This is a story about the start of an eventful year...

On May 13th, 2015, which was my Mum's birthday, I decided it was time to try and clean up my act and get back on my feet. I spoke with a friend from Ireland who had been very supportive during a very difficult start to the year, but later that day I was sideswiped by events that defy rational interpretation. This is my account of those events.

I came to be staying in a hotel near Finsbury Park, Islington, North London. How I came to be there is a matter of shame and regret, that I don't particularly want to go into. I believed that the predating matter had been settled, and I was killing time until the 13th of May, which was the last possible date I considered it acceptable to have not yet managed to get my shit together. I had set myself a deadline, but I was being quite slow to get on with what needed to be done.

When I had checked into the hotel, it had seemed quite an ordinary place, stuffed full of tourists. The layout of the building was maze-like, and I struggled to find my room. The room numbering wasn't logical, and there seemed to be staircases everywhere. My room was sparse beyond belief, with two very basic single beds, and a flimsy wardrobe. The curtain was barely more than a semi-transparent sheet. I'm not being snobby, because I was lucky to have a dry roof over my head, but I mean to describe the setting for some of this tale.

My hotel room was on the top floor, with a large sash window looking onto the terrace of houses opposite. You could see in the windows of the house opposite. Outside the window was the top of the bay windows of the rooms below, forming a kind of balcony without any railings. Obviously you weren't supposed to climb out of the window onto that balcony, but more on that later.

There had been some excellent sunny weather, and I had come and gone from my room to a little shop nearby to purchase ice lollies, as well as other food & drink, but I was pretty under-nourished. I was also extremely sleep deprived.

2015 had not been going well. In Swiss Cottage, my landlord had decided he wanted to end the contract of me and my flatmates and re-let the flat at much higher rent, after he had spent money on much needed renovation. The flat had chronic damp problems and the heating didn't work, until I had eventually nagged him into fixing the place up... triggering my own eviction. My contract with Barclays had been unexpectedly terminated due to a complete asshat of a guy trying to protect his key-man dependency and little fiefdom... I wasn't the only one who he didn't get on with, and the existing contractors had refused to work with him, leaving me with the short straw.

I returned to the hostel I had lived in, after being chucked onto the street by Camden Council, a year earlier. Camden Council had been most unhelpful in their legal duties to house a resident, and had wasted a lot of time. I was given two weeks in a crisis house, but it was then left up to me to try my luck with local homeless charities. They literally didn't care.

In the summer of 2014 I had been living in a hostel in Camden Town, funded using my overdraft. This had gotten me back on my feet, so why wouldn't I go back there at the beginning of 2015, when I no longer had a place to live? It turned out that most of my friends had managed to move on and make a better life for themselves. The prospect of starting to rebuild my life again, from scratch, was devastating.

I decided to head out East, and lived in a hostel in Shoreditch and then one back in Swiss Cottage. These were chaotic times. Food and sleep were the big casualties, which had a knock-on effect on my mental health. Dragging piles of bags all over London, while not looking after yourself and having very uncertain living arrangements is quite detrimental, it turns out.

It has to be confessed that stimulant abuse was a large component of these problems. The insomnia and anoretic (appetite suppressing) effects of these chemicals conspire to cause you to neglect to sleep and eat. Without sleep and nutrition, the brain quite naturally gets pretty strung out, and you're more susceptible to strange thoughts and behaviours. Quite possibly this entire tale can be told as the result of a chain of unchecked drug binges, but there are elements that are clearly external influences.

As with any drug addict, ever, I decided to have "one last hit"... and this is where things go a bit sketchy.

I was overcome with a sense of threat. I felt like I was being watched, listened to. I decided to lock myself in the bathroom, around evening time on the 13th of May, 2015. I stayed there until the next morning, trapped by fear.

Fear of what? Well, at first, it was impossible to describe. I felt that the people in the houses opposite were staring in through the large sash window, with its flimsy curtain. I felt that the people in the neighbouring rooms were listening in to my mutterings. I felt sure that there was some hostility, just outside the door of my room.

When I was in the bathroom, for the whole evening and night, there was nothing to suggest that anything untoward was happening, but I was still racked by this irrational fear. In the middle of the night, to calm myself down I started telling stories to myself, in the pitch blackness: I hadn't turned on the bathroom light. I gave myself a lecture, on all the physics that I know. I went through everything from fluorescent lightbulbs, to Cathode-Ray Tube televisions, Light-Emitting Diodes and lots of other phenomena that can be explained by Quantum Mechanics. I then started to tell myself a story about the birth and death of the Universe, in some kind of helio-centric model, with a new interpretation of atomic fusion. Clearly, I had lost my mind.

As dawn broke and I could see light under the bottom of the bathroom door, I was certain that I saw flickering light and shadows in my room. This made me extremely agitated. As time went on, I heard stampeding in the corridor, and crude animal noises being made by people, whistling sounds. Then, the fire alarm bells started to be sounded at random intervals, accompanied by yet more running around that sounded like adults acting like children.

I was intensely annoyed at this animal call, running in corridors, fire bell cacophony. I felt extremely persecuted and afraid of imminent attack by these savages. Clearly, I was being deliberately spooked, pranked, by some malicious idiots. This went on for a couple of hours.

Eventually, I could stand it no more, and decided to act as if I couldn't hear what was going on, and try and act normally. I had a shower in the dark, towelled myself off and burst back into the bedroom to face my persecutors. There was no clear sign of anything wrong, but I was freaked out.

There were sounds that were quite clearly audible of the other hotel guests in the adjoining rooms. I was muttering to myself under my breath, in a German accent for some reason. I assumed that my low-volume muttering could not be heard by anybody. I was quite angry and resentful that I had been made so fearful by a bunch of childish adults, playing pranks in the corridor, and started to mutter all kinds of weird things about these people, mostly about them being crass, uncultured out-of-town folks.

At some point, it seemed like I had clearly been overheard, and there was an angry reaction outside the door. I felt ashamed that I had caused offence, as much as I felt surprised that my insane mumblings had been overheard. I took the 'please do not disturb' sign and tore off the 'not' and hung it on my door handle outside my room as some kind of peace offering. As far as I could tell, the hostile family I had upset took particular offence to this, and it sounded like I was about to be lynched.

I hurriedly packed my bags and phoned the hotel reception, and asked if they could smooth things over with these guests, as I didn't fancy getting my head kicked in by some family of chavs who seemed to be spending most of their day hanging around in a budget hotel room antagonising me, rather than going sightseeing around London. I begged the manager to send somebody to safely escort me to a waiting taxi, where I would beat a hasty retreat.

There was a knock at the door, and an energetic young man, beaming from ear to ear bounded into my room when I opened the door. He listened to my concerns with a look of pure amusement playing on his face. He looked as if he could barely stifle a laugh. I'm still not sure if that's because of my strange behaviour and the fact I was clearly off my rocker, or whether he was "in on the game"... but that's just paranoia. The fact that he was a young, well-dressed English guy in good physical shape certainly jarred with the sullen under-paid Eastern European staff that I had encountered up until that time. I had not seen this man behind reception ever, during my comings and goings.

Nothing much seemed to happen. No taxi arrived. No phonecall from reception to say the coast was clear and I could make my escape, free from persecution by the chav family, baying for my blood for taking the piss out of them as uncultured scum. I know it's pathetic to say it now, but I had been half-joking and simply continuing the madness of muttering random crazy stuff to myself, in a bad German accent, such were the depths of my insanity.

I phoned the non-emergency number for the police, and tried to explain my predicament. This didn't go well, and I didn't seem to be getting anywhere. The day wore on and started to get towards evening time. None of this could prepare me for what happened next.

The strange thing is, that over 24 hours had elapsed since I had taken any drugs, and the amount of time that they would last would normally be around 16 to 18 hours, maximum. It made no sense that I was still experiencing severe paranoia, auditory hallucinations, delusions and other weird thoughts and ideas. I struggle to explain later events by simply saying that it was a result of drug abuse.

Perhaps I had finally done it. Perhaps I had finally tipped myself into complete insanity. Certainly, the sense of threat that I had initially perceived was mostly unfounded, unwarranted, irrational.

So, I'll leave it at that for part one. We pause this tale, with me terrified of an angry lynching mob of a family outside my bedroom door, the hotel staff alerted to my distress as well as some non-emergency contact with the police, who were no strangers to me... although it was Kentish Town (Camden) police who I'd had brushes with in the past, but I was now in a different borough of London (Islington). Who knows how joined up the different forces and stations are, especially when dealing with somebody who's got no criminal record.

I wonder what the conclusion will be when the tale is told. That I definitely interacted with people during this time, suggests there is a very real but unfathomable component to this weird story... let's see where it leads.

This is where things started to get unravelled, before I ended up in a couple of hotels near Finsbury Park. The fun run took me right past my bike, where it was locked up on the street outside, as a deliciously ironic twist (May 2015)

Tags: #london #drugs #addiction #bipolar #police

This is a story about human connection...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think about committing suicide every day.

Tags: #bipolar #suicide #parents #addiction

This is a story about being bored to death...

I've had enough of alienating people. I even bore myself with my repetitive themes, labouring the same points over & over again. I know I wrote once before about changing the scratched record, but I've struggled to do it yet.

If you've stuck with me this far, I'm amazed, and I'm grateful. I will try my hardest to make it worthwhile, as the narrative hopefully turns in a positive direction. I decided that I was going to blog for at least a year, every day if possible, and I've stuck pretty true to my original objective. I'm about 8 months into this whacky project.

When I think back to some of the weird and (not very) wonderful stuff that has spewed out, during some rather strung out periods, it's a bit cringeworthy. Having all this brain dump out there for all to see is quite embarrassing, shameful, but who cares? The genie is out of the bottle.

I'm far more self aware than you probably think I am. I'm aware how bitter & twisted I come across. I'm aware how much I'm grinding my axe, and refusing to bury the hatchet. I'm aware how stuck in the past I am. I'm aware how absolutely bat shit insane I've been at times.

It's going to take months before I have most of the pieces that build a stable life. I currently have a place to live and a couple of friends that I see regularly, so that's more than I had in July 2014, homeless on Hampstead Heath, but it's still a pretty incomplete picture. I don't have a lot of control over how long it's going to take to get another job, and rebuilding a social network is going to take ages. Who knows if I'll ever patch things up with my family?

I wrote before about compassion fatigue, and besides, don't my problems look self made anyway? Doesn't it look, to all intents and purposes, that I'm a spoiled little rich brat, wailing about first world problems, or things that I shouldn't have to fix up anyway? How can I talk about being fortunate at one time, and then talk about being down on luck another time?

When I'm starting a sentence, I notice how often I'm using a personal pronoun. It's all "I" and "me". This hasn't escaped my notice. As a proportion of the world that I inhabit, I'm alone with my thoughts far more than most. No job, no work colleagues, only one friend that I see regularly, apart from my one flatmate.

If you think I've become self absorbed... or maybe that I'm always self absorbed... that's perhaps a function of isolation, loneliness, being an only child up to the age of 10, being bullied & ostracised, being moved around the country away from friends, switching schools 6 times, isolated in a tiny village in France every school holiday.

I try and fight the self-absorption, but it's a fact of where I am right now. I'm broke, unemployed and I don't see anybody face-to-face on any kind of regular basis. I have no passion at the moment, nothing to live for, nor the money to pursue a passion.

There's a bird I photographed, when I was living up on Hampstead Heath. Perhaps I seem free as a bird to you, seeing as I don't have any kids to feed & clothe, seeing as I don't have a partner to buy handbags and shoes for, seeing as I don't have a mortgage to pay anymore.

Certainly, I felt free when I didn't have rent to pay, debts to service. It was exciting, an adventure, sleeping rough in London. But, I'm not stupid. Sleeping rough is no fun when the weather is bad. Sleeping rough is no fun when your luck turns, and you get robbed or in trouble with the police or park wardens.

Rejecting the rat race can only be done for so long, before you are unemployable and so far outside the system that you can never re-enter it. People and their neat little pigeon holes can't cope with a gap in a CV where you were a no-fixed-abode hobo. When you have no address to fill in your last 5 years of address history, the forms just aren't set up for that. Computer says no.

There's a very real lack of excitement and adventure in my life at the moment. The more that you play chicken with the grim reaper, the more the humdrum daily existence becomes anathema. My whole childhood and career was mostly boredom, so the chaos of even traumatic and stressful events holds more interest than yet more rat race game playing.

In a way, I want to fix up things in my life, only so that I can burn them down again. To chuck things away at the moment would be an insult to two people who've helped me not lose everything that we consider vitally important in the world of the rat race. It's a shame to admit how depressed I am at the moment though.

Am I supposed to be happy about the prospect of brown-nosing bosses and dressing up in a fancy suit every day, trying to make a good first impression with new work colleagues? Am I supposed to be excited about having the money to wipe out my debts, and to feather the nest of my landlord? Am I supposed to be pleased that while death rushes headlong towards me, I'm saving up towards some imagined future time when hopefully I have enough health & wealth left to fuck the whole thing off?

During periods of exhaustion and particularly poor mental health due to extreme stress and pressure, I've talked about wanting to teach deprived kids physics, write a book, solve the riddles of the Universe, set up a hostel for refugees... basically jack in the rat race and do something worthwhile. There's a social conscience and a curious mind that are completely unfulfilled, and 36 years of trying to keep it at bay is just as damaging as anything you can do to yourself with drink & drugs.

But, when I'm well, I'm a realist. I will choose the path of least resistance. I won't burn every bridge.

However, I do worry that the day has finally come when I've burnt every bridge. This website, where my entire psyche and darkest secrets are out on display for all to see... it could be the end of my professional reputation. It could derail my gravy train. If it does, I'll feel guilty for those who tried to protect me from myself, but I'll probably be happy, deep down. The rat race is a miserable existence.

There's a Lego gravy train. Adults like playing with kids toys. What does that tell you about how pointless and boring most jobs are?

Tags: #homeless #career #mentalhealth #depression #bipolar #parents #childhood

This is a story about unlocking potential...

I have been unproductive for 6 months. In fact, I was counterproductive for 3 months: self sabotaging. That might be a turn-off for some people. They might assume that my actions are nonsensical, and point to irrational behaviour, madness.

I would argue instead, that my ability to fight my way back from being abandoned by my own friends & family, and society as a whole, but getting back onto my feet without assistance, is proof that I can do things that would send most people insane with stress and anxiety.

If you hit Christmas, when everybody is thinking festive thoughts and taking loads of holiday, and you haven't got a job, you haven't got a lot of hope of finding a new role until well into the new year.

With no means of paying my rent & bills, and no cashflow, what hope did I have? Seeing as I'm out of contact with so many friends, and my relationship with my family is beyond broken, what was I really living for?

Society is literally better off with me dead. I'm a risk. Although I'm a net contributor, through taxation and productive output, there only looks like one outcome, according to conventional wisdom: that I should live out the rest of my life heavily medicated, on benefits, or that I will fully relapse onto drugs before being caught up in the criminal justice system.

Surely, given this bleak outlook, you should reach the same conclusion as my parents and leave me for dead. When I'm dead, at least I have a life insurance policy that can be cashed in. When I'm dead, at least the expensive assets in my estate can be sold off and the proceeds distributed. Only my life stands in the way of unlocking all that cold hard cash.

And what quality, this life? With hardly any human connection, it's a miserable existence. I don't see my children every day (I have none), I don't see my girlfriend or wife (I haven't got one), I don't see my friends (I'm out of contact with those far-flung people), I don't see my family (the relationship has broken down). Without human connection, what do I exist for, except to pay rent, to service debts and to consume, consume, consume?

I know that it is only the bullshit of the system that keeps me down. The millstone of paying rent can be replaced by living rough on the streets. The misery of working a pointless job can be replaced by just doing random acts of kindness, making human contact instead of trying to thrust more crap down people's throats, trying to squeeze a drop more blood out of the stone.

I'm wrung dry. I've been playing the silly games for so long that it seems patently ridiculous to be asked to continue doing the same stupid shit that doesn't go anywhere. "Make poverty history" charities exclaim, and have exclaimed for many lifetimes... but yet the rich:poor divide is wider than ever. I can't switch my brain off. I can't turn a blind eye, in the self-centred interests of child-rearing, like you can.

The more I write, the more I see a thinly veiled jealousy. Of course, I would love to feel fulfilled by the unconditional love of my children, knowing that I have passed on my genes, and that I have a reason to get up in the morning and go to work: to put food on the table, and keep a dry roof over the heads of my family.

I've been trapped up a dead-end alleyway. I'm now somewhat forced to take the highest paid work that I can, in order to service debts that I incurred as a result of being let down by people who believe in abandoning their own family members and reneging on promises. I'm angry that I trusted them, instead of making commercial lending agreements to bridge the gap during my divorce.

Again, I can point to evidence to show who the real fools are. I made shrewd investments when my back was really hard against the wall, and made 1,200% return in just a few months. I had few options, because my time had been wasted on false promises, and so I had to bet big. I outsmarted some dumb, nasty people, and survived. My credentials gained even more credibility, whilst some other people proved to be an unreliable waste of the hot air expelled from their mouths.

But for some reason, I don't feel credible. I feel broken. I feel like a fraud. In fact, I'm far less of a fraud than many, because I'm so self-critical, even in the face of great evidence that I can create value wherever I go, no matter how shitty the circumstances.

There's a picture that my parents have painted of me: a drug addict who has wasted thousands on drugs and time wasting. In actual fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The total amount of money I've spent on drugs in my lifetime is less than a week's wages. Admittedly, I'm paid quite a lot of money, but it's still less than a week of my wages, in my entire life.

The other fact is that despite crippling mental health issues, I have still managed steady gainful employment. I've still been incredibly productive. Even in the very darkest days of problems with mental health and substance abuse, I was still valued by colleagues and bosses, well paid and contributing big sums of tax to the state.

What is the measure of a man? As I'm currently not in a contract, I feel worthless. I feel like I've 'gone soft' while I've been off work and that my skils and employability have been very badly damaged. I feel less of a person. I feel a great pressure to sell myself short, to undervalue myself, in the same way that other people undervalue me.

It's only because a select handful of people have gone above & beyond that I don't chuck the towel in and fuck the whole thing off.

The sun only shines in my life for short periods at the moment

Tags: #career #depression #bipolar #mentalhealth

This is a story about things that can't be changed...

London represents opportunity to me. People talk about the streets being paved with gold, and this city has always provided for me, when I've been going through hard times or thought I had reached a dead end.

Obviously, it's people not the place, that has meant that I've had a roof over my head, and the chance to work again, when I would otherwise have sunk, stagnated, rotted and died.

I've been very bitter about my ex-wife and parents, who haven't helped, and have even been obstructive. The bitterness is partly because I've not yet been able to have a sustained period of recovery, to show to those who have helped me that it was worthwhile.

I've considered going back and deleting or editing some of my bitter, angry rants at people who've let me down, obstructed my recovery, even injured me and taken me away from friends, work, my life. It's obvious to me how stuck in a rut I am, how boring and repetitive I've become, how obsessive and negative I sound.

There are several challenges I've set for myself at the moment:

• Get back to work
• Fight depression
• Tidy up a load of administrative loose ends
• Stay 'clean'

It probably seems like I'm making mountains out of molehills, having a storm in a teacup, but there are few words to truly convey just how dysfunctional my life was. Post was shoved out of sight, bills piled up, finances got in a terrible mess, out of contact with all my friends, conflict with my family. The threat of bankruptcy and homelessness was imminent, around the clock.

I know that you have probably had times when you've worried about making ends meet, how you're going to pay the bills, how you're going to pay the rent or the mortgage. I'm sure you've felt like you're not going to do it, that you're going to fall on hard times and be evicted from your home. Try living like that for a few years, and see what your stress levels are like.

A lot of my bitteness stems from the fact that the depths I sank to, the problems I've had to overcome... a lot of it was so easily avoidable. A very small handful of people just had to honour their commitments, their word, their duty and their obligation as supposedly decent human beings, and my situation could have been very different.

However, I need to move forward. I don't feel in a particularly forgiving mood, so instead I'm going to blame myself. I'm going to blame myself for trusting people. I'm going to blame myself for taking people at their word. I'm going to blame myself for thinking that other people were dependable, reliable, trustworthy, pleasant, decent human beings.

I can improve on that. I can actually say that I learned some important life lessons. "In sickness and in health" are just empty words to some people, and some parents are just terrible, terrible people. My faith in humanity is damaged, but I will probably benefit from becoming cynical, untrusting, negative, selfish and unreliable... just like them.

I need to make it clear here that I'm not talking about all those many people in London, who have been my friends, my support network, my saviours in my hour of need. London has provided me with clothes in hospital, where my parents have left me for dead. London has provided me with a dry roof over my head, where my ex-wife would see me go homeless. London has provided non-judgemental friends, where others have recoiled in prejudiced horror at the propaganda pedalled by my ex and my Dad.

One of my great sadnesses is that where these worlds have collided, and the chaos and trauma that I have been through has overspilled into all areas of my life, long-standing friendships have been damaged. I can not and will not criticise my friend, who made me a guest in his home, for the fact that he believed things said behind my back, which his naïvety led him to believe, but it's hard to know how to fix things up between us.

There's a saying amongst people dealing with mental health issues:

Nothing about us without us

It's quite simple really. You have no idea what a person is going through, when they're suffering the chaos and trauma associated with mental health issues (including substance abuse) and 2nd or 3rd hand information is just tittle-tattle, and will not help anybody.

It sounds like I'm ticking my friends off, and I'm really not. Where people have tried to help, I have nothing but gratitude. I don't expect people to understand, to make allowances, to go out of their way to educate themselves. I have no entitlement, beyond the basic human decency of not making assumptions based on stuff that's been discussed behind my back, but I can understand that there might be honest good intentions.

This is all starting to sound rather paranoid, confused. Yes, that's the psychological damage that's done when you overhear hushed whispers about yourself, and news spreads via gossip and contact behind your back that you aren't party to.

As a sick person, I felt like a failure. I blamed myself for being defective, and later for 'choices' I made. I viciously attacked myself, criticised my inability to cure my ailments and restore my former stability, reliability, order in my life. When you feel terrible about yourself, you carry a huge burden of shame. You try and hide yourself away, minimise your footprint on the world, withdraw from human contact and the public gaze.

It's very strange, pretending you don't exist, because you're ashamed, embarrassed. You live in fear of anybody discovering that you're not well. You live in fear of anybody finding out how much of a failure you think you are. Of course, this breeds paranoia. Of course, you are hypersensitive to people talking about you behind your back.

Of my friends, there's no blame here. They tried to help. They wanted to help. Their motives were good. They aided. They helped, they didn't hinder. I have only regret that I haven't yet been able to use the patchwork quilt of support that I've received to put it all together into something more positive... yet.

Certain beginnings haven't reached the end yet. This story's not over

Tags: #london #friends #parents #divorce #bipolar #depression #mentalhealth

This is a story about how people respond to incentives...

The last time I was in the Accident & Emergency department of a general hospital, I got a ticking off from the consultant. It was almost as if he didn't understand that the threat of kidney failure and early death was no disincentive to the path through life I was taking. It shouldn't have been a surprise to him: I hadn't gone to the hospital through choice, but instead the police had taken me there.

This was my life for a while: being passed from pillar to post by people who didn't understand what I was going through or how to deal with me. One thing that everybody seemed to agree on though, was that tough love was probably the best option. I should be ridiculed, shamed, talked down to and ostracised until I "saw sense" and decided to change the course of my life. Why would anybody choose the life that I had?

Actually, the police were excellent, seeing as they deal with society's dregs day in and day out. The well-to-do Royal Free hospital on the hills of London's exclusive Hampstead, was perhaps less used to dealing with those who have lost their way in life. Certainly, those who were struggling with drink and addiction, that I met, were sent to more central hospitals, like UCLH on the Euston Road.

I certainly don't see hospital as the first port of call, to rectify issues, and I bandaged my own massive leg wound and would have tried to avoid hospital, had paramedics not insisted that I was admitted, on another occasion.

It is only with regret that I have consumed NHS resources, but I certainly don't feel that there was any choice in the matter. When I injured my leg one night on London's streets, alone, I pulled out the broken glass and let it heal as I lay in agony in a bush for several days, with the blood-soaked wound sticking to my torn trousers. It needed stitches and I needed antibiotics to avoid infection, but I was lucky. I saved the NHS some money and I've got the scars to prove it.

Passing the buck, and driving somebody away from their home, family and friendship groups... making somebody feel ashamed, turning them into an outcast, demonising and villainising somebody... that's ridiculous!

I picked the wrong life partner: somebody judgemental, violent, abusive. That's my fault. I wasn't equipped with the life experience to know that I should walk away. My own parents relationship was full of verbal abuse and psychological warfare, but they stayed together: commitment to a partner was all I knew. I was naïvely optimistic that things would finally work, if only I tried hard enough.

When depression worsened and became bipolar disorder, when bipolar was overshadowed by addiction... things were chaotic, and consumed my sanity, temporarily. I was heavily dependent, trusting, of my partner and my Dad, and my GP. They acted with ignorance and without consideration of my wishes. Later, my partner would act with spite and selfishness.

It's hard to recover if your partner is working against you, and has your Dad in co-operation too. But, I'm going over heavily trodden ground. I don't mean to re-iterate this. I mean instead to talk about another approach: carrot, not stick.

I was dealing with something, in technical terms, called a clusterfuck. A combination of mental health problems, an unsupportive partner, unsupportive and even obstructive family, sex addiction, drug addiction, having to find a new home, new friends, new job... it's too much to ask of somebody. A breakdown, a major relapse, becoming completely dysfunctional: this was made inevitable by the circumstances around me.

Only the police acted with any restraint. The police see lives ruined, and people enter into the revolving-doors of criminal justice. The police know that slapping a criminal conviction onto somebody makes their life harder, rather than improving their chances of rehabilitation into society, so they are reluctant to condemn somebody to that fate. However, many in the rest of society are keen to label and ostracise and destroy their fellow human beings.

We are living in an increasingly isolated society, where we are mistrustful of each other. We avoid listening to anybody's personal story, lest it instil some sense of sympathy within ourselves. To view every stranger as a potential murderer, rapist, paedophile, thief and dirty junkie, is easier than just seeing other human beings, and feeling compelled to hesitate in the rat race for a second and give somebody a hand up.

We are all competing with one another so fiercely, that we believe that it is only with intensely selfish and self-centred actions, to the detriment of society as a whole, that we can get ahead, that we can succeed. We believe that we are helping our family, by turning a blind eye to the beggars, the homeless, the poor and the addicts and alcoholics.

The welfare state is being dismantled. The sympathy of society and the basic human instinct for care and compassion is being eroded. Instead we have a culture of "every man for himself" and we'll allow incredible human suffering to be perpetrated in our names, because we are sold good vs. evil fairytales by a wealthy elite, intent on turning us into scared, isolated consumers.

I feel with certainty that the depression that I feel - the dissatisfaction with what I see in the world - stems directly from an unpleasant attitude that's prevalent everywhere I look: the collapse of social bonds, and the mistrust of strangers, neighbours, fellow human beings.

I've paid over £30,000 just to be treated like a human being, by some kind and compassionate, non-judgemental people. That's all it takes to help somebody on the road to recovery: just don't be an arsehole to them. Be consistently nice to each other, and the world won't be such a shit place that people get depressed in, want to get intoxicated and want to kill themselves.

Yes, it's true that when my life is absolutely appalling, I will probably run to drink & drugs. What's the alternative? The razor blade and the noose.

They feed you in hospital. You could try starving people, to punish them for getting sick, but seeing as that's how I ended up in hospital I can't see why that would work. Carrot works. Stick doesn't

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

This is a story about an inevitable crash...

If you're under too much pressure for too long, eventually you'll crack, you'll crash & burn. Making hay while the sun shines is all well and good, but when you enter a cycle of boom & bust, it's very hard to restabilise things.

My school year was one of the first to do the dreaded SATs exams. These exams turned out to be incredibly important for the next set of exams that followed hot on their heels: my GCSEs. My SAT results pretty much decided which stream I would be in for Maths, English & Science. Being in the 'top set' was important, to not get dragged down by those who didn't want to learn.

Education and a corporate career is just unrelenting. The mindset of continually challenging people with arbitrary measurements never goes away. Whether it's A-level exams, University or your performance reviews at work, life is one continuous game of sorting and sifting, presided over by little hitlers who want to confine everybody into neat little boxes.

I never felt particularly stressed about exams and getting good grades, at the time, but there was a heavy culture I was being indoctrinated into, which I didn't realise until it was too late, and I hit a brick wall and could no longer continue on the same bullshit path.

We tell our kids that they need to work hard at school and get good exam results so that they can continue into further education, get a better job, have a better lifestyle. It turns out that's simply wrong. Society certainly benefits if we are all unthinking slaves, simply parroting the same identical bullcrap, and unquestioningly following our allotted route: KNOW YOUR PLACE is what's drummed into us, for 40 or 50 hours a week.

Playing the game, playing by the rules, believing in the value of pieces of paper above talent and experience, believing that there's a place for everybody, and that if you try your best, you can do better than your peers, and it'll give you and your family a better life. At some point, the bubble bursts, you become disillusioned, you see that it's all a lie.

I felt cheated out of my childhood, with such an unhealthy fixation on academic achievement placed ahead of playtime and social activities. Nobody would ever tell me off for reading too many books, completely isolated in my room, but playing games with my friends was not a good use of time, apparently.

My parents pulled me away from my peers at every opportunity. Whether that was visiting their friends all over the country, or spending weeks at a time in a dilapidated house in a tiny French village. I did make a friend in this village eventually, but he was younger than me, and I was criticised for being "immature" and the effect this friend had on me.

Some of my parents friends had children too, and I tried to be friends with them, and indeed I felt closer to these children than I did with a lot of my schoolfriends. I was kept away from schoolfriends so often during weekends and holidays, when there was less emphasis on homework, but I could never get close to any group of friends before I was dragged away.

I started to value material possessions above social bonds, because I had been taught that social bonds were not something I would ever be allowed to cultivate. I changed schools 6 times, instead of just once, because of my parents' lack of care about how my social development was being affected. In the end, I gave up, and saw friendships as totally transient, meaningless.

It's a real tragedy, when somebody is taught not to get attached to anybody, not to make meaningful bonds, not to value friendships. I fixated on career achievements and money, believing that there was no value in staying with my peer group, having a group of friends, being socially bonded.

It was quite by accident that I ended up with a group of kitesurfer friends. For me, the appeal of kitesurfing was that it was a loner sport. Most people who have been socially normalised enjoy team sports. It's the camaraderie of the sport that is most of the fun, rather than the sport itself. That brotherhood (or sisterhood) between team members is something I never experienced growing up.

Given that I was socially under-developed, and even cynical about friendship and human relationships, it was easier to develop relationships through technology, the internet. I started to read and contribute to an online discussion forum, about kitesurfing, and from this I got to know the online nicknames of a lot of people, as if they were people who I knew intimately.

As my confidence with kitesurfing grew, I started to get more outspoken on the online discussion forums, and this developed into arranging to meet up with people at the weekends, to go kitesurfing where the wind and the tides were best. There was a social meet up every Tuesday night, at a pub in central London, which was popular, and cemented a lot of real friendships.

Having access to a group of friends, a peer group that I felt bonded to, was something that was very new and alien to me at first, but it completed me: I felt secure and happy for the first time in my life. For the first time in my life, I was living for more than just exam grades and good feedback from my bosses at work. It was healthy, it was stable, it was sustainable and it was happy.

Sadly, my underlying mindset was still one that placed ambitious career goals and risk-taking ahead of valuing the social group that I loved and who gave me great joy and security, a deep-seated sense of wellbeing, of connection to the world. I didn't miss it until it was gone.

I was driven to find a girl, to fall in love... having been so socially insecure, awkward, such a late starter, I hadn't had the opportunity to meet that special lady, and I felt like that was the most important thing I had to do, since I had become happy in the rest of my life. I put all my energies and efforts into trying to make it work with every girl who I thought I was madly in love with.

There are few words to describe just how immature I was, in some very vital and 'normal' areas of life. You can't bully and pressure and cajole your kid into being an academic bookworm without damaging them as a rounded person. Who gives a shit if they're grade 8 on the violin if they had a miserable childhood and can't relate to their peers or find any happiness in the world? Who gives a shit if they've got a first-class degree from Oxbridge, if they're shy and awkward and depressed?

It seems inevitable that I would go astray, with no peer group, no group of friends to compare notes with, to keep each other safe.

I cannot possibly express to you just how isolated and alone I am.

I walked the tightrope for a long time, believing that good qualifications and work experience would lead to a stable life, but as soon as I looked down I realised that there was no safety net

Tags: #bipolar #childhood #parents

This is a story about brain damage...

Look at me, eating brains for breakfast. Actually, it's obviously porridge, but I've clearly lost the plot. I'm a few sandwiches short of a picnic. I'm a few cards short of a deck. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, at the moment.

I've been job hunting again this week, after a lengthy hiatus, and it's remarkable how badly affected by stress I have been. In the grand scheme of things, 4 or 5 months out of action is really nothing at all, but having to jump through the recruitment hoops is my idea of hell.

It was only a little over a month ago that I was completely bat shit insane and life was headed down the tubes, so I guess it's natural that this first week back in the swing of things should come with some trepidation.

I wonder how I will answer that question, in an interview: "what have you been doing with yourself since Christmas?". I wonder how well it would go down if I told them I had mainly been locked in my en-suite bathroom, suffering extreme paranoid psychosis, out of my head on bath salts, or in a slurring semi-comatose state induced by legal benzodiazepines, that meant that it took me 15 minutes to explain to a friend that I was eating a slice of toast. Another friend thought I had suffered a stroke.

Oh, I'm making my family very proud, eh? But what can you do? There was really very little hope for me after my brief efforts to keep the wheels of the machine turning, ended up being blocked by the holiday season. Faced with a cashflow crisis and the slow January job market, I backslid, I relapsed, I self-sabotaged.

How much damage does it do, to get so messed up for 3 months? I mean seriously messed up. At one point I believed that window cleaners were spying on me at 11pm at night, on a bank holiday, with horrible winter weather lashing the building.

You only have to look back to some of my blog posts from around that period to see that the whole bath salts & pink/blue pills from the internet combo wasn't the greatest thing for my mental health. You can see the disjointed thinking, but yet my mind had failed to stop whirring away, so instead the complete garbage running around in the hamster wheel of my brain was just spewing forth onto the pages of this website.

In a way, I'm tempted to go back and edit what I wrote, or even erase it from history. However, it's an interesting record of everything that happened to me, in 8 months and counting. Here's a brief recap:

• I was living in a hotel
• I was working a contract for HSBC
• I was really enjoying my work
• I was well liked and respected at HSBC, and a valued member of the team
• I wasn't drinking any caffeinated drinks
• I wasn't taking any drugs (i.e. bath salts) and hadn't taken any since June
• I decided to quit alcohol for 100 days
• I got a flat, and said my friend John could live with me rent free if he did some work for me
• After 30 days without any alcohol, I became suicidal, unable to cope with extreme stress
• I went into a secure psychiatric unit of a hospital, voluntarily, for my own safety, for a week
• My friend Klaus and me did a Man on a Mission scouting mission to Devon/Cornwall
• I then went to San Francisco and caught up with one of my oldest schoolfriends and some of my startup friends
• I then threatened to whistleblow on HSBC because their Customer Due Diligence project was being completely mismanaged
• Naturally, HSBC then terminated my contract
• I then travelled round London, doing my #notanonymous thing
• I went on a load of political demonstrations
• I started doing my advent calendar, leading up to the deliberatly ironically named Cold Turkey on Boxing Day
• I sliced both forearms open with a razor blade, along the length of multiple veins
• I did 101 days without alcohol, then relapsed heavily onto bath salts and benzos (sleeping pills) and pretty much destroyed my bed and generally made a right mess of myself and my bedroom/en-suite
• I got better (or did I?)

Perhaps I should put this website on my CV and link to it from LinkedIn. I've obviously given a great deal of consideration to who is likely to read this. I expect that at some point, some people from JPMorgan, HSBC and my startup days have read things that must be quite eye opening for them.

I remember on the first Friday at my most recent contract at HSBC, a couple of the guys took me out for a beer and the conversation was steered onto the topic of drugs. I had my game head on, so I didn't go into exquisite detail about my colourful past, but I did later fall asleep at the bar and get told by security staff that I couldn't take a nap on my stool. I wasn't on any drugs at the time, but my alcohol tolerance was quite low.

It should be remembered that I wasn't abusing drugs for that whole time I was working at HSBC, and I was actually sober for the whole of October, as the first 31 days of my 101 day sober challenge to myself, which I achieved.

Well, that's not strictly true. After a week at HSBC, I realised that my cashflow was completely screwed and living in a hostel whilst working on the number one project was not going to work, but I didn't have any money. I mean no money at all. I wasn't going to be able to travel to work, eat, or even afford to pay for my hostel bed anymore.

What a ridiculous situation. I was earning many many times more than the average wage, but yet my cashflow was in bits. I was employed doing some very very important work, but I couldn't afford to get the tube to work or buy a sandwich. The money was there, but it was trapped in the system: waiting for my invoices to be paid.

Can you imagine that? You were living in the park, then you were living in a hostel bed, you start work with your one suit and your one pair of shoes, and you don't have any money, but you're working on the number one project for the biggest bank in Europe, and the CIO names you in front of the entire team, at the townhall meeting, as the guy responsible for a certain important piece of work... but you haven't got two pennies to rub together.

So, I ask you, where do you think some of my 'madness' comes from? Is it all due to genetics, to a disease... or do you think some of it comes from the extreme stress and pressure, and the lack of a proper safety net? How hard do you think it is, to fall between the cracks, and try to rescue yourself from destitution? How much of a toll does it take on your body and mind to have to fight your way back from the brink of death and dereliction?

I pretty much slept at the office, because there was nothing for me to go home to

Tags: #career #banking #bipolar #addiction #depression #suicide #homeless

This is a story about tl;dr...

Creativity loves constraints, although I have gotten rather carried away recently, with my average post length stretching out from under 1,000 words, to now pushing 3,000 words. If you write 3,000 words a day, you're churning out nearly 2 novels every month. It's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) on steroids.

There are lies, damn lies and statistics, but I must admit that I have been gathering browsing data from my website since January. I know, for example, that the average amount of time per day, that a person spends reading my website is 4 minutes and 25 seconds.

On a more interesting note, I can also see the kind of things that people search Google for, and end up finding my website. Here is one wonderful poetic example:

"i want to go to london soon dont worry i dont want to do anything stupid no big hand outs just want to book into re hab strait away or as soon as poss get my teeth sorted and be human again please dont block me might got replys when i am sorted want to leave this funiv life for good want to see my favourite wife i always think of her i went back in hotel but she was gone i wish i had of spoke" -- anonymous

That is, word for word, what somebody typed into Google, and found my website.

Here are some other delightful highlights:

• "methylone made me think wife was cheating"
• "london people fucking on sister"
• "legal highs that make you randy"
• "i do not argue with imbecile i respect myself and my profession"
• "i bully my granny to have sex with me story"
• "fucked my sister wjen (sic.) she was hospitalised"
• "sugar mummy fucking themself"

I think that the person who was searching for a story about bullying a granny to have sex with them is my personal favourite, for some sick reason. I don't like the idea of the story or that kind of perversion, but I like that something so corrupt and awful brought that person to my website. Sucker.

I can see from the statistics that most of my traffic comes from Facebook and Twitter. You would have thought that 6,000 Twitter followers would bring you a lot of readers, but it's only 35% of the total.

Direct means people who have bookmarked or typed in manicgrant dot com. I love you guys & girls... you're my regular readers, who remember my website and keep coming back ♥︎

Organic search is all the screwed up weird stuff that people type into Google... with some of the most precious examples listed above, for your amusement.

Referral is links from other sites, like Reddit. I haven't done much link building, because I like writing, not promoting my website. I write it for me, mainly, to keep friends and family informed secondly, and thirdly, I write because I'm developing a body of work that I hope will at some point become useful for people suffering from Bipolar Disorder, depression and substance abuse.

I like writing on my own website (although it's powered by Known, created by my friend Ben) rather than one of those free blogs that you get from Wordpress or Blogger.com. I like and respect bloggers, but they make up the bulk of your readers when you blog on one of those mainstream websites. I have no idea where my regular readers found me, or why they choose to read my stuff, but it sure as hell isn't one of those "choose random blog" buttons you get on the free blogging sites.

Writing on the public internet feels a little bit like shouting, not whispering your secrets into the hollow of an ancient tree, in a very crowded park. You have no idea who's listening, and how they're reacting to a complete stranger's private life, being brain dumped onto these webpages.

It's only because some individuals have been kind enough to comment and email, that I have any feedback at all, and I know that people beyond my immediate circle of family and friends are getting something out of it.

For all of us, we face off to parents, brothers & sisters, friends, work colleagues, more distant family members and even the public to some extent. We are in the eyes and ears of all these different people, who each perceive something different, and have a different recollection of events.

The reconciliation of the version of your life, imagined by everybody and anybody you ever come into contact with, is a rather impossible thing, when people come and go at different times, and they only know snippets of your story.

Of course it's totally self-absorbed to be a normal regular Joe, who isn't famous for anything, to write something that is so biographical. We think of autobiographies as things that are ghostwritten so that they can be bought as a Christmas present for somebody when you can't think of anything else better to get for them. How completely absurd that a nobody like me should document parts of my life like this!

In a very large way, this is my anti-Facebook. Instead of trying to appear as successful, happy and having my shit together as possible, with lots of photos of me smiling and doing nice things like going out for meals with friends and going on holiday with pretty girls... this is my answer to the fake world of the perfect social media identity.

Of course, I'm playing with fire, using my real identity to write about real events in the most honest and unflinching way that I dare. Naturally, I have had my fears about employers and work colleagues reading this stuff, but the experiment continues.

Frankly, I'm through having to wear a mask, and hide my true colours in order to be considered grey, bland, boring and corporate enough to be allowed into the inner sanctum of bankerland. I'm glad that I lost my last contract, because I was too outspoken about a moral and professional duty to the shareholders.

Now, as I look for a new contract, I do so with less fear than ever before.

The last year in a single graph

Tags: #bipolar #career #mentalhealth #depression #addiction

This is a story about returning to normality...

One week from today I'm going to start circulating my CV and generally getting back in touch with my network to try and find some work. It's been a surprisingly long road, getting back on my feet.

I've picked an arbitrary date to try and get back into the swing of the working world. I certainly don't feel very well. I'm tired all the time. I still need help and support to deal with things, which are otherwise overwhelming to me.

However, I seem to have an on/off switch inside me. When I'm powered down in the 'off' position, you would barely believe how dysfunctional I am. Just getting out of bed and getting some food is considered a highly productive day. Pathetic, I know.

Something triggers me to switch gears from neutral, to top speed. The 'on' switch gets thrown and then the only problem is slowing me down enough to try and stop me from burning out. Next week is going to be a blur of activity, and if things go right, then there will be at least 3 or 4 months of frenetic activity before the circuitboards melt.

There are lots of bits of data that are graphable to see these two poles in my behaviour. Whether it's my bank balance or my activity data, collected by the movement sensors in my watch & phone, they all show the same thing: peaks and troughs.

Sadly, I would say that the peaks and troughs are getting more and more extreme though. I was certainly having some very odd thoughts and ideas when I was getting really tired last year, but I was in the middle of a highly productive phase. I had great difficulty biting my tongue, and thinking about the medium to long term benefits that would selfishly suit me best.

It's quite possible that I've totally busted my brain by just asking way too much of it. I've tried to be really kind to it for long periods, to see what difference that makes, but it's a bit like a tube of toothpaste that's open at both ends... you can put the cap on one end, but the toothpaste still oozes out of the other end when you squeeze it.

There's so much pressure in modern life. There's no opportunity to stop and catch your breath. Just as soon as I'm physically able to drag myself into an office for 8 hours a day, and not fall asleep in every meeting, I have to get back in the saddle and earn another load of cash, knowing that my episodes of stability are increasingly rare.

It's really strange, but I think that I used to know what was best for my health, and be really strict with employers, way before I got sick. The idea of working weekends was really offensive to me, and having to do on-call work, or late nights was something I'd only do very occasionally, and there had to be the bait of a big bonus or promotion on the table if I was going to do it.

I used to be really good at managing my long-term health. I made sure I took all my holiday allowance every year, and I made sure I always had something to look forward to. I was also really strict about maintaining a good work:life balance. I was fit and active, spending most weekends at the beach, kitesurfing. I was sociable and had all the right elements to create a fulfilling healthy life.

Nowadays, if I can work, I work. I live for work. When I'm not working, I'm just eating and sleeping. My existence is isolated, unhealthy. I dare not spend any money. I dare not take a holiday. I don't feel like a whole, functional person... and I don't see my friends. I feel worthless.

Frankly, when I am working, I'm way too intense at the moment. It doesn't take me very long to get a handle on an organisation and its objectives, and to understand the team and technology. From there, I seem to fall into my old pitfalls of becoming cynical and overly outspoken. Plus, I'm always in such a rush to get everything done... there isn't an IT project in the world that isn't late or overbudget.

It's hard when you've worked at a particularly demanding level, managing your own team or department, or even running your own company... and then you've got to slot into a massive corporate environment. It's hard to get back into the mindset of the wage-slave. It's hard to remember how to achieve the difficult balance between getting stuff done, and just terrifying the hell out of senior management, because things are happening at breakneck pace.

There was one particular piece of work that I was doing, and I knew there was a really important deadline to hit. There was a TV screen setup, which would light up green when we had succeeded and hit our deadline. I was working away in one of the meeting rooms, away from distractions on the open office floor. I knew that there was going to be a really tricky period to navigate with some of the senior management, who didn't understand what I was doing.

My very worst fears were confirmed when the senior management came rushing into the meeting room to say that there had been cheering in the office, because I'd made the screen go green. I then had to tell them that it was only because I had done some contingency work in preparation for the proper work. The pained and stressed look on their faces was unbearable, but I knew I only had 10 or 15 minutes to wait until the real 'green light' popped up, hopefully.

There then followed a very strained 10 minutes where I attempted to explain that I had done something to give us a retreat route, in case there were problems further down the line. The senior managers felt that I had done something cavalier, they felt misled, they were confused, they were disappointed, they didn't understand... this continued for 12 or so minutes.

Then the screens went green again, much to my relief. There we go. Job done, that was the event that they should be cheering. I had just been killing time explaining what I'd done, because I had a great deal of confidence that everything was going to be OK.

Such is the way with IT. The explaining takes the time. The work is normally trivial.

It takes time to get used to working with me. I tend to work on the principle that it's easier to ask forgiveness than ask for permission. I just put a great deal of pressure on myself to make sure that I get things right when I'm sticking my neck out.

I'm pretty unencumbered by fear, especially now I've been to hell and back a few times. This could be part of the general broken brain problem I've got. I have absolutely no fear of being reprimanded... I stick to my guns when I know I'm right, and my hunches are normally right too. There are so many times when there is enormous pressure to say or do the wrong thing, and the middle ground is to simply button your lip, say nothing, go along with some madness.

I'm not very good at going along with amateur hour.

I was working such long hours that I was staying in a hotel just minutes away from the office. I even had to take my washing to work with me

Tags: #career #banking #computing #london #bipolar