.

Anyway, I need to get well again first.

 

Tags:

 

The Dark Web

14 min read

 This is a story about drug dealers...

Dark Web

The top image shows an official UK prescription. A doctor registered with the GMC prescribed me the medication and a pharmacist registered with the GPHC filled my prescription. The bottom image shows black market prescription drugs for sale on the Dark Web. When you buy from the Dark Web an anonymous vendor will sell you whatever you want, no questions asked.

In order to receive my official prescription, I had to answer 14 yes/no questions. One of the questions was "do you have high blood pressure?". How the hell should I know? The last time I had my blood pressure checked was 11 months ago, and I've gained loads of weight and have been drinking far too much since then.

According to my order tracking, a doctor spent 7 minutes deliberating my 14 answers - 30 seconds per answer - before writing my prescription. I never met this doctor, we never spoke and they never saw my medical records.

Some years ago, with a great deal of arm-twisting from my private psychiatrist, my GP agreed to prescribe me Bupropion for the depressive episodes of my bipolar disorder. In the UK, Bupropion is not licensed for the treatment of depression or bipolar disorder. NICE guidelines do not recommend the use of Bupropion for anything other than as a smoking cessation treatment. Basically, my GP faced being struck off the GMC register if I suffered some horrible medical complications because of an adverse drug reaction.

I've been back in London for 3 years and I've had 2 different GPs since then: one in Camden and one just across the road from where I live. Neither of them has prescribed me a single medication, but the Camden GP took it upon himself to phone me on my mobile in his personal time to see if I was still alive. My GP went out of his way to try and help me.

The average face-to-face GP consultation time in the UK is just under 9 minutes. Imagine having just 9 minutes to establish that somebody is suicidally depressed and then select a psychiatric medication for your patient. The medication could either save them or reduce their quality of life even more. It's not much time, is it?

And so, I became an educated well-informed patient. A doctor I spoke to some years ago said that I would be better off finding a "prescription pad psychiatrist" who would write me a prescription for whatever I wanted. These doctors exist. They're available online, without even having to meet them or speak to them on the telephone, it would seem.

I have no criticism of the ethics of what the doctor and the pharmacist who I obtained my official UK prescription from are doing. It doesn't seem unethical to me.

Interestingly, it cost me £90 for 60x 150mg Bupropion tablets. I could easily buy the exact same medication for less than half that price on the Dark Web. If I was to buy the medication from India, it would cost me less than £6 (plus postage).

On the NHS, a prescription costs £8.40 if you're working and not entitled to welfare benefits.

Basically, you pay for convenience. With the online pharmacy I had a short form to fill in and I got my medication delivered next day. With the Dark Web, I would have had to faff around with Bitcoins, but my medication would also have been delivered next day. With my doctor, I would have had to make an appointment, and there's every chance that they wouldn't have been prepared to take the risk of writing an off-label prescription. With the Indian medication, their postal service is appalling and it takes weeks for a delivery to arrive.

One reason not to order from the Dark Web though, is that you can get anything you want. It's easy to start window shopping. Once you've loaded up your account with some Bitcoins, it's easy to fill up your 'shopping basket' with all kinds of things that you're curious about, or things that you know you really shouldn't be buying because they're bad for you. It's a slippery slope.

One of the reasons why I don't have any drug dealers phone numbers and I've never bought drugs from a drug dealer, is because it's so convenient. I don't believe in the idea of a 'pusher'. People want drugs, plain and simple. The drugs push themselves.

One of the reasons I'm not using internet banking at the moment, is because it makes it too easy for me to buy some Bitcoins, transfer them to a Dark Web marketplace, and have a little jiffy bag containing deadly white powder, hitting my doormat the very next day.

I don't believe prohibition works, but certainly making things a little more inconvenient does offer some protection from temptation. I wouldn't even know where to begin, trying to find a drug dealer, unless I wanted to buy low quality cannabis or terrible quality imitation cocaine from one of the many dealers who hang around by Camden Lock.

Prohibition created legal highs. Prohibition created the Dark Web. Because I'm an IT expert and a sensation seeker, when I read about legal highs in the news I was tempted to give them a go. The rest is history. All of that "moral panic" crap in the media had precisely the opposite effect than intended. A naïve middle-class IT professional working for an investment bank, suddenly became exposed to a world that I would never have become part of, if it wasn't for the fact that prohibition lowered the barrier to entry.

As the legal highs started to get banned, I then took to Internet forums to find out where people who had stockpiled - like me - were supposed to go after we ran out of drugs. That was how I found out about the Dark Web. Yet again, prohibition moved me from a world that was legal, taxed and regulated, towards the dark and murky world of illegal drugs.

One day, in a pit of despair at my spiralling addiction, I decided to order all the drugs. I bought crack, heroin and crystal meth. I didn't even know what to do with them. You can snort heroin and meth, but not crack, as it turns out. How does a middle class homeowner even smoke crack? I didn't even own a cigarette lighter.

A couple weeks later, I had nailed my door shut and put newspaper all over the windows. It's remarkable how quickly a respectable middle-class rich person can turn the house they own into a crack den.

What's also remarkable is how quickly you figure out that you've bought a one way express ticket to an early death, if you have vast sums of money and a reasonable intellect.

One day, I smoked a pipe - I had bought a meth pipe off the Dark Web by this point - that had been filled with heroin, crack and meth. I thought "is this as good as it gets?". The room was bathed with a yellow light, even though it was barely lit. There was a calm serenity. I thought "this ain't even that great" and decided that I'd better stop before I decided that it was great.

It's the strangest thing, flushing rocks of crack and a big bag of heroin down the loo, not because you're addicted and you want to quit, but because you can see how easily you could become addicted.

People think that drug addiction is all about wanting drugs and taking drugs, but it's not that at all. Drug addiction is about identity, routine, habituation, ceremony, lifestyle... things that I even struggle to explain. If you're just locked in a room with a virtually limitless supply of drugs, because the postman keeps bringing your supply and you have lots of money in the bank... you'd think you'd just take drugs and more drugs until you died or ran out of money.

In actual fact, addictions are self-limiting. Given a clean pure supply of drugs, eventually, addiction becomes kinda boring or the downsides start to outweigh the upsides.

I'm lucky, because I'm wealthy and I'm not a total dumbass. I tried so many drugs, and eventually found one that was far better than crack, heroin or crystal methamphetamine, but cost less than £1 a day.

I used to buy a packet of capsules off the Internet for £27. This was a legal high called "NRG-3", which turned out to be MDPV: I've nicknamed it supercrack. The packet contained 20 capsules, and each capsule had 100mg of MDPV in it. I would hide these capsules all over the house, so that I would never have to hunt for very long to get my fix, when the cravings became unbearable.

I would divide the 100mg contents of a capsule into 3 equal piles. Then, I would divide one of the piles into 2 lines. I would snort one of the lines, which would weigh approximately 17mg.

17mg of MDPV is a very strong dose. Basically, it's enough to be bat-shit insane for 24 hours. I would pretty much always end up going back for the second line... so that's 48 hours of insanity, with no sleep. I would go back to work for a rest.

120 days of bat-shit insanity for £27.

Cheap.

Deadly.

You spread 120 days over the weekends, and you've got 2 years worth of hiding a drug habit. If you do anything for 2 years, it becomes an integral part of your life. It's hard to change the habits of a lifetime. Again, you've gotta be smart and spot the changes in your behaviour.

I started cancelling plans, because a 1-day drug binge turned into a whole weekend drug binge.

I started not making any plans, because I was planning on taking drugs all weekend.

How the hell I held down a job during this time, I have no idea.

My psychiatrist and my GP thought I was self-medicating for depression. They thought I was in control. They actually told me "don't stop what you're doing... just try to cut down gradually". My GP signed me off work for 5 weeks, and I thought "great! I can take drugs for 4 weeks and then spend a week recovering".

It's true that my clinical depression and abusive relationship had led me to self medication, but when it became drug experimentation, I lost control over the course of a year. I started with a legal drug called Methylone, which I took every day and it worked to alleviate my depression. Then, when I found NRG-3 during a messy breakup, I was completely hooked.

Less than a month after becoming addicted to NRG-3, I started carrying a letter with me and a £20 note in an envelope. The letter said:

"I am a drug addict. If you have found me with breathing difficulties or unconscious, please put me in a taxi to A&E".

In actual fact, the letter was far more detailed and contained some information that would have been useful for any medical professionals who had the misfortune of trying to look after me... but you get the idea. The penny had dropped. I knew I was in trouble. Self-medication had turned into experimentation, which had unleashed addiction.

For others, there are 3 valuable lessons I learned:

  1. Depression, stress, relationship difficulties, money worries, housing worries: these are the things that create a festering swamp. Addiction will take hold, not because of the drugs, but because somebody's life is already awful. If you want to prevent addiction, you need to improve people's lives, not ban drugs.
  2. Even though it sounds disingenuous, it does make sense to shop around. Think about all those Oxycontin addicts who haven't yet figured out that heroin is stronger and cheaper. They're going to one day. How much money are they going to 'waste' in the meantime?
  3. Addictions are naturally self-limiting. People need to quit on their own terms. There's an oft-quoted line about how addicts and alcoholics "can never get enough of their drug of choice". In actual fact, very few people can actually afford to take as many drugs as they want. Look at the mega wealthy: aren't you surprised that so few of them drop dead from drug abuse?

Alcohol is a dumb choice of drug, because it's so damaging to the liver. In a way, benzos are the smart alternative. GHB/GBL makes you 'drunk' but it doesn't have the same hangover, and it's not so damaging to the body. You can buy 10 litres of "alloy wheel cleaner" from BASF in Germany for about £500. That's equivalent to 7,000 shots of vodka, and it won't give you cirrhosis of the liver.

Cocaine is a dumb drug of choice, because it's so expensive and the adulterants are highly damaging to the mucous membrane in your sinuses, to the point where you might lose your nose. You can buy nitracaine from China in bulk for just a few dollars per gram, and it'll be 99% pure.

Heroin is damn cheap. It's the injecting that causes the problems: collapsed veins, abscesses and dirty needles leading to blood-borne diseases. With an adequate supply of medical grade diamorphine, a heroin addict can live a long, healthy happy life, and will probably "grow out" of their habit in their 40s or 50s.

Crystal meth is cheap anyway. Smoking meth is undoubtably incredibly destructive to teeth and lungs. It sounds crazy to say this, but given an adequate supply, at least crime will go down and the need for prostitution goes away. With higher self-esteem because people are not selling their body to get drugs, surely a large number of addicts are going to stop using eventually?

I'm not saying "legalise all drugs and have your local supermarket stocking crystal meth". Drugs are so widely available and so cheap, we're at the point where prohibition is like a bad joke. Shutting the original Silk Road marketplace on the Dark Web just caused dozens more imitators to spring up and fill its place. You can't legislate to control human nature. It doesn't work. Supply and demand are the only forces that you need to understand.

If you have a loved one who you think is at risk of addiction, or struggling with addiction, you can prevent that journey from even starting by making their life vastly better so that addiction never takes hold. Once an addiction has started, you're not going to be able to cut it short by cutting off their supply of money or forcing them into some rehab program. An addict will simply go around any obstacle. An addict needs to quit on their own terms, when they've had enough.

Perhaps I will never have had enough, because perhaps my life will never improve. Certainly, when you're depressed, stressed, bored shitless by your job, worried about money, isolated and lonely... those things are perfect breeding conditions for addiction to take hold. Why the hell are you being clean & sober, if your clean & sober life is utter bullshit?

This is how I've arrived at the decision to start using drugs again.

Except, I'm being smart... I think. I think I'm smart. Correct me if I'm wrong. Am I smart?

What am I doing differently? Well, nothing really. I'm combining my experience from far too many years of ups, downs and dangerous self-experimentation. However, I have meticulously gathered data. I have documented pages and pages of details on my drug and medication use, and cross-correlated that with my mood diary, earnings, movement data and every other data source that I could harvest.

My conclusion: I need a fast-acting antidepressant that gives me a mood improvement.

So, I decided to prescribe myself Bupropion.

It arrived today.

I took it.

The experiment continues. It's a big relief to finally change something, after 6 painful months of controlling the variables, even though it was causing me untold mental anguish.

Actually, two things changed today, which is a shame, in terms of conducting a decent trial.

Today, I'm unemployed.

Anyway, I need to get another job, and it might just be a little easier, now that I have relented and I'm taking happy pills... let's see, shall we?

 

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Structure and Routine

9 min read

This is a story about unhealthy coping mechanisms...

Work shoes

I've been surviving on a combination of barely concealed loathing and contempt for my job, copious amounts of alcohol, occasional use of tranquillisers and a lot of passive-aggressive blogging. It seems to have worked, according to my bank balance and my CV.

In four months, I had one day off sick and a one-week holiday. That's not bad. Just 6 working days that I was unproductive. 1 out 82 working days unwell is only 1.2%.

It's been killing me in unusual ways though.

I've been comfort eating a lot. When I first started my contract, I was munching my way through loads of sweets and nuts at my desk. I was having a great big lunch. I was having cakes and pasties. I was having super-size meals at McDonalds. I was coming home and stuffing my face with crisps, ice cream and unhealthy meals.

I've been drinking far too much. To begin with, I was picking up a bottle of wine on my way home, every single day. I switched to beer because I could drink more of it, but there would be less alcohol in it. There's 94ml of alcohol in your average bottle of white wine. There's 75ml of alcohol in 3 cans of lager, even though the beer is double the volume. Then, things got out of control briefly. I was having two bottles of wine, or 6 cans of beer. The alcohol was a real problem, but then so was the job. Sobering up at my desk was a way of getting through the day.

Early on in my contract, I decided that I wasn't going to blog at work. I wanted to do my best to look busy. I didn't even want to surf the web and read the news websites that I like. I certainly didn't want to be looking at Facebook on my phone all day long. However, that just made things worse. Getting through the empty boring days was excruciating agony. By the time I got home, I was so relieved, but so stressed out, that I felt I needed alcohol to relax and face the next day.

Then, I started to read the news. I found myself constantly clicking refresh, willing something to happen. The summer months are fairly dreadful anyway. The politicians have gone off on holiday, the markets are quiet. Not a lot was going on. Brexit provided a very unhealthy obsession for a while, and I took great delight in trolling the closet racists and xenophobes. Post-Brexit was quite anti-climactic, and just tragic.

I decided that the only way that I was going to stay sane was to write 3 times a day. I was briefly mailing short stories that I was writing to a couple of friends. They helped to keep me sane by being the willing recipients of my bleak allegorical tales of wage slavery: read Alan the Alcoholic if you want to know what I mean.

Finally, I decided I would allow myself to blog at work. I had the additional problem of being told I could no longer use my personal MacBook and I would have to have some piece of shit PC "because data security" or whatever. Anyway, I then didn't have access to my photo library - I try to use images that I own the copyright for - and I didn't have Photoshop to be able to make high quality edits. There's also a slight worry about what kind of corporate spyware is watching what I'm doing.

Somehow, I've nearly limped through to the end of my contract, and I even managed to work my notice period, which is something I haven't done for 6 or 7 years. I'm even getting a couple of leaving dos, as opposed to being escorted off the premises by security (that's never actually happened, but things haven't been wrapped up 'neatly' in recent years).

Obviously, I'm on really dodgy ground, because I'm going to be looking for a new contract in a fortnight or so, and I suppose prospective new employers could stumble on my Twitter profile, Facebook page or this blog. So, to be sensible, I probably have to blog "nicey nicey" for a couple of weeks, so that all the juicy gossip is buried deeper than most miserable corporate drones would ever dig.

I'm not sure what the magic formula is for recovery from clinical depression / major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, substance abuse (dual diagnosis), borderline personality disorder, functional alcoholism and all the other labels that get bandied around. However, I'm pretty sure that it looks like this:

  • An absolute imperial fucktonne of cash. I mean LOADS.
  • Rest & recuperation. I don't just mean a couple of weeks. We're talking months or years
  • Surround yourself with addicts and people with mental health problems. Nobody else 'gets' it
  • Cut horrible toxic people out of your life
  • No compromise
  • Force yourself to do things you don't like very much
  • Do something that requires discipline and routine, and stick with it for months, if not years
  • Set yourself some achievable goals, where you're in control

That last one is probably the most important. I absolutely love the fact that I've been blogging for over a year, and I'm on track to write 365 blog posts and 450,000 words in less than 13 months. I've blogged from psychiatric hospital. I've blogged from San Francisco. I've blogged from a desert island off the coast of North Africa. I've blogged through a couple of projects from hell. I've blogged through depression. I've blogged through addiction. I've blogged through isolation. I've blogged through loneliness. I've blogged through suicidal thoughts and self harm.

The only thing I haven't quite done yet is to blog through happiness and contentment, but either that's coming or blogging is keeping me trapped in a certain mindset and stopping me moving on with my life.

I don't think writing like this is keeping me stuck in a rut. I can't imagine my life without writing now. Writing has become such a part of me. I'm more a writer than anything else. There's nothing else I live for, as much as writing. There's nothing else that I put as much passion and energy into. There's nothing else I'm as enthusiastic about.

I guess for many people, work is what defines them. "What do you do?" is the classic middle-class party icebreaker question, when meeting new people. What do you even say if you hate what you do, or you're flailing around to find something new? What should I say, on Thursday, when I'm out of a job again?

If I tell people I'm an IT consultant, that's slightly misleading, because that's a thing that I do just to get money when I'm desperate, and I won't even be consulting for any clients on Thursday, or for at least a fortnight or so after that.

However, I'm not going to stop writing when I finish my contract. I can't see me ever stopping writing, now I've started. What would I do with myself? How would I structure my day, without writing?

Obviously, writing is not a panacea, and it's a dangerous strategy to turn yourself into an open book. So many people will gleefully abuse your honesty, in order to gain a competitive advantage over you, put you down. So many people are looking for an excuse not to hire you, or to sack you. I'm giving my enemies all the ammunition they could possibly want.

However, isn't there something poetically wonderful about loading the gun, handing it to your enemy and turning your back on them? If they choose to shoot you in the back, with the bullet that you loaded in the weapon that you gave to them, isn't that going to eat away at them for the rest of their life?

Isn't there something exciting about deciding to say things that you're not allowed to say because of the conspiracy of silence? People are so afraid about becoming unemployable, and tainting their professional reputations. I almost want to start linking to this blog from my LinkedIn. Of course, every time I write the word "LinkedIn" the higher up the Google search index I will climb when somebody types "nick grant linkedin" into the little search box.

I'm not sure how much the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday routine has given my life some useful structure. I think, on balance, it's been more damaging to my mental and physical health to have a shitty project and an offshore team, than any benefit that I have gained by forcing myself to get out of bed every morning. I have no difficulty getting up and getting on with being productive, when I'm working on something that isn't mind-numbingly boring and depressing anyway.

The suffering has been worth it, financially, and with money comes opportunity: the opportunity to find something better to do with my limited time on the planet. Life is short: too short to be working a job that's like death itself.

Who knows how I'm going to feel when I wake up on Thursday. Will I feel elated, depressed, motivated, anxious?

I'm not exactly in a rush to get my CV out into the marketplace and find myself in another shitty contract. I want some time out, and I want to be more picky about the project I choose next time, even if I am still in a precarious financial situation. It's unwise to become complacent about your employability. Catastrophic market events can happen at any moment, and work can dry up overnight.

Will I be able to cut down my drinking, eat less, exercise more, or will the task of job hunting loom large and make me unbearably anxious? I certainly lost a lot of sleep during the week that my contract was terminated early and my flatmate revealed that he didn't have any money to pay his rent & bills for the 4th month running. Life's never straightforward, is it?

Health vs. wealth. That seems to be the battle that is being fought. Is it possible to have it all? Watch this space.

 

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Rolling Stone: a Picture Story

11 min read

This is a story about quicksand...

Koa Tree Camp

After being discharged from psychiatric hospital, what do you think you'd do next? Well, imagine that for months you have been travelling but you haven't been moving.

Things are not stable for me, no matter what my senses tell me. I go to the same office, looking at the same computer screen, surrounded by the same people, for months if not years on end. According to my senses I'm not moving anywhere.

However, my bank balance would tell a very different story. Just sitting mute in a chair, keeping my head down and being a perfect corporate drone who never rocks the boat, means that I am very rapidly travelling... financially. My body and mind don't really agree though.

My moods tell a very different story again. I don't necessarily notice seasonal effects and depression taking hold. I'm not fully able to tell when I'm getting hyped up and excessively involved in work or other projects. I'm not great at judging when it's time to take a break, either because I'm too down or too up.

It is unhealthy and unnatural that I work in the same place, doing the same thing, and working a job that moves at snail's pace. I just don't have the social life and hobbies at the moment to get any balance, let alone the financial means to travel, socialise and pursue pastimes with the usual gusto that I apply to everything.

What happens is that I become like a champagne cork. The pressure builds and builds, and then I explode with frustration.

My journey began with a two week stay in a psychiatric hospital, because I was so beaten down by the task of getting myself off the streets, back from the brink of bankruptcy, beating addiction, working on a massively important high-pressure project, renting an apartment, moving house for the zillionth time, and then realising that I was in an unsustainable situation: I needed to get rid of a 'friend' who thought he'd live with me rent free and get pocket money: for what reason he thought he deserved that, I'm not even sure. I also needed to quit a horrible contract that just wasn't worth the sleepless nights.

Next thing I knew, I was sleeping in a Mongolian yurt in Devon.

Hitchikers

Then, I was surfing and hitch-hiking in Cornwall. Hitch-hiking is surprisingly hard, it turns out. Hitch-hiking is a bad way to get around if you have to be in a certain place at a certain time. I'd hitch-hiked once before, earlier in the year, in Ireland, but it turns out the Irish are a lot more friendly, helpful and trusting than the British, based on my anecdotal evidence.

Back in London after my Westcountry adventure, I still felt overwhelmed by depression and the feeling that I was trapped by my job. I had a lovely trip, but it had been very short and coming home was very anti-climactic. I knew I needed to quit my job, but I didn't quite have the guts to terminate a very lucrative contract.

I had made a plan a couple of months prior, to shame HSBC by sleeping rough in Canary Wharf, right by their headquarters. I found it deliciously ironic that they had inadvertently helped one of their customers to avoid bankruptcy, escape homelessness and generally improve their financial situation. I had no doubt that if they'd done their due diligence on me, then I would never have been employed to work on their number one project. I was planning on getting my contract terminated for no reason other than I cared about my job and was trying to do the right thing: acting with ethics and integrity.

But, I still had the contract like a millstone around my neck. I was desperately trapped and depressed about it.

I decided to fly to San Francisco and go to the Golden Gate Bridge. I wanted to illustrate how the desperation of my situation had driven me to contemplate suicide. I also wanted to go because I had planned to go 3 years earlier, but my parents had reneged on a promise and generally conspired to pull the rug out from under my feet at a time when I was terribly vulnerable. What they did was an awful thing, and I wanted to take that trip that I never got to make, because of their horrible behaviour.

I booked a flight for approximately 4 hours' time, packed a bag and left immediately. It's the most impulsive thing I've ever done in my life.

London Heathrow

In San Francisco, a friend kindly picked me up and I dumped my bags at her house. I then borrowed a bike and rode to the Golden Gate Bridge. Less than 24 hours had elapsed since deciding to travel 5,351 miles. I stood in a jetlagged and travel weary state, peering over the edge, looking at the perilous drop to the sea below.

Travel, novelty, adventure, excitement, old friends, social contact, good weather... all of these things are the perfect antidote to depression. Who knew that the prospect of being chained to the same damn desk, in the same damn office, doing the same damn work you've done for 19 years, could lead to a tiny twinge of "Fuck My Life".

Obviously, the whole dumping your bags at your friends' place and then going off and killing yourself thing would be poor social etiquette. Plus I'd arranged to see an old schoolfriend while I was in San Francisco. The potential for positive experiences was massive. In the office, I had found myself hoping for a fire drill just because it would be slightly novel.

Grant Avenue

I'm no dumbass. I know it's important to stop and smell the roses. But, there isn't the time, energy or motivation to do so when you're trapped in the rat race.

In San Francisco I took delight in the simplest of things, like taking a selfie of myself by a road sign that matches my surname. I didn't even do any specific sightseeing or look at a map. I took a trolleycar because I saw one passing. I found myself by landmark buildings, just because I stumbled on them. I walked miles and miles.

My AirBnB host invited me out to a Halloween party. I dressed up. We drove to some house near Mountain View, where there were fascinating Silicon Valley tech people to meet from Google and Apple. That kind of shit generally doesn't happen when you're depressed working your desk job.

I got a tattoo to piss my parents off. My sister has several tattoos and my parents are always giving her a hard time about them. I thought that getting a tattoo would be some gesture of solidarity with my sister, and my parents would have to give both of us a hard time for having one. It was also a kind of souvenir from the trip, and a bit of reminder that I was going to try and stay in the land of the living for a little longer.

I caught up with a schoolfriend who I hadn't seen for years and years. He was supposed to be a mentor on a startup accelerator that I did in 2011, but he'd had to move back to California. It was great to see him, in the Mission district of San Francisco, even if we only had the briefest of time to catch up. Precious moments.

Meeting my friends' second child, and hanging out at their house reading stories to their eldest. Going with the kids to the science museum and playing with the interactive exhibits. Still etched in my mind.

Getting a glimpse into family life, valley startup life, California life... special.

Hanging out with some of the people who I have so much respect and love for... priceless.

I tried to provoke HSBC into terminating my contract immediately, by sending truthful emails, saying things that needed to be said, but were blatantly above my pay grade. Sadly, the mark of a corporate drone is somebody who's completely gutless and two-faced. They emailed me to say they just wanted to have a "routine chat" with me when I got back. No matter how hard I pushed, they wouldn't admit that my contract was effectively terminated, which is what I wanted so I could stay in the USA longer.

Bournemouth Pier

I came home. I went into the office and exploited the fact that nobody would be straight with me. I kinda got my goodbyes from everybody, even though they were "great to see you back in the office" but only those who were nice genuine people seemed to be unaware that the long knives were drawn. I loved the look of shock on the faces of those whose incompetence I had exposed.

I shaved my stupid beard and kept my moustache, because it was now November. There's no greater pleasure than having your contract terminated from a 'straight' job, when you're wearing a stupid moustache and you have a tattoo. This was all part of the plan in preparation for the sleeping rough by HSBC headquarters anyway.

Then, I was deflated again.

It'd been a helluva journey. Psychiatric hospital, Devon, Cornwall, Mongolian yurts, surfing, hitch-hiking, sleeping on the floor of New York's JFK airport, cycling over the Golden Gate Bridge, sightseeing in Silicon Valley, old friends, nice work colleagues, miserable office drones, contract termination... relax!

Bonfire night - November 5th - I was still pretty hyped up. For some reason I decided that I wanted to whizz around London giving out brightly coloured cardboard stars. I think I spent 90 minutes from conceiving the idea, to then whizzing round London sticking stickers on stuff, giving out stars, losing my luggage and generally careering out of control somewhat. That was classic hypomania. What gets held down must go up. It was such a relief to be released from my soul-destroying contract that the nervous energy almost demanded to be released by doing something crazy.

I decided I needed to see some neglected UK friends. I zoomed down to Bournemouth and stayed in the Royal Bath Hotel by the pier. I met up with one of my most loyal friends, and met his son, caught up with him and his wife, saw their house. I caught up with another friend. Friends who had offered to take me kitesurfing didn't materialise, but it didn't matter... I'd already had a very action-packed trip.

Sleep Out

Then, finally, the night of the sleep out came. Lots of things got conflated in my mind: "Hacking" humanity, Techfugees, homelessness, bankruptcy, HSBC's unethical behaviour, soul-destroying bullshit jobs and the unbelievably erratic, exhausting, stressful path I had taken to reach that point.

I always knew that keeping moving is the answer to staying alive, but there's so much financial incentive to be trapped into a chair, chained to a desk, not moving anywhere, not doing anything, not talking to anybody.

As I burnt through my money on rent and bills over the winter months, I knew the day would come when I'd have to go back into the rat race, and it depressed the hell out of me. By Christmas Day I was in a pretty shitty state. By New Year's Eve I was cutting my arms with a razor blade.

For the last 4 months, I've sat at my desk, not saying anything. For the last 4 months, I haven't rocked the boat, I haven't tried to improve anything, I haven't tried to do a good job. For the last 4 months, I've kept a low profile. My bosses couldn't be more pleased. My bank balance is much improved. In theory, my mental health should have done something but it doesn't feel like my mood's done anything but sink.

How am I supposed to reconcile the drudgery of the rat race with the excitement of the crazy tale that led me here? When I look back 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, things were very different. Are things better? It doesn't feel like it.

I'm still not moving, I'm not travelling. I still don't have my needs met.

If I want to survive, I need to be moving. It's not sustainable for me to stagnate. I wasn't built to just sit and rot at a desk.

If I stop moving, I sink into the quicksand.

 

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21 Days to Go

6 min read

This is a story about clock watching...

September 21

In 3 weeks' time I celebrate a year of blogging [almost] every day as well as 6 months 'clean' (whatever that means). I'll have pretty much proven my point that stress, anxiety, depression, hypomania, addiction, homelessness, destitution, social isolation and every other ailment that threatens every single one of us, can be swept under the carpet.

My life is hideously painful: basically, Fuck My Life.

Nothing has any purpose or any meaning. To volunteer at a soup kitchen makes a mockery of everything, if the vital exercise of feeding the homeless is seen as a fucking hobby. To spawn children because it's fulfilling to nurture things, is to ignore the fact that there are already plenty of hungry mouths, the planet is fucked and existence is pain and suffering.

I'm going to continue until the 21st of September, keeping everything the same, in the hope that my depression will somehow lift. I doubt that my mood will improve without medication, or impoverishing myself by setting myself on collision course with destitution and homelessness again. Who wants to be functional in a dysfunctional society?

On the 21st of September, I have to make a choice: whether to continue for another couple of months, to possibly reach financial security and wealth again. Would loosening of the purse strings and retail therapy make life more palatable? It's distasteful to say that money brings happiness, but it's obvious that lack of money brings stress and anxiety.

Through comfort eating and alcohol, I'm limping along. My waistline is suffering and I'm getting quite depressed about my physique too. It's a vicious cycle, because depression is one of the reasons why I feel so drained and unable to stay active. You might think that a boring day at work should leave plenty of energy to do other things, but in fact quite the opposite is true: it's so draining being bored all day.

It doesn't make any sense that I'm so exhausted and depressed. I do all the right things: good sleep hygiene, good diet, good routine. I do a lot of walking, some cycling. I occasionally see friends or have a little more interaction with my work colleagues than the bare minimum. I'm working my job, saving my money, paying down my debts. I'm a model fucking citizen.

Yes, a lot of people find their lives mundane and boring, but if those people are as desperately suicidal as I am, then society is about to collapse at any moment, because I'm always just on the brink of either drawing the curtains and going to bed for 2 months, killing myself or running away, where nobody can send me a fucking bill or harass me on the telephone. If there are vast swathes of people who think like that, because they have a modest dislike of the rat race, society is utterly fucked and why the hell aren't they speaking up?

I had no choice but to speak up. I could have died in silence, misunderstood, and with people keen to mis-label me. At least by recording my thoughts and feelings in great detail, I have a fighting chance of dealing with hateful people who would wish me buried as a madman and an addict, even though I can clearly be neither if I'm holding down a highly desirable job, paying my rent, paying my bills. Can't anybody see that the attempts to pigeon hole people are ridiculous, insulting and desecrate the memory of those who can't stand the bullshit any longer?

I steer clear of talking about conspiracies, because that's the hallmark of somebody who has succumbed to paranoia. When a mind implodes, the vultures of organised religion swoop on the poor fool, and fill their head with all kinds of falsehoods about deities and miracles. Sometimes, when a person's grip on reality is loosened by the relentless hardships of life, they will start believing that the universe is conspiring against them. Even though we are ruled by cruel and evil plutocrats with insatiable greed, no conspiracy could really work successfully to control 7 billion people.

Instead, we are collectively the architects of our own demise. Every time we say "I was just following orders", "I was just doing what I was told" and "I was just doing what everybody else was doing" we illustrate the fact that we hide behind pathetic excuses for behaviour that is to the detriment of the greater good. In the relentless pursuit of the impossible dream that we might one day be elevated from struggle and poverty, we actually collectively enslave each other.

My aim is to play by the rules, so that I can die with integrity. I aim to cut away from the mainstream as soon as I have reached the point of break-even. To become fixated with the unattainable goal of 'getting ahead' is to make myself a lifelong slave. Who gives a shit if I can retire fabulously wealthy, if I gave away my youth and my health so cheaply?

And so, I watch the clock tick down. I'm just killing time. All I'm doing is waiting. Waiting for the day that I can show that my point is proven: yes, it's possible to look like a fine upstanding member of the community, wearing my smart suit and going to work in a fancy office. It's possible to be valued immensely by the capitalist system, and very well remunerated. It's possible to do without drugs & alcohol. It's possible to do without doctors, medications and psychotherapists. Then, with everything we supposedly hold dear in life, I reject it all because I think it's morally wrong to prop up a corrupt system that enslaves so many.

The end of the collective insanity can only come to an end, when individuals are brave enough to vote with their feet and risk their lives and their livelihoods.

So many poor fools are buying lottery tickets and working dead-end careers hoping for a promotion that will elevate them from a position of financial insecurity, into a tolerable situation. This mistaken belief that there's some pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is akin to the donkey that keeps trudging along to try and get the carrot that's suspended just out of reach... always just out of reach.

You've got to pay to play, and you have to run just to stand still. Even the homeless are criminalised. Anybody who doesn't conform is bullied and tortured. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.

At some point, it's time to give up.

 

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Right to Die

17 min read

This is a story about euthanasia...

Nick at work

I need to cover what I'm about to write with a hefty preamble, full of caveats and other disclaimers, because there are so many considerations with this issue, but it's an issue I need to tackle.

Firstly, let's consider this: nobody really wants to die.

For people who are in pain and other kinds of physical discomfort, or are otherwise afflicted by diseases, injuries or genetic problems that mean their quality of life is terrible, or certainly going to end up terrible: these people do not want to die. Those people would dearly love for a cure or some kind of relief from their symptoms that doesn't come with intolerable side effects.

Clearly people who want to prematurely end their lives in a dignified manner, have exhausted all treatment options, and their future looks bleak: pain, discomfort, infirmity, senility and disability.

Alzheimers and other kinds of incurable degenerative brain diseases carry the added worry that the sufferer will no longer be of a sound and rational mind when the illness reaches its late stages, and they will burden their carers, while perhaps not even being able to recognise their loved ones any more.

Let's also consider this: some people have hope, while others do not.

Yes, there's always a chance of a miracle cure. Yes, there's always a 1-in-a-trillion shot that God might personally intervene to remove the horrible afflictions that he originally cursed you with.

Most people love life and can't bear the thought of being torn from the arms of their loved ones. Most people cry out in fear, when they think they're about to die. Most people fight to survive.

There are people who have gone through many bouts of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, transplants and who take bucketloads of medications with horrible side effects, and generally battle through awful sickness and pain, holding out hope that their ailments will be at least treated well enough to prolong their lives a little longer.

Some people might spend a long time on a transplant list, barely surviving, while oxygen and dialysis just about preserve them while they wait for a donor match. An agonising race against time happens: will a donor arrive before the illness kills the poor helpless person who can only sit and wait?

I feel like I should use softer language, to cushion the blows for every person who's lost a child, parent, friend, partner, relative. Death is painful, and all the more so knowing that a person had so much more life left in them. Death can be so cruel. People so deserving of more life can be snatched away, while others who are seemingly careless with the gift of life can seem so selfish and ungrateful for their good fortune to have been spared by the gods.

And it's the ungrateful ones I want to talk about.

What do you do with the alcoholic who 'wants' to drink themself to death? What do you do with a suicidal person?

The footballer George Best famously received a liver transplant, and then proceeded to court controversy when he was caught drinking again. Instead of demonstrating his gratitude for his stay of execution, by becoming teetotal, he was clearly the same person - ungrateful for life some might say - as he was before he received an organ donation.

What do you do with somebody who is determined to kill themself? Do you put them in a straightjacket and keep them in a padded cell indefinitely, just so that they can die of old age in an asylum?

It might be the case that a suicidal person is in perfectly good physical health and does not abuse drugs or alcohol, but they are nonetheless determined to end their own life prematurely.

There's a general belief that telling people that their lifestyle is much akin to suicide, will curtail their health-damaging behaviour. Doctors mostly seem to take the route of saying "if you keep drinking, you're going to die young" to alcoholics. While most people would think that this would shock somebody into cutting down their drinking, in fact there's little evidence that it has any affect at all.

Similarly, telling suicidal people "you've got so much to live for" and "it's just your depression telling you lies" and other statements that make perfect sense to people who are not suicidal, is also ineffective. The only thing that has proven somewhat effective - as far as short 12-week studies paid for by pharmaceutical companies can tell - is psychoactive medication.

Smoking causes many preventable diseases, and is a big killer, but yet people still choose to smoke even though it's expensive, makes you smell and stains your teeth. You would have thought that the large "SMOKING KILLS" health warnings on packets would cause people to stop smoking immediately, but no.

You know what one of the most effective smoking cessation treatments is? It's the antidepressant called Wellbutrin (marketed as stop-smoking drug Zyban and generically known as Bupropion).

Why would an antidepressant be a good treatment for smokers? Well, let's consider two things: firstly, people smoke because they're missing something. Take smoking away, and a smoker's life is now incomplete. Removing nicotine and the habit/ceremony of smoking leaves a void in that person's life. Also, you've got to be fairly depressed to do something that's clearly a threat to your health, and possibly your life.

Wellbutrin is a fast-acting antidepressant, unlike anything we can get on the NHS. Instead of making people feel sleepy and emotionally numbed, Wellbutrin has been proven to offer a number of improvements in the lives of patients, including their sex lives. Wellbutrin is France's most popular antidepressant.

What do you really want from an antidepressant, other than to relieve your symptoms of depression now when you're feeling it? Being told that a medication might take 6 to 8 weeks to become effective, and then having to suffer your symptoms that whole time while you're waiting is no use at all! Some depressions will lift naturally after a month or two anyway.

But what goes up must come down. After some weeks or months taking Wellbutrin, many patients experience panic attacks and insomnia. Plus there's the obvious problem of having to stop taking the medication at some point, and suffering the comedown (sorry, I mean withdrawal syndrome).

Yes, the difference between 'drugs of abuse' and 'prescribed psychoactive medications' is precisely zero. Every medication that has an upside also has a downside. Addiction and habituation with prescription medications is just as much of a problem as with street drugs. The only difference is medical oversight and quality control.

And so, I arrive at the situation where I'm perfectly well aware that I can get short-term relief for the symptoms of my depression, in the form of a pill from my doctor. However, I'm equally aware that to go down that road is to have a lifetime dependence on medication for my sense of wellbeing. Basically, do I want to be a medically sanctioned drug addict? None of the stigma, but all of the same behaviours.

You're right, I wouldn't have to lie, cheat or steal to feed my habit. I can wander into my pharmacist, and get my uppers over the counter, and carry on like I'm a fine upstanding member of the community. Did you know that even heroin addicts are completely functional members of society, when they can get a clean high quality supply of the opiates they need? When doctors in the UK used to prescribe heroin, there were none of the antisocial problems that we instinctively associate with drug abuse today.

Of course, I'm not advocating drug abuse, but then I'm also pointing out that the flaws that afflict a smoker, a drinker, a junkie and even a depressed person... they're all rooted in the same psychological need to cure an invisible illness.

Pretty soon, I will have spent a year where over 75% of the time I was using no psychoactive substances at all, except for alcohol. A period of 115 consecutive days - 32% of the year - I was completely teetotal. For the whole year I had no tea, coffee, cola, energy drinks, or caffeine containing headache pills (more common than you think). I'm completely unmedicated.

How do I feel? Awful.

It seems to me like I have a choice: suicidal depression, or drugs (i.e. medication, coffee & alcohol etc.)

I know that a scientific study with one participant tells us nothing, but equally I'm not a group, I'm me. You can't dismiss my individual findings, that are true for me. I've gathered the data during a 20 year career, and I've come to the conclusion that my life is unliveable in its current form.

When you are conducting a scientific study, you have to control the variables. Thankfully, I'm an ideal test subject for this.

Since the age of 17, I've been a very well paid software engineer. For sure, during the first couple of years it took me a while to get my salary up to a decent level, but since the age of 19 I've never had to worry about money. Also, I've done pretty much the same thing for all my career: sitting at a desk, tapping on a keyboard, making software.

I've had the same running crisis my whole career. When I was 19, I was bored so I applied to university and was offered places at some very prestigious institutions to study psychopharmacology. I decided to stick with the money, and keep selling my soul to the highest bidder.

When I was 28, depression had crushed me to the point I was on my knees and unable to turn up and do the same office bullshit anymore. I retrained as an electrician and started my own company.

Man with van

As a self-employed tradesman, I loved what I did, but I was grossly underpaid for the level of responsibility I had. Ordinary members of the public think that tradesmen are out to rip them off. In reality tradesmen are highly trained professionals whose job it is to stop houses burning down and families being electrocuted or poisoned by carbon monoxide.

The freedom of not having a boss, not having a 9 to 5, Monday to Friday routine, and not having to sit in the same damn chair at the same damn desk, pushing the same damn 102 keys on the same goddam keyboard... all of those things are just as great as they sound. However, getting paid peanuts to do dangerous dirty work is also not great either.

And so, I returned to what I'm experienced and qualified to do.

I earn staggering amounts of cash for moving my mouse around and looking busy at a desk. However, I used to earn £470 per day when I was 20 years old, doing computer programming for Lloyds TSB back in the year 2000. My job is exactly the same today, doing the same damn computer code for HSBC, JPMorgan, Barclays or any other damn bank.

But maybe the problem's banking? Nope. I've written computer code for nuclear submarines, torpedos, school computer networks, trains, parking ticket machines, busses, security guards, shop assistants and just about every other weird and wonderful industry you can think of. I've written in dozens of programming languages, for dozens of operating systems, on dozens of form factors. It's all the fucking same binary 1s and 0s and boolean algebra under the covers. All code is made from the same nuts and bolts. It's fucking boring.

And so, I can be a miserable exploited worker on a low wage, doing something I take pride in but knowing that I'm undervalued. I can be an overpaid and underworked software developer / scrum master / development manager / IT director. I can be a stressed out startup founder working my arse off to line the pockets of the venture capitalists who are going to get filthy rich at the expense of my health. I can be a destitute bum, a tramp, a hobo. Which would YOU choose?

I particularly object to the idea that I have to drug myself up, just to fit in with the bullshit jobs economy. I object to having to be high on antidepressants just to be able to cope with the same bunch of fucktards making the same fucking mistakes I've seen a million times over, in the job that I've mastered and brings in obscene amounts of cash. I object to having to be high on anxiety medication, to cope with the insecurity faced by the underpaid and undervalued front-line members of society who build your houses, look after you in hospital, grow your food and perform every other truly useful function that we need.

Even to work in civil engineering would frustrate the hell out of me. Crossrail, the multi billion dollar project improve London's cross-capital transportation, is rather pointless because it will be at full capacity on the day it opens, because London is already packed full of idle fucktards like me, clogging up the world with pointless makework jobs. Do we really need any more offices and office workers? Do we really need any more service sector jobs? Do we really need such a bloated financial services sector, with its equally parasitic support industries of corporate law and accounting? It's all such utter bullshit.

And so, I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't.

In my 20 years of full time work, I've become worn down with it all. I'm exhausted. I've tried a number of things, and I find that bullshit prevails everywhere I look. My heart is broken by all the bullshit that trumps everything else.

I'm exhausted, and I'm depressed and I'm suicidal.

Yes, I know some people are grateful for their lives and what little quality of life they can squeeze out of their existence. Yes, I know that I have good physical health and I'm reasonably young still. Yes, I know that there'd a queue that stretches around the planet, of people who would love to have my job.

So, if I choose to reject all that and end my life because I feel like I have no quality of life, is that morally wrong?

You can't even level the accusation of me that I don't know suffering, and I don't know poverty. I've lived homeless in a park, destitute, penniless and surviving on charitable food donations. I've woken up in hospital numerous times in pain and discomfort. I've had numerous scrapes with death. Shouldn't all that stuff make me grateful to be alive? Guess what? You have absolutely no idea. Guess what else, I have a very good idea, because it's already all happened to me.

I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I went to state comprehensive schools. I wasn't gifted jobs by any friend or family member. I had no head start in life. It's true that I have no obvious disability or disadvantage either, unless you count a couple of drug addict alcoholic parents, but I still had other family members, teachers and friends who were nice to me. It's not a fucking competition. The point is that the variables are controlled. I neither had advantage nor disadvantage, but yet I arrived at this point, here, now, today.

It's not like we can say this is just a short-term crisis. Like this will fucking blow over.

It's not going to blow over. For 20 fucking years it's been the same. The same shit, different day.

Yes, there were times that were actually pretty good, but guess what... they weren't sustainable. I liked living in a hostel with a bunch of other homeless people. I liked not having a job and being a bum. I liked having no responsibilities. Who wouldn't? But that's not real life. We don't get to have a freebie just because 'real' life is killing us. It still cost £120 a week for my bunk bed in a dormitory that slept 15 people, with one fucking bathroom between us all. My current rent is only £240 a week and for that I get a double bedroom, an ensuite bathroom, a kitchen, a dining room, a dual-aspect lounge with panoramic views over London and a balcony overlooking the river Thames.

I should be happy, but I'm not. Happiness is not a choice, no matter what you read on some bullshit Internet meme inspirational quote.

All the right pieces are in place. My doctors are chuffed to bits that I don't drink, smoke, abuse drugs or in any way engage in health damaging behaviours. My blood pressure is amazing. My cholesterol is low. My eyesight, hearing, teeth, joints... all of it is perfect.

And yet, my mental health is in ruins. I'm so depressed. I'm so suicidal.

I'm doing everything right, and yet everything feels so wrong.

Of course I feel guilty for feeling like this. What the fuck am I supposed to do though?

Honestly, I feel like I want to spend the next 30 days convincing people that the most humane thing is to let me end my life. Honestly, despite the things that should be really great in my life, nothing feels great. Nothing feels good or nice. Nothing works. Nothing is working.

There's still the possibility of just running away and absenting myself from all responsibility, but then when I'm dirty and sick from a life of destitution... when I die then, will anybody understand? A tramp, a bum, a hobo, a junkie, an alkie... these people are all too easily dismissed by society.

What happens when highly paid banking IT consultants start dying? Well if they're white middle class thirtysomething men... not much. Who cares? Probably just a selfish socialite, having a tantrum because they can't do whatever they want, one newspaper article basically said, in the wake of one death.

What the fuck is anybody supposed to do about this fucked up life that we're supposed to live?

I really don't feel like I can live this bullshit rat race anymore, and the alternative is a long slow death, shunned by society and marginalised.

In the long run, we're all fucking dead anyway.

Apologies if I'm triggering raw and painful feelings about your beloved family member or friend who is busily fighting for survival, or who lost their battle. I really don't mean things disrespectfully, but I can't lie anymore. I feel this stuff and it's undeniable.

Call me narcissistic needy spoilt white middle class brat if you like, if it'll make you feel better. It certainly won't make me feel any worse, but isn't that so terribly melodramatic and attention seeking?

Can you understand, how exhausting it is, having to justify your feelings and apologise for wanting to be dead the whole fucking time?

It's a one-way ticket and for sure it needs careful thought, but aren't we being a bit unfair, shutting down the conversation by guilt-tripping people into hiding their feelings? Perhaps suicide is a smart choice for people who feel that they have no quality of life.

 

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102 Blog Posts : A Sleepless Night

3 min read

This is a story about tireless commitment...

London sunset

I came up with a list of 102 titles of blog posts that I wanted to write something about. I wrote a few of them, but the vast majority are in the waiting room. I'm terribly frustrated that those ideas and feelings are circling with nowhere to go. If you haven't already got the idea... this whole blog is somewhere where my pent-up frustrations are being expressed.

Actually, confession time: this whole blog is where I work out the whole live vs. die decision in real time, right in front of your very eyes.

Now, despite being somewhat tipsy from end-of-working-week indulgence in alcohol, I've decided at 2:19am to do a kind of live-blog as I attempt to make sure that I've covered off all 102 topics that are on my list.

Why would I do this?

Well, it's quite simple: I'm stalked by suicidal thoughts during most of my waking hours. I can't be too close to a sharp knife, a London bus or an underground train without thinking about the oblivion of suicide. This is alarmist language, but the reality is with me every moment of the day: I'm struggling to find the energy and enthusiasm to go on living.

Anhedonia - the complete lack of reward from all normal activities - has sucked the life from within me, and I feel like a mime artist doing a performance with no idea why it delights my audience. Life is brutal. From the moment I wake up to the moment I pass out, I'm asking myself "why bother?".

Yes it's melodramatic etcetera. Basically: fuck you. Goodbye.

I present to you, now, a string of live blog posts that attempt to catch up on the backlog of writing that I have not been able to pursue given my bullshit job. Due to said bullshit job, I've not been able to write the bulk of 102 blog posts that explain my existential crisis, and resolve the unreconcilable difference between what I experience and know intuitively to be worthwhile, and the horse shit that seems to bring cold hard cash into my bank balance.

I wait. Tick follows tock. I patiently wait for my moment to express my frustration at the structure and routine of human existence.

This is a fucking time capsule. Clearly, I have somewhat lost my grip on 'reality' but I don't give a fuck anymore. This is life and fucking death. These are the last acts of a crazed lunatic. This is the evidence for the postmortem.

Enjoy.

 

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Biggest Killer of Men Under 45

4 min read

This is a story about lies, damn lies and statistics...

Blood Poppies

What do you think the main cause of death is for men under the age of 45? Road traffic accidents? Infectious diseases? Cancer? Industrial accidents? Drug abuse? Murder? War? Terrorism? Starvation? Auto-erotic asphyxiation?

It's suicide.

It's well documented that the number of people dying in wars has dropped immensely in the last hundred years. The number of people dying of starvation has nosedived in just the last 40 or 50 years. In theory, we are living in a time of peace and plenty.

At its peak in the 20th century, death by starvation never exceeded 1% of the population. Most people were not starving to death. The 60 million soldiers and civilians who died in World War II accounted for 2.6% of the population, but 12.5 million babies were also born in that period.

Even for your grandparents and great grandparents, the chances of dying through war or starvation were surprisingly slim.

But what are the chances of you buying some land, building a house, having a job or some project to work on where you feel happy and fulfilled? What are the chances of meeting a nice girl and settling down and having some kids, living close to your family, near where you grew up? What are the chances that you'll be able to stay on top of your finances, and have the things you need for you and your family? What are the chances that you'll have the basic essentials you need in your bio-psycho-social world?

You would have thought that now we have the high-yield agricultural techniques to grow all the food that we need, and we have the means of mass producing everything else, we should be free to pursue arts and education. We should be released from the need to do bullshit jobs. We should be freed from the prison of the office.

The benefits of working part-time are unquestionable. Not working at all is arguably bad for you, because the structure, routine and socialisation of working is good to keep the brain ticking over, but working 5 days a week or more is counterproductive.

Empirically, it has been proven that the same productivity can be achieved in a 3 day week as a 5 day week. There is so much 'padding' and pointless time wasting, as we attempt to spin out our bullshit jobs to last all day, all week. The jobs are utter bullshit anyway. There isn't going to be any less food on the table or fewer houses built because some social media marketing person didn't tweet enough, or some corporate lawyer or accountant didn't turn up for work.

Wars galvanise whole nations into action and hunger is something that cannot be ignored. The drive to fight and protect, hunt and gather, build shelter... these things are instinctive, and human.

However, there is no instinct to put on a shirt and tie and go and sit at a desk for 7 or 8 hours staring out of the window, bored out of your mind.

The link between going to work, getting paid your salary, and then using that salary to pay your rent, buy food and drive your kids to school is a very tenuous one. For sure, once you've got skin in the game you're utterly fucked and you just have to go along with what everybody else is doing, no matter how insane it is. You can't rock the boat when you're living a hand-to-mouth existence where you're never more than one or two months away from being evicted or having your home repossessed (i.e. mortgage foreclosure).

In the UK, 8.6 million people live with Damocles sword hanging over them... just one missed paycheque would see them unable to pay their rent or mortgage, putting them at risk of homelessness.

The pressure is ridiculous, and although the chance of you dying by war or famine is really small, the chance of you ever escaping the rat race is also really small. You hate your stressful shitty life where you've got absolutely no hope of ever getting ahead. You'll never escape the stress and relentless bullshit. Why wouldn't suicide become a more and more attractive option?

This is what we're seeing. There is no hope for people, but there is a mountain of stress and anxiety.

Depression rates are soaring. There is a mental health epidemic that is raging out of control.

Were we born to just pay bills and then die? Is that much of a life?

 

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