This is a story about hypnosis...

Dredging up the past is meant to be unhealthy, but how are we supposed to move forward without letting go of things that are holding us back? How are we supposed to be secure and happy, until we find a stable base to build upon?

I've been going back through the memory banks, trying to figure out how I arrived here, today. I've been wondering whether I should repair and renovate, or whether to build anew, to start again afresh, from scratch.

As I've recounted my story, I realise there's a repeating theme: having to leave stuff behind and rebuild everything. Every time I do that, I feel like it's a test of true friendships - to see if they'll survive long-distance. It's insecurity that drives a lot of this, so please don't feel I'm actually testing people.

Thinking about it, I've actually become hypersensitive to feelings of rejection. I will now push people away, as soon as their commitment to friendship seems questionable. I've learned to not let people into my heart anymore, and to try and be a person who can withstand the shock of losing all my friends, at any moment. "I'll just make new friends" I tell myself, as I find myself feeling all alone, yet again.

The first times I lost all my friends, circumstances were out of my control. I was moved from school to school, and around the country. These were early, formative lessons in the value of human relationships. The message was clear: I don't deserve stable relationships.

Later, I lost groups of friends due to relationship breakups. This was part of the learning process of growing up. You need to have your own friends, or else you're too heavily dependent on your partner for your social life, and you have a double-whammy when you break up.

Finally, I tried to move out of London to live on the coast, and hoped that I would be able to have friends come visit from the city, to keep me going. In actual fact, the change wasn't so bad that time, as I made local friends through kitesurfing, plus my friends from London did come to visit quite often.

Unfortunately, my life completely collapsed, what with an abusive all-consuming relationship, that poisoned a lot of relationships and a malicious ex who campaigned against me and caused many of my friends to take sides, in a way that I've never experienced before. The place I used to live in was small, and rumours and gossip became unbearable. I needed a clean break from that microcosm.

In that instance, every area of my life was intimately connected to every other area. People from completely different areas of my life would say to me "I heard..." and repeat some vicious propaganda from my ex, that was completely one-sided. Because I was very sick, I couldn't stand it, I couldn't defend myself against the onslaught of a person intent on defacing my character, I couldn't match my ex's energy and I couldn't bring myself to stoop to the level of retaliation. Believe me, I could have dished the dirt on her, just like she did on me.

But, this is about moving on. I'm determined that I'm not going to let bitterness and regret overwhelm me, even though I feel terribly hurt, isolated, alone and treated unfairly. There's two sides to every story, but my side doesn't have to be told if it's just tit-for-tat. I'm bigger than that.

You know, you should go ahead and judge me. If you don't know and like my character by now, then I'm not going to try and convince you. I'm not going to twist your arm. I don't know why more people don't unfriend me on Facebook, block my number on WhatsApp and generally send the message that I'm dumped, as a friend... I've been judged unworthy, unpleasant, and having bad character.

A recent ex-girlfriend started throwing plates and knives at me in a stroppy rage, having a tantrum. I thought "here we go again" as I shielded myself from blows, with her screams echoing throughout the building. She stormed out of the flat. I didn't let her back in, it was over. I'm not going to be an abuse victim again.

I lost a whole bunch of friends, when I broke up with that girlfriend. Some of them even said that they didn't agree with the way I mistreated her. Errr, you mean, like, I should have allowed myself to remain a victim of domestic abuse? I was very hurt by the way that people took sides, and what was clearly a corruption of the truth of the reasons why we had broken up. Clearly, my ex had painted a different picture from the one where she was being violently abusive towards me. But, I guess I've gotten used to such bullshit. I cried and cried, but at least it was over relatively quickly.

Maybe there's something just unloveable about me? My parents could look at me and say "it's cool, he doesn't need his schoolfriends or any stability in his childhood". A couple of ex-girlfriends could look at me and say "that face really needs a couple of black eyes and a broken nose". A load of friends could say "well, we've heard one side of the story. I'm sure that's enough, and now our opinion of this guy's character is completely changed and we no longer want anything to do with him".

I was brought up to be a pacifist. I was brought up to turn the other cheek. I was brought up to believe that two wrongs don't make a right. Every time I ever lashed out in retaliation, it was always me who suffered the consequences, so I became passive. I've been everybody's punchbag and convenient dumping ground.

I've cast my mind back as far as I can go, searching for a memory of security, a sense that somebody is loyal, that they'd treat me the same as I'd treat them... clearly, I'm carrying a lot of hurt, a deep sense of loss and abandonment.

It's a new challenge for me, to improve not move. It's a new challenge, to repair, not throw away and start again. It's a new challenge, to stand my ground and refuse to let my character be defaced by horrible people.

I've got to learn how to defend myself in a more positive way. Just being a passive punching bag, and letting people say what they want about me, and paint me in any light they like, is not good.

My new approach has been to be brutally honest, about every tiny flaw, every little mistake I've ever made. I've tried to fess up to every regrettable action.

People told me I'm a bad person for so long, that I decided to live up to my character. However, I couldn't do it. I couldn't lie, cheat, steal or do anything to hurt anybody. I ended up hurting myself. You would barely believe how much I've beaten myself up, harmed myself and taken myself to the brink of death.

I've paid the price, plus surplus too. I don't give a fuck now, if people want to hold me to account for something I was never to blame for in the first place. If you corner a dog and beat it, and you want to put it down because it bit you, when it was cornered, frightened, beaten and suffering, with nowhere to go except through you... go right ahead.

I've examined my entire history, and I see a caged animal. I see a person who's been trusting, who's taken a chance on people, been brave enough to risk getting hurt. People have taken advantage of my trusting, innocent nature, my kindness and want to feel accepted, included. I've forgiven those who have hurt me, not that it makes the blindest bit of difference to me.

At least I can sleep at night. Those who bully, abuse, slander and take advantage of those who show the slightest weakness, must surely have a conscience. Those monsters must surely feel filled with regret at their abhorrent behaviour. At least I can put my hand on my heart and say that I never set out to hurt anybody or exploit the weak and the needy.

There's so much stuff that I'm dredging up, and I wish it could stop, but stress, pressure and the fragility of my situation, plus the dysfunction and neglect of all my relationships, mean that I'm pretty much trapped alone with my thoughts. I'm trying to write, to expel the toxin of all this hurt, but writing's all I've got. I sit at work, bored, unchallenged, while the thoughts and the feelings pile up like a traffic jam. When I get home, the words just flood out like a raging torrent, and I can't stop. I always write more than I mean to.

I have a friend who's stuck by me, even though he saw the very worst of my character, and was deeply involved through the death throes of my normal life and my long-term relationship. He caught some of the flak, as I thrashed around like an injured beast, blindly lashing out, due to fear and pain. Surprisingly, he is one of my biggest supporters, despite the fact that I brought a great deal of stress into his life, and dragged him though months of hell, as co-founders of a startup.

I have few examples I can hold up, to support my belief that my character is sound, and that I should remain living. Even my own parents have always made it clear that I'm a "bad kid" and that I'm worthless, a disappointment.

I've been digging and digging, to see if there's some evidence in my childhood history of an evil streak. Perhaps I committed a genocide when I was an infant? Perhaps I perpetrated torture on a global scale? Perhaps I murdered my real family, as a psychopathic toddler, before being adopted by an experimental cult where I was reprogrammed to believe I was worthless and to act passively when I'm abused?

Anyway, I'm going to leave it there. When I get into this trance-like state, I can just write and write and write (I know, right?) and before I know it I've written far more than anybody would have the time, patience and indulgence to read.

I'm going to start limiting myself again, to how much I write. It would be good if I can break out of this regression, this state of backwards-looking. It would be good if I can look forwards, and think positively, but there's no external trigger to do so. The world is stunned into silence, or the void is simply too cavernous to even care about the white noise, the hot air that spews forth.

Looking for some nugget of security in my past has yielded nothing. Looking back to see if I can remember some happy, stable, secure time has brought chequered results. Perhaps I might have found some compassion for myself, even if I haven't managed to elicit it in anybody else. Either that, or I just have enough accumulated evidence of mistreatment to assume that the world is nearly entirely hostile to me, and it's time to say goodbye.

If I look at the trend, I appear to be spiralling downwards.

Tags: #childhood #bullying #abuse #divorce #friends #depression #suicide #parents

This is a story about imitation and flattery...

What's through that door? Well, probably my entire career and every golden opportunity that will ever be presented to me, throughout my adult life.

That North Oxford house, if I've identified it correctly, used to be the headquarters of Daily Information. It was here that on one midweek night, computer games ceased to be a solitary bedroom activity, and instead became an opportunity to socialise.

So important was this place in my childhood, that I can still remember the code for the door behind the front door, that would lead up to my friend's parents' office, which was above the offices of Daily Info.

The main office itself was a fascinating place. There were zillions of flyers and posters pinned up on the wall, as examples of the desktop publishing and reprographics business, which also produces a popular "What's On?" guide for the Oxford area. There were also instructions on how to operate the many pieces of equipment and notices for the staff who worked there. It was a complex ecosystem, so unlike a home stuffed full of static ornaments and pictures.

There were piles of photocopier paper, and cardboard sheets in all colours and sizes. Printer cartridges, ink ribbons, toner, and daisy-wheel heads were piled up on shelves, or stacked nearby the cream-plastic machines that they served. Half-finished print jobs lay on the tops of every available flat surface.

But, the main event, and the thing that a group of geeky and otherwise introverted kids, had gathered there for, were the many computers. There seemed to be screens and keyboards everywhere. There were PCs and there were Macs, and they all had mice and colour screens, which was a big deal back in the 1990's, when people still used to do word processing on green-screen terminals that couldn't play games.

Yes, it was the computer games that we were there for, and between my friend, his mum, and a few willing staff members, they had always managed to coerce all the computers into playing amazing computer games. It was like the most fantastic treasure trove of an amusement arcade, with unlimited tokens to play again and again.

There were single-player games, like Shufflepuck, where you had to play air-hockey against a whole host of fascinating characters of increasing difficulty and deviousness. This was an interesting use of the computer mouse, which mirrored your hand's movements with the on-screen mallet, to try and send an air-hockey puck sliding into your opponent's goal.

However, the thing that I enjoyed the most, was co-operating with other kids to try to solve puzzle games. These were mainly of the point-and-click variety, where you guided an animated character through a world that you could interact with, using a number of verbs, like "push", "pull", "open", "close", "pick up", "walk to" and "use". These delightful creations included such titles as The Secret of Money Island and several Indiana Jones inspired games.

We would would pair up, with one of us operating the mouse, while the other pressed keyboard shortcuts to choose the different operations, while you tried to figure out how to solve the puzzles, which generally involved walking around, opening doors and boxes, picking up items, and then figuring out what to use the items on, or how to combine them together to make some new kind of object.

I idolised this friend who ran the event on a midweek evening, and tried desperately to imitate all the things he seemed to do so effortlessly. I read the same books. I tried to write and contribute articles to a school magazine that he had founded. I tried to learn how to become a programmer, and to create music using a MIDI keyboard, plugged into a computer. I wanted to play all the computer games he liked, which were often the Lucasarts point-and-click adventures, rather than 'shoot-em-ups'.

The bitterness that is so evident at times in my writing, could have ended up repressed and perhaps revealing itself in even more ugly forms, had computing not become a social experience for me, as well as a creative outlet.

Writing has never been my strong suit. When I was about 13 years old, I wrote an article about a computer game that I'd never played, in a desktop publishing program that I was learning to get to grips with. It got horribly mangled as paragraphs got moved around. "Were you on drugs when you wrote that?" my friend asked me, having reviewed it with another friend of his who I never met, on account of him going to a different school. I was put in my place, although not maliciously.

Everything I ever did was a pale imitation of what my childhood friend did, however, it was still immensely fortuitous that I had this role model in my life.

By writing computer programs nearly every day throughout my teens, I gained enough experienced to get a job as a junior programmer, some 3 years ahead of my peers. A few years later, there was a skills shortage because of the Y2K millennium bug, and I was able to get a very lucrative contract. Having held a graduate position for a prestigious corporation, and also been an IT contractor before the age of 21, I was then able to break into financial services and banking, which is normally off-limits to anybody without a good degree from one of the top Universities.

It should be remembered that there are many talented geeks, plugging away at code in their bedrooms. The difference between those who are 'tame' and able to play nice with others, is whether they have had adequate social contact. I was certainly rather removed from healthy social bonds by too much screen time, spent in isolation in a darkened bedroom, hunched over a keyboard.

Through people like the friend I idolise, the joy of computing became a joy of using technology to have a shared experience, to use computers as a mechanism for social bonding. Even though I had to move away from Oxford because my parents relocated the family, I was able to reproduce a little of the magic I learned at Daily Information and the social group that clustered around this one charismatic friend.

I learned how to connect computers together using coaxial cable, and I used to have groups of friends get driven over to the family home, with their PCs. We used our paper rounds and washing-up jobs, in order to buy the equipment necessary to allow our computers to 'speak' to each other, and so we were able to play co-operative games, with each of us operating our own computer.

As a bunch of 14/15 year old spotty nerds, having these early "LAN" (network) parties was amazing, even if we were cooped up indoors for whole weekends, waging virtual warfare against each other. Games like Doom were popular with us, where we just attempted to kill each other, but the pecking order was soon established, and the one-on-one combat soon grew tiresome.

We moved onto games like Command and Conquer where we could have two teams, each in their own "war room" connected by an extra-long cable that I had bought for the specific purpose of separating us, so that we couldn't hear each other's tactical discussions. A game would last over 12 hours, with us playing right through the night.

Because of the inspiration to write and to publish, plus the few social skills I had developed and the exposure to the reprographics and 'typesetting' industry, as a teenager I was confidently able to get a Saturday job for a little company that was like a smaller version of Daily Information, in Lyme Regis, called Lymteligence (yes, it had one 'l' missing, which wasn't very intelligent).

I had used money from my washing-up job at a local hotel to purchase my first modem and get connected to the World Wide Web (Internet) after a rather crappy old modem had completely failed to give a connection to my friend back in Oxford, who I was desperate to stay in contact with. For hours, my friend had patiently allowed his phone line to be tied up, while I tried to coerce some antique piece of hardware that I had bought at a car boot sale, into connecting with my distant friend's computer, but alas, he finally convinced me to give up.

At Lymteligence I learned how to author websites, writing the code by hand. I created a website for The United Kingdom Men's Movement. I remember feeling ethically challenged, as I typed up some of the bitter words of men who had suffered painful divorces. Thinking about it now, I feel that I myself could have been driven into the arms of this movement, had I not had a healthy social outlet for my technological skills.

Although it's shameful to admit, and a little creepy, I would try to keep tabs on my friends I had left behind in Oxford, by being a bit of a lurker on the rapidly developing Internet. However, by doing this, in a way I was able to stay abreast of advancements and trends that would otherwise have passed me by.

"Social media" means Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, today, and perhaps Snapchat and Vine. In fact, there is probably a movement that's already begun that's going to kill these technology giants, that I'm not even aware of yet. I've always been a bit behind the curve.

However, back in the day, social media meant bulletin boards, forums and websites like Friends Reunited. I have no idea how I managed to maintain a toe-hold of social connection with old friends, throughout the disruption of moving away and then our adult lives, but the Internet always provided a way.

It used to be the case that the search engines, of which Google didn't feature prominently until surprisingly recently, used to be very good at digging out which particular corner of the Internet your friends were hiding in, provided they were using their real name, and that name is quite uncommon... and my role model friend is blessed with quite a unique name.

Now that we tend to do most of our Internet social activities on Facebook, you'd be surprised to learn that your privacy is actually very well protected, and you have a reasonable level of control over what people can and can not find out about what's going on in your world.

In 1999/2000 I was living in Winchester in Hampshire, UK. Things were going well with my career, but I was struggling socially. Through a housemate, we ended up in the NUS (student) bar at Winchester University. I was leaning up against the table football table, when somebody behind me challenged me to a game. I turned around and realised that it was one of my fellow Daily Information computer club friends, and a guy who I went to school with since about the age of 5.

Reconnecting with an old schoolfriend was great. I had been back to Oxford, in order to show off my company car and boast about how well my career was going, but it was crushing inadequacy and a sense of loneliness that had driven me to go back there. I had even been quite evil and immature, and had wanted to exclude certain friends and monopolise other friends' time, in order to try to salve my insecurity. I was still a deeply troubled, lonely person, expressing that in very unhealthy ways.

Shortly after that chance meeting, I picked up a local newspaper and read that somebody had been electrocuted, while trying to take a short-cut underneath some parked railroad carriages, in order to get back to his University halls of residence. It was our childhood friend. Killed, through a momentary lapse of judgement, while under the influence of alcohol and the excitement of a fun night out in town. Tragic.

This put me - the lurker - in a really strange position, in terms of grieving. I later discovered through the Internet that my friends were attending the funeral, but because of the sense of distance and the shame of admitting that I had been somewhat jealously following our old social group from afar, like a stalker, I didn't know what to do. I procrastinated until it was too late, and the funeral was over.

There used to be so much stigma associated with using the Internet as a means of human connection. Admitting that you met your partner through Internet dating was likely to instigate stifled sniggers and snide remarks about axe-murderers and weirdos. I guess I am a weirdo though.

I don't know whether it's a British thing, or perhaps a function of a lonely childhood and being a needy, oversensitive person, but I'm kinda always struggling to articulate my needs and ask for what I want. I don't even admit to myself, what my fears and unmet needs are.

Writing this blog has been a journey for me, but it's taken me further than I would have ever expected. One leg of the journey was 5,351 miles, and took me to the hometown of a bunch of my idols and role models.

Is it creepy, is it weird, is it an unpleasant amount of pressure, knowing that in some sense, a friend is looking to you for guidance and direction? It must be, a little. Why the hell do I never seem to have grown up and gotten over childhood infatuations?

For me and at least one other friend, our mutual friend has provided at least some of the inspiration for our careers. In a way, I at least owe this friend a debt of gratitude for my financial security and the fact that a lot of doors are open to me, for career opportunities. I know that he shared with me at least a twinge of regret for having perhaps nudged one of our friends down one particular technology path.

Who knows what are going to be the knock-on effects of the connections we make with one another. Who could have foreseen that I would have taken the wealth that I generated so effortlessly in the highly paid tech sector, and use it to implode so spectacularly in my mid-thirties.

Of course this is not about blame, but instead, I feel this great sense of responsibility. I feel that there are certain individuals who I am crippled with shame, to imagine reading my sorry tale and thinking "what kind of monster has this guy turned into". I imagine their disappointment, and it slays me.

Where do we look for guidance and inspiration from in the world? Our parents? Well what if your parents don't provide it? In fact, what if your parents provide a cautionary tale for how not to live your life? I don't want to go into the details again, of why I don't want to follow in the footsteps of either of my parents, but suffice to say, I've always been looking to people outside of my family, to provide feedback and inspiration in my life.

So, I'm fessing up. That's what this whole blog has been about. I'm playing up like a kid and wanting to test my boundaries. When is some parent-like figure going to stand up and say "stop that!" so that I know I've gone too far? When is some authority figure going to step in, and tell me that I'm out of line, and give me some guidance on how I should think, act, speak?

Being given stacks of cash, relatively few responsibilities and no social structure around you, to tell you when you're taking things too far, when you're getting yourself into trouble, when you're wandering too far from the flock, when your ideas are getting too outlandish, when unpleasantness is rearing its ugly head. You probably take it for granted, the checks and balances that exist around you.

So, I'm making an appeal, to people from every period in my life, from every stage in my development: from childhood to adulthood, from Oxford, to Dorset, to London, to Cambridge, to San Francisco, to Prague, to France, to Brazil, to New Zealand. I'll travel round the world a million times, if somebody can just reach out and give me some kind of reality check.

I'm pouring my heart and soul out into the chasm of the Internet, hoping to make a connection with people, hoping to trigger some kind of response. I have no idea how I'm received. I have no idea how I'm perceived.

Yes, it's needy and yes, it's kinda pressuring people to say something where it seems impolite to even ask for feedback. We have lots of phrases that kinda shame people into keeping their mouths shut, like "emotional blackmail" and "attention seeking". If somebody even came out and accused me of such things, at least I'd have something to reflect on.

Everytime I ask somebody a direct question, they seem to think that the kindest thing to do is to spare my blushes, but I don't know whether to trust my own instincts, or actual concrete feedback that I've received.

For example, I was living with some friends, and it was only over dinner one night, when I had moved out of their house, that my friend finally let me know what he really thought and felt. The fact that the truth was suddenly unleashed was brutal. There was real pent-up frustration and having it all released all at once was too much to bear.

I just contradicted myself, didn't I? What an awful, needy, demanding person. I want honest feedback, but I want it little and often. I'm asking for people to give me a reality check, but I'm also admitting that the last time that a close friend fired both barrels at me, I nearly committed suicide. Who wants that kind of responsibility?

But, you know, the takeaway from this is that I didn't commit suicide, and even though that friendship was really badly damaged, at least it moved things along. I was in limbo before... really unsure of what was real, what I'd overheard, what was being said behind my back. It's an impossible way to live, like that.

I'm adrift in a vast ocean, with no tether to any fixed objects. I have no point of reference. I couldn't tell you which direction is which, and where I'm travelling from or to. I'm rather lost.

A friend got in contact earlier in the week, and offered their impression of something I wrote - noting that I had become bitter again - as well as some advice. I can't stress enough how this was like gold dust to me.

I'm not sure you realise how disconnected from the world I've become. I don't have any normal healthy friendships anymore, or regularly see people who I've had a long-term relationship with, knowing me for years, so they can comment on how I've changed. So many people have become just another 'like' on Facebook.

As a friend who I chatted to via Facebook messenger today said, we know what all our Facebook friends position on Britain leaving the EU is, but we don't know what's going on in the lives of those who are not sharing anything personal, except political opinions. There's a vast difference between the occasional reminder that somebody is still alive, because they're active on social media, and actually looking somebody in the eye, when they give you the British knee-jerk reaction of "I'm fine" when you ask how they are.

I appreciate I've written a lot, and huge amounts of it is virtually unreadable. Also, long bitter rants are not exactly pleasant reading, nor do they paint myself in a particularly favourable light. Who wants to know that angry venomous twisted person, hunched over their keyboard, blindly firing resentful and blame-filled missives into the void.

If you've persevered this far, I'm ashamed of myself. I think about all the stuff you must've read, and what you must think about me, but of course this is conjecture. I admit, I am trying to cajole you into giving me some feedback.

You know, I often think about how immature and childish I am. I often think that everybody is in the same boat, and we're always going to be left wondering how other people perceive us, and what people really think about us, to some extent.

It's easy to dismiss a lot of what I'm wrestling with, as just a standard part of the human condition. I'm also reflexively programmed to offer up neutralising statements, as standard, such as "I don't think I'm special and different" and "I know that my life is no more stressful and turbulent than yours".

The engine that drives this verbal diarrhoea is the fact that I do feel insignificant and worthless. I'm driven to try to anchor myself back into the world of the living, given that I have been hospitalised so many times with suicidal and self-harming behaviour. In a lot of ways, I feel justified in telling people who want to guilt-trip me into suffering in silence to shove their "you're not special, shut up" statements up their arses.

How does one go about fixing the very real and practical things, such as figuring out how to live amongst your friends once again? Sure, I can reconnect with people, but if they don't like who I am and what I say, what hope is there of there being any lasting relationship?

Anyway, this stuff is always cringeworthy and difficult to read, so I'm going to leave it there, as an open letter to my friends and acquaintances. An appeal to human connection, and the feedback that is essential for social bonds.

It's mighty cold when you're out in the thin atmosphere of the outsider, frozen and clinging onto life.

Tags: #friends #childhood #oxford #career #computing #socialmedia #suicide #depression

This is a story about viewing the world through the lens of a mood disorder...

When I'm hypomanic, nothing seems impossible. Hypomania brings big ideas and grand ambitions, and the only thing standing in my way is the stupidity and myopia of other people. Nobody seems to have the guts to go for the glory, and nobody seems to be able to keep up with me. I get frustrated at a sense of dragging other people along in my wake, having to dumb things down and spoon-feed people at a painfully slow pace.

Obviously, when I'm hypomanic, I over-estimate my abilities and I'm rather rude and obnoxious about other people. Not exactly a team player. I tend to be pretty disrespectful of other people's opinions, believing that they've had their chance, and have failed to make any significant impact. Why should I listen to such gutless wimps? Why should I listen to anybody not firing on all cylinders, like I am, when I'm riding that hypomanic high?

Another thing that I overestimate when hypomanic is my stamina. I assume that I can continue at breakneck pace indefinitely. I feel like the enthusiasm and passion that I'm feeling will carry me along, despite the huge amount of energy that is being expended. I don't walk, I run. I don't speak, I shout. I don't discuss, I decide and act. It's a blur of activity, in single-minded pursuit of a goal, to the exclusion of everything else. There's no balance. There's no downtime. There isn't a second to spare: rush! rush! rush!

But, I'm not stupid. I've been through enough episodes of hypomania now to know what's happening. So why don't I modify my behaviour? Well, part of the big rush is the fact that I know that I'll hit a wall, and almost overnight, I'll hate everything and everybody, and I'll just want to curl up and die. I will have run out of energy, and suddenly be overwhelmed by the enormity of the task ahead, and with no gas left in the tank, I'll realise there's no way I can continue without sleeping off the work binge and catching up on those lost hours of rest.

Instead of trying to work at a steady pace that could last for years, instead I try to pack work into frantic periods of rushed and hectic activity, before I run out of steam and depression hits me like a sledgehammer. Instead of being discouraged from milking hypomania for all its creativity and productivity, I feel encouraged to try to achieve Herculean tasks.

When I'm in one of these moods, lots of stuff gets done, but there's lots of wastage. Instead of planning ahead or hesitating for a single moment, I'll just do whatever I can to minimise downtime and delays. If I unexpectedly need to work through the night, I'll do that and go out and buy a fresh shirt for the following day. If I need to get some rest, I'll book whichever hotel is quickest and easiest to book. If the project I'm working on needs something, I'll buy whatever I need, whatever the price, on the assumption that it would be a waste of time trying to penny pinch.

Can you spot the pattern in my activity? Can you see any trend that would suggest ups & downs? This is actual movement data that has been gathered over a whole year. I would never have thought my mood fluctuations would look this obvious, with hard data.

I used to keep a mood diary, but of course, when you're hypomanic you can't be bothered with the faff of it, and besides, you're not sick when you're hypomanic... at least you're convinced that you're not anyway.

I'm not sure whether I'm mostly suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) or whether my Type II Bipolar Disorder has simply become aligned to the seasons. It's virtually impossible to unpick cause and effect anyway. There are so many seasonal factors, such as the stress of Christmas and the fact that nothing much gets done at work during the holiday season between late December and mid-January.

Anyway, I'm locked into this cycle, where I start to emerge from hibernation around March/April time. In May I start to begin to do normal things again, rather than just being completely decimated by a sense of malaise, exhaustion, demotivation and feelings of being totally overwhelmed by mundane trivial shit. By June time, I'm about ready to work again, but in danger of tipping into hypomania at any moment.

At the moment, I struggle to get out of bed in the morning. I have a feeling of dread throughout the working day. The continuous anxiety is matched only by crushing boredom and an inability to concentrate. I flit between looking at my phone and making trips to the toilet to look at Facebook and message my friends. I read documents, but the words don't sink into my head. The phrase "what the fuck am I doing here?" is on repeat in my head. I'm struck with regular impulses to commit suicide and end the relentless monotony and unending pursuit of a seemingly impossibly distant goal of my next potential holiday.

By contrast to my hypomanic state, I assume that something is going to go wrong, and I'm going to be plunged back into the stress and pressure of looking for some more work, while the bills pile up and imminent deadlines to pay my taxes and deal with debts that have built up during my winter depression. Everything looks impossible, and boring, and pointless.

When I'm depressed, I'm absolutely convinced that my skills and abilities and experience count for nothing, and that I'm only good for the scrap heap. Even when I get a job, I feel like a fraud and that I'm going to be found out. When I make a mistake, I beat myself up about it for days, weeks even. I grimace and groan at my desk as I replay something stupid I said, over and over and over again.

I sit at my desk, watching the clock, wishing I was busy, wishing I felt useful, wishing that the feeling that life was completely pointless would go away, and feeling like death wouldn't be so bad, because there's no way I'll be able to put up with months and years of just turning the pedals, over and over and over again. The same commute, the same routine, the same colleagues, the same game, the same formula.

How on earth am I going to cope with feeling so bored and unchallenged, and so uninspired and so lacking in passion and like such a fraud and like I'm wasting away, and like there's no way I can stand even the next few minutes, let alone the next few hours, let alone the whole day, let alone the whole week, let alone the whole project and the whole contract, and the whole career? How the hell am I supposed to keep doing what I do?

I could drink coffee, which aids my concentration and motivation, but as soon as I do that I'll start getting big ideas and getting really bossy and overconfident, and before you know it, I'll be hypomanic again. Coffee always stokes my hypomania up. Also coffee stops me from sleeping, so I start drinking alcohol to get to sleep... and before you know it I'm knocking back copious amounts of both caffeine and alcohol to get through the shitty work.

Once I start drinking alcohol, I start having days where I wake up massively hungover, but weirdly I can get up and go to work. I find it easier to get up with a massive hangover, and easier to sit quietly at my desk getting on with my work, when I'm just about holding down my breakfast and I've got a pounding headache.

I think that drinking lots of alcohol regularly means that I've always got booze in my system, and it works like a kind of anti-anxiety drug. I feel super sick and stuff, but it gets rid of that sense of dread. By the afternoons, I start to sober up and my hangover goes, and I'm really happy and productive. When I get home, then I start to get the sense of dread about going to work again the next day, so I start boozing all over again, and end up going to bed pissed again. The whole cycle repeats itself.

Alcohol and work seem to go hand in hand for me, and it seems to stop me from being such an obnoxious prick and pissing everybody off before finally chucking in the towel on a perfectly good job. I've gotten used to using alcohol to bring my hypomania and anxiety under control. It's a massive crutch for me, and the temptation to use it is massive, when there's such pressure on me to perform and earn money and not fuck up yet another job.

I know that I could quite easily return to a tried-and-trusted form of mood stabilisation, using caffeine to get me moving when I'm deep in an exhausted depression, and alcohol to bring my hypomania under control when my brain is starting to get a bit over-excited, or anxiety and boredom are threatening to make life unliveable. However, these things led me to a massive breakdown eventually, which I'm sure was caused in part by massive amounts of these two innocuous chemicals.

When you're drinking 12 espresso shots during the day and two bottles of wine at night, everybody's chuffed to bits with your work, but surely you're just screwing your body up for the sake of making some money while you're young enough to cope with that kind of beating.

I value my liver and my mental health now, not that I have much of the latter. I'm struggling virtually all year round with a mind that tends towards either suicidal depression or self-sabotaging and career-wrecking hypomania. I've trashed my financial security, meaning I now have extra added stress and hassle that I could really do without, but I don't think resorting to self-medication will be good in the long run.

So, I remain caffeine free and I'm trying to wean myself off alcohol. Today is my 3rd consecutive day without booze. It might not sound like much, but you probably can't imagine the kind of pressure I'm under, with life very much hanging by a slender thread.

My days pretty much start with deciding whether to kill myself or not, and they don't improve much from there. The evenings and weekends are good, when I can see friends, but possibly it's also been the excuse to drink that's also played a part.

I need to get a handle on booze, but I also want my moods to be manageable. However, I also need to earn money and be able to cope with work. It's a Catch 22.

My gut feel is that I'm just going to stick with my harsh regimen of zero caffeine and very moderate booze consumption - ideally no booze at all except on a Friday & Saturday night.

Clearly, I'm just emerging from under the cloud of a very severe depression, especially as I slashed my own arm with a kitchen knife because the sense of hopelessness and relentless anxiety in the face of overwhelming odds stacked against me, was just so unbearable. Things look a little brighter, but now I'm starting to worry that hypomania will suddenly rear its ugly head, and I'll sabotage everything, like usual.

However, I do still refuse to medicate myself, merely to cope with the bullshit life that we're expected to live. I'll play the game as best as I can, but my brain is not for sale. Hopefully one day, I'll be able to better align my needs and my values with my work, but for now, I have to do some stuff that's pretty incompatible with good mental health.

One big thing I've learned from this rollercoaster ride, is to not expect change to happen quickly. Thinking things will change overnight has led to frustration and disappointment, which has either triggered further depression or has spurred me into regrettable actions. Thinking that I can use the blunt instruments of medication, drugs, legal highs, caffeine and alcohol to force my moods to bend to my will, has been very hard on my body and mind, and has only achieved very temporary effects, for horrific long-term costs.

Unfortunately, returning to stable mental health, a sense of wellbeing, comfort, happiness, security and an acceptable standard of living, has always required more luck, more time, more favourable conditions than I've ever been granted. I'm not complaining - we all face the same harsh and uncaring world, after all - but I recognise that modern society does little to allow people who get sick to ever re-enter the game.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #caffeine #alcohol #drugs #addiction #career

This is a story about being strung along...

How much does it cost to make a difference to somebody's life? How much time? How much money? How much effort?

By the time you end up homeless, far more stuff is broken than just needing a job and a place to live. Not only is your self-esteem destroyed, but also your squeaky clean credentials, which are required by the gatekeepers in the world of wage slavery.

I was asked to provide details of where I've been living for the last 5 years. If I was truthful, it would read like this:

• Current address
• Hospital
• Hotel
• Hospital
• Hostel
• Hampstead Heath (under some trees)
• Hostel
• Shitty student flat
• Hostel
• Hospital
• Girl's flat
• Kensington Park Gardens (under a bush)
• Hostel
• Crisis house
• Hospital
• Hostel
• Hospital
• Rehab
• Friend's guest bedroom
• Garden shed
• Own home

How the hell are the drones who process paperwork at my new job supposed to deal with that?

They say that moving house is one of the most stressful events that can happen in our lives. It's so disruptive. It's so hard to function, without a base, without somewhere settled to call home.

I used to drag tons of bags all over the city. It was worse when I was working, because I obviously needed smart clothes and my work laptop too. Can you imagine going from being homeless, to living in a 14-bed hostel dorm, but having to get suited and booted and go to work, with one tiny little locker and heaps of baggage? Can you imagine having to pack all your stuff up every morning, in case you got moved to a different dorm, and then going to work?

I've never claimed benefits, because I can see that they're just enough to do nothing but not enough to do something. For all the effort involved in filling in the forms, it's not worth it. No wonder people beg and steal... you really don't need that much money to support yourself in some kind of miserable existence, with no hope of escape. Benefits are the very worst option: maximum effort with minimum opportunity.

Anybody who thinks that cutting people off financially is some kind of motivatory strategy is simply an idiot. Here in the UK we have squats, soup kitchens and there is enough wealth to get by, hustling, scamming, stealing, panhandling and generally opting out of society. By raising the barrier to getting benefits, and offering so little assistance, people either find their way into antisocial behaviour, or get trapped into poverty.

Is it right that I should be trapped into a pool of people who can never work again, because we don't have a nice clean address history and we're stressed out as hell from being passed from pillar to post, as nobody wants to invest in our lives?

It takes time and it takes money, but there is a net benefit for everybody if you invest in the potential of people. There is no way that you can deny that the government, various councils and social workers decided that I was worthless, and not even deserving of a hostel bed, despite the fact that I contribute massive amounts of taxes. In the commercial world, it's the complete opposite: companies have shown that I'm worth huge amounts of money, despite the fact they'd shit a brick if they knew the truth about my past.

The obvious thing to do would have been to support me, so I could have gotten back to work sooner and started paying buttloads of tax again, but instead, Camden Council wasted months of my life before finally sending me a one-line email saying that they were making me homeless.

I wonder how many other 'lost causes' are actually capable people who just need a little investment. Stringing people along is not a good strategy. Shortchanging people, giving them less than they need, is a false economy.

Tags: #homeless #frank #career

This is a story about pounding the mean streets...

Here's a map of the fun run route that I followed. I wasn't actually following a route or a map, as you will see from the tale I'm about to tell.

Picking up again, where we left part two of this story, yesterday. I had just left my hotel bedroom, in pursuit of the woman and her family, who had been antagonising me all day. In my mind, this had become a game of hide & seek.

I dashed down the back staircase of the hotel, and found myself in the kitchen. Everything was dark and deserted. I went to the front windows and looked out. The police helicopter was still there, shining its light onto the front of the hotel. I decided to try and get out the back of the hotel.

At the back of the hotel was a room full of building materials, as well as the fuseboard controlling all the electrical circuits in the building. Everything was falling to pieces, with plaster hanging off the walls, doors hardly on their hinges, and some kind of makeshift extension on the back of the building. The back door wasn't locked.

Going out of the back door led me into a kind of car park, that was also a bit of wasteland. I started heading away from the hotel, but then noticed that there was a security guard at the gates. I pretended not to have seen him and to be looking for my car. Then, the lights from the police helicopter shone over the top of the hotel, and I rushed towards the back wall so as not to be seen. I explored the other end of the car park, where it was just overgrown and derelict, but there wasn't anything there of interest.

I spotted another entrance into the hotel, but that seemed to be serving a function room and I didn't want to freak any other guests out, so I headed back to the back door where I had originally come out from, turning my jacket inside out as I went, as some kind of 'disguise' as I planned to try and come out of the front entrance and I didn't want to be recognised by the police.

I was scared that I might have been spotted by the security guard, going in and out of the back entrance, so I hid myself behind a big stack of rolled up insulation and other building materials and waited for 20 or so minutes to see if I would hear anybody coming looking for me. I heard nothing.

I made my way out of the hotel, where there was a man on a scooter, talking incessantly on the radio and watching me. I walked down a side street, changed my jacket again, and went back into the hotel. This time, I went to the other side of the building, down a ground-floor corridor.

I descended a staircase into the basement and found a stack of plasterboards which I hid behind. I wanted to know if the hotel staff had been spooked out by me acting all weirdly, and if I was being followed. I tried to hide myself in the gap between the plasterboard sheets and the wall, but it wasn't easy. I was making a lot of noise and generally acting extremely strange, and felt sure that I was going to get in trouble with the hotel or the police. Surely I was disturbing other guests? It had been about 45 minutes of running around already.

I came out of hiding and found another corridor, this one had guest bedrooms on it. I heard somebody talking in what sounded like a bad German accent, and followed the sound. I decided that I was sure to be confronted by hotel staff though, and near the sound of the voice I decided to hide in a maintenance cupboard. Strangely, none of the maintenance cupboards were locked.

This particular cupboard I hid in didn't have a proper floor: it was just the floor beams. There were also two water tanks for 2 bedrooms' ensuite bathrooms, plus various pipes. It was also really dusty and cobwebby in there. I struggled to hold the door shut and regulate my breathing. I must surely have been overheard by guests, hiding in this cupboard.

I bumped into the girl who had been speaking in the German accent. She didn't seem shocked to see a dust-covered man, hiding in a cupboard right outside her room. She appeared to be beckoning me inside her bedroom, but I couldn't be sure exactly what her body language was saying. She certainly wasn't freaked out. I had no idea what to do. I was receiving no clear communication, and my thoughts were jumbled, confused.

I decided to go back to my room, but on the way there, I freaked out about somebody seeing me and decided to hide in another cupboard. This one was much the same. However, it sounded as if my noises had upset a guest. I could hear them phoning somebody. I imagined that they were freaked out by the sounds emanating from the flimsy walls, which were probably very clearly audible in the ensuite bathroom of their room. It certainly would have freaked me out.

I marched up to reception, and explained that I might have disturbed a guest, and that I was very sorry. I must have been quite a sight, covered in dust and cobwebs. There was a man sat in the lounge near reception, and he muttered something about "what a disgusting state" when he saw and overheard me, and wandered off when I made eye contact with him, and agreed with his sentiments.

I returned to my bedroom, and wasn't sure what to do. I was sure that the police would surely arrive at any minute. I didn't want the police to think that I had tampered with any evidence or anything, so I went to the window, and sat on the sill with my hands behind my back, so they could be clearly seen from the helicopter, if it was still there. I waited there a long time.

The night passed with much confusion. There was no sign of the police and I even rang the non-emergency number to see if there was anything they could tell me: was I in trouble? Things seemed to quieten down.

As it got light, I got changed and made my way outside. There were some young lads hanging around. They offered me drugs, which I declined "I don't do that anymore" I told them. I'd never encountered open drug dealing in a suburban residential area. Perhaps it was because I looked a wreck, or perhaps it was a setup, I mused.

I went back inside the hotel, to my room. The noise of other guests moving around was starting to rise. I heard a big group leaving, and looked out of my window to see a large family party getting on board a coach. A girl saw me looking out of the window and she waved and beckoned me. I was very confused about what to do.

Then, there was a voice. "Are you coming down?" it said. There then ensued a kind of argument, between me and a couple of voices, where I basically said I'd had enough... I'd been running around playing this silly game all night, and I still didn't know what I was supposed to be doing or why. I started to say "do your worst, you can't hurt me anymore, I've been bullied loads and some more won't matter" but these people, these voices, threatened to 'tell' everybody I knew what a disaster area I was.

It seemed I was being ransomed in some way. The footage from the spy camera, and perhaps other things, was going to be used against me in some way.

I sat down on the bed and decided that I wasn't going to play anymore. I was sulking. I was fed up of being bullied. I'd had enough.

Then, I thought, sod it, I'll go and see what they want me to do. I grabbed all my bags and went down to reception, where I put them into left luggage, except for my backpack which had my laptop and my mobile phone which was plugged into an external battery pack, for extra charge. I then left the hotel.

I heard somebody shout "wanker!" and I made my way down the street towards where I thought I had heard the voice from. As I walked down the street, I heard other catcalls of abuse. "Tosser" I heard, as I went past another house. I noticed that some windows were open on the top floors, but there wasn't anybody to be seen.

I walked up and down the road, noticing that the yelled abuse would come from a few of the same places, but nobody was showing their face. I was very confused about what I was supposed to be doing.

I started walking further and further along the road. There was lots of building and decorating work going on at various houses, and I would hear clanging that was much more like somebody trying to get my attention rather than somebody doing some work. I went to investigate these noises.

Eventually, I started to feel like I was being directed by these clangs and bangs. Somebody clanging, hammering or shutting a car door seemed to be my cue to cross the road, or to turn 90 degrees right. Two slams would see me do a U-turn.

As I made my way up and down the road, I noticed that as I passed somebody, they would run off down the street or get on a bike and ride past me. As I came and went, making several trips, it seemed like I was being made to walk a circuit so that I would see a bunch of people face to face. I started to say "thank you" to the people who I saw, who were all looking for my eye contact for some reason.

I started to jog along, and the vehicles got larger and larger. Starting first with a stream of bicycles, then cars, then vans, then lorries... I seemed to have to greet a larger and larger number of people with a "thank you" while I was running in circles, directed by people slamming doors and banging on scaffolding.

I realised that a huge number of people were involved in this dance, and I could be holding up their day. I wanted to show that I cared that they'd all got involved in 'helping' me and that I was going to put in as much effort as I could. I tried to run as much as I could, with my heavy backpack.

There appeared to be co-ordinators. People would jump on their mobile phones as soon as I passed them and they'd say "yeah, he's just gone past" and other things to suggest that I was running late, behing schedule. I tried to pick up my pace.

I had been hoping to get the ordeal over with quickly, and had assumed that it was only the road that the hotel was on that was involved, but it soon became clear that I was then starting a much bigger circuit. I started being directed through roads taking me away from the hotel. How big was this route and how long was it going to take me?

I kept kind of hoping that I would run into the usual crowds of commuters and normal London life, and this strange experience would be over... I'd just be mingling with everyday Londoners and there would no longer be this sense that I was being guided on a pre-planned journey around Islington, choreographed by people banging on building sites and slamming doors.

I ran, and I ran, and I ran, hoping that I would soon be done, hoping that I would have seen and been seen and said "thank you" to everybody I needed to, and the route would turn back towards the hotel, and I could collapse in a heap with exhaustion. However, the route seemed to be taking me nowhere near the hotel. I had no idea where I was going or how far I had to run for.

I started to feel really dehydrated and that I was getting dangerously tired. The backpack with the expensive and heavy electronics was a real burden, and the shoes that I was wearing, although they were waterproof, were really heavy - designed for walking, not running. There was a bottle of isotonic fluid in my backpack, but I felt bad stopping to drink it.

Eventually, after many miles, I decided I needed to stop and drink the half-bottle that remained. I heard jeering as I paused to get it out of my bag, but I couldn't go on without something. I was drenched in sweat, and I put away the fleece I had been wearing and carried on running.

As I ran down a big wide open road, with a park in the middle, and large grand Georgian terraced houses either side, I noticed that I was being followed by an ambulance. Whatever I was part of, it was certainly well organised. I started to get the idea that I was being tracked by GPS, so that I wouldn't be lost, and there was a little restraint being shown by the organisers. I wasn't going to be hounded to my death. I had to trust these people, I told myself.

I ran down one road, and a girl and her boyfriend stopped me. "My boyfriend did this too, and it helped him get better" the girl told me. They were a sweet looking young couple and were linked arm-in-arm, and looked very happy and in love. I was touched that they told me this, and it spurred me on to continue.

I ran down another road, past a school playground, and all the kids yelled "Nick! Nick!" I thought I really had lost my mind, so I went back and ran past again. "Nick! Nick!" all the kids yelled in unison, once again as I ran past. This was getting pretty surreal.

I then ran into a less residential area. There were people there that were clearly minding their own business. I was starting to get into ordinary London, and it was clear that nobody was paying a blind bit of notice to me. I started to think that perhaps it was over. Then I realised where I was... I ran right past my bike, where it was locked up on the road, where I had gotten into a bit of trouble, and really upset somebody, about 4 or 5 days before this whole weird fiasco.

I looked around, as I ran past my bike, to see if I could see the injured party, who had perhaps been the trigger for this entire event, but I could see no sign. I kept running. At times I assumed that I had perhaps reached the limit of the 'zone' where I was supposed to be, and I was outside the influence of the people who were directing me, but then surprising things happened...

Whenever I needed to cross the road, there was always a gap on both carriageways, opened up by the cars, vans, lorries and busses. This was uncanny. Also, the ambulance was always there, somewhere nearby, presumably on hand in case I collapsed. The traffic thing was really spooky though. London traffic rarely parts like the waves to make way for you.

I kept running and running, but I was getting tired and dehydrated. It had started to drizzle with rain, but it wasn't doing much to keep me cool. I tried to scoop up the water as it settled on railings and benches, to put on my face, to cool down. I really needed some more water as I had run a long way and quite fast with a heavy backpack.

I started to get dizzy and my balance was getting dubious. I started to wonder where the 'finish' line was likely to be for this crazy event. I imagined that it would probably be right at the top of Finsbury Park, where I knew there were some large function halls. I imagined that there was probably going to be an 'intervention'-like event up there, with me having to face the people I'd somehow upset.

I decided to get my phone out and look at a map to see where I was. I could hear groaning and jeering. People in cars started to toot their horns at me and yell at me. I knew I was quitting something too soon, but I didn't know how far I had left to go. I didn't feel like I could carry on any longer, without water, without a break.

Using my phone, I made my way to the top of Finsbury Park. There were lots of hostile yells now, mainly coming from people in cars. The drizzling rain got more persistent and there was a real air of disappointment in the air. I felt like I'd let people down, but at the same time, I felt in my heart-of-hearts that I'd given it my best shot, and to continue would mean passing out from exhaustion and dehydration.

I reached the buildings at the top of Finsbury Park, and there were lots of people milling around. I looked to see if there was any acknowledgement of me, but there was only hostility. It looked like whatever was happening there was being packed up. I heard things being yelled at me.

There was a water fountain in the park, and I greedily guzzled water down, and splashed my face and neck. My feet were in agony and my muscles ached. I was also soaked through with drizzle now.

I set off in the direction of the hotel, or so I thought, but I emerged onto the Holloway Road by accident. I had taken a wrong turn. I decided that I couldn't carry on by foot and tried to hail an Über using the app on my phone. It said the wait time was 35 minutes. I went into a local cab office and waited there for ages, but there didn't seem to be any cabs.

Lots of people were hanging around, sheltering under shop awnings and under the eaves of buildings from the rain. Holloway Road seemed to have reached gridlock. The traffic was bumper to bumper. People still seemed to be yelling abuse at me from cars and vans though. There were occasionally people who passed me on the pavement, and gave me a withering stare, as if I'd personally failed them somehow.

As I stood, sheltering momentarily from the rain, I heard the familiar voices of the woman and the main man I had been talking to. I looked around. Where the hell were they? How the hell did they get here? "We're in your phone" they cackled with laughter. I felt like such a fool... how obvious it suddenly seemed, that these voices had been coming from my phone, which had done the entire journey with me, in my backpack with a 12,000 mAh battery backup pack attached.

The GPS data from my phone confirms the precise route I followed, on this crazy caper. I plotted the GPS data onto Google Maps, which is shown in the image above.

I phoned my friend Cameron, who lived nearby, and left a message saying I really needed his help. I realised that I had left my wallet back at the hotel, and besides, I was exhausted.

I started to wander up the road aimlessly. I was sure that I was still a long way away from the hotel. Then, miraculously, I bumped into Cameron. He hadn't got my message, we just happened to be crossing paths. Anyone who knows London will tell you that this is a very unlikely occurrence.

I begged Cameron to get me something to eat and drink, and help me get a cab back to the hotel. Cameron got me fed & watered, and then into a black cab, to collect my bags and get me back to the hostel in Camden, where I collapsed and went straight to sleep for 24 hours.

I tried explaining to Cameron what had happened, and had imagined that he might have even been involved, as it seemed so co-incidental that I'd bumped into him at that moment. I also knew that he was very interested in street theatre and had organised a kind of zombie apocalypse 'run away from the undead' type event, as well as attending a couple of these events put on by professional outfits in London and Bristol. I thought that his sister, an actress, could perhaps have provided the 'voices' for this personalised event that I had just experienced. He listened to my wild theories, but didn't seem to be doing anything other than humouring me.

The next day, in Camden, I went on a similar long run, where I tried to respond to the slamming of doors and clangs from building sites. I think I was just insane though... completely freaked out by what had happened, and exhausted.

My feet were screwed: two bloody stumps, covered in blisters and with my toenails black and hanging off. I'd completely soaked two sets of clothes with sweat. I'd been through a physical ordeal, to match the mentally horrific things I'd been putting my brain and mind through with powerful stimulant drugs.

It's hard to know what the hell happened. I've looked back at emails and messages I sent from around this time, and it's clear that my brain was barely functioning, and what it was spewing out was total gibberish. I had been through some fairly stressful stuff and I was definitely losing my grip on reality.

However, I know what I saw. I know that I interacted with people. I know that it's pretty hard to go absolutely bat-shit insane and not attract some attention to yourself. The fact I didn't end up in trouble with the police or in hospital is either a miracle, or there's something fishy about the whole mad caper.

In a way, I came back to London so I could let an episode of insanity work its way out of my system. The anonymity of the place, and the fact that most people turn a blind eye to even the most alarming behaviour, means that you can go stark-raving bonkers without causing a scene. Perhaps this was just the ultimate realisation of that urban solitude, and me pushing that envelope of insanity to the very limit.

I often think that in all the parallel Universes where I have died or gone insane, I'm obviously not able to tell the story. Therefore, at that moment when I should have died of a drug overdose, or my mind should have finally splintered and collapsed from all the abuse, chaos and trauma... at that point, the only possible outcome was for something incredible to happen to stop me in my tracks.

I've got to say I'm incredibly grateful to this fantastic city - London - for being everything I have ever seemed to need. I have no idea how I've managed to scrap through such ordeals as I've been through, but I seem to be pretty much unscathed, which is not the case for the crappy things that have happened to me outside London.

I guess it's fairly clear to me, in retrospect, that my sanity is hanging by a very slender thread. Another bout of addiction would be sure to finish me off, either physically or mentally, I'm sure.

It bugs me, not knowing what was real and what was in my mind, but in practical terms, it's given me a sense that I owe it to those who helped me on that day, to see that lots of people want to see me stay clean from the powerful stimulants that I was hopelessly addicted to. I have no idea who they are, or what brought them together, but there was kindness and compassion there. That girl and her boyfriend will always stick in my mind.

I wish somebody would reach out and tell me that they were there, they know what happened, but I know it's unlikely to happen for whatever reason.

Anyway, sorry it's so long and there aren't any pictures. I hope you've managed to read the whole story and been able to follow it, even though it does sound every bit as crazy as it was.

Hopefully, I'm well and I'm sane at the moment. I certainly feel fit and healthy and in OK mental health, apart from a bit of anxiety and depression. Anxiety and depression are nothing compared with a talking mobile phone.

By the way, I don't recommend you getting a Google Android phone or using the Google Gear watch... I've been very suspicious of these devices, and a lot of the apps on the Google Play app store... I suspect that one of the many many free apps that I had installed had some kind of ransomware software in it, but that's just a hunch.

I'm just praying I'm not mad.

Tags: #mentalhealth #addiction #drugs #london

This is a story about everything trapped inside my head...

I'm lying awake and my mind is going at a million miles an hour, thinking about all the things that I want to write about, need to write about. There's a lot of my story that still needs to be told before the 13th/14th of May. I'm not sure why anniversaries are important to us humans, but we seem to attach significance to the passage of 365 days and nights.

I want to write an open letter to my Mum, for her birthday on the 13th, but I don't want that to overshadow something more significant that happened at around the same time: The Finsbury Park Fun Run. My parents have become quite irrelevant really, and I'd like to keep it that way. The further they are from my life, the more I feel within touching distance of restabilising, recovering, moving forwards.

My parents will tell you that I shouldn't be thinking about myself at the moment, when there's been a death in the family and another family member is seriously unwell. However, as I've alluded to before, I'm not exactly off the critical list myself. I took a kitchen knife to my forearm only last night, daring myself to open my veins, to end it.

When I came to listen to all my old voicemails at the beginning of this week, there were heaps of messages from my Mum, berating me for not being emotionally available to her. I couldn't believe how I'm supposed to be the responsible, reliable, dependable member of the family, there as emotional support and as a punching bag, for my flakey drop-out loser parents. Ok, so I've thrown off the shackles of wearing a grey suit and being the career-minded sensible and conservative member of the family, after the best part of 20 years in financial services technology and 9 to 5 office humdrum. However, I reject both roles: punchbag & outcast.

I can't be both left out in the cold when I'm having a hard time, but yet supposed to be there for my family when they're having a hard time. Fuck them. Fuck them to heck.

Anyway, I've kept my safety barriers up. There's too much at stake at the moment. I'm under too much pressure and stress as it is, and things are too fragile, the green shoots have only just appeared. I'm not going to have it all go down the shitter because of my damn parents again, rearing their ugly heads at precisely the wrong moment, because they want something.

I already occupy a convenient space for my parents: a talking point. They are friendless, isolated, unhealthy and unhappy. Their abusive relationship is toxic, and the only way that they know how to function is by picking holes in other people, sitting in smug judgement over the world.

Anyway, enough about my damn family already. The sooner I'm disinherited the better. I may revisit the topic of my Mother, in an open letter, but otherwise it should be case closed. The open wound that was my horrible childhood will never heal while I'm still dragged back into that sick, unhealthy family.

END OF RANT

So, what else is going on inside my damaged little noggin? Well, I feel like I haven't really bridged the gap for my readers, between the happy me who had my shit together, and the drug addict homeless guy. There's a period of time that warrants further examination.

I appreciate that what I'm doing - picking at the scab, committing public reputational suicide - is rather strange, hard to deal with, almost impossible to comprehend. If you think about the damage that I'm trying to undo though, and how close I've come to death or permanent insanity (perhaps already there, ha ha!) then you might be able to see why I have to take such a bold step.

Somebody who has been through what I've been through should be suffering much more permanent and irreversible brain damage. I should be attempting to swat invisible insects, perhaps picking off my own skin to get to invisible bugs underneath. I should be shouting at unseen people, hearing voices. I should be consumed by paranoia... convinced that something or somebody is out to get me.

I've certainly unseated my mental health, which has always had dubious stability. I was clearly suffering from a mood disorder before I started putting copious amounts of powerful narcotics into my body. The two things really don't mix well and play nice.

It's hard to be self-aware, and it was certainly surprising when I was told that I was slurring my words and talking really slowly, back earlier this year, when I was swallowing loads of legal benzodiazepines and suffering the cognitive impairment of drug withdrawal from long binges on powerful stimulants.

I'm quite familiar with the brain-killing sluggishness of stimulant withdrawal. Normally it means I'm really sleepy and struggle to hold a coherent conversation or thread of thought. When writing, I might drift in and out of consciousness, and it'll take me ages to finish what I'm writing, which ends up flitting from topic to topic. You can see it in my writing, but it's masked by the fact that you have no idea how long it took me to write.

The benzos leave big gaps in my memory. Rohypnol, the famous 'date rape' drug is a benzo, and the amnesia-inducing effects are presumably what the would-be rapists are looking for, when they're spiking drinks. So, I guess I was spiking my own drinks. Who would do such a thing, and why? Well, another effect of stimulant comedowns is horrible panic attacks and anxiety, as well as disturbed sleep and appetite. Benzos help to calm everything down after a big stimulant binge.

But anyway, I'm getting waaaay ahead of myself. How did it even come to this? How did I even get off the rails in such a bad way?

In actual fact, you don't realise this, but things have improved massively. Things were much, MUCH worse. That's the thing about your journey downwards... you don't even know where you're headed yet. People talk about rock bottom, and I think that's a lot of nonsense. I never reached a rock bottom, but I can tell you that things started out slow, crept up on me and then got the better of me. No rock bottom, but I had to learn some pretty brutal lessons before I got the upper hand.

So, let me give you a little insight into how I became a drug addict. It starts with sex.

SEX ADDICTION

I've written before about experimenting with drugs to enhance bedroom antics, but what I haven't had a chance to write about yet is just how much of an addiction sex was. Perhaps it wasn't an addiction, but it was the yardstick by which I measured happiness and security. If I wasn't getting sex, my life felt pretty meaningless.

A few of my relationships were built on an almost purely sexual basis. One girlfriend, I really didn't find at all attractive, but at least I was getting regular sex. It was somehow important to me in my late teens and early twenties to get a lot of sex. I felt like I was making up for lost time, that I had missed out on a lot of those great experiences of first girlfriends, childhood sweethearts, school crushes etc. etc. I felt like I was 'owed' a debt of sexual gratification.

One of my close friends talks about notches on the bedpost as a way of warding off the relentless bullying endured at school, and it was this exact thing that I was trying to do myself, except I was just doing it with the one girl, rather than being the heartbreaking rogue that he is. Fact of the matter was, my self confidence was probably damaged, not enhanced, by being with somebody I really didn't fancy, and actually felt ashamed that I had 'sold out' and decided to date.

The truth is, I'm actually pretty vulnerable. Very vulnerable in fact. I'm so desperate to be loved, liked even, that I'll accept all kinds of mistreatment and being pushed into things that are really not in my favour. There are desperately needy things, like being friends with people who are just taking advantage of me. Then there is the sexually fucked up thing of having sex with girls I don't fancy, just because I don't want to be alone.

My ex wife was different. I did actually fancy her. I mean, I do kind of corrupt and twist myself though. I found her attractive, but in truth, I also tried to dump her when I realised she wasn't a nice person. I also realised that I wasn't even that compatible with her, the more I got to know her. However, there was one thing that we stuck together for: the sex.

I'm not sure what your relationship with sex is, but mine used to be like this: I felt I had to have it. If I thought I wasn't going to have it, I used to get stressed, upset, anxious. I had more of it than I really wanted, just because I was fulfilling some kind of ritual, reassuring myself that I could have it whenever I wanted. When I couldn't have it, I'd react badly, getting upset or threatening to go off to find it elsewhere.

Basically, I'm pretty sure I had all the hallmarks of a psychological addiction. When my ex mentioned she'd have to be away for a period of time, the pit of my stomach would feel sick. What about sex? Where am I going to get sex? When can I have sex? Will I be able to have enough sex? What if I want to have sex and I can't? This was a major issue for me.

I must be clear: I used seduction rather that coercion to ensure I had a steady supply of sex. I worked my arse off in the bedroom to ensure my ex wanted it as much as me. In a way, I addicted her to sex. I was a sex pusher. I gave her a great time in the bedroom, but my motives were not pure. I wanted her to be available to me, whenever I wanted. It took time, it took effort, but slowly I was building a co-dependent relationship based around sex. It's all we had.

There were other reasons why sex became such an unhealthy fixation in our co-dependent relationship. Namely, she was a really mean person to me. She isolated me from friends and activities I loved, criticised everything about me and generally dragged down my self esteem to the point where I was trapped by a sense of worthlessness and loneliness. All alone in a flat in the middle of nowhere that she insisted we move into. I was miserable as sin.

I'm covering old ground here a little, but it's important to go over this, as this was the groundwork for the really destructive stuff that was to follow.

CO-DEPENDENT RELATIONSHIP

It was always clear that the relationship was unhealthy as hell, and really needed to end, but it was virtually impossible for me to back out of it, because I had so little in my life except for the sex. So many friendships had been damaged and fallen into disrepair. Even my work was suffering because of this all-consuming fuck up of a relationship.

Eventually though, I found a reserve of strength and finally managed to break up with her. This was the catalyst for me forging a more entrepreneurial path. Mingled in with the breakup was some career changes, some business ventures... basically a lot of my pent-up creativity and strength came out in much more positive directions, around the time that we broke up, the first time.

Then, when things were going really well in my life, I decided to try and get back with her. Things were different. The relationship was less destructive, but the way that things quickly developed was deepening co-dependency, with the introduction of sex-enhancing drugs.

Yes, the introduction of drugs into our relationship brought a kind of stability. I've written before about swathes of time at weekends being taken up by the drug-fuelled pursuit of sexual ecstasy. I felt like drugs would bring us closer, and they certainly reduced the arguments, the agression and abusive nature of the relationship. However, it wasn't healthy. It was co-dependency taken to the next level.

With drugs, it's sometimes only a matter of time before you take things up a gear, if you're chasing a high. What started out with some MDMA (Ecstasy, Molly) and GBL/GHB then turned into rampant experimentation across the spectrum of available legal highs, before fatefully arriving at a compound nicknamed NRG-3.

MY FIRST DRUG ADDICTION

This is where the slowly-slowly creeping up thing happens. You feel like you're in control, with your accurate measuring scales and strict rules about dosages and keeping things limited to weekends, but you're playing with drugs that erode your self-control, willpower. I was the sensible one, but I was also a lot of the driving force too... this new level of co-dependency felt a little bit like we were in love and had a stable happy relationship, with me as the architect.

It would be me who carefully researched each chemical, measured doses and made sure we stayed safe. The problem was, I hadn't yet found my nemesis: my drug of choice.

NRG-3 was deemed by me to be too dangerous for us to try, and it remained an unopened packet, a closed Pandora's Box. I was right to treat it with respect... it turned out to be every bit as dangerous as my research had led me to believe.

But, addiction needs a catalyst. Me leaving Cambridge and facing the stress of how to grow my little company to be big enough to employ at least 2 people full time, plus resolve the intractable issue of where to locate the office, reached crisis point. A busy summer of relentless weddings taking up whole weekends was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Me and my ex were absolutely paralytically drunk at her brother's wedding. We had an absolutely almighty row in front of her whole family, and I ended up back home, alone, suicidally depressed. It seemed like the perfect time to try NRG-3.

People talk about drugs being near-instantaneously addictive, and I don't think that's correct. However, the circumstances under which I tried NRG-3 certainly conspired to create brain conditions that were almost perfect for addiction to flourish. I disappeared into the depths of my first ever drug binge. All the rules about dosage and measurement went right out of the window.

So, the rest is history right? Wrong.

Chronic drug addiction still doesn't happen overnight. At the end of my binge, I had an almighty panic attack, got really scared by it, and then life kind of got back to normal... except it didn't. There was now a little devil inside of me that wanted to repeat the experience, and was just waiting for an appropriate moment.

Enter the era of the 'secret drug habit'. My ex talked about my 'drug habit' during our divorce. What utter nonsense. By the time we separated, 2 years later, I was a raging drug addict. There was no hiding a 'habit'... I was actively turning parts of our home into a crack den. However, there was a period of 18 months where I tried my very best to keep the devil at bay, and hide my habit.

I'm actually putting myself in an excessively bad light here. I had no idea that addiction had taken hold so firmly. Yes, sure, it was me who played with fire and got burned. It was me who made bad decisions that led to an ever-worsening situation. However, as I've tried to explain above, one thing leads to another. It's impossible to separate my decision making from my state of mind and the circumstances surrounding it.

So, I started to try to use NRG-3 in secret, which wasn't a problem at first as my company was going down the shitter, so I could use drugs at home when I was supposed to be working, and my ex was at her job. Whether the drugs were the reason why my startup failed, quite possibly, but actually you could say that a terrible relationship was the reason why I did a startup in the first place, which later led to unmanageable stress that was the catalyst for my drug habit... one thing leads to another!

Within a month or so, I thought I was going to die. I was carrying a letter around with me at all times, that basically confessed that I was addicted to powerful stimulants. This letter was going to be given to the doctors at Accident and Emergency, in the event that my heart started giving out, or I went insane or something.

I was a little more proactive than this, and did reach out to community mental health services as well as addiction support specialists, but when I met other 'service users' I felt that my case was unworthy of their time. Meeting child prostitutes who'd had their children taken into care, and had poly-substance abuse issues as well as alcoholism, and grinding poverty... versus me, with my health intact plus a big pile of savings still in the bank. I felt like I was taking the piss by taking up the time of those treatment centres.

This is what I mean by saying that there were lessons I had to learn. I sensed the danger, but I still felt in control. The main problem was a recurrent lie that a lot of addicts tell themselves though: I thought I could use in moderation, and I thought I was better off hiding my problems and trying to fix things on my own, which actually turn out to be contradictory things.

There's a lot of times when drugs are talked about, not as something inanimate, but actually as if they have a life of their own. It's the drugs that are to blame we say, as if they have legs and walked right into your bloodstream all on their own. It's certainly hard to unpick the strange behavioural changes that addiction has on you, from the supposed free will that we all apparently exercise.

What happened to me, during my descent into chronic addiction, was the re-programming of my brain. Whenever my ex would say she was going away or she would be doing something, my brain would instantly say "great, more time to use drugs". When I wasn't using drugs, I was planning the next time I would be able to, anticipating it, aching for it, willing the time to pass more quickly so I could get to my next fix. This didn't happen overnight.

I used to be able to go for a week between getting a fix. Then it shortened to about every 3 days. Then of course, it started to be a daily habit. Then it came to the point where I would pretend to be staying up late to watch TV or something, but just stay awake all night taking drugs. Then it progressed to 'secretly' dipping into a bag of drugs when we were actually in bed together. By the time it gets this bad, you're not exactly hiding your 'habit'... you're practically a chronic drug addict.

Two things happened to significantly worsten the addiction: firstly, I started getting signed off sick for periods by the doctor, which in my mind were to be used 80% for drug taking, and 20% for recovery. I remember when I got signed off for 5 weeks, my very first thought was "great, that's 4 weeks drug taking and 1 week to recover". It had become automatic by then... I didn't choose to think like that... that's what addiction does to you. It changes your subconscious, your priorities, the way you think and act.

Secondly, conflict erupted between me and my ex, and my response was to corner myself. I would go into the spare bedroom, and she would kick and punch the door and scream at the top of her lungs. I was always afraid of her aggressive, violent, abusive side, and this was particularly harrowing when under the influence of powerful drugs or on a comedown, so I tried to barricade myself from these attacks.

THE PRISONER

Being barricaded into a corner, with somebody raging and snarling and raining blows on the only physical barrier that prevents you from being the object receiving the beating, is not conducive to good mental health. Siege tactics were employed, but hunger and thirst don't have the intended affect on somebody so psychologically traumatised, and under the influence of anoretic drugs.

Eventually it got so bad, that my ex could finally see that she was killing me. You can't leave somebody backed into a corner with no food, no drink, no toilet, and not see that your aggression is the reason why somebody is so physically wrecked. It was being cornered that destroyed me, as much as the drugs. It was being cornered that affected my mental health, as much as anything.

By the time we separated, we had entered a dangerous dance, where it was almost routine for her to spend entire weeks keeping me entombed in my sarcophagus. It was unrelenting, the screaming, the shouting, the hammering of fists and feet on the door. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that I felt shellshocked. I was hypervigilent: I could never relax for a second. I was in a state of constant fear, agitation.

If you'd like to blame the drugs in isolation for this, you're wrong. It's quite possible that the addiction would have developed in a different direction, without this mistreatment, but it's certainly true that what I went through was inhumane. I was a prisoner in my own home. Drugs just facilitated this, made me an easier target for abuse. I can barely convey to you the awfulness of being subjected to around-the-clock abuse like that, when so weak and so vulnerable.

Finally, our parents stepped in and enforced a separation to spare my life. I was fucked, and had made a desperate appeal for my release from captivity, to both her parents as well as mine. Mercifully, they arrived and stopped the relentless vigil at my flimsy barrier.

Am I being melodramatic? Well, find yourself a tiny room in your house and lock yourself in there with no food, water or toilet for days on end, with people coming to hammer on the door and scream abuse at you around the clock. See how long you last for. See how your mental health holds up, without even the amplifying effects of a drugs.

Why didn't I run away, go somewhere else? Well, this is where the illogical bullshit that addiction spews into your brain comes in. In my mind, my drug use was still a 'habit' that could be hidden, and it was only when a weekend or holiday arrived that this folly was exposed for what it was. The arrival of a weekend can even come as a surprise to somebody completely in the depths of chronic addiction... it was only the screaming and the yelling and the kicking and the punching that I had any means to mark the passage of time at all.

You have to remember that I was the weakened one here, I was the one in trouble, in distress, cornered and traumatised. You don't fight abuse with more abuse. Nobody's psychological problems were ever cured by screaming at them and cornering them. I had enough on my plate with drug addiction to deal with, let alone an abusive partner.

I did need to quit drugs, get cleaned up... addiction was consuming me and fucking up my life... but, abusing me only prolonged the agony. I learned nothing from being cornered and abused. All it did was to leave me with deep psychological scars.

Separation only opened the door to these psychological issues being resolved, over time. When some friends in London invited me to live with them, I was paralysed by fear of somebody hammering on the door, shouting at me. When I went to stay with my parents, they actually did hammer on the door and shout at me, which is what I had spent days anxiously anticipating... deepening my sense of threat, confirming my worst fears. Obviously, these feelings were irrational, however I had been traumatised to the point where serious psychological damage had been done.

London was chaotic and traumatic in whole new ways, but at least I was eventually released from the prison cell of being trapped in a room with no food, water or toilet. My life imploded to the point where I was actually in full public view, either in hostels or sleeping rough. All privacy, dignity was stripped away from me. I was laid bare for the world to see.

But London led me to social reconnection. Having interactions with people that weren't screaming, shouting, punching and kicking... it started to bring me back to the real world. As I built a network of friends at one hostel, my life started to stabilise. The more human contact, the more friends, the more ordinary conversations and interactions I had, the more normal I felt again, the more my dignity and self-esteem were restored, the more my chances of recovery increased.

RECOVERY

Johann Hari, writes that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but human connection. Addiction is about forming a bond with a drug, when healthy human relationships are not available. I had fallen back into the clutches of an abusive co-dependent relationship, miles away from my fellow startup founders, investors, mentors, family and in a part of the country where most of my friendships had fallen into disrepair due to the all-consuming and destructive nature of the relationship I had with my ex.

Of course I was going to get sucked into drug addiction. It replaced my ex perfectly. It was actually a superior relationship. I had everything that a co-dependent sex addiction gave me, in a convenient powder form. It was this drug - NRG-3 - that allowed me to finally break the habit that was my ex. We finally broke up once and for all, and I knew that it would be easier to quit drugs than to break up with her, so I felt relieved even though I was deep in the hole.

When me and my ex wife separated, I was using heroin, crack, crystal meth, cocaine, speed, diazepam, alprazolam, zopiclone as well as my drug of choice... NRG-3. Within a few weeks, I had cut it down to just some pure Dexidrene, which I was using to get over the worst of the depression and fatigue that would be inevitable after a lengthy period of addiction.

I was using 5mg of Dexidrene per day, to combat fatigue, cravings and poor concentration that would have ruined my recovery. It was a remarkable turnaround, but unfortunately it all got ruined by a complete lack of care for my wellbeing and future survival prospects, in favour of my ex's unreasonable demands to have the divorce processed her way or the highway. I wanted her to just take everything and leave me alone. My life and my health were the most important things. She continued to make my life hell.

Not that it matters, but today I've been abstinent for 7 and a half weeks, but not only that, I'm not drinking any caffeinated drinks or taking anything to help me sleep. I'm 100% drug free, and I'm not suffering unmanageable fatigue or cognitive impairment. I have no motor tics, and I don't have any psychosis or paranoia. This is quite remarkable. Considering how long and how deep this gash in my life has run, it's quite remarkable that I should be as close to normal as I am.

Anxiety and depression are unspeakably horrible forces in my life at the moment. I guess when I think about it, it's to be expected: withdrawal from benzos gives horrible rebound anxiety, and withdrawal from stimulants can trigger deep depressive episodes. The fact that I'm chugging along through a very stressful period of financial problems and job hunting, with very little support from friends & family, while going completely abstintent from all drugs... this is a big deal. It's not every day that people pull through things like this.

I'm sorry that last paragraph ended up a bit back-slapping, self-congratulatory. Certainly, any kind of complacency will lead to relapses. I've fallen foul of thinking "I can quit anytime I want" before, but the next challenge is to try and sustain recovery and put in place all the pieces that make a proper life. Everything was so temporary and fragile before.

Anybody who says "oh yeah, heard it all before" doesn't have a fucking clue what they're talking about. Every relapse has been due to either excess stress, or a collapse of the things I worked so hard to build. Losing all my hostel friends due to the pressures and stresses associated with the life change of moving from an unemployed homeless bum to being a guy working 9 to 5 in an office, plus a breakup with a girlfriend, plus the loss of a contract. Then, facing financial armageddon with a rent to pay and no means to do it, deep in a hole of debts, ridiculous pressure on the project I was working on, and bad mental health problems due to the sustained anxiety and stress I had been under relentlessly for so long, losing friends as well as colleagues when my work contract was no longer sustainable and I had to leave a job quite abruptly and inelegantly.

We've all faced bumps in the road, and these hiccups, these hurdles are inevitable. Part of sustainable recovery is once again being able to cope when things aren't going great. However, expecting somebody who's been through hell to be able to cope with an absolute clusterfuck as the challenge to their fragile, delicate, green shoots of recovery... I've got to say... what sort of cruel fucked up world would wish that upon somebody who's trying so hard.

That's fundamentally the driving force behind so many of my bitter, angry rants. I'm just incredulous that I'd be left to flounder by so many of my nearest and dearest, when the distress flares have been going up and the opportunity to rescue an entire ship before it sinks below the waves has been there for the taking. Raising a wreck is hard, when it's at the bottom of the ocean. Better to step in when it's just a little leak in the hull, rather than after the captain and crew have drowned and the boat's sunk.

It's not anybody else's responsibility other than my own, but you can fuck off if you're going to ring me up and leave me shitty voicemails saying I'm letting friends and family down. You want something from me now? Well, where were you when I needed support?

I know that a lot of friends have been there with support at the most unlikely of times, and in the most dire circumstances. I know it's seemed a little thankless, and that friends have even felt a little used or that trust has been abused. It's really not like that.

Yup, I've made some mistakes along the way. I'm still making mistakes. However, the tip of the iceberg conceals the great mass of the shit that I've been through, and yet, I still maintain some ethics, some sense of a debt of gratitude. I have a functioning moral compass, and I'm honest and acting purposefully towards repaying my friends for their help and support, showing them it was worthwhile, aiming to restore some semblance of a will to live to my shattered life.

That's what you're doing if you help me: you're saving a life. Don't believe any bullshit about 'enabling'... it's true that's possible if I'm wrapped up in active addiction, but I have the ethics, the sense of right and wrong to not ask for anything of my friends that would be squandered on addiction. The truth of the matter is that there are plenty of times, like now, where I'm not an addict. I'm just somebody who's struggling to rebuild their shattered life. I'm less of an addict than you, given that I don't drink tea or coffee, or even take headache tablets.

Yes, you could say I was reckless, I was irresponsible. Not really. I always paid my own way. I always covered my bets. I've kept track of where any debts or favours need to be repaid.

It's true, I felt a little entitled to have a complete breakdown. I felt entitled to lift the burden of responsibility from my shoulders for a time. For a time, I didn't feel guilty for being a risk taker and for the consequences that followed. Most of the consequences were suffered by me anyway.

CONSEQUENCES

Consequences, consequences. I've felt perhaps less than I should have done, but perhaps I have paid in other ways. I certainly feel like I don't want to rack up any more consequences. In fact, I'm back to the position of wanting to end my life quickly and cleanly if it looks like everything's going to go down the shitter again, rather than prolonging the agony and creating more problems for the world to mop up after I'm gone.

I feel a little bad that I would be depriving my sister of a brother, to be there to support her and my niece after my parents are gone, but at the same time I'm aware that I need to keep my distance from my niece, in case I don't make it. An uncle she hardly knew who's now gone is no big deal in the grand scheme of things, and certainly better than a drawn-out endgame that's just continuous "will he make it? won't he make it?" heartache, until the inevitable day that luck runs out.

Maybe you think I'm being melodramatic again, or using emotional blackmail. You think I talk about my suicidal thoughts lightly? You'd seriously call my bluff on this? I really think you'll regret it when I'm dead. I'm obviously not going to feel anything when I'm dead, except sweet sweet relief from a world that's been indifferent to my suffering and pain.

It'd be so easy for me to just decide, and act. I'm a very decisive person. I'm determined, stubborn, brave... everything that could quickly snuf my life out, if the scales tip just that bit too far. I'm keeping score, and if things get too unfair I'll just tip the whole boardgame onto the floor, along with all the playing pieces, dice and cards. You might think it's childish, flippant, knee-jerk, but it's actually cold hard rational, logical.

I feel like the writing I did when I slipped back into addiction doesn't make a fine account of me. I feel like the bitterness and anger towards unresolved issues with my parents made me come across as very unpleasant, as well as obsessively stuck in the past, and even launching tirades against people who only share some of the responsibility. I can't lay everything at the door of my horrible childhood and irresponsible and unpleasant parents. At some point, I have to draw a line that indicates where the division of responsibility lies.

The fact of the matter is though, that you've got to live with yourselves after I've gone. Coulda, woulda, shoudla... that's not going to mean jack squat when I'm gone. There's a smoking gun here. It's going to be hard to say that it was inevitable that I'd meet my untimely demise, when there's a record of periods of opportunity to step in and help, before things got too unmanageable for any human being to endure.

We should be fucking celebrating somebody coming back from the fucking dead. This is a fucking big deal, where I'm at right now. I shouldn't be here. The way I've been treated thus far in my life, I've been left for dead so many times. Aren't you going to fucking learn?

BACK FROM THE DEAD

It's not right to write people off, and leave them for dead. It's not right to nickel and dime people. It's not right to let the bystander effect be your excuse for not stepping in: let somebody else make the first move, surely it's somebody else's responsibility, not mine?

What the fuck happened to collective responsibility? What the fuck happened to a sense of community? What the fuck happened to helping each other out?

Where the fuck did this every man for himself bullshit come from? Are we Darwinian beasts, duking it out in the jungle, or are we a supposedly advanced race living in a modern civilisation?

I watched the film Se7en (Seven) again the other night, and I was taken by the similarity between me and the psychopathic killer. He had filled books and books with his thoughts, and then wanted to make a grand gesture to the world, culminating in his death. He thought that his actions would be studied, that they would make a difference in an indifferent world.

In a way, I'm drinking poison, hoping to kill somebody else. Everything I've done and written since I reached breaking point has in some way hurt me more than it's hurt anybody else. I threw away a very lucrative contract, I destroyed my professional reputation with a large number of individuals, I have spread word about my personal and private problems all over the internet and throughout my network of contact. If you search for my name and any company that I've worked for on Google, there's me.... right there on the first page, for all to see.

Here I am, with my guts hanging out. All my internal organs are on display. All my gory detail is right here, on these pages, for anybody to see.

What's worse, to die with some kind of false reputation? Your friends and family could always hold some mistaken belief about what your life was really all about, in the end. The more lurid details could be discreetly swept under the carpet, to save the blushes of your family, and to preserve your memory in some slightly more wholesome light. Seems like bullshit to me. I want people to know what drove me to the brink and beyond. I want people to have the facts, and decide for themselves. I want a world where we see that the only difference between people are the circumstances that conspire around them.

To say that this writing, this journal, this log, is a gift, that it serves some useful purpose... is grossly arrogant, deluded. However, it's all I've fucking got at the moment. Perhaps I am fighting to clear my name a little. Perhaps I'm not going down without a fight, and I'm taking hostages, taking some people down with me.

It's up to you, dear reader, to decide. I present you with my side of the story. It's up to you whether you dismiss me easily, as a madman and an addict, with no worth to my words. It's up to you whether you remember me as having the potential to be good, or the destiny to be bad.

Personally, I think it's immoral to make bets on living people's lives.

Tags: #parents #childhood #drugs #addiction #depression #suicide #career

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 a fresh start...

Why do we believe we can motivate change by shaming people, blaming them, making them feel guilty, placing even more obstacles in their path, isolating them, damaging their self-esteem and denying them the basic respect that every human should expect to receive?

My assumption, from childhood, school and my longest relationship, is that I'm going to be physically and verbally abused, to get me to comply with somebody else's idea of how I should think and act.

If you tell somebody they're "bad" enough times, sometimes, that person might say "screw it" and start acting up to the bad name you've given them. If you always expect the worst from somebody, one day, they might start fulfilling your long-held prophecy.

I saw a satirical cartoon the other day, where a policeman arrests a person doing drugs, because "drugs destroy lives". That person is then tried in court and sent to prison, and of course, they then can't get a job, seeing that they're a convicted criminal. When the policemen then sees that person, now living destitute on the street, the policeman says "I told you so!".

I've been trying to escape the gravity of an abusive relationship for quite a long time now. It's harder than you think. When your partner that you love has no respect for you, and your self esteem is destroyed, you can't expect a person to get back on their feet quickly. You don't know how deep the damage runs.

I've still got the shouting and screaming and battering of doors ringing in my ears. Imagine being shut into a tiny room, with somebody raging and snarling and unleashing a torrent of vicious aggression on the other side of the door. Imagine being trapped in that corner, not knowing when it's going to end, not having any way out.

I'm not looking for pity. I'm trying to explain how a confident, outgoing, gregarious character, with a bright, sunny positive disposition, might end up becoming pale and withdrawn. How that person might end up falling foul of escapist traps, and being brainwashed into believing that they're a "bad", "evil" and "worthless" person.

I've been asked to carry the can, to shoulder a shit-tonne of blame. I've been asked to beat myself up and hold myself accountable for every 'choice' I've made, and every consequence. I'm expected to think of myself as some isolated individual, who acted entirely with free will... I'm not subject to influence of other people, circumstances, my environment. Apparently I'm the first person in the history of the Universe to be in total control of my own destiny.

I don't think it's at all useful, this idea of holding everybody accountable for unforeseeable consequences, or the unavoidable results of being beaten into a corner. Does it really make you feel better, to have subdued a person, where they just resentfully start to parrot your bullshit? Does it really feel like a victory to have abused a person to the point that they submit to your muscle-flexing and intimidation?

Feeling sorry for myself is not going to lead anywhere positive. Yes, if you do wrong by a person, you do give them an excuse to act up, to react. I'm sorry, but if you're going to treat a person like shit, you have given them the mandate to act the way you wanted them to. That's not to say that you've revealed or changed that person's character though. There's no such thing as 'bad' or 'evil' people... we're all shaped by the world around us.

It's taken a hell of a long time to move judgemental, unkind people with no compassion or understanding, away from me. Breaking the bonds with people who were supposed to care - but don't - is a hard thing to do. It's not my job to re-educate those who would rather see a life destroyed than admit they're wrong. It's not my job to soak up the abuse of somebody who's got an axe to grind, and I'm their punchbag.

I don't want to become another bitter, twisted, negative, cynical and bullying individual, out to trample other people in order to get ahead myself. If I can't beat them, I'm not going to join them... I'm going to put as much space between me and them as possible.

When we think about Game Theory, and specifically a game called Prisoner's Dialemma, what strategy would you employ? In this game, the person who rats out their co-conspirator stands to gain the most, by stabbing their partner-in-crime in the back. The person who acts in a positive, giving, trusting way stands to potentially lose everything, even though their motive is to reach the fairest possible outcome.

I refuse to switch my strategy to that used by my persecutors. I refuse to become a backstabber, because then the whole world just turns into a horrible place of mistrust and unpleasantness. I don't want to live in a world where everybody is out to screw over everybody else.

I have literally turned the other cheek. I had the trust that, having received a black eye one side, I would return my face to centre and allow it to be struck the other side, if my abusive partner wished to dish out further unprovoked blows to my head. They gleefully gave me a black eye on the other side, before planting one square in the middle of my face, breaking my nose.

Even with self defence as a reasonable just cause to raise my own fists, I'm quite glad to say that I simply took that beating and stood by my strongly held beliefs that we can't simply descend to the level of animals, and be ruled by our temper, anger, aggression, violence.

When I eventually cracked, it was with glee that I had given this vicious person exactly what they wanted, and they tried to label me as the 'bad guy'. For some crazy reason, I felt guilty about no longer wanting to be the passive punchbag. For some crazy reason I felt guilty about defending myself. For some crazy reason I felt guilty about retreating into a corner, in self-defence.

This abusive partner had the gall to talk about me infringing their human rights, when they had me as a prisoner in my own home. Violence, aggression, verbal abuse... and I was the bad guy for using a door as a shield to protect myself from the blows of their fists, and kicks. That doesn't make any sense.

That was how this horrible, horrible relationship ended, with me having been sealed into my own tomb, a sarcophagus. I had no access to a toilet, food or drinking water, but still it was me who was in the wrong, despite the fact I was completely trapped, dying, in a corner.

When the separation was mercifully forced upon this unrelentingly vicious person, a friend took pity on me and took me into his home, to release me from the place that had become my prison cell.

It should come as no surprise that there was lasting psychological damage from the sustained attacks that I received. However, the expectation - especially from my family - was that I should bounce back immediately and be absolutely fine. They were even surprised to find that given the same treatment: shouting abuse at me, while cornering me, would give the same negative response of me retreating into a position of trapped self-defence, paralysed by fear.

It was me who made the brave steps to start moving forwards. I was living with a generalised threat of abuse, invasion of privacy, being attacked anywhere, anytime. I had gone through the long period of abuse, and been psychologically scarred, but it was me who made the first moves to try and repair the damage.

I tried to allow myself to be even more open to attack. I tried to fight fear with trust. I thought that by allowing myself to be in a vulnerable situation, things would somehow improve. It's very hard to let yourself be vulnerable when you've been so deeply affected by something that's damaged you so deeply.

My attempt to open myself up to abuse by my persecutors backfired spectacularly. Psychologically, I couldn't cope with that level of threat, and it made me act in a very strange way. The net result was that I kept myself hiding in my corner, with absolutely no defence. I spent 3 days paralysed by fear, before eventually being physically attacked by a member of my family who's supposed to love and care for me. I was hospitalised with a major injury. Hardly a success.

Later, I ended up in large hostel dormitories, which meant the total loss of all personal space, privacy... living in a totally exposed way, under continuous scrutiny. Again, you can't imagine how hard it is to be suffering major psychological trauma, while being watched like a goldfish in its bowl by nosey strangers. Many people found it far more entertaining to stare at me, rather than get on with their own lives, mind their own business.

People found me fascinating to sit and stare at. Instead of leaving me alone, moving away from me and the shit that I've been dealing with, they've been drawn to me like moths to a flame. They've pulled up a chair, got out the popcorn and sat back to enjoy the show.

"Oh my god, this is awful" they must have exclaimed. "I know, we can't miss a single second of this engrossing stuff. It's so entertaining" is what they really mean. Nobody recoiled in horror, or could tear their eyes away. They were fascinated, intrigued. Are we so used to seeing pain and human suffering on TV that we genuinely consider it entertainment, a spectacle for us to simply sit back and observe, for our own sick pleasure?

One of my friends, who actually understands a bit of what I've been through, actually managed to convince people that I'm not part of the paid entertainment. I'm not a one man travelling show, for your viewing pleasure. Much to my audience's disappointment, he actually convinced them to go and gawp at something else. That helped. A lot.

Very recently, another friend masterfully diverted attentions from creating an unwelcome storm, an intrusion that would have been unhelpful. He recognised the hallmarks of somebody trapped by psychological trauma, and actually held back those forces that I feared so much, so that some repair work was finally done.

Fools rush in, and first, do no harm. These are good mottos. If you don't understand what somebody is going through, it's not a spectator sport, and you don't know what damage your interference is going to do. Hands off, back away from the person who's trapped in the corner... don't drive them deeper into their attempts to fend off the world.

There's a hell of a long journey to feeling safe and secure in my own home again. It might not seem like it, because the story is a long and complex one, but there's a lot of damage to be repaired and it takes a lot of time.

It's the rushing that makes everything take so much longer. When you expect a person to be magically back to normal overnight, and you do nothing to understand what they've been through, or try to imagine what they're dealing with... that's what keeps a person trapped in a never-ending cycle.

You might think that episodes of illness prove that I'll never be fully better again, but it's actually you who is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you mistreat a person, assume the worst, and act on your own negative views, of course you're going to trap a person into a position they can't escape.

It's hard enough to just deal with the backlog of problems. To have extra obstacles placed in front of you, to have support withdrawn and be left to fend for yourself... those are the reasons why lives get written off, why people sink without a trace.

It's a long game, helping somebody recover, get their strength back, get back on their feet. There are no short cuts, and there are no easy conclusions you can jump to. Even when you start to think you understand what makes a person tick, and you can extrapolate, guess, and work out what their possible future is, you're wrong. As soon as you start writing a person off, you're part of the problem. You're hurting and hindering that person.

I know it sucks to care about a person who's really hurting, and is really damaged. I know it's easier to protect yourself by joining in the attack on that person, rather than taking the harder road of actually undoing the years and years of attacks that an easy target sustains.

Once you've started to be abused and bullied, you get weaker, so you're easier to abuse and bully, and so the cycle continues and gets worse. Everybody wants to be on the winning team, to some extent, and there's an animal instinct to pick on the weak.

I think we should be better than that. We're humans, not wild animals. We need to be better than that.

Damaged people need a clean, fresh start, but you don't know how much baggage they've got. You don't know how much of a burden still rests on that person's shoulders. It takes a lot more effort than you could possibly imagine to give that person a chance of a fresh start, a clean break.

Tags: #divorce

This is a story about univited guests...

I'm not really inspired to write anything today, so here are some photos. Specifically, here are a bunch of photos where somebody walked into the shot, or I took a shot by accident.

This pair of gay lovers strolled into shot, just as I was trying to make everything symmetrical.

Not sure where this grey bearded chap appeared from. It was completely by accident that he ruined my selfie.

Hey! This isn't the funfair and it's not a hall of mirrors. Anyway, it was my tur on the ride, and you muscled in, shorty.

Yeah, I really wanted your elbow and iPhone included in my panormaic shot of Bude beach.

This rugby star wanted to remain anonymous, and levitated a ball in front of his face to hide from screaming fans.

"How does this camera work?" Let me just take a blurry photo of your hand and arm.

Here, take a photo of us please... no, we're not down there.

I'm just going to take a few phot... oh, ok, please mince around in front of the camera instead.

Oh they're pretty flowers. Too late, you're already walking up the steps and into my shot.

In my defence, this one was probably shot from a moving bicycle.

This foot photo was probably taken by accident when I was living in the park.

Not exactly sure why I ended up photographing this leaf. Probably trying to text while getting off the train.

This is the guest bedroom of my friend's house, with my massive thumb obscuring most of the picture. It's a shame as this was bound to be a classic photo.

That's my weird dump of photos I reall should have deleted.

Tags: #london #friends

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