This is a story about human connection...

I try to use photos that are a metaphor for what I'm going to write about. I was thinking that the yo-yo could represent mood fluctuations, but I actually think of it more as an autonomous puppet on the end of a string.

I've been feeling like I've lost my way. I've certainly felt like I've pushed just about everybody away that I possibly can. After the 'big confession' around Christmas time, I've felt like I've been fighting to clear my name, to explain and justify myself, my actions, my thoughts.

Obviously paranoia is sometimes a product of drug abuse, and I can certainly see that my brain was getting more and more destroyed as January became February, and then March, and the self destruction was still continuing unabated.

Actually, last night when I went back and reviewed the 214,000 words that I have written to date, I could really see a frightening degradation of my capability to think and express myself, progressing over those 3 months. What shocked me most was how coherent I was in January, and how incoherent I was in March. For some reason, I had imagined that I had been 'on the mend' for a lot longer that just 7 weeks.

I'm acutely aware that the gibberish that I was spouting, plus the repetitive angry rants and axe grinding, made my writing virtually unreadable. I'm still coming to terms with the fact that I've got this bitterness that's still coming out in a very unhealthy and unpleasant way. I'm not sure why I'm still so raw, tender and full of anger and pent-up aggression about things that happened a long time ago.

I think there's a massive amount of insecurity I'm experiencing at the moment, having 'confessed' my darkest secrets, and I now feel very exposed. I feel unlovable. I feel like a failure. I feel like all the things I've been trying very hard to convince people I'm not. I notice that the harder I attack those who I pin blame onto, the more unpleasant I become myself, which shames me.

If you imagine what my life is right now: trying to fight a drug addiction that has nearly claimed my life on a couple of occasions, trying to get a job and get back into a sustainable routine, anxious about servicing my debts and paying my rent & bills, with no income. I'm doing this with a supportive flatmate and another friend, but that's pretty much it... for months, this is the only human face-to-face contact I've had.

I had about 20 voicemails I hadn't listened to. When you get into a financially distressed situation you don't really listen to voicemails or answer the phone. It's too much stress.

My mum had left me about 6 messages that were all berating me for not being emotionally available to her, for support and to dump on. Sure, the family is going through some turbulent times, but my own name might easily be added to the list of casualties. Death is closer than you think.

I think about committing suicide every day.

Tags: #bipolar #suicide #parents #addiction

This is a story about getting out of practice...

My friend Ben taught me how to program a computer when we were kids. I floundered on my own for a while when our family moved away from Oxford, to Dorset, but eventually I had managed to write a couple of computer games before I even had any proper lessons at school and college.

I've been a professional programmer for the best part of 20 years, but my recent ups and downs really hurt my confidence, and also meant that my skills got a bit rusty. It is a little bit like riding a bike, but the jargon changes and the syntax of what you have to type looks subtly different, but it's all still the same binary ones and zeros underneath the covers.

I nearly had a meltdown today, when I was set a programming test that's the sort of thing that you'd give to a first year Computer Science student. I feel a little insulted that I'm being asked to do things like that, when I've got such a strong CV. However, IT is riddled with managers, architects and other people who haven't touched code for years and years. I guess it's a test to see if you can roll your sleeves up and get hands on or not.

I'm getting really worried that there's a tech bubble that's going to burst, and bring down the whole economy. When I think that there are so many jobs that are centred around social media marketing, digital campaigns and mining the vast amounts of data that are gathered about website users and their browsing habits... it's all a lot of bullshit. At the end of the day, people have lost sight of the fundamental principle of creating products and services that add value to the real economy.

Why is it that a company can have a massive valuation and raise loads of money, just because the number of people using their website is growing exponentially? Why is it that a bank, or other financial services company, can be one of the most profitable enterprises in the world, when they don't actually produce anything of tangible value? The markets are just supposed to route money efficiently around the real economy, to grease the wheels of commerce.

I started to get panicky all of a sudden, and worry that I won't be able to get myself into a position to weather the storm before it hits. But then, when you think about it, it doesn't matter unless you're just coming up to retirement and hoping to cash in your casino chips and sit on your arse for the rest of your days until you die.

I don't begrudge people their retirement, but considering the huge population growth, the massively extended life expectancy, plus the low birth rates, retiring at the same age as the previous generation is just not feasible.

It is really sad when somebody retires, and they're so burnt out that they hardly get to enjoy it. It seems that life is very much lived backwards. When we are young, fit, healthy, energetic and full of life, we are also heavily indebted and have to work as many hours as we can just to pay the rent and try to keep a car on the road so we can get to work. Then, when we retire, we have heaps of time and money (hopefully) but our health is failing and death is stalking us.

But I'm only talking in abstract terms, because something different happened to me. I didn't quite catch the ultimate wave, but I caught the tail end of a pretty wild ride. For those lucky enough to get into IT at some point from the 1960s to the 1990s, we have enjoyed boom times that seem to have kept rolling.

Perversely, I was a little disappointed when the millenium bug didn't cause every computer in the entire world to explode, as the clock struck midnight and we rolled into Y2K. By the year 2000, I was already bored and disillusioned with programming, and I had even applied to University to retrain as a Clinical Psychologist.

It seems churlish, to be dissatisfied in my position. At the age of 20 I was an IT contractor, taking advantage of the fact that there was a huge brain drain, as most of the best programmers were working on fixing the millenium bug. I had a 20 minute phone interview, and then started work a few days later... doubling my salary in the blink of an eye.

In a way though, you have to consider the bigger picture. How many years of my life were spent locked away indoors, hunched over a keyboard, because I was unpopular and ostracised at school? The bullying I endured was pretty relentless until I finally got to college, so in a way, I have always felt some entitlement to the wealth that compensated those miserable years.

Money doesn't buy you maturity though, and it doesn't repair low self-esteem. It does, however, broaden your horizons. As the year 2000 rolled into 2001, I was taking 5-star luxury holidays around the world. I didn't rub people's noses in it, but I hadn't yet begun to feel that the debt of karma that the Universe owed me had started to balance out.

I bought a yacht and moored it in an expensive marina in Hampshire, age 21, but this still didn't seem exceptional to me. I still felt that I had somehow missed out on a lot of what other people had done: to feel popular, to feel fashionable, to feel loved, and have girlfriends that you really fancied. I still had crushing inadequacies and a poor self-image.

Getting into kitesurfing gave me work:life balance and brought me a social group that finally meant I started to feel like I had friends I'd chosen, rather than just the group of geeks, thrust together for strength in numbers, against a world hostile to us outcasts.

The dead time at work, when I had previously just been struggling with boredom, was now filled with planning kitesurfing trips and chatting with my friends on the kiteboarder forum. My bosses were still happy that the work was getting done, but I was spending 80% of my time and energy looking at wind and tide forecasts, reading and writing forum posts.

Moving to the coast meant access to the beach every day, and eliminated the need to experience kitesurfing vicariously midweek, through an internet discussion forum. However, it also meant I no longer had anything entertaining during the boredom.

Eventually, the boredom led to me obsessing about my job, and pushing hard for promotion, and then to burnout. Work:life balance is important.

I've been trying to piece everything back together again in a way that's not simply hopelessly nostalgic for bygone years. If I can get on an even keel again financially, of course I can start going on kitesurfing trips again, but the really important thing that I lost was the social aspect, and having another passion as well as work, that could keep me busy midweek.

A lot of my fear of getting back into the working routine is that I know that simply living to work is not healthy or sustainable, and I really have very little passion for IT anymore... it's just a job, and a job that I can do blindfolded with one arm tied behind my back.

I am sorry if I come across as ungrateful for my opportunities, but there's more to life than a well paid job, and I have so few of the other elements that make up a happy little life.

Would you believe that some of my happiest times in recent years have been when living in the park or the hostel? There was at least a group of other no-fixed-abode bums like me, and we formed strong social bonds. Having a group of friends turns out to be a lot more important than a healthy bank balance.

So, getting back to work is a necessary evil, but it won't stabilise me and give me any quality of life, you might be surprised to learn.

I overcame that fear, and did that technical test, and I impressed myself that I can still apply myself when I need to. However, it seems a shame that our modern lives drive us to live to work, rather than work to live. I feel certain that this must be behind the mental health epidemic that is sadly getting worse and worse.

I'm going to grow carrots, come the revolution

Tags: #computing #career #bullying #childhood

This is a story about the best advice you can get...

Why write to your younger self? You won't be able to act on that advice. It seems like that letter could be concealing regrets, and things you'll never be able to change. That younger version of yourself has gone, and is not able to receive mail anyway.

So, I've decided to write a letter to myself, today. Nobody knows me better than myself. I can't even fully remember what I was like 5 or 10 years ago, let alone 20 or so years ago. I can probably offer some pertinent advice, from a very well-informed vantage point, to my present self, so that sounds more rational to me.

So, here's my letter:

Dear Nick,

Don't freak out, but this is a letter from you, to you. I mean, it's from me, to me (you). Oh, you're smart(ish) so you can probably figure out what I (we) mean. I'm going to write it from me (you) to save confusion, otherwise this letter is going to get very silly.

I'm writing to you to give you some advice, because I'm probably the best placed person to advise you, given that I know everything about you, even your darkest secrets and innermost desires, which are probably one and the same thing.

I know there's this trend of writing to your teenaged self, but you're quite different from 12 or 16 year-old you. You really went through quite rapid changes around age 19, and then another load of big life changes in your early to mid twenties, so writing to that earlier version of yourself doesn't make much sense.

While your childhood shaped who you are as an adult, to some extent, it's not who you are today. You already managed to overcome your shyness talking to girls and your tendency towards introversion and isolation is now something you recognise as unhealthy, which is good.

Your handwriting sure has improved a lot, although it looks to me like you're cheating and using some font that looks a bit like a person has hand-written this. Actually, I know that your handwriting is still terrible, but in the age of computers, smartphones and tablets, who really cares? You're right to not be swayed by dying traditions, like mainstream education & dogma, physical books and rote-learned facts.

You used to be very ruled by insecurity, and it's good that seems to have gone now. You were really trapped into situations that made you very unhappy in the past, because you feared being alone, but now you just seem to go for what you want. It's good that you cut away the things that aren't working for you, although you're still too hesitant to do it, and then you do it in quite a quick and brutal way. Try not to get yourself involved in things you really don't want, and then have to later extract yourself from those situations.

I know you really want to feel loved and like you've got friends there for you. I think you still feel unworthy, and like you have to go to extraordinary lengths to get people to take an interest in you. You're not a jester or a clown, and you don't need to bribe people to like you. It's up to them: if they can see the value in being your friend, you're a rewarding person to know. Getting used by people and then feeling resentful, and acting out passive-aggressively is not a healthy way to get rid of klingons.

You probably need to tone down the way you talk to people at times. I know that you have incredible empathy for people from all walks of life, and you're very mindful that other people might not have had the same life opportunities as you, but you still seem to have this way of making people feel insecure, inferior. I don't know what it is about you, but you can be quite intimidating, even though you don't mean to be.

Frankly though, you're a half-decent guy who tries hard to please everybody. I'm sure you'd benefit from not being so hard on yourself, so self-critical. There's a queue of people around the block who'd like to take their turn telling you what a bad person you are, or criticising your life 'choices' when they don't know their arse from their elbow, so you don't need to join in their ignorant bullshit... be kind to yourself. The world certainly isn't going to be kind to you, even though you try to be kind to people.

Certainly, judging people by your own standards is a disaster. Just because you trust people, try to give people the benefit of the doubt, try to give people chances, try to contribute rather than just taking whatever you can get... that doesn't mean that anybody else is living their life that way. You need to protect yourself.

You're actually pretty vulnerable. People recognise that vulnerability, and try to take advantage of it. I know that you've decided that you don't really care, and you'd prefer to live your life properly, rather than being another mean, selfish, grasping, horrible idiot making up the seething mass of a disgusting majority of people. Make sure you don't turn bitter though. Don't give away more than you can afford to lose. Nobody is ever going to repay those favours or that kindness. Reaping what you sow is bullshit when it comes to being kind and nice to people. The only bonus is that you can sleep at night knowing you tried to make the world a better place.

I'm sorry you haven't had a great deal of luck in recent years in hanging onto a group of friends who you see on a regular basis. It's really not your fault that your supposed support network dropped you in the shit at a critical point in your life, and you sank into depths that put you in a position that not a lot of people come back from.

There was always going to be difficulty in rising back up from a place that nobody expected you to recover from. It's other people's shame that they let you down that is the problem that means you're having to rebuild your life from scratch, not anything bad that you did to them: you owe those people who let you down absolutely nothing.

It's a hard thing, rebuilding your life and making a new group of friends in your mid thirties, and not having any family support. Remind yourself that it's impressive how much you have achieved virtually entirely on your own. Remind yourself how strong you must be as a person to go through hell without a support network close to you.

Try to forget about the pressure you're under to magically become "steady Eddie" again. I know that your family are expecting you to magically become the reliable and dependable member of the family again, in the regular job and doing all the travelling to see everybody plus not requiring any support yourself. I know that your family expects that a magic wand gets waved and everything in your life goes back to normal, and that's an enormous burden, but just forget about them... they're just living in their own selfish little bubble and looking out for themselves. Your life is so perilously fragile at the moment, so you don't need that kind of bullshit.

You know you're lucky to be clinging onto a few things with your fingernails, and you are extremely fortunate to have another chance at getting back on your feet, thanks to a couple of very kind people who've been there for you during your hour of need. You need to make sure you don't screw up that opportunity, even though you're under extreme pressure and stress, sorting everything out in your disintegrating life.

There are a couple of things you've got going in your favour that you didn't have a year ago, and summer is coming soon, so there's a slim window of opportunity. Don't self sabotage!

I know that nobody else understands just how much pressure and stress you're under to fix all the things that got very broken, because you were simply under too much strain. Forgive yourself for breaking down, for cracking under that load. It's not your fault. Anybody in your situation would have reacted the same.

Try to ignore those ignorant idiots who talk about life 'choices' and bad decisions and things like that. They are just smug c**ts who simply have a more comfortable existence and better luck than you. We are all a product of circumstances, rather than good vs. evil. Forget those moralising, judgemental little shits and get on with doing your own thing. You know in your heart that you've always tried your hardest and done the best you could in the circumstances.

If people don't want to hear your story, try to empathise, walk a mile in your shoes, then they're unworthy of your love. They can't sit in judgement over you, when they're no angels themself, and they're just being unpleasant and unhelpful. Why would you want them anywhere near you? Why would you want somebody like that in your life? Good riddance, I say.

Surround yourself with nice people who are kind to you and you value the opinion of, because you know it's not driven by judgemental ignorance. You know deep down that your gratitude and deep drive to reciprocate the love and support you receive means that you're a good person, and you deserve to have friends, companionship, care and some attention.

You're right to keep reminding yourself to be humble, and making sure you don't become too self-absorbed. I know you always think about things in context though, and you do care about what other people are going through too, but just remember to keep it up. You know that it's not a competition, and on the grand scale of things, you've been lucky. Don't fall into the trap of feeling too sorry for yourself, and painting a picture of yourself as some hard-done-by character who's had a really hard life: it's not entirely true, although you have had some shitty stuff happen to you.

People might say "grow up" and "get a life" and "stop going on about old news" or "stop living in the past" but it's OK to go through some stuff, as long as it's part of moving on, developing, letting go. Don't hold onto grudges about the shitty way you've been treated. Just let those people go out of your life, and find positive, inspiring, kind people to replace them. Try and forget about everybody who has trampled you, badmouthed you and written you off... you don't need them.

There are a lot of people out there who feel very entitled. They think about what they want and what they can get and what they need, and don't put any effort into understanding those who are easy targets like you. I know you take things to heart when somebody jumps to the wrong conclusions about you. Forget about those people. They're just trying to destroy other people's lives in order to make themselves feel self-righteous and improve their own self-esteem at the expense of others. You've wasted a lot of time and energy on those narcissists and leeches, and it's time to forgive yourself for trying so hard to be nice to them, and make a relationship work.

You need to learn to be a little more selfish, self-protecting, guarded, while at the same time, you should also remain as humble as you can, grateful for those who have stuck by you, and those very few who are close and have actually stepped in to help you. You need to spend less time and energy trying to convince horrible people of your worth and trying to make them see how much they're using you and hoping that they'll act with some common human decency... it's a waste of time. Try to forget... don't even bother forgiving: they certainly have no forgiveness in their dark little hearts. Instead, concentrate on being positive, and building on those few green shoots that you're really lucky to have. Those people who are kind and care, you should keep close to you, and try to build on that with those who are still there for you, to some extent, because they still care and haven't judged you. They understand, they empathise, they sympathise, they actually care about you as a person, no matter where they are in the world.

I know it's hard, living in this day and age when everybody gets scattered far and wide around the globe, but you're an interesting person who's kind and caring, so you should find people to be in your close support network, wherever you go. Just remember to not turn bitter, not to feel entitled. Remember to keep giving back, feeling gratitude. And don't let insecurity get the better of you. When you find something good, don't grip it too tightly.

Try to slow down a bit. Approach things with a marathon pace, not at a sprint. Everything will get sorted out in the fullness of time.

I know it's frustrating, to have had it all and then lost it, and you want to get back to that happy place you were in age 24 or 25, when you had the friends, the job, the girlfriend, the hobby... your life was quite fulfilling and you felt secure and happy.

You can't fix everything overnight, and even when you start to get things back together, it's going to take time to get back into the rhythm and routine of normal life, and start to build up a safety buffer, to protect you from bumps in the road.

There are going to be setbacks, and I know that you're really fragile and it wouldn't take much to completely wreck your life, but you need to just have faith and act in a positive way, instead of throwing in the towel when you're faced by insurmountable problems. You've added to your own problems when you've decided that everything is ruined, and that you're going to kill yourself as an act of spite.

Everything has been ruined, several times, but you can see that something fairly miraculous has happened every time, but it's dumb to keep deciding that everything is over. You should have learned by now that somehow, everything kinda works out. You are worthy of help, and help does eventually come... even if it is rather late, and not from those people who supposedly love and care about you.

If there's one thing you should have learned from 36 years on the planet, it's that life will always surprise you. Stop trying to second guess, to imagine what the future holds. Even when your future looks bleak as hell, you should know by now that you can turn a corner almost overnight.

Killing yourself would be really stupid: you won't get to find out how the story ends if you do that, which would frustrate the hell out of you.

I know that people think you're attention seeking and stuff, but just forget about those idiots. It's totally like you to do something just to prove people wrong, but you won't exactly be able to say "I told you so" when you're actually dead. Sure, they're total c**ts for calling your bluff and being unfeeling, selfish horrible arseholes, but hurting yourself to hurt them is not a great plan.

If you do end up killing yourself because existing with a world that just wants to be mean and cruel and selfish and ignorant and generally descend into base animal bullshit, where people are just rutting and raping, stealing and generally acting like a bunch of prehistoric beasts... I forgive you, and I understand why you did it. I'm certainly not happy with what I see in the world either. Somebody has to take a stand, and I applaud you for thinking about the big picture. Keep doing that, but try to act in a positive way. You can't actively improve things if you're not around to play a part.

I know you want to make a grand gesture. I know you want to make a big contribution to society, to humanity, but try to do it in a positive, constructive way. Protest suicide, hunger strikes... people are becoming so heartless and beastly that quite possibly nobody would give a shit. It would be a terrible waste of your life, your talents, your energy, your creativity.

You go a little mad at times, and start imagining grand schemes that are maybe a little crackpot, but there is good stuff in there. You'll find a project that is important, and was made for you. In time, you'll make a difference and feel like you're doing what you were made to do. You'll find your true calling, just give it time.

You're impatient, and that's OK because I do understand that you need to rush at things, because certain parts of your life are on fire, or like a ticking time bomb. You only have a short amount of time to shore things up, to lay the foundations and make sure that things are strong enough to withstand the inevitable problems that will crop up over a longer stretch of time.

It's frustrating, I know, dealing with people who don't understand the urgency of making repairs and getting a safety cushion ready, so that you can keep moving forwards. Don't waste your energy chasing any help from those who don't understand the fragility of your situation. Don't waste your breath on people who aren't really going to help... they just like to pretend they're there for you.

It's a tricky time, but remember, if you can do it, you've got plenty of happy contented life ahead of you, and a big chance to achieve something, to make a difference, to make a contribution.

Don't let guilt or judgemental bullshit get in your way. I know you want to be everything to everybody, and you'll have your chance to be there for those people who have helped you, supported you. You have a sense of debt, of karma, of right and wrong. You will make everything right again, and more besides, if you can turn those green shoots into a mighty oak again. But it takes time, don't rush at it.

It's a shame I'm not from the future or anything, otherwise I'd just give you the lottery numbers for tonight or tell you who's going to win the Super Bowl or something useful like that, to give you a buttload of money to solve those cashflow problems.

I think it's good that you're comfortable with everything that's happened up until today, and accept that it's shaped who you are, so it would be ridiculous to wish to change history. It's good to want to be who you are, not somebody else, because it's impossible to change who you are. Keep telling people who think you made bad 'choices' to go fuck themselves. The illusion of free will and all that, yeah?

I like you. I think you're interesting and funny and you try hard. Keep up the good work.

Lots of love,

Nick

Tags: #childhood #parents #friends

This is a story about going round in circles...

The mistakes of the past, the pitfalls, the traps, and the warning signs and the other things that can be learnt by experience, are not hidden from me. The 'right' way to live your life is not alien to me. There was a period of many years where I worked regular hours, paid my mortgage, bills and went about my daily routine with familiar normality.

Now, it's easy to point at many aspects of my life and say "that's not right" and "you need to fix that". I'm not blind and I'm not stupid. I can see what needs to be done. I know where I need to get to. However, there is no short-cut to moving from dysfunctional to productive regularity. There are no fast fixes for the myriad little things that break down and need attention.

The accumulation of this backlog of little broken things and time spent trapped into a dysfunctional existence, leaves very steep sides to a very deep trench that you get stuck in. There are limited opportunities to make your escape.

Please don't think this is a case of poor me, poor me, pour me another drink. I'll either get out of rut I'm stuck in, or else I know quite precisely where I'm going to end up.

It's true that at a certain point, it becomes attractive to just give up, to capitulate, to self-sabotage. When the task ahead just looks so daunting and you have none of the resources you need to complete it, why not use what little remaining life force you have in reserve, in a hedonistic exit from your miserable existence?

I'm certainly not in that position at the moment. I have a couple of excellent lifelines, and to throw in the towel now would be churlish. When I scratch the surface, things are so much worse than I could even imagine, but at the same time, I have some assistance and opportunities that I'm ridiculously lucky to have.

For those who have to imagine the many parts of the picture that remain obscured to anybody except the mind-reader, you will struggle to see much difference between your own functional life, and my dysfunctional one. It doesn't look like it would take much to restore normality.

However, it has been a long time since I was 'in the saddle' as it were, cycling along with good balance and steady pedalling rhythm. 3 meals a day, a hard day's work and a good night's sleep. Week after week, month after month, year after year. My life simply has 'episodes' now, where I switch between different modes.

I'm stuck in an episode of low mood, low energy, high anxiety, high stress, low productivity. Things that aren't exactly peachy for getting your life back on track. It's hard to imagine why I'm not up at first light, fixing everything up and pushing hard to get back into the swing of things. Hard to imagine if you've never hit a brick wall of depression or anxiety.

It's a bit of a waiting game. Moods fluctuate. The body and brain dictate the terms, and to artificially alter them with chemicals is partially how I ended up stuck in this rut, so it's not like I just need a few happy pills from the Doctor. Or that's certainly a route I'd like to avoid anyway, having already seen several iterations of that particular approach, with the same results every time.

It seems there's no cheating the system.

Doping in sport can lead to enlarged hearts that can suddenly stop beating, blood that's so thick that you can't fall asleep and have a drop in blood pressure, muscles that are swollen into vein covered monstrosities from steroid use, arthritic joints and inflamed tendons. Don't you think we're just pushing the human limits too far some times?

Using vast amounts of strong coffee to concentrate on work, and vast amounts of alcohol to switch off and de-stress after work, is perhaps the office worker's equivalent of being in the Tour de France, surrounded by other people who are using the performance enhancing substances, who are your peers and you need to keep pace with.

My body is screaming "where are the stimulants?" as I deny it caffeine. I could start drinking coffee and cola again, but I have no idea how far away from my true self I really am, I've been so out of touch with my chemically unaltered moods for so long.

I've started drinking alcohol again, and it's alarming how insidious it is, rushing back into my life, to tranquillise my jangling nerves and put me to sleep. There is some moderation, self-control there, but not much. There is sanctuary to be found at the bottom of a bottle. Intoxication is sweet relief from otherwise never-ending relentless exhausting stress and anxiety.

Without alcohol or some tranquillising medication, or even an herbal sleep remedy, I will just spend a night awake with my fears, my negative thoughts, my anxiety about the sheer volume of things that need to be fixed up, repaired, my stress about the workload ahead.

Things are getting worse before they get better.

Ok, so we have London, and we have bicycles. Some elements look consistent. However, we still have the seasons, and the dark and the rain and the cold are all fairly debilitating unless I'm in a well-established routine, or I can get away somewhere hot and sunny for a couple of weeks respite.

I know that Spring has sprung, and that we are on British Summer Time (BST) now, giving a whole extra hour of evening light. However, my body's not fooled, because I don't have a routine that is particularly dictated by clocks and calendars. I have moods that are dictated by sunlight and warmth.

Over the years I learnt what my body and brain needed, and when. It was important to establish an annual routine, as well as the daily workweek routine. How else could I lay down periods of up to 4 years in the same job, for the same company?

All that's been washed away in recent years. I've shown I know how to survive and get by, but not how to thrive and make things have any longevity anymore it seems.

I would say though, that I haven't forgotten the vast majority of what I learned in 20 years attempting full-time employment. It's only been since 2010 that everything went very much out of kilter. I guess it's like spinning helicopter blades. It only takes a little bit of damage to one of the blades, and the machine will shake itself to pieces.

Just popped round to see Liz and Phil for a spot of tea

Tags: #bipolar #depression #mentalhealth #london #career

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a story about modern life...

I missed 5 blog posts. 3 people were worried on Facebook, plus my flatmate. My sofa-surfing Kiwi has gone back to NZ.

2 of those people, I met at a hackathon, back in October. When I had to go into hospital a few weeks later, one of these new friends brought me a backpack that contained a set of hand-picked items from around my room, each thoughtfully chosen as something that I would probably need during a week or two in hospital. It felt like Christmas.

When I got really sick over the Xmas/New Year period, my other new friend came and sat on my bed and gave me a hug. He also did loads of my washing, cooked for me, and generally nursed me back to health. The most important thing he did though, was to just be thoroughly lovely. It makes a difference, somebody asking how you are and giving you a hug.

I was in a pretty bad way with muscle wastage and weight loss, having stopped eating for about 2 and a half weeks. Obviously I couldn't impose on my poor friend, with additional burdens, such as extra shopping to carry home, when he was already doing so much that was well above and beyond what any flatmate and friend would do.

Another new friend had become concerned by my lack of blog posts, and had actually come over to my flat on her own initiative. She's a very active person, with a busy life, but it so happened that she was off work... although I doubt that she pictured herself nipping to the Tesco Local for protein shakes, isotonic fluids and anything that had high calorie content. It was so kind and helpful of her that she did.

So, I just received an email from my sister. Apparently she's been getting shit from my parents, because they've read my blog and being the horribly abusive people that they are, they are taking it out their frustration with semi-illiteracy and their almost total exclusion from my life, on my poor sister.

Let's recap what wonderful parents they are, because apparently I've forgotten all the great stuff they did for me:

• Born to a couple of junkies. My mum was a student and my dad was failing to make enough money to support a family by buying and selling junk.
• Grandparents took pity on 3-year-old grandchild and bought them a house. Dad still doesn't have a proper job... too busy taking drugs.
• I spend all my time when I'm not at school in the pub, because my parents still can't afford to support a family, a drug addiction and alcoholism. Alcohol comes first.
• My Dad decides to scale up the junk buying/selling that didn't work before, so I have to leave all my playgroup and primary school friends to move to Oxford
• Between eye patches that I don't need and a yet another girl's bike with a fucking basket on it, I pretty much become the most bullied kid at school. I remember picking gravel out of my back whenever I was 'clotheslined' on the hard play area.
• My mum did take me to London a bunch of times, which was nice. We went to the Science Museum, which got me interested in science.
• Move to a school with a uniform. Turnups and the school blazer (optional) plus carry-over from previous school means the bullying continues. My mum sympathises with the bullies.
• I get a goldfish. He's called Fred. You can't stroke a goldfish. It's a shit pet, but I cry when he dies and make a little gravestone for him.
• Finally get a home computer. Not the Apple Mac like Julian and Joe have, or the PC like Barnaby, Ben, Marcus etc. etc. No... this is the last of the ZX Spectrums ever made
• Have to move school again. Great school. Bullying not quite so bad as there is an unpopular Russian boy and I'm in all the top sets and a good form group... so my parents decide we should move to France
• Some accountant friend of the family takes pity on me and gives me the oldest PC you've ever seen in your life. No software works on it, but that doesn't matter because the monitor is black and white anyway. This is my parents main gift to me: giving me something that's so unbelievably unfit for purpose that I try and try in desperation to make things work.
• Learn to speak French in France. Also didn't make any friends in the UK, and was away from all my other friends. Given the choice, I'd rather have friends than be able to speak French.
• Another new school. Bullying atrocious. Teachers are nice though. One of them takes me sailing after school... like a dad.
• Rather than leave me in a town where I can cycle everywhere and remain with my friends during puberty, we move to the middle of fucking nowhere. I write letters to my friends on floppy disks and post them to them. One friend comes to visit. One. That's it. One.
• Sailing club is good... thanks again to that teacher
• Another start at a new school ruined by the only bike that was capable of tackling the steep hills being a proper mountain bike. One that my dad stole. It was a girls bike. I had to ride past over 1,000 children all congregating on a big long pavement, before going up the steps to the school. My few sailing club friends disowned me.
• I was supposed to be saving up for another new computer, but £10 a week from a paper round doesn't leave a lot of spare money to buy replacement parts for my mountain bike, which gets used at least twice a day on very steep hills
• With a small contribution from me in cash, but absolutely huge in terms of the number of miles I cycled every day on my paper round, my Dad got me my new computer, well after its processor became obsolete. It doesn't have a co-processor or enough memory, but I figure I can upgrade those parts when I get a better job than a paper round.
• My dad bought the shittest, most rotten, neglected boat that looked totally not water-worthy. I restored it, then sold it for a big profit. Can't remember if I paid him back.
• I had a small financial contribution when I bought my 4th and 7th cars. The 7th car was brilliant, but I could have paid for it myself. I think I was only short a few hundred quid, and I was IT contracting so I was raking it in. I can't believe how my parents still say they "bought" me that car. I shall have to dig out the bank statements.
• That's it!

Oh, here are a few things that my parents like to misremember:

• They gave me one of their cars. My mum had crashed it and it had been repaired by a blind man. The thing is, it wasn't a gift. My granny had been saving money since I was really little so that I could get a car and insurance, and I would have easily been able to buy a small engined petrol car, in a low insurance group, with cheap parts... like everybody else my age. Instead, ALL the money had to go on insurance, and the shitty car broke down all the time, and because it was a complicated diesel with expensive parts, it was the world's shittest car for a broke 17 year old.
• Holidays: well, actually these were conferences for my mum, or the shitty dilapidated house in France where I was away from all my friends in the UK. My parents were always pulling me out of school, and sure it was an education and experience, but it was just what my parents wanted to do, with me along in tow. If you were going to do it anyway, it doesn't count as something you did for your kid. The fact we drove past Alton Towers so many times but never went illustrates their mindset perfectly.
• I've cost them a lot of money. Horseshit. I read books from the library or was playing round at friend's houses or somewhere I shouldn't have been. My parents never bought me the correct shoes to not get beaten up. Once I saved up the money from my granny and bought a pair of Nikes. I remember everybody commenting at school for days. I remember wanting to fall asleep just looking at them.
• They lent me money when I was in London. Nope. What they did was not lend me money when I was in London. I needed it in October 2013. Two years late is too late.

Ok, so there are myriad little things, mainly to do with cooking with my mum. My mum is really great. She did try her very best to give me a nice life. She worked hard, paid the mortgage and bankrolled my dad.

I'm trying to think of a nice memory with my dad, but it's all so practical. I was always watching him do DIY or cook but the only thing I think we learned together was when he taught me to read & write. Later, we would change the oil on a car and suchandsuch, but we never did something together, although I was allowed to come along to car boot sales, for example.

My only memory of him really taking an interest in something in my life was when I wanted to do a sponsored mountain bike ride, and I hadn't been doing the big hills for long enough to really travel all the way to the town where the event was being held, and then have much remaining energy to race.

It wasn't much more than a completely lumpy field, with a savagely steep climb, long traverse, descent and then back on the flat to the bottom of the climb again. I had no bottle cage on my bike and I was dressed in jeans, and it was a pretty hot day. People were laughing at this kid in jeans with a touring helmet, no other safety gear, on a girls bike.

When the race started, I left everybody who had "all the gear but no idea" behind. The traverse was quite tricky, especially without toeclips. The descent was suicidal on a fully rigid bike, but I started to lap quite fast.

The more the laps went by, the more of the skilled but unfit riders fell away. The ascent really was a killer in that heat. Anyway, I decided I'd better stop after quite a few laps, because I was feeling really badly dehydrated, and I was sick of getting flies in my eyes.

My dad was gobsmacked. I can't remember where I finished, but from his point of view, I was just lapping everybody over and over and over again. He took me to the bike shop in the nearby town and bought me a pair of clear cycling glasses for the flies, mud and stones, plus a bottle cage and bottle so I could carry a drink with me.

Perhaps if I racked my brains I could think of something else, but getting complemented on my riding, and then him making a further investment - unprompted - to allow me to take my hobby further, was a special moment.

So, my sister's pretty pissed off with me, but I can't understand why. My dad conspired with my wife and my GP to drag me away from my home, my life was dismantled, and the one time in my adult life when I did actually need and want their help - and it had been offered - they reneged on their promise in October 2013, and bang went my best chance to put my life back together in London, thanks to their lies.

I've not really altered the formula, and it's really quite simple:

• Place to live (not a hostel, tent, or shop doorway)
• Job (I'm an IT contractor. Thanks for your offer of [insert low wage job] but it would be uneconomical of me to not focus my search on highly paid contracts)
• Enough money for any cashflow shortfall until the 60+ days it takes before I get paid are done, plus I've absorbed the hit of the 6 weeks deposit, 1 month rent & agent fees
• I'm afraid that I'm so profligate that I replace my suit every 5 years, and my overcoat every 12 yeas. Shoes, I'm afraid I throw away when the shoe repair man laughs in my face. Shirts, I replace when the collar is worn through and it's horribly yellow under the arms.

There are certain things that people in London don't do either:

• They don't walk for 2 or 3 hours. They get the tube. That costs over £5 a day
• They don't bring a thermos flask of coffee into the office. Coffee is a £6 a day habit, but a necessary social visit
• They don't bring a picnic basket, get the blanket out, lay it down on the office floor, sit down and start getting foil-wrapped cucumber sandwiches out. Lunch is a £5 a day habit
• They don't drink much water. Sometimes they drink fizzy drinks. Sometimes they drink a kale, ginger and apple smoothie. Drinks are a £3 a day habit
• They don't have home-brew kegs hidden under their desks. When a Londoner goes for an after work drink, which is pretty much a social necessity, they will spend £5 a pint or more
• They don't work the longest hours in Europe and travel on a packed tube train to then get home, travel back in time, and start making fresh pasta and picking basil leaves in the garden they don't have. Your economy Londoners will buy fresh pasta and pesto, and will even push the boat out for a bit of parmesan: cost £7. Some days, you're at work so late that you might even get a luxury stonebaked pizza sent to the office, or failing that, you'll probably pick up a takeaway on the way home, because you're just going to fall asleep as soon as you've eaten: cost £15.
• They don't live in Zone 99. The zones go 1-2-middle-of-fucking-nowhere-99-100. Yes, it's true that you can save 50p a year on rent by living in Zone 99, but it will cost you over a million pounds for a travel card that goes out that far. It would also be quicker to just get a jet or a helicopter to City Airport if you're that far out.
• They don't all take loads of coke. Yes, it's true that there is some drug taking in the capital, but I bet there are good statistics to show that a far greater percentage of people are on drugs in the provinces, because it's so fucking dull out there.
• They don't fret about saving 7 pence on a loaf of mouldy bread, or consider it profligate to buy popcorn at the cinema, because wages are so much higher and you'll be working too hard to do all the stuff that you have to do to entertain yourself in the provinces on your meagre wage

So, anyway, I've shown my magic formula works. I know what I need to get back into work, routine, friendships and get on an even keel financially, so that I never ever have to explain to a dimwitted out-of-towner why the cost of living initially looks quite high.

However, my sister has a shit job, got pregnant with kid they couldn't afford, went through a divorce, lives in midlands suburbia and generally acts with incredulity that I could maybe have found it a bit stressful trying to re-enter London life on a credit card, living in a hostel.

I had said that my sister & niece were the only thing keeping me alive when I was in hospital. My life is fucked, the cashflow doesn't work, I'm not very well, I still haven't got a contract and there are now further delays. I know what'll happen... I'll get a nice big money contract, but after a month I'll be bankrupt, and my money will still be 30 days away at least. If I take it all out as soon as I can, then it means I'm not maximising my dividends, and it means I have to live on 33% of my income, instead of 100%. That means the stress carries on, month after month after month. But, apparently everybody's an expert in accountancy and cashflow forecasting now.

Apparently one of my sister's friends has it so much harder than me or something. Anyway, they're dead now. I'm just being a martyr or something. According to my sister and parents it's really easy to blag your way into a mental hospital, and slicing lengthways down my forearms with a razor blade was some kind of emotional blackmail, or maybe it was melodramatic... I don't give a shit anymore.

I literally think that you are a grade-A douchecanoe if you have no idea just how hard it has been to survive in London with no parental or state support, when I was completely fucked.

A big part of me says "fuck it". I was a homeless bankrupt drug addict in a park one day, and then you expect it to be all fixed in 5 months because I managed to get a flat, and a job. Then you only choose to help me when I'm hospitalised, suicidal. And then after it's already too late you say it's blackmail.

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Can't be bothered.

Why bother?

You have absolutely no idea how hard it's been to work my way back from the brink and just how carefully I've had to budget, and how cleverly I've done my accounting.

I really didn't want to write another thing about my parents. They're dead to me. But to hear my sister echoing their lies is heartbreaking, and to receive a lengthy message telling me things that are just total bullshit, and saying "I'm sorry, but I don't want to be anywhere near you".

That's just fucking awful. OK, so I've poured out my anger at my parents for forcefully removing me from my own home so my ex could cheat on me, generally backing her up, and then totally fucking me over when they had their chance to make good on something helpful. It's something I have been trying forgive and forget but they're never going to re-enter my life. They have no interest in it anyway. My dad didn't even want to come in my London house and meet my London friends, despite being parked right outside.

My sister says I should ask if I need help. My parents don't do anything until it's too late: I'll either be dead or in hospital.

That's not emotional blackmail. That's getting rid of some worthless cunts from your life.

I'm absolutely heartbroken that my sister has been taken in by their bullshit. We had been talking about her visiting London and her getting a matching semicolon tattoo.

Fuck life

Tags: #parents #childhood #sister #career #london #suicide #depression

This is a story about blowing off steam...

While the world gets on with its life, I seem to have one foot in the grave, or to be stuck in the past. Apologies for the self-absorption. I'm trying to move forwards, but it turns out there's quite a lot of stuff I needed to work through.

Many people might view me as a 'keyboard warrior'. Somebody who is far more aggressive and outspoken when protected behind a computer screen. I think you'll find that I don't really tone things down face to face, but when people read what I write they certainly interpret it as being quite angry.

It's hard to infer emotion from writing. I tend to use a mix of humour and sarcasm, as well as writing down explicitly what emotions I'm feeling, if they're strong enough to warrant recording in the text, as I write. Perhaps I'm just impervious to my emotions a lot of the time though. I'm mostly very calm when I'm writing.

I'm acutely aware just how self-absorbed I have become, and I certainly need a bit of a reality check. The fact of the matter is that I'm pretty exhausted, depressed, stressed and anxious. Writing doesn't seem to have brought any relief yet, but when suicide and drug abuse are places that your mind can wander to, it's good to have a distraction.

I reviewed what I wrote so far, and it's interesting to see a pronounced dip in quality, as I started to self-destruct over the Christmas and New Year period. I can really see my writing get sloppy and thoughts get jumbled. The writing up to that period was quite repetitive though, quite laboured.

It must be fairly obvious to any independent observer, that whatever I turn my hand to, I will get excessively involved with. If I start going to the gym, I will train far too hard and push my body too far. If I get into a new sport or hobby, I will obsessively learn everything about it and just pursue that one thing, to the exclusion of everything else in my life. If I get a new job, I will be so passionate about it that it will become very personal. I will be super dedicated to whatever I do.

Is the explanation for this behaviour simply that I am transferring my addict's habits into different kinds of activity? The repetition, the obsessiveness, the single-minded pursuit of one goal... it all smacks of addiction.

So, am I addicted to writing? Am I addicted to telling my story? Am I addicted to sensationalism and attention seeking? Am I addicted to the little dopamine hit I get for every Facebook like, Twitter retweet and Reddit upvote? Yeah. Probably.

But, at the same time, writing is immensely useful for recovery. I'm not sure I could have gone from the end of October to the end of January with no job and only one lapse, without the continuity of this blog. It's also served one its original purposes of keeping people informed, letting people know whether I'm afloat or whether I'm sinking. Even a simple "signs of life" as one caring friend put it.

I write for me, but it is meaningful who takes the time to respond. When somebody I haven't really been in contact with for a long time indicates that they've read something I've written, there is initially a gut-wrenching realisation that they've probably had their eyes opened to a side of my character that they never knew, then there is a pleasing sense that there is still an ongoing connection between us, as friends whose contact has dwindled over the difficult years.

It's interesting the responses that my writing has prompted from friends and strangers alike. People have shared some things with me, that I will keep completely confidential, but have really helped me to realise that we're all putting a brave face on things a lot of the time. Everybody has an untold tale behind their stoic exterior. The happiest, smiliest, 'life is perfect' type people have connected with something in my writing and shared some quite shocking truths about their own wayward journey through life.

Don't read a book by it's cover. Does a blog really have a cover? I suppose "manic" is quite a provocative title. It's interesting that you could dip in at any moment in time and dependent on the phase of writing, you could assume that I'm a junkie, sex addict, suicidally depressed, pissed off with my job, happy with my job, pissed off with my parents, had an unhappy childhood, had an interesting childhood, was a domestic abuse perpetrator, was a domestic abuse victim, had a shitty divorce and am completely bat shit insane, with long unintelligible monologues about some half-baked ideas in theoretical physics that don't really add up to a hill of beans.

Is it so different from the sumtotal of my Facebook status updates? I generally get the impression that the world has kids, babies, cats, dogs, cars, holidays and dubious politics, from what I can see on the Facebook walls of my friends. Who knew?

There are a lot of social commentators saying that this eruption of social media sharing of our innermost thoughts and feelings is leading to an addiction to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc. etc. and that we're headed for some kind of armeggedon because of it.

Having been somebody who has written on forums under my own name for the best part of 14 years, I have only ever felt the benefit of human connection, even if it has been computer-assisted. With the kitesurfing/kiteboarding forums, we used to meet up every Tuesday and every weekend. I've made some of my very best friends through forums and the social ties that the forums enabled.

When you have to get through a long working week, your job isn't particularly challenging, you're a bit jaded and cynical and sick of the 9 to 5 drudgery, there's nothing quite like a forum to while away your 37.5 hours a week. I made it a personal mission to read every forum post, and respond whenever I could.

A life lived online is a bit strange, but I've been all over the world with people who I met online. Electronic communication is creating social cohesion where otherwise there would only be urban solitude. Unless you live in some 1950's throwback community, where you know your neighbours and you leave your doors unlocked and let your kids play with the dodgy looking guy in the raincoat, then you probably live most of your life in social isolation, beyond the members of your household, and a small group of people who you go out of your way to stay in regular contact with.

Most of us probably have a certain day or a time that we speak to our mums. Most of us probably have people that we regularly speak to online or a regular social get together. Most of us probably have a group of friends that we regularly meet up with at weekends, and see in the pattern of our daily lives: the school run, the kids birthday parties, the meals out with a network of friends, celebrating some event or other. Plus there are the people at work. You know how many kids they have, and some vague things about what's happening in each of their lives. You have an established social routine with your work colleagues.

If you're a bit of an oddball like me, you don't really fit in. For a long time, I was a lot more senior than people my age. When I started my career, I was the young kid with poor social skills and a bad dress sense. Later, I was the golden boy who was trying to do the same thing as his peers - have a nice settled little life with a family and a lovely home - but was roughly the same age as the group who were partying and generally having fun.

This disjoint has meant that as my boring old person life fell to bits, it was just about at the same time as my younger friends were all getting big houses and having babies. My older friends now have kids who are going to big school. My younger friends are up to their elbows in nappies.

I guess it happens to everybody. There are waves of engagements, marriages, house purchases, babies and then come the divorces. Thankfully, not too many of my friends have started dropping dead yet.

Everybody is so darn busy, and working so darn hard. Apparently, life is supposed to be taxing on parents with two kids. Life is optimised to bleed the parents dry, of their time, energy and money of course. If you're not flat broke, exhausted and don't have a minute to yourself to sit down and read a newspaper, you're not trying hard enough.

Sorry if that sounds condescending or anything... I have no idea what it must be like having copulated for 30 seconds and now having a screaming, shitting, vomiting thing that can't look after itself and you'll be chucked in jail if you hide it in the oven.

My views are probably quite obnoxious to many people. Certainly a recurrent theme is parenting. I'm very hard on my parents, and sure there are a lot of people who say "I'm sure they did the best they knew how to do" and I'm not going to re-iterate the fact that sitting around on your arse taking drugs is a bit stupid, when you're supposed to be childrearing. I certainly see a lot of smiles on the kids faces that get posted onto Facebook, and I know that my sister is doing a great job with my niece, so I certainly don't think that my friends and sister are doing a bad job.

It must seem very annoying and pathetic that I'm complaining about my lot in life, and being so self-absorbed and selfish, sitting around writing crap about "woe is me!" and so oh-so difficult life is for me, me, me. Sorry about that. I must be doubly difficult when you're struggling to make ends meet financially, and you're stressed about little Oliver's violin recital, and whether Hermione's going to get into that grammar school. I'm sure you hate your job too. I'm sure you'd love to have a breakdown and be in bed for 14 hours a day exhausted, shaking like a wreck.

Yes, I do claim that I don't feel entitled, but I'm certainly able to some extent, to spend some time thinking about the past and wallowing in self-pity. I have no dependents. I didn't spawn any gene cloning machines that I'm trying to protect from the wolves in the forest. I'm not being smug. I'm actually jealous. I can see that it's pretty exhausting and terrifying, having 'skin in the game' but I can also see those chests swelling with pride and those eyes lighting up with delight at your beautiful children. I don't get any cuddle time with my offspring that I don't have.

So, life looks a lot simpler for the single guy with no kids, but in a way, my life is less dictated by the demands of feeding, clothing and schooling of any infants, which means I kind of have to find a reason for living, every day.

I hope you don't hate me for saying I have to decide what I'm going to do every day. I'm sure you have a long list of things you'd love to do, if you had the time. My life is not exactly like that... I don't wake up and think "shall I learn to waterski today, or should I go to Mexico?". However, I don't wake up and think "I have to get the kids dressed and make them breakfast" just like every morning for the next 18 years.

I can't decide whether having made a rational decision to defer parenthood was a mistake. It would be interesting to compare some kind of objective quality-of-life scores with my peers who made different choices, but I suspect that things would be comparable, as I know that many of my friends have suffered with depression and anxiety just as much as me, despite being mummies and daddies. I know that many of my friends are just as cheesed off with the work they do, and it's making them unwell.

Anyway, we're all slowly inching our way to the grave, like it or not. One thing's for certain with life: death will follow hot on its heels.

Yeah that's lava going in the sea. Salt water cleanses everything, especially tears

Tags: #depression #parents

This is a story about stormy weather...

Apologies for the interruption to the blog regularity. This was caused by unpleasant winter weather and being unemployed. I also couldn't see straight and I passed out. Normal service will be resumed again soon.

Since my life fell apart due to illness and divorce, I have never managed get all the essential life things in place at the same time:

1. Stable Accommodation (without 13 snoring people per dorm)
2. A job that's more than just giving blow jobs in a toilet (never tried it, but it's plan "Z")
3. Friends, who respect me, and understand that my life was decimated
4. Family, including parents who can understand how hard it is to do all the things on this list (with no money, despite working)
5. Getting my stuff out or storage and into my apartment
6. A hobby: kitesurfing maybe. Failing that, at least some holidays
7. Deal with a huge pile of 2-and-a-half-year-old post
8. Do my business administration and tax affairs
9. Live near work
10. Not just getting totally smashed drunk all the time, and don't abuse drugs

You have no idea how hard it is too do almost all those things, when you are barely just surviving. The individual tasks are not hard for a person with a job, girlfriend, home. I'm is pretty much totally exhausted and suicidal from other attempts to fix my life. When you get low on funds then idiots start pulling the plug, and all the other work is ruined.

Just because you have a sorted life, don't lecture me. I bought my own home and did loads of work on it, never missed a bill payment, quit my job despite having a "top" ranking in the company (according to my annual performance review). I went to work for New Look to help them internationalise. Job was OK. Commute was too far.

I became an entrepreneur again. I sat in my back garden and made iPhone apps. I had a couple of number 1 hits. This gave me encouragement to say away from 9-5 drudgery, I started IT contracting again, and it was an improvement on being disrespected by the people above your pay grade.

I was then an electrician. If you think your paperwork is bad... wait until you've got to do safety certificates, inspection reports, quotes, cashflow forecasting, wholesaler credit and the challenge of doing all of this comes before paying any money into the bank.

After being an electrician, I went back to iPhone apps, but developing custom ones for companies. That business gave me just about everything I wanted, except a high quality team, and having the cash to grow. There is also even more paperwork associated with a technology company.

I took Hubflow/Mepublish business through the Springboard Accelerator program in Cambridge. We even won 2nd prize at the Cambridge Union Society. The angels didn't want to invest in me at first, because I pitched for their money in flip flops. We still managed to find investors though.

Seeing 150+ mentors in 2 weeks, plus all the other Springboard work was hard too. We had very little time to fix our users bugs, stay on top of invoicing our clients and all the other business administration crap. There were actually too many things on the list.  It was too much to handle.

When I got back from Springboard, my horrible ex was there, pressuring me to go to social occasions and blocking me from moving to the Startup capital of the UK: London. She liked having at least 3 or 4 luxury holidays a year. She liked doing a hobby job that got to stroke her ego. Teachers can work anywhere. She needed to support my 3 years of busting my balls to get into the Tech startup scene.

Anyway, she wouldn't. Her main preoccupation was getting blind drunk at social occasions and then smashing up my expensive camera(s). She'd smashed up one of my cameras 3 weekends in a row. She was never sorry. "It was an accident" is not accepting blame. "I'm sorry" is how humans apologise.

Shortly after Springboard finished, in 2011, the last evening event we ever went to, she smashed another camera, and then when we got back to our hotel room, she started verbally abusing me. She was saying things like "you're a weirdo, none of my family like you [not true] and none of my friends like you [not true]" then she got up, opened the door and stood in the doorway, just shouting "YOU'RE A WIERDO, YOU'RE A WIERDO, EVERYBODY HATES YOU, YOU WEIRDO, YOU'RE A WIERDO" at me at the top of her voice.

I'm not sure whether she held the door open so that people could hear, if I shouted back, or whether it was so she could make a quick getaway if she verbally abused my too much. Whatever the reason, it backfired.

I snapped. I don't really remember what happened, because the next thing that I remember is her screaming. Her scream brought me back to reality. Reality at the time was that she was on the floor, pinned down by me, and my fists was raised in anger.

Because she screamed I let her go and she ran off to many of the concerned faces peering out of their bedrooms: they had been woken up by her tirade of verbal abuse.

I tried to remember what had happened. I remembered asking her to stop abusing me. I asked her to stop being so disrespectful about having broken 3 digital cameras in 3 weeks... I'm the one who paid for those cameras and replacements. I remember being called a "weirdo" over and over again, which was often a schoolyard chant for bullies, which I was on the receiving end of a lot.

Afterwards, my brain finally pieced what had happened together. She had said I was worthless and abusively insulted everything I've ever done, interspersed with calling my a "Weirdo" and telling me that friends and family don't like me.

I grabbed her, but she started trying to punch me, so I threw her on the ground and pinned her arms. She spat in my face, and then the rage was really unleashed. I was no longer in control - I'm guessing - because I don't remember the rage bit. I threw 4 or 5 punches against the struggling abuser before she screamed. The scream woke me up and I got off her and let her run away to the people who had been looking, because of her shouting "weirdo! weirdo".

She spent the night surrounded by her friends and family. I got in my car, knowing that there were a couple of concrete columns I could drive into at 100mph.

Domestic abuse perpetrators should commit suicide though, right. I agree that there need to be severe repercussions for those who commit domestic abuse. Smashing up my face with her fists, going though my personal stuff, isolating me from my friends, controlling my life, verbally abusing, destroying my stuff with no intention of replacing or repairing it, generally being a low grade piece of shit... that kind of stuff affects people.

I blamed myself. I didn't even use the provocation or fact that she physically abused me, as an excuse.

I turned my airbag off and made I made a couple of 100+mph lunges for motorway pillars on the way home. Sadly, most of them have fencing to deflect drivers who  have fallen asleep or want to die.

When I got home I bought something online to kill myself with. It almost worked, but it had very unexpected consequences.

If you think domestic abusers deserve to be miserable, depressed and die, then I'm in agreement with you to some extent.

I had to go to work with two black eyes and a broken nose, and lie for my girlfriend. Nobody can see the verbal and psychological damage that she was doing either. She had an insatiable appetite for spending hours, days, outside my cell, just hurling abuse and threats of violence.

If there is that kind of abuse going on, and you're missing one or more of the 10 things on my list, you are going to struggle to be well. Yes, my mood gets very bad in winter and Xmas/January are particularly horrible times for making it through the seasons.

How can you expect somebody to sort out all the broken things in their life, when they just escaped an abusive relationship, but they lost their job, their home, their friends, their money etc. etc. Just because you've entered a routine boring life, doesn't make you special. I had a normal life. In fact, it wasn't ordinary. It was extraordinary.

Bipolar Disorder can have its blessings. When I'm depressed I can't do much about the shits who gang up on me, but when I'm hypomanic I can work like an absolute machine and avoid having my reputation tarnished by the people who hit and verbally abuse me, and make promises they have no intention of carrying through (another form of abusive): like waving a £50 note in front of a homeless person, asking them if they want it, and then setting fire to it.

To help somebody with a manageable mental heath problem, it's really easy. Just don't lie to them. Don't insult them. Don't stigmatise them. Don't make them spend all their money on private treatment, so they don't have any money. Don't take away their house. Don't badmouth them too all their friends so that they're totally isolated and alone. Don't tell them that you know f**k all about managing a mental health problem that they already successfully managed for 32+ years.

If you're always leaving them out in the cold. If you're always removing opportunities rather than creating them. If you're physically injuring them. If you talk to them in a disgusting way. If you're a totally disrespectful c**t... that's going to drive that person to a bad place.

During my 6 month experiment I discovered this, beyond all reasonable doubt. My Dad's an abusive waste of space who would ruin a supercar to save the money on a single bolt. My Mum is kind and generous, but she's not immune from ignorance, and she trusts my Dad's disgusting views. My ex-wife wanted me dead so she could have my live insurance money, and she's successfully painted a picture of me as some sort of demon.

In private treatment, they teach you not to accept a clinical label for an acute illness as a it will be used against you as derogatory term. Stress and unreasonable expectations, abuse and the relationships collapse around you. Your only visitor is the one who runs the prison. The prison in your home. Your gaoler will come and bang on your locked door around the clock, to make sure you are as agitated as possible.

That's what I've learnt. I've learnt that playing by the rules, being kind, not being vindictive, trusting professionals, but fundamentally evaluating everything base on an objective analysis of the data, has shown this:

• The NHS is wonderful, but Fluoxetine as a first line of defence is ruining lives
• The NHS is wonderful, but getting a referral to a Psychiatrist takes far too long (6+ months)
• The NHS is wonderful, but their Psychiatrists are used to dealing with mostly psychotically ill people who are completely dysfunctional
• The NHS is wonderful, but it's NICE who get to decide what medication they can use. Most things on offer will give you horrible side effects and have very little evidence of long term efficacy
• So, in short, if you're an educated patient, don't listen to your GP. My GP helped to kick me out of my house, so my absolute c**t of an wife could have an affair without distractions
• Your parents know f**k all. Especially if they've put you in hospital a couple of times. Oh, and if they've caused Grievous Bodily Home because they've such primitive apes that they don't have the power of speech, to say "I'm coming to attack you with a piece of glass now because I only know how to be a violent psychopath"
• Private Psychologists and Psychiatrists can be very kind and non-judgemental, and can actually say things that really help. You can actually have a conversation with them about whether a medication is good for dribbling and Jeremy Kyle, or whether there are any upsides
• Dual diagnosis is a fucking curse. Dual diagnosis is a death sentence. When you say something, people have an unlimited amount of ignorant idiotic crap with which to belittle and dismiss your opinion.

But the short explanation is this: people are not very mature and people are not very intelligent. People love to point and laugh and label and exclude the different kid. That translates into adult life too. One of the big reasons why adults don't lose their vicious c**tishness is that all they do is do crosswords and watch TV. They're hopelessly idiotic. When I go to the doctor, I tell them what I want, and they give it to me.

I went to my GP and said "I'm having unmanageable suicidal thoughts, and thinking about self-harming. I've tried to keep myself safe, but I no longer feel able to keep myself safe any more".

My GP wrote a letter to Psychiatric Liaison at the Royal London Hospital, and sent me there immediately.

I spoke to Psychiatric Liaison, and explained that my life was unmanageable, because "my parents kept lying about supporting me, but they were just stringing me on, and that was an unmanageable situation, with a stressful job and the recent stress of moving (without their help of course). I explained that 2 years ago they had told me not to borrow a small amount of cashflow money, and that they would help. I explained that they lied. They waited until the last minute and pretended they had never made the offer, even though they had made it on multiple occasions"

I spoke to the Duty Psychiatrist, and told her I wanted Olanzapine (never taken it before, but I knew it was fast acting... I had no plans to take it... I just wanted to give the Psychiatrist a job) but I wanted to be admitted to hospital.

The Duty Psychiatrist gave me the spiel about hospitals not being a nice environment. I reassured her that I had been on Psych wards before.  She suggested Monday to Friday visits with the Crisis team. I pointed out the day was Saturday.

When I got into the Psych Ward that I wanted, I was happier, relaxed. That's the way things are supposed to work. It took me 13 hours, but I got what I needed.

One of the nurses brought me my Olanzapine, which is what I said I wanted. I knew it's a much smaller pill than Quetiapine, so I could hide it under my tongue and then spit it out when I was out of view.

Yes, I finally got what I wanted out of the NHS, which was to help me from committing suicide. They gave me a safe hospital environment to shield me from the bullshit life that drove me to suicide. Can you believe that my boss at HSBC actually gave me and my sister a hard time. I was in hospital for 2 weeks with a suspected heart condition. That's disgusting.

3 hot meals a day and a bed. Oh, and maybe a TV. I was a little bored, but the other patients were good to talk to, and we did our little Hole in my Bucket musical number. A s**tload more interesting than working on a project that's falling flat (HSBC Customer Due Diligence: CDD) on it's face because they terminate the contracts of anybody with expertise and skill and has a track record of turning failing projects around.

Oh, and while I was in hospital (was it the 4th or the 5th major admission, I've lost count) my parents decided to give me half the sum of money that they promised me I could borrow off them 2 and a half years ago, but just lied. That's right, they lied. They lied about wanting to help, and their lie was exposed too late for me to be able to arrange an alternative. Two and a half years later! Having to spend 2 and a half years living off my wits in London is hard.

So here's the bottom line: if you love your children and you want to help them, listen to them and if you make a promise to help them, don't let them down.

If you think you've got a "bad kid" you're probably a hypocritical c**t. My mistreating your kids, mugging them off, taking the p**s out of them, never praising them for anything, just doing whatever the hell you want all the time. There's no such thing as a "bad kid" they've all got parents. If those parents drink and smoke and take drugs and can't be bothered to get a proper job, and had their house bought for them by their elderly parents... what disgusting hypocrisy.

The reason why this blog post is late, is because I always have to take matters in to my own hands. You know all those anti-depressants you pop, and the beer, wine and vodka that you tip down your gullet? You're buying overpriced medication, and self-medicating for whatever problems you have in your life, or baggage you're still carrying around.

I'm still not drinking, but I'm sick of being in hospital. I'm sick of how much time & money it costs me to be your convenient scapegoat. I'm sick of people looking at medicine bottles and thinking that they know something about me. I actually keep my medication in a bottle by the bed to get rid of shallow girlfriends. The medications inside have never been touched.

I'm going to start tapering psychoactive substances into my life. Total abstinence proves nothing. If we follow the abstinence theory to its ultimate conclusion, we give up on food, because it's converted to glucose in the body, and glucose is sugar.

So, which is a more fitting epitaph?

Here lies Nick. He was such a non-addict he even gave up food. Any oxygen. What a hero. He died, so that his parents could continue being complete selfish ignorant cunts. A noble sacrifice. Turns out that life is a lot more livable with sugar and other things

Or I've got another one for you. Do you like this one?

Here lies Nick. He died doing what he loved. His parents actually gave a shit about him, so they decided to support him for once, and involve the rest of the family rather than just spreading malicious bullshit about him. Turns out that you don't die young if you're nice to your sons and daughters. Rumour has it that Nick's dad even gave £1 to charity for the first time in his miserable life, in the hope that Nick could see it from the afterlife.

They're quite long. Maybe they need to be edited down a bit.

Anyway, chemical oblivion awaits. Wake me up when 2 and a half years have passed and my cunt Dad might actually let my mum help her son.

Oh, help myself? Did you say "help yourself".... yeah, good idea. I've been doing it for my entire adult life, because my parents are such selfish liars who should never have had kids. I've had barely the briefest breaks in between companies in my career. I work my f**king arse off. I'm busting my balls to help myself, and others too.

This is what my parents think I spend my money on. No, when my life has been completely fucked over I very rarely spend the price of a large Dominos pizza on enough drugs to tranquilize an elephant, because you lie to me and fuck over my plans, which is very stressful (December 2015)

Tags: #drugs #suicide #bipolar #nhs #addiction

This is a story about the rise and rise of mental illness...

I used to be a Sea Scout. The motto of the Scouts is "Be Prepared".

When I suspected that I was becoming mentally unwell, I read every book, website, academic paper and journal that I could find that I felt related to my mental health and its potential treatment. I educated myself.

I'm an educated patient. Because I'm an educated patient, I avoided being medicated with a Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor (SSRI) which would have caused greater mood instability than I was already suffering with.

SSRIs are also linked to emotional blunting and the destruction of the sex lives and relationships of many couples. My relationship was already on the rocks, hence going to the doctor to see if there were some magic beans or a silver bullet, that could cure my ills.

Fundamentally, I believe that some mental health issues are risk not destiny. There don't seem to be any genes that are clearly faulty in individuals who suffer from Unipolar Depression and Bipolar Disorder. They are complex spectrum disorders. Some people are really dysfunctional when they are unwell, and others find ways of coping, sometimes to the point that people around them don't even know they are suffering.

However, out of desperation, I have tried the following medications, prescribed to me:

-----

Mirtazepine

This was well tolerated (no nasty side effects that made me want to stop taking it). It certainly seemed to reduce my stress levels and get some sleep. I think I might have rebounded though and started to go hypomanic fairly quickly.

Quetiapine

Unless you like weight gain, constipation, dry mouth and feeling like a drugged zombie for the few hours that you are awake, before your next dose knocks you out and you start the whole miserable 24 hour cycle all over again... I can't say this medication gives much quality of life beyond dribbling at daytime TV.

Aripiprazole

This is useful to see if your head is held straight. If your head is leaning to the left, then you will dribble out of the left side of your mouth. If your head is leaning to the right, then you will dribble out of the right side of your mouth. If you are holding your head perfectly straight, then you will dribble out of both sides of your mouth.

Lithium

This is hardcore. You need to have regular blood tests. It will shorten your life. Avoid if you can tolerate other meds or manage without.

Sodium Valproate & Depakote

Do you plan on working again? In an office? 9 to 5? Not really compatible with going back to work full time. If you're not completely manic (psychotic) then best avoided.

Lamotrogine

Just takes so damn long to get up to a therapeutic dose, you go through another hypomanic episode, decide that you're fine, and then stop taking your medication anyway. It's pretty subtle. Apparently it improves REM sleep. I dream a lot anyway. My sleep quality is more a function of good sleep hygiene.

Olanzapine

Fast acting. Good to calm you down if you're having an unmanageable moment. Makes you sleepy though... couldn't really work 9 to 5 on it.

Bupropion

Fast acting. Incredible antidepressant. It did give me a panic attack once though. Also stokes my hypomania pretty bad. Although it's a nicotinergic agonist, it actually shares many characteristics of stimulants like caffeine and amphetamine. Makes you pretty horny. Helps you quit smoking too (I don't smoke though).

Diazepam

Mother's little helpers (Valium). This powerful long-acting GABA agonist is an amazing anxiolytic. You could literally stand in the middle of a highway and not give a sh1t about the cars whizzing past you at 70mph. Super addictive. Horrible to taper off.

-----

Fundamentally, do any of these medications work? Well, I can vouch for Bupropion, Olanzapine, Mirtazepine and Diazepam for their short term efficacy. However, the body soon gets used to the effects and builds tolerance, which means you forever need to increase the dose to get the same therapeutic effect... welcome to homestasis, b1tches!

In my anecdotal experience, it's better to tough out the storm and not mess with the ridiculously complex organ that is a brain. When the psychopharmacologists imagined how Prozac (Fluoxetine) was having its antidepressant effect they expected to see higher serotonin levels in spinal fluids. They told the world that depressed people had "low serotonin". They just guessed and they guessed wrong.

Type I Bi-Polar Disorder was also known as Manic Depression. This is a serious illness that requires serious treatment. It's not my place to comment on whether medication plays a part in that. I'm no expert on Type I BPD.

Type II Bipolar means that you have hypomanic episodes, not fully blown mania. That means risk taking, spending money, hypersexuality, racing thoughts and pressured speech... amongst other symptoms, such as reduced need for sleep & food, and intolerance of slow-witted fools.

I'm Type II. I think it's a very important distinction. If I can control my mood disorder with good diet, good routine, good sleep and abstinence from alcohol & drugs (including prescribed drugs) then my brain has the best possible chance of finding homeostasis.

If I can remove unnecessary stress in my life, caused by complete ass-hats, and I'm empowered to just get the f**k on with my life, then my symptoms will abate. It's as simple as that.

This was the first time that Frankie had ever seen snow. His brain adapted to the change in environment (December 2010)

Tags: #bipolar #mentalhealth #depression #suicide #sex #drugs #frankie

This is a story of exploitation...

Bipolar II is risk, not destiny, but I have unwittingly utilised my diagnosed illness in order to achieve things which many can only dream of. There has been a price to pay, which might aptly be summed up as Nick in blue.

For the uninitiated, a chronic illness is something that you will suffer from your whole life, with little hope of a cure or doing anything beyond masking the symptoms. An acute illness is one that presents itself - an episode of an acute illness - but can go away, for days, weeks, months, years or even the rest of your life.

As the Bipolar propaganda proudly purports, many famous 'sufferers' are not really suffering at all in their hypomanic phases, if we consider the following: very few would give up those highs in favour of a normal range of moods, despite the savage depressive episodes which inevitably follow the hugely productive and energy-sapping explosion of activity, which tends to punctuate the cycle.

Why should anyone who is so applauded and revered by bosses, parents, society, for their 'achievements' - measured only on abstract scales such as school and University grades, income and other work-related nonsense such as promotions and job titles - think that they are unwell and seek treatment?

It's very hard to spot a person with Bipolar II in your organisation, your team. When they are hypomanic, they are also productive, but they are disruptive and argumentative. Essentially, they are totally unmanageable and unable to play nicely with plodders. Companies like plodders. Managers like plodders. They make up the numbers nicely and don't give you any surprises.

When your Bipolar II team member becomes depressed, their productivity drops to zero and so do their hours. They will arrive late at work, leave early and generally do very little. However, as a manager, you will be flooded with relief that your team member is now no longer being so disruptive and argumentative, and you will finally see that a hell of a lot of work has been achieved, and happily let the burnt-out wreck turn up and be miserable at their desk.

As a plodder however, you are only waiting for the sleeping beast to re-awaken. It keeps you awake at night. It stresses you out. You only know how to do the thing that you're totally mediocre at, and you absolutely hate change and are unable to deal with it, so the idea of getting away from the source of this stress is unthinkable. You stay and accept round after round of unintended abuse.

Organisations like productivity, and stressed plodders are even less productive than normal plodders, so when they speak up and say that they are tired (from all the lost sleep) and stressed and they can't plod as averagely as they had been plodding before, the management don't tend to be very sympathetic. Often times, it's the poor plodder who gets the shove rather than the primadonna Bipolar II golden boy or girl.

Now, if this sounds Sociopathic, Narcissistic and arrogant, you are mistaken. Our entire pyramid-scheme structure is rather adversarial, and when we set targets for our employees in these fake hierarchies, we do so in the full knowledge that there are more people competing for the next rung on the ladder than there are fake job titles at the next tranche in the pyramid. We are deliberately asking people to squabble with each other over those precious promotions.

The Narcissist believes he or she is special, and deserves special treatment, deserves the status that they have (or better normally!). I personally, always wonder why people are listening to me, why I am the one who seems to be making the decisions or getting the promotion, because I don't do the work that's asked of me, play politics or jump through the hoops and clap like a trained sea lion in a circus, which is what we are told will get us to the top of the tottering tree.

Believe me, I try to fit in as best as I can. I have literally been crying every morning for weeks and months on end, when I am nearly dead with depression, but yet I have to try and comply with somebody else's idea of ideal office hours. Likewise, I try and do what is asked of me by my bosses, but unless you know how to do it at plod pace, you have normally finished your work by lunchtime on Tuesday, and your boss is rather annoyed that he or she now has to give you some more... so you have actually failed to please your boss.

So, there are a few things I have found, which help to give me a little more stability: to cap and floor the moods, so to speak, and not have absolutely bat sh1t crazy hypomania, and dangerously low depression:

• Breakfast : this is absolutely crucial. The stomach is a key part of our circadian rhythm. Digesting that first meal tells your body clock that "this is the time to get up tomorrow". I never used to be a morning person until I started eating breakfast, and now I spring out of bed with no "snooze" button presses at 7am.
• Lunch : I think you can probably see where this is going. Yes, lunch is important, because it breaks the tendency to just work without a break. When a person gets going in a hypomanic phase, they can work for days almost without sleep or breaks
• Dinner : saying to yourself that you need to stop work so that you can eat and digest before winding down for the day is crucial. Eating before 9pm is mandatory, and eating before 8pm is preferred. Otherwise, you find yourself gorging on whatever you can find, just before collapsing after 18 straight hours with no food at all since waking up.
• Wind-down : almost impossible if you don't start early enough, but essential preparation for the next part of being an animal.
• Sleep : not something you always feel like doing. Your intuition can be totally wrong when you are hypomanic, and usually you are way more tired than you realise, even though you don't feel like sleeping and you most definitely can keep on working. You would not even believe how many nights of sleep I have skipped in a row. Sleep is essential for energy, mood and the immune system. You get really sick if you don't have 6 or 7 hours a night, at least. More than 9 is too many... you'll get lethargic, or perhaps you are exhausted and depressed and you don't even realise!

In addition to this, there are some other rules:

• No caffeine : because it's a Dopaminergic and Noradrenalinergic stimulant in the same class of chemicals as amphetamine. It's a potent wakefulness agent in the brain, and will mess you up. "Do stupid sh1t faster and with more energy" is accurate.
  
• No alcohol : because it's a GABA agonist, like Diazepam (Valium) and you will develop a physical dependency on it, requiring it to be able to sleep, especially if you have been drinking coffee. It's the same as mixing uppers & downers as any other kind of drug addict. Did you know you're a junkie? Think about that next time you're looking down your nose at somebody. Alcohol is also hydrophilic, which means that it draws water out of the cells in your body... you are actually less full of life-giving water, when you are full of booze.
• No psychoactive medicines or drugs : the brain and body are homeostatic. That means, they are designed to stay in equilibrium. You don't need to add anything apart from glucose, water and a few vitamin, mineral and amino acid trace amounts, which you can get from proteins. Fatty proteins should give you everything you need (yes, animal fat is good for you in its natural form).

And finally:

• Exercise the brain and the body equally : when the brain is tired and the body isn't, it doesn't have a frigging clue why you are not absolutely whacked out and ready for bed. In our modern sedentary society, where we do little more than scroll through emails and web pages, our brain is a lot more tired than our muscles. This is not natural, and leads to 'brain exhaustion' despite the rest of you being physically dormant.

Of course, this recipe for mood stability is what I aspire to perfect, but it takes practice. I'm still working on keeping the routine, and resisting the temptations of a cold beer or a glass of wine. Giving up tea and coffee was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and I still have my 'methadone' in the form of mint leaves in hot water.

By the way, anyone who tells you sugar is a drug is an idiot. What's next, Oxygen is a drug?

Sex can be addictive, but it's not unhealthy. However, an unsatiated libido is most definitely unhealthy and unnatural (March 2015)

Tags: #career #mentalhealth #bipolar #sex