This is a story about paralysis...

I'm never really unsure of what to do. I generally have a very certain idea of what I want to do and how I'm going to do it. I have a really big problem when I can see all the way to the end, and life seems to be a bit of a paint-by-numbers exercise. I really struggle when life is predictable and routine.

I went to see a psychiatrist on Wednesday. I knew what I wanted from the psychiatrist: to see a clinical psychologist. I also knew what the likely outcomes were if I was honest: to have pills thrown at me and put myself at risk of being locked up on a psych ward. It was a situation that was so predictable, that I was able to forecast exactly which medication the psychiatrist would suggest.

Instead of allowing myself to be sectioned and swallowing the prescribed medication, I ran away. I'm currently 1,200 miles away from home and by the time I get back the system will have forgotten all about me. If I really wanted to get what I need - which is some talk therapy - then I'd have played a completely different strategy. Frankly, I can't really afford to be sitting on a therapist's couch - I've nearly run out of money.

So, I find myself away from my friends and my new home, in a strange city, in a new job. It's very stressful. I'm very anxious. However, it's also novel and therefore a little exciting. Even though I've done similar work a million times before, I'm still a little challenged by meeting new people and learning the particular nuances of the organisation I've just joined. There's a little novelty in the experience, even if ultimately I'll realise that it's the same old shit, and I'll be on cruise control until the end of the assignment.

I'm presently thinking about eating pasta from a plastic pot, having poured boiling water over it from a miniature kettle in my hotel room. I will need to stir and eat the pasta with a shoehorn, in the absence of any cutlery. This is the glamorous life I live.

You may wonder whether the stress of homelessness, near-bankruptcy, drug addiction, brushes with the law and general dysfunction in every area of my life, is something that I regret. No. No I don't regret it. Having been an adrenalin-junkie extreme-sports enthusiast all my life, you can't get more of a rush than playing "go for broke" in real life. It seems inevitable that I would push everything to the limit, including taking life-or-death chances.

It is a little hard to see where the reward is, when my life seems mostly miserable. I've had unbearable anxiety and depression for long periods during the last couple of years. However, I'm not rushing to the doctor and begging for a miracle cure. The deeply distressing feelings I'm having are doing very little to change my behaviour. I almost guarantee that I'll find the urge to self-destruct almost irresistible, if I pull through my latest episode of adversity.

Having lived in a bush in a park, it seems rather more preferable to be living in a hotel like I am now. Having nearly run out of money, it seems preferable to have a well-paid job, like I do now. However, I can't make any sense of life when I swing between impending doom and intolerable boredom. What's the point of living if it all ends in misery and disaster? I'm too busy moving from certain destitution to probable financial stability at the moment, to stop and have suicidal thoughts, but I know that the absurdity of the rat-race existence is already something that I'm not able to ignore - I'm completely unable to relax and enjoy trivial distractions.

Existential angst paralyses me. I wake up and I want to go back to sleep, but I can't because I have to go to work. I get to work and I want to walk out, but I can't because I can't lose this job. I should work but I want to scream "THIS IS ALL JUST UTTER BULLSHIT". Everywhere I look, I see needless complexity; makework. Existence itself is just killing time before our eventual death. Why go through the stressful and exhausting bit in the middle? Why not take the short-cut and just commit suicide?

It's strange to write like this, given that I've overcome the incredible stress of getting this job, travelling over a thousand miles and facing my first nervous couple of days in the office. Given that I'll avoid bankruptcy if I just keep turning up and keeping my mouth shut, why would I be writing about suicide? I'm not even suicidal at the moment. I've entered a strange kind of state, where I'm incredibly anxious, but I know that suicide doesn't make sense anymore. I know that I've gone to strange cities, started new jobs and rescued myself from financial ruin enough times. Why am I even writing about death and disaster?

January.

It's been a very, very long time since I had a stable January. Potentially, I'll still have well-paid work in the New Year. Potentially, I don't have to start job hunting and worrying about money during the absolute shittest time of year. Potentially, I start 2018 with prospects rather than worries.

On the flip side, you might say that I'm stuck in a cyclical pattern and that I keep trying the same thing but expecting different results, except you'd be wrong. I'm trying something that's been staggeringly successful, and the circumstances are different each time. One of these days, there's going to be a combination of favourable factors, as opposed to badly-timed clusterfucks.

Money is a 'trigger' for self-sabotage, one might say. Also, finding myself trapped on a rainy miserable island in the middle of winter is also a 'trigger'. My coping strategy in the past was to jet off to Venezuela or Brazil for a couple of weeks. I had a long successful career doing that.

In order to survive, I'm going to have to orchestrate friends, work, money, a place to live, a passion and a girlfriend. You might scream with frustration at your screen, because we're all trying to get that perfect balance, and there's always one area of our life that's not going as well as we'd like it to. Erm, well... you don't know how good you've got it, actually. Try living in a bush in a park with none of the things I listed, then get back to me. This is not a boo-hoo story - I'm just explaining how dysfunctional my life got. If it helps you to say it's all my fault for making bad life choices or whatever, then knock yourself out, but I'm far too busy figuring out whether there's some way I can rediscover a reason to live to worry about shit like that.

I'm just writing now. I'm brain dumping. I'm trying to write without a filter.

It's possible that I got caught in some thought loops before, and I needed to take a break from my usual blogging topics. It's possible that my blog wasn't helping me at all. It's possible that I'd lost perspective, because I'd been doing too much navel gazing. I took a break and now I've come back.

Now, I'm writing mindful of the fact that I have friends who I've been living with in Wales. I'm mindful of the fact that I've got a friend who helped me get this job. I'm mindful of the fact that I can't afford to put a foot wrong. I'm mindful of the precarity of my situation. I'm mindful of the fact that writing is actually pretty exhausting, and I need to devote quite a lot of my energies into doing a good job and impressing the people I'm working with. I'm mindful of the fact that I have repeated the pattern of boom and bust, and it looks pretty obviously cyclical to a casual observer. I'm mindful of the fact that my consistent perseverance in the face of a headwind might look a bloody-minded and stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality. That's not the case.

There's a prescription for an antidepressant waiting for me at my doctor's surgery back in Wales. Given the chance, I would be institutionalised by the mental health services. Instead, I'm pursuing a ridiculously optimistic and hopeful, yet extremely risky strategy, of attempting to avoid medication and the dead-end of financial ruin and the mire of pathetically paid jobs that're just as soul-destroying as the very well paid job I've got. I'm not happy about being unmedicated, but I wouldn't be happy popping pills either. I'm not happy about having to work a bullshit job, but I wouldn't be happy doing a so-called 'fulfilling' one either (there are none).

"What if you're still depressed and anxious in 6 weeks time?" the psychiatrist asked me. "Wouldn't you regret not having started taking medication sooner?" he asked. What happens if I don't give up though? Wouldn't I regret never finding out what happens if I stick to my guns and persevere? What am I going to find out, that nobody else ever would, because it's too hard?

I didn't mean to write so much, but I've uncorked some of the stuff I've been holding back. I've never regretted writing, despite the seemingly dreadful consequences. Writing has been financially disastrous for me, but yet it's got to be a healthier coping strategy than drink or drugs, or even going to the gym excessively, where I'll strain my heart and give myself arthritic joints.

I imagine that I'll meet a nice girl soon enough, and the pleasure of tactile affection will change my mood. I imagine that my lengthy abstinence from mind-altering substances will pay dividends soon. Already, some feeling has returned to my nerve-damaged foot/ankle. I must surely be somewhat more sharp-witted, now that I'm not taking heaps of pills every day. I must surely be on course to return to a more normal life, since kicking my addiction to stimulants.

I'm going to give myself a big pat on the back for reducing my alcohol consumption to a moderate level, breaking my physical benzodiazepine dependence, reducing my sleeping pill habit to almost nothing, getting off powerful prescription painkillers, staying 'clean' from supercrack for 6 months and otherwise living a pretty damn healthy life. It might not seem like I've done very much this year, apart from work three contracts, survive double kidney failure, survive a suicide attempt and survive a bunch of very traumatic events, but I'm damn well going to go ahead and congratulate myself on having spent a couple of days in my new job in what must be the very best mental health that I've enjoyed all year, even if I'm diabolically depressed and anxious.

Thinking about my achievements a little more, I'm going to give myself an imaginary medal for 30 days of not drinking, 30 days of writing a novel and spending more days clean and sober than I've spent intoxicated by medications, drugs and alcohol. Quitting a whole host of highly addictive drugs and medications, while in the throes of depression and anxiety, is something I'm going to go ahead and actually feel really proud of - sorry, not sorry. While I'm at it, I'm going to give myself another imaginary medal for not writing my blog for 30 days too. That was harder than you'd think.

My verbal diarrea is pretty bad, so I'm going to stop now, but I hope you can see that I'm not idle, even if you think I've been unproductive, lazy and self-sabotaging all year. It pisses me off that anybody might think I don't have a work ethic.

I'm not going to give up on my crazy experiment to see how my mental health is affected by my circumstances by just damn well being patient, consistent and relentless. I'm controlling the variables.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #medication

This is a story about aide-memoires...

I've been blogging for 779 days, including a period of 120 consecutive sober days and the current stretch of 45 sober days, which totals 165 days. I worked for approximately 300 days (including weekends). I spent circa 60 days in hospital. I had two major periods of drug abuse, six girlfriends, wrote a novel and I attempted suicide seriously once. I've written 702,412 words on the pages of this website.

So, where's it gotten me?

Nowhere and everywhere.

I had no idea I had so much to say; so much stuff that I needed to write about. When I uncorked the bottle, all this stuff just came flooding out - bitterness, resentment, bad memories, as well as strong opinions on myriad subjects. Of course, there was a lot of toxic filth which spewed from my mouth - not everything I've written has been kind and eloquently put. Do I regret what I've written? Sometimes, yes, but on the whole I feel glad I spoke up. I feel ashamed that I wrote some absolute gibberish when I was messed up, but there it is: my soul laid bare for all to see.

To have poured time and effort into sharing stuff on Facebook or Twitter would have left me horribly invested in those walled gardens. To have ingratiated myself with another online community - a discussion forum - would have perhaps been a useful exercise, to give me social contact and a clear purpose, but in some ways I'm glad that I've learned how to work in isolation; to keep up the discipline and routine even when I don't know why I'm writing or what good will come of it.

If nothing else, I can proudly say I'm a writer, of a sort: I'm an eccentric hermit who's lost in his own thoughts. I've got 200 blog posts planned and my next novel to write in November - my mind buzzes with ideas. I'd write long rambling posts that jump around from topic to topic, running to many thousands of words, except that I feel like I've had enough practice of sentence construction and finding my natural voice. Now I'm starting to enjoy a kind of delicious frustration, knowing that I only allow myself to write once a day, and I aim to keep my daily word count to around 700.

As a barometer of my mood, there is nothing finer than writing. I can see all my insecurities, anxieties and my propensity to become obsessive or consumed by things, as clear as day. Of course I fear egocentricity, narcissism, navel gazing and other undesirable labels that might be hurled at me, but frankly the process of writing is an essential pressure-release. Not having this blog made me unspeakably frustrated, because I was grotesquely misunderstood. "Oh, bless you poppet... so full of teenaged angst!" you might patronise me. LOL says I.

My maturing process has been unorthodox, due to relentless bullying and a generally unpleasant start to life that robbed me of my self-esteem and opportunities to be a child, a teenager and a student. I now take my chances where I find them, and delight in acting like a great big kid. Being a late starter in life has its advantages, even if there is a general presumption that I should be better at handling life events, when I actually have not had the benefit of experience - how was I supposed to, for example, get any good at relationships if I didn't have stable friendships, childhood sweethearts or good role models in my parents?

Entering my third year of daily writing, this could be considered my "finals". I've had a few jobs which have stretched to the 4+ year mark, and enjoyed a little more stability with friends and homes in my adult life, than I did through the 8 different schools I had the misfortune of attending. This writing project has provided stability and structure, when my world was blown to bits by divorce.

While the backdrop to my story has changed from hostel to hotel room, to a few different apartments, hospital wards and psychiatric institutions, I've somehow managed to keep writing on a regular basis. I feel like the same person, when I sit down in front of the keyboard, even if there has been a huge variation in the state of my mental health. I know that I have written during periods stimulant & sleep-deprivation induced mania, causing me to pour out thousands upon thousands of words in a confused jumble. However, my mind still makes a surprising amount of sense, despite circumstances which should have tipped me into out-and-out insanity.

I am fearful that the pages of this blog might chart my final decline into a state where I'm rendered permanently useless to the world. I often wonder if I have caused so much trauma to my fragile brain, that it can never recover. If I'm at all paranoid, it's that I'm talking complete nonsense, and everybody is just humouring me while snickering behind my back. "Why didn't anybody tell me I'm writing utter crap?" I sometimes think.

Watching a friend or a stranger careen towards imminent disaster, in a slow-motion car-crash, is something that holds our gaze while also somehow stunning us into silence. I'm vaguely aware that many will be thinking "what can I do?" and be paralysed, without a clear cry for help or call to action. Not only is this the world's longest suicide note, but it's also the world's slowest ongoing crisis, for anybody following along in real-time. It took me a long time to find the guts to finally make a decent attempt at killing myself.

I'm aware now that the burden of responsibility shifts back to me, having received an outpouring of support from unexpected corners, in the wake of my suicide attempt. To resort to self-murder again, would be churlish.

As my mind begins to un-fog from the painkillers I had been taking for most of this year, I wonder whether I have learned anything from the events of the past. I hope I have developed and I'm in a better position than I was, when I was rather trapped in some most unpleasant circumstances, although I find myself in a never-ending cycle - rushing back to work before I'm fully recovered, in order to service debts and otherwise line the pockets of the rich.

Stress keeps me wired, and I wonder when the last time I cried was. Surely, there's a lot of tears that I'm holding back.

I'm tense; agitated; nervous; anxious; hypervigilant.

Tags: #writing #anxiety

This is a story about medical notes...

My ex-wife - a biochemist by way of undergraduate degree - once screamed at me in an incoherent rage because I had innocently asked her "how big is a protein?" having wondered how many nanometers across, the average protein molecule measured. The sheer audacity of me asking such a question enraged her, perhaps because free thinking is expressly forbidden in an academic world which promotes rote-learning of facts and examinations graded to a marking scheme, ahead of learning.

(The answer, by the way, is roughly 3 nanometres in radius).

When I attempt to answer a difficult question, I sometimes pause and chuckle. "What is consciousness?" came one question. Although I was desperate to talk about weakly interacting subatomic particles, General Relativity and nuclear fusion, I somehow managed to constrain myself to a meaningless analogy, while keeping quiet about my "mind's eye" which could picture every piece of information that captured my entire existence, smeared out in a infinitely thin sphere at the event horizon of a singularity, across all meaningful spacetime for the entire universe that I will ever perceive, which would have been rather a mouthful to express.

Just as one may cram for an exam the night before, I've attempted to only ever amass the prerequisite knowledge that may be considered the minimum viable to navigate whatever situations I have had to endure to reach my goals. Education has never seemed like an end in and of itself, given that our understanding of the fundmental nature of reality is evolving, and the Standard Model of particle physics is rather long in the tooth. Although I find it quite delightful that there are quarks named strange, charm and beauty in the particle zoo, I would find it rather frustrating to dedicate years of my life, obtaining a degree and writing a thesis using tools which may soon look as clunky and outdated as Newton's inverse-square law of gravity.

The mathematicians will mock physics as simply being applied mathematics. The physicists will mock chemistry as simply being applied physics. The chemists will mock biology as simply being applied chemistry, and so on.

Computers are now capable of solving equations and modelling real-world phenomena, potentially making algebra and calculus into dying arts, along with handwriting and long-division. The Fractal Geometry of Nature has revealed that cold rational calculating machines can produce simulations that imitate reality, through repeating patterns. Massive computational power does not only aid human discovery of hidden algebraic equations.

Amid much fanfare, computer software is touted as potentiating new drug discovery by simulating molecular binding, protein folding, rapid gene sequencing and personalised medicine. However, we seem to have forgotten that half the planet is impoverished & hungry, and vast numbers of those who are fortunate enough to live in advanced, wealthy & technologically advanced societies, are suffering from an epidemic of anxiety, depression and other mental health issues that is bad enough to drive vast numbers of men in the prime of their life to commit suicide: the biggest killer of males under the age of 45 in the UK - more than road traffic accidents, drug-related deaths, physical disease, murder, accidents and all the other causes of death.

One should consider that I took leave of my senses in 2008, but since that time I have only managed to attract two clinical diagnoses - convenient medical short-hand - although I have acquired a third which is perhaps the bluntest instrument of the three, and much more of a pejorative than a diagnosis.

"Substance abuse" is a catch-all term which serves me well when I haven't the time & energy to go into detail. Given humanity's long history of self-intoxication, some physicians would consider themselves to be well-versed in the matter. Even the most insulated amongst us, will have struggled to escape contact with a drunk in our lives. We quickly forget, of course, that psychiatry is an extremely young discipline. The isolation, refinement and synthesis of molecules which can short-circuit brain mechanisms, is something that dates back only 70 or 80 years, along with the branch of medicine chiefly concerned with treatment of matters of the mind.

The brain: the most complicated organ in the human body - estimated to have up to a quadrillion neuronal synapses - is often considered only in terms of its vital function as central nervous system, insofar as the same fatty grey matter helps other species to fuck, fight, flee and feed. This does not, however, tell us much about human consciousness, and even less still about pathological thought.

I once sat down and hand-wrote 12 pages of notes, from memory, of every General Practice doctor, psychiatrist and hospital, which I had attended during a 7 year period. Although I kept things as brief as I could, with names, dates and locations, as well as diagnoses and medications, there was a great deal to write. I'm not a complete hypochondriac - there were important notes about my episodes of depression and hypomania, where my mental health had caused me to become significantly dysfunctional.

Perhaps your mind is now skipping ahead - as mine often does - and you're attempting to finish my sentences. Presumably, you're trying to guess the punchline of the joke. I assume you've already got more than enough information to diagnose and treat me.

I'm second-guessing myself here, and I'm struck by the egotism and "navel gazing" of the very act of being sufficiently appraised of my own medical history that I should remember such a level of detail. Who the hell am I to take an interest in my own diagnosis and treatment? Where's my certificate, framed on the wall? Where's the photo of me wearing a mortar board & gown, and clutching a scroll of parchment with a red ribbon tied around it?

When I think about where I should spend my precious time and effort, I'm not motivated by the prospect of being an understudy to a failure. While psychiatry continues to produce dismal outcomes for humanity, in terms of the epidemic of mental health problems, addiction and general societal collapse under the weight of stress and burnout, I'm reluctant to follow in the path of those who are not succeeding in improving the human condition. It should however be noted that I do not for a single moment, criticise the well-meaning intent of those in the healthcare professions, nor do I mean to discredit the lifesaving work that takes place every single day.

The idea of using myself as a case study seems quite ridiculous, but one must consider that it would be unethical to - for example - risk a person's life when there is a treatment available that has been proven to be more effective than placebo.

With a sample size of one, perhaps nothing useful can be gleaned from my first-hand experiences, but I have attempted to corroborate my findings with other evidence wherever possible. I have deliberately avoided areas where another data point would make no difference: what use would it be if I too experienced anorgasmia as a result of SSRI medication, for example?

A great deal of our knowledge regarding the anatomy of the human brain has been gleaned from unethical experiments on unconsenting psychiatric patients - lobotomies, testing of medications and induced seizures. Animal studies have been gratuitously gruesome, with a great deal of unnecessary suffering inflicted upon primates. I'm not an anti-vivisection nutcase, but there must be very tangible goals to justify the means of obtaining the results.

To bathe a brain in psychoactive molecules that will cross the blood-brain barrier, is barbaric when we consider that the theoretical reasons why drugs have the effect that they do - the theories have so often been disproven. The 'chemical imbalance' theory that said that depressed brains had lower levels of serotonin, and that SSRIs would increase levels of synaptic serotonin, has been conclusively disproven, yet it is still a widely-circulated myth.

The much-vaunted sequencing of the human genome looks like a ridiculous white elephant of a project, when we consider that epigenetic gene expression had been discovered to allow genetically identical animals to exhibit completely different physical characteristics, depending on the environment that they have been exposed to.

In a collapsing global economy, education is one of the few sectors that's not feeling the pinch, and good solid science is getting drowned out in a sea of noise: pointless research. There are already excellent animal models which demonstrate that overpopulation and otherwise horrible living conditions, will produce a "behavioural sink" and addiction, in individuals who would otherwise lead happy healthy lives.

It has seemed fairly obvious to me from the start, that my mental health problems have stemmed from the ethical objections I had to the conduct of financial services organisations, and the role of global capitalism in ruining billions of human lives, in pursuit of unrestrained, unregulated and immoral profits, to the exclusion of any and all consideration of long-term consequences. In short: my problems should not be medicalised. I'm having a sane reaction to an insane world.

While this essay goes well beyond the "answer A, B or C" multiple-choice options on the prescriptive menu that is on offer, I feel that this does not invalidate the points I am making.

To have invested heavily in a mainstream education, would be to risk becoming incoherent with rage whenever somebody was so impertinent as to ask a thoughtful question - questions that spring into a mind that's unconstrained by the narrow status quo viewpoint, rote-learned while kowtowing to those with the necessary credentials to approve clones of themselves.

This is not "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge" anti-intellectualism, but instead a suggestion that we don't need so many people who've all read exactly the same books and sat more-or-less exactly the same tests. Moving towards intellectual homogeny is as dangerous as book burning, in my opinion.

In conclusion: this is a convoluted way of saying that you're unqualified to judge me, although you're possibly technically correct if you say that my problems are mostly of my own making.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #addiction

This is a story about relapse...

I've downed a whole pint of cold crisp refreshing lager before I've even realised I've done it. How I came to be in the bar in the first place is unclear, but I've greedily drained the contents of the pint glass and replaced it on the tabletop. A sense of "what have I done?" sweeps over me. Although I feel guilty - I have let people down; I have failed - I immediately decide to have another pint, and another, and another... until I wake up.

This morning was the first morning all year - more or less - that I didn't wake up and immediately think about reaching for a packet of pills.

"Addict!"

Hold your horses - things are a little bit more complicated. What would you do if you suffered from chronic pain? Would you just grin and bear it?

Perhaps the medication I have been taking for pain has inadvertently helped me to stay off the booze. Now that I only have one more day before I stop taking pain medication, a subconscious desire to get drunk has returned with a vengeance.

Every time I see beer & wine, I imagine that it would taste amazing and I get a mild craving to consume some. However, thankfully I can remember that alcohol didn't taste very nice after I stopped drinking for a period of over 4 months.

There's no reason why I'd stop taking my prescribed pain medication and become a teetotaller, except that I want to clear my head - I'm desperate to see what my brain is like, without the intoxicating chemicals I've been putting into my body.

My dream last night was very vivid, and the feeling that I had accidentally failed in my mission to temporarily abstain from mind-altering substances, was the strongest feeling: I was devastated. Then, in my dream I decided that if I was going to fail, I was going to fail spectacularly.

The fact of the matter is that I haven't failed at all. I'm spectacularly successful. Very few people are able to beat the demon drink, and especially not at the same time as quitting physically addictive medications and overcoming a heap of other shit too. I'm a motherfucking world-leading expert on sobriety and getting clean.

Skin-crawling anxiety, suicidal depression and a warped perception of time, means that the hands of the clock barely move as I wait for my brain to recover sufficiently, so that I can feel slightly better.

I wait. I wait and I wait and I wait.

To say that I'm white-knuckling the journey to being totally clean from all substances, is cruel and unkind. To accuse me of being some kind of "dry drunk" or to suggest that I'll always be an alcoholic and an addict is ridiculous. If labels and stigmas are going to follow me around forever, I'll be more than happy to return to substance abuse. I aim to confound prejudices - there's no point in suffering pointlessly.

Trust me - I'm suffering a million times worse than I ever did before, even when I was in the depths of stimulant psychosis. Even when I was in deep shit and completely messed up, that lasted for the blink-of-an-eye versus the round-the-clock awfulness I'm having to endure at the moment. I might've thought I was going to die at times, but now I really wish I had died.

Tomorrow I have 24 little hours to endure and then my recovery starts properly - every day after tomorrow takes me a little bit closer to normal brain chemistry. Every day that I manage to stay clean & sober after tomorrow will allow my body to restore itself to its natural state of homeostasis.

It's going to be like the world's shittest Christmas Eve.

Tags: #addiction #alcohol #drugs

This is a story about free will...

Having spent the best part of a month in hospital, I am now convalescing in the Welsh countryside. It's remote, rural, peaceful and therapeutic, which is exactly what I need. Why on earth wouldn't I stay here, when this is the very best place I could be for my health and wellbeing?

If you believe in free will, then I'm afraid you're quite deluded. Every decision we make is heavily biased by circumstantial factors.

Having experienced the stress of moving to new places, getting jobs, making friends and otherwise climbing the greasy pole, I've got nothing to prove - I know exactly what to do and exactly what to expect. I have very little motivation to repeat the same well-worn moves that I learned a long time ago - I'm sick of playing the same old game. Rebuilding my life holds no surprises; only stress and misery.

Thus, I arrived at the decision to die, some time ago.

When you've decided to die, there isn't any fear of failure, shame, embarrassment or any of the other things which would usually predispose your behaviour towards more risk-averse choices.

If you look at my life choices through the prism of depression and defeatism - I have no desire to play by fucked up rules - things make a lot more sense than any stupid over-simplifications. Perhaps you think I'm infantile, immature and irresponsible? In actual fact, I'm not inflicting this shit on children who didn't ask to be born. I'm terminating the cycle of pain: somebody's gotta stand up to the relay-race of human misery, where fathers fuck up their sons.

I'm not critical of parenthood per se, but it would be irresponsible of me to spawn offspring of my own when my kid(s) might ask me one day "if you had a miserable life, then why did you bring me into the world?". Given that my children might ask about my own unhappy childhood, it seems unconscionable to take the chance that I could perpetuate that misery.

In a world of war, famine, climate change and spiralling problems, we are clearly on collision course with disaster. I don't want to add to the world's woes. To be yet another sharp-elbowed parent, concerned with the propagation of my genes at the expense of everything else, does not seem like a good idea when there's another option: to not do that.

I can end the male lineage and bury the surname "Grant" which I inherited from a heroin addict. I can do my bit and act in accordance with a conscience that encompasses more than my animal instinct to rut like a beast and impregnate willy-nilly.

Fucked up ungrateful entitled rich spoiled know-it-all brat says my shattered brain. I think about the people who've tried to help me; who care about me. I feel guilty that I feel so bad; still feel suicidal. Countless opportunities seem to be open to me - am I rejecting them? Am I throwing the 'gifts' that I have received back in the faces of the bearers? If I am ungrateful, so what?

My charmed existence has led me to a situation that's quite wonderful, but also exquisitely painful because of it - this isn't real life I think to myself. I can't stay here. The need to earn money to pay for debt and taxes will force me back onto the treadmill. The misery of the rat race is inescapable, except through suicide.

Tags: #suicide #depression #career

This is a story about picking on an easy target...

Has anybody ever died of shame and embarrassment? I feel horribly exposed all of a sudden, having published my entire psyche into the public domain - all the inner-workings of my mind; every dark secret is out on display.

I'm acutely aware that I've kept writing and publishing throughout periods where I was incredibly unwell. I'm acutely aware that I've published unedited things, despite being exhausted, stressed and unable to make a sound and rational judgement call on whether or not to publicise private matters.

It's quite apparent that my rather strange and questionable mission - to submit my private journal to public scrutiny - has been incredibly costly.

Have I made a mistake?

Clearly, I've made a whole string of mistakes. Every day, I think about millions of mistakes I've made that I could write about. Even the process of exploring all my feelings and admitting my fault, is somewhat of a mistake.

Racked with self-doubt and feeling a mounting sense of vulnerability, I've thought about back-pedalling - haven't I made myself look like a buffoon in front of enough friends, family and strangers? Shouldn't I now clam up with shame and regret that I ever opened my mouth? Shouldn't I bury this blog and hope that nobody ever brings up the matters I've made public?

It would be so easy to press the "delete" button and destroy the digital identity which I've created. It would be so easy to deny all knowledge of ever sharing extremely personal matters. Don't believe everything you read online.

If I loaded a gun with bullets and handed it to you, I turned around and you shot me in the back, would you feel victorious?

I don't understand why anybody would take the ammunition which I give them and use it against me. I don't understand why anybody would take the opportunity to sucker-punch me, when I'm making myself so vulnerable; such an easy target. Is there really any pleasure in picking on somebody who's laid wide open to attack? Where's the sport?

I've started to wonder what happens to the people who pick my pocket, blame things on me or thump me in the face, knowing that I won't defend myself or retaliate. Do they feel pleased with themselves? Do they feel happy and are they able to sleep soundly at night?

If I'm starting to sound like I think of myself as sweet and innocent and free from all sin, that's not the case. There's more than enough admission of wrongdoing on these pages, if you want to go digging. I'm not some butter-wouldn't-melt, holier-than-thou, whiter-than-white person who claims to never have said boo to a goose. I admit that I'm a deeply flawed individual.

I'm struggling with a cloudy brain. I feel like my wits are dulled and my thoughts swim through treacle. I feel run-down; unwell. I feel like I'm not well enough to be writing. I regret things I wrote when I was sick, in the past.

As the truest version of myself - free from drink and drugs - emerges from under a dark storm-cloud, I struggle to reconcile the way I feel now with how I felt when I had the protective armour of intoxication. I'm full of stress, nervous tension and anxiety, while my brain is raw and damaged from abuse - I'll recover, but it's taking time.

I'm defensive, because I can't afford to lose any more opportunities. I can't afford to have my reputation tarnished anymore, even if it appears to be me who's doing the tarnishing. I can't afford to have influential people leaping to the wrong conclusions. Why continue to write so honestly? Why take the risk? Why not shut down this crazy experiment?

The fact you're reading this means that you're either going to use it against me - shooting me in the back with the weapon I handed to you - or you'll dig a little deeper; try a little harder. It's all too tempting to kick a man when he's down though, isn't it?

It's too obvious and easy to shut down; shut up. I've come this far, so why shouldn't I keep writing? What does it matter if I make myself unemployable? What does it matter if I can never return to the part of society that routinely lies and wears a mask of insincerity? Why the fuck do I want to live in a world full of absolute arseholes, who stab each other in the back?

Come; come and beat up on me; come and put the boot in; come and strike me with sticks and stones and whatever weapon you can grab, while I lay battered and bruised, unarmed on the floor, naked, afraid, defenceless, outnumbered and in pain.

I invite you to martyr me.

Tags: #writing

This is a story about neurotoxicity...

What's happened to the left hand side of my face? My eyelid has drooped; my face is no longer symmetrical. Why do I have a facial tic? Why is my speech slow and slurred? Aren't these all symptoms of cognitive impairment; brain damage?

I decided to read back through some of my blog - I read from February through to June, when I was very unwell. I was surprised that a lot of it was gibberish - I thought that I had written with lucidity, but I had mis-remembered things.

As is so often the case with me, I dice with death and I dodge bullets. I'm still very sick, but I'm getting better. I'm going to make a full recovery. My speech is normal; my face doesn't tic and my eyelid no longer droops. The brain is a remarkable thing, but I do need to stop abusing my body.

A month ago I was livid; I was unbelievably angry. I was fighting for my income, my home and my liberty - I was fighting for my legal rights - and I was spitting venom; I was furious at being abused; mistreated; taken advantage of.

I re-read the lengthy blog post I wrote a month ago, which started OK, but then I got plunged into repetitive thoughts - you can tell that my brain was stuck on a loop and I repeated myself several times. It's surprising that I could express myself fairly well, given the circumstances. I imagine that it took me a long time to compose what I wrote, and I clearly struggled to remember what I'd written at the start, as I reached the end.

It's tempting to edit and airbrush history, but it's much more interesting to maintain a public record of exactly what I was thinking and feeling at a certain point in time. Inadvertently I also capture other details about my state of mind in the way in which I express myself.

I've now been writing for long enough to capture two periods of total abstinence from all mind-altering substances, including alcohol, caffeine and nicotine. I'm a lifelong non-smoker. I stopped drinking caffeinated beverages in 2013. During this particular period of abstinence, I've not drunk any alcohol for 35 consecutive days.

What's the net result of all this?

Nah, I'm only kidding... that was me when I was twenty years old. However, I'm sure there's been a marked improvement now that all the crap is out of my system.

A few friends spoke to me soon after I arrived on the psych ward. Although I sounded like my old self and I was in good spirits, my recovery was only just beginning - friends who see me and speak to me on a regular basis report that I'm much improved from how I was a month ago.

My hair, my skin, my nails, my teeth, my breath, my sweat and most importantly, my brain - all of these things are completely different, now that I'm not glugging gallons of booze and popping loads of pills.

I cringe with shame a little bit, to think that I made myself very exposed and vulnerable at a time when I was very unwell - the public got a little bit of a behind-the-scenes peek at me when I was extremely poorly. You can go digging in the archives, if it pleases you, or you can take my word for it: there's no surprises and there should be no pleasure in gawping at somebody when they're sick.

If we've not spoken for a while, I highly recommend that you get in contact and we actually speak on the phone - my email is nick@manicgrant.com. You might be very surprised to learn that your friend is in possession of most of his marbles, and not the raving lunatic that you might have guessed I would be, after such a traumatic couple of years.

Here's another one for the photo album, taken only seconds ago. My left eye is not yet 100% and I'm still suffering a lot of brain fog and other recovery-related problems - it'll be a month or two before I'm fighting fit. My face still tics when I'm stressed, but it's less pronounced.

I'm struggling with horrible anxiety, depression and confusion; memory problems. None of this is a surprise to me - it's to be expected, given what I've been through and I'm still going through.

I've got no idea what I'm really writing about, or what my purpose is now. Is this still the world's longest suicide note, or am I now campaigning to end the stigmatisation and discrimination that our less fortunate members of society must face: the mentally ill, alcoholics, drug addicts and homeless people... the dregs that nobody wants to touch with a bargepole. I know that I want to be the voice of the voiceless, although I know how clichéd that sounds.

I'm swimming through a fog of confusion, but I know I'm slowly getting better.

Tags: #mentalhealth #recovery

This is a story about the odd one out...

I'm trapped in a prison of my own mind. My internal monologue chatters away incessantly. When social norms don't constrain me, I talk to myself. Sometimes my brain tells me to do stupid stuff, like kiss a male work colleague who's talking to me in the middle of a busy office - the most inappropriate thing that my subconscious can imagine. Often times, agonisingly cringeworthy memories pop into my head, that are so awful that I wince and whisper "fuck!" under my breath.

Tags: #childhood

This is a story about storytelling...

I'm stood in a sunny garden, sheltered from the wind by mature shrubs. Beyond the confines of the walls and fences are lush green fields; rolling hills leading down to the sea. The air is fresh and clean, blowing in off the Atlantic. There's a smell of mown grass, which has been cut for the last time before winter - the trimmed blades clump on the lawn. Gravel crunches under my feet - I'm stood on the driveway where the cars are parked. There's a sound of a 2-stroke engine which powers a hedge trimmer, being used to tame the runaway growth in the hedgerows; the exhaust fumes blown away by the prevailing wind.

I'm throwing a ball for the white wolf. Eyes on the front of his head, not the side - that's how you know he's an apex predator; he's not worried about anybody creeping up behind him, although his ears are pricked up, listening intently. He's a smart wolf - anticipating me throwing the ball but not so eager to run and collect it that he would be fooled by a dummy. Besides, why would I want to trick a wolf? What satisfaction would I get by proving I'm smarter than an animal with a much smaller brain?

The wolf pants and drops his ball some distance away from me. The game is over. I fetch a water bowl for the wolf and he laps up the cool liquid with his long pink tongue. He brings his ball to me again, ready to play - the game starts over.

My throwing gets erratic and the ball lands on a rockery. I'm fearful that the wolf will injure himself. I stop throwing the ball.

A running sheep; a chasing wolf - he's found a new game.

Clambering over fences, the farmer holds the wolf while he strains to get at the flock which has retreated into a corner of the field, unable to flee further because the sheep are enclosed by a fence. The wolf has to learn that this is not a game.

I feel guilty. Did I get the wolf over-excited by throwing the ball for him? Was I the immature adult who gets the children over-excited before bedtime? Was I irresponsible; inconsiderate of the consequences?

I want to tell stories but not everybody wants to feature. I want to tell stories but invariably people will wonder if it's about them. I want to tell stories, but I have to be careful that I respect the need for peaceful private family life.

I'm lying on a bed with sunlight in my eyes, telling a story. It's warm and quiet and I'm very comfy and calm. My brain buzzes with thoughts; ideas - I've written a list of 49 stories that I want to tell, and I have another list with 70 more, some of which I've already told. There are more words than there are waking hours in the day to type them. Now that there is some calm around me, the dam has burst and I'm struggling to not be swamped by the deluge.

I think about tenses - why is this told in the present tense if it's a story?

So much has happened in the past and it's hard to not relive and refine the story. I do not embellish or exaggerate, but stories improve with retelling. With each iteration, a more accurate and engrossing account emerges. I have a mountain of material, and the temptation is to weave it all into a captivating patchwork quilt of tales; adventures.

Here in the present there's plenty going on but I'm a guest in somebody else's story, and it's not my place to tell it. It's strange for me to observe quietly and not pass comment. In all honesty, I swing between "where did it all go wrong [in my life]?" and gawping in awe at what's been built; forged - the achievements of the loving, kind, generous and humble family who've taken me in are breathtaking.

Outside, there's a well. It's blocked, but it's obvious what's down there - a dark cavern filled with cold water. To fall into the well would be deadly: you could never climb out. Why unblock it? Why go down there?

Obviously, the well is a metaphor for my past. I have an aquifer of hair-raising tales that I could never drain, even with a million buckets. I can draw upon my dark murky past, but perhaps I shouldn't - perhaps to plumb those depths will lead nowhere new. Haven't I written enough already, about the past?

I'm planning on writing another novel in November.

Tags: #writing #family

This is a story about mortality...

I can't bring myself to read the comments on Twitter from approximately this time 4 weeks ago. For some reason it makes me feel physically sick and psychologically overwhelmed, to take myself back to that time.

I have no idea why I've taken the photos I've taken.

Usually, photos are taken from scenic panoramic views, or at tourist attractions. Our friends and families smile back at us from our photos - happy children and kissing couples. Our photos help us recall social gatherings and other pleasant occasions.

For over 2 years I've documented my lonely and erratic life. I haven't photographed my breakfast cereal, but instead I've photographed things that are like a breadcrumb trail, that will perhaps lead me back to wherever I misplaced my marbles.

Pictured above is the cab ride I took where I decided to kill myself.

It seems apt that there would be a gap where I was without my smartphone. If anybody's read Finsbury Park Fun Run, then they'll know that our smartphones are recording where we are all the time (part 3 is where you can see the geolocation data I downloaded from my phone).

It seems apt that there would be a gap where I was without a camera.

What you might find surprising is that the only hole in my memory is the part where I was in a coma on life support. I remember exactly what it felt like to have a seizure. I remember almost everything. You'll have to take my word for it though. I do also have the documentary evidence I've been able to gather: things like hospital discharge summaries and other bits of paper I collected on my erratic journey through the last 28 days.

I've started to think about my life in terms of 'pre' and 'post' the events of 9th September 2017.

You might think that you'd be flooded with relief if you found yourself unexpectedly alive after a near-death experience. Certainly, a man who survived a suicide attempt from the Golden Gate Bridge said that he felt regret the moment he jumped off. I did not feel regret at any point.

I'm sad that I traumatised friends and Twitter followers. I haven't really had a chance to speak to some important people in my life. I can't really face ringing round. I know it'll be good when I do though - I'm immensely grateful for the phonecalls I received soon after I got my phone back.

If we consider hospitalisation for somebody who's experiencing a life-threatening crisis, 28 days seems like the usual minimum amount of time that somebody would take to get well - we'd hold people in a safe environment for 4 weeks, to make sure they're not going to fall flat on their face.

Perhaps Wednesday/Thursday is the bigger milestone, because that'd be 4 weeks since my mind finally fractured and I became so unwell that I had to be hospitalised for psychiatric reasons.

It's as if my body needed to be synchronised with my brain - there weren't any physical feelings that matched what was going on in my mind.

Today, things feel a bit more lined up.

Tags: #suicide