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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop the world, I want to get off.

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

This is a story about ingratitude...

Give me liberty, or give me death!

How do you like living in the free world? Freedom of speech, not that anybody's even listening and you'll never get into print. Freedom to work, if you can get a job, and you'll have to pay exorbitant taxes. Freedom to do what you want, if you're not dead and have any spare time and energy after working a job until you're nearly 70 years old. Freedom to buy what you want, except you probably can't afford it.

There: that's the ingratitude part out of the way. Do I actually think like that? Some people think I do. You'll have to read between the lines to see where I am being self-mocking, humorous, sarcastic and even a little farsical in the interests of courting controversy.

This talk of death and suicide sounds a little flippant, a little melodramatic, but in actual fact, it's shaped my mindset.

I was always impossible to manage, and fearless talking to people of all ranks and status. I refuse to be cowed by credentials and hierarchy. I refuse to know my place.

If you were to just dip into part of my story, and try to make a knee-jerk assumption about me, you might assume that I think I'm better than other people. You might think I'm an entitled snob, a spoiled little brat. You would have misjudged me, and instead you've failed to understand that I'm coming at things from a totally different end of the spectrum.

I'm not claiming that I'm hard done by and that I've made my own luck and worked my way up from the bottom. On closer examination, these claims always prove to be horse-shit. When we look at people who claim to be self-made success stories, the tale is always ridiculous. For starters, many of the ones I've encountered came from loving homes in middle-class families, with parents who had a profession, a job for life. There has been financial security and a good education, even if they paint themselves as some sort of working class hero.

My tale is slightly different. I'm judging things based on the experiences I had when I had nothing. No roof over my head, and no money. I'm judging life based on how close I came to death. I literally made a life-or-death decision... actually on a couple of occasions.

So, I write from a position of knowing how it feels to have nothing. I write from a position of knowing how it feels to have to choose to act to stay alive, or else inaction would lead to death.

Based on this standpoint, I judge things very differently. You might think I'm ungrateful to have a "good" job. You might think I'm ungrateful for my opportunities. In actual fact though, I'm just judging things relatively. I think to myself "am I more or less happy than when I had nothing" and "am I more or less inclined to die, than the time that I nearly died before".

There's a cold hard rational core within me, that could quite easily slice my veins open, in a sudden brutally decisive act, if I decided that the effort of maintaining myself in a state of perpetual unhappiness and struggle would be ridiculous.

As a subject of Her Majesty the Queen of England, I was indoctrinated in the state schools of the United Kingdom, to become a loyal wage-slave, contributing to stability, increase and ornament of British commerce. Does it give me any pleasure or pride to say that? No, not really.

My very first job was for a Ministry of Defence subcontractor, and I actively contributed to Great Britain's military capability, as a naval power, to further their imperialist ambitions. Should that give me a lump in my throat when I see the Union Jack and hear the national anthem? Actually, no, it makes me think about the high price that is paid by the nations we have subjugated, in order to pay for the lifestyle I enjoyed.

Do people enjoy their lifestyle? Huge numbers of ordinary working age people can't afford a house, a family, a wedding. Most ordinary working folks hate their shitty jobs and their long commutes. Most ordinary working folks fret about getting ahead in the work rat race, or getting their kids good exam grades so that they can die an early death due to stress-related illness. But the good news is that you're not going to have to die in poverty if you drop dead at your desk, given that the pensions are in a meltdown.

It looks so hypocritical. The Westeners sit there in their sedentary jobs, comfort-eating themselves to death through obesity-related illness and giving themselves repetitive strain injury from their mouse and keyboard, cataracts from their computer screen and a bad back from slouching in a chair all day. Our short life expectancy is a function of stress, depression and poor lifestyle 'choices'. Meanwhile, the developing world slaves away, with the dream of attaining a western-style lifestyle. Supposedly, the West is the model the world should follow.

However, maybe we got it wrong. In other cultures, the smartest member of the family gets sent away to study and work, so that they can send money back to their family to support them. Isn't that something to get out of bed in the morning? Being the breadwinner for your family.

Instead of the young, fit and active people being the economic providers, we have instead tipped our society on its head, where we worship the 'grey pound'. Since the pension funds became the biggest investors in all our companies, and all the wealth pooled in the accounts and property portfolios of the baby boomers, we now have an impoverished youth, who have a much lower quality of life than their mothers and fathers, and far fewer opportunities to provide for even themselves and their own offspring, let alone feathering the nest still further of their elderly relatives.

I went to the Southampton Boat Show last year, and instead of successful young businessmen treating themself to a toy, as a reward for their hard work, ambition and ingenuity, it was baby-boomers who were spending their kids and grandkids inheritance, as a reward for having created an asset bubble that has meant crashes in both the stock market and the housing market.

I know that all the pounds of economic output that I generate will simply disappear into a pensions black hole, to pay out final-salary schemes for a generation who have nothing but contempt for their kids and grandkids.

Would you toil and toil, if you had no prospect of ever being self sufficient? If you were simply working for ungrateful masters who called you lazy and stupid? If the wealth that you generated simply inflated asset prices further out of reach, concentrated in the hands of the idle coffin-dodgers who didn't work to create the very assets that they own?

Since when did it become a bad thing to be motivated to work? Why should we be so fearful of immigrants, who are young, fit and economically active? The very language smacks of greedy hoarders who are like a dog in a manger.

Every year we have more students than ever before achieving the top exam grades, yet we print headlines and stories asking if exams are getting easier. Homework and the pressure to succeed is driving ever increasing numbers of young people to suicide, but yet it isn't good enough.

The prospects for young people are awful. The minimum wage is lower, and they'll never be able to get married, have kids and buy a house like their parents did. Why do we label them as 'gangs', 'hoodlums' and 'thugs' and mock them for their materialistic attachments to modestly priced bling, like gold cellphones and other trinkets that cost a fraction of the homes and cars that their parents had as their status-symbols?

Why do we not see the link between demanding endless dividends on our shares and ever-increasing capital gains, and the need for corporations to suppress wage inflation, which impoverishes our working-age people?

There are many people who would say that I'm not entitled to ask these questions, given my six-figure income. There are many people who think I should just shut up and take the money, because it's there.

In actual fact, I'm going further than just asking difficult questions. I'm actually putting my job on the line.

I lost two big money contracts because I refuse to be bought. I refuse to stay my tongue, just because I'm being paid a lot of money. Is it unprofessional, arrogant, reckless, stupid? Actually, it's none of those things.

I struggled a lot with middle-class guilt, but predictably, I did very little about it. I used to wring my hands and say "but what can I do?" while reading the Observer and The Guardian newspapers, and having passionate discussions about putting the world to rights, while quaffing expensive wine in fine restaurants in North London. This was hypocrisy. The final straw would have been going on a sponsored run and doing some kind of gift-aid contribution out of my salary every month, to salve my conscience and give me some kind of sense of smug satisfaction that I'd played my part.

Instead, I went on a journey. I've been to the bottom and back again. You might think that my risk was underwritten by my middle-class family, but they actually turned their back on me, when I had apparently left my social rank and become 'untouchable'. I was disowned, disinherited.

I can never claim to know what it was like growing up in abject poverty. My parents might claim that they never had any money, what with my mum being a student and my dad working behind a bar in a caravan site, when I was born. However, my granddads were both professional men with good pension provisions, who were able to bail out my drug-addled hopeless parents whenever they really hit hard times. The same privilege was never extended to me. Perhaps I should have recklessly sowed my wild oats, and then pled poverty when there were extra mouths to feed, like they did.

A parent's relief that their child is alive and physically healthy has no bearing on whether a person feels grateful to be alive. I didn't choose to be born and I don't want to go on living, if life is just endless misery and suffering. If you expect your kids to love you unconditionally, you're just plain wrong. It totally depends on how you treat them, and there's a real generational problem.

Handing over a planet and an economy that's absolutely fucked, and then retiring, is pretty ridiculous if the generation who are going to have to clean up the mess, accept austerity measures and live a lifestyle that is unimaginably frugal, in order to allow pollution to return to safe levels. It's a bad deal, by anybody's reckoning.

It's in my nature to question everything and anything. There are no taboos for me. There is no 'respect your elders' bullshit, because the first question is "why?". Why should I respect the generation that proliferated nuclear armaments, caused global warming, deforestation, pollution of the water table, an asset bubble that's priced ordinary working people out of the market, an unprecedented increase in the rich:poor gap and widespread economic calamity and didn't think about how they were going to afford their retirement, except by mortgaging the future of their children and grandchildren.

Why do I work? I can't tell you, but I can tell you what damage working does to humanity.

The wealth that I generate goes to corporations, who pay it out in the form of dividends or use it to inflate asset prices, to generate growth for their majority shareholders, who are institutional investors - asset managers - whose job it is to generate yet more wealth for an idle elite who expect to receive final salary pensions and an amazing lifestyle, in return for having wrecked the world.

And you wonder why I struggle to get out of bed in the morning and get excited about going to work?

People that I've worked with throughout my career have read what I've written, and I'm slowly making myself unemployable. How could you employ me, knowing that I don't subscribe to the groupthink? How could you employ me, knowing that I speak my mind, and have no respect for the instruments of power? How could you employ me, knowing that I'm not cowed by fear and insecurity?

I'm impossible to control, using the millstone of debt and the threat of destitution. For me, destitution is freedom. Freedom from the oppression of working a job that only serves to line the pockets of an ungrateful elite who have no respect for the workers of the world, and are only interested in a comfortable retirement at the expense of over 50% of the world's people.

Obviously, I think to myself "I must take this down" or "I must cover this up" or "I must keep my mouth shut". There's a part of me that just wants to take the king's shilling and let him call the tune, no matter how maddened I am by degrading myself as the court jester.

There is so much false promise. Work today and be happy tomorrow. Fritter away my cash on good times to forget about the soul-less day-to-day existence and futility of it all, is what I could so easily do. I've done it before.

I sometimes laugh at myself, so full of middle-class angst, but there's a deep seriousness here. It's just bullying groupthink to call somebody a hypocrite or a champagne socialist. The fact of the matter is, somebody has to do something, because we're sleepwalking towards disaster. The middle classes are just about comfortable enough to write letters and furrow their brows with concern, but not enough to actually risk their jobs or their reputations and good social standing.

Every day I sit at my desk, unable to not think about the bigger picture, unable to put the futility of it all out of my mind. I think "what the hell am I doing here?" and even though I'm good at my job and I am perfectly capable of toeing the line and keeping my bosses happy, I inevitably start to rock the boat, just because I have so much barely concealed contempt for a system that so obviously fails to serve the bulk of humanity.

I've let a genie out of the bottle, by considering the wider questions that we face as a species. I've gone down a rabbit-hole of thought, and I can't stop chasing that rabbit, even though I'm throwing away golden opportunities that people would love to have themselves.

Please try not to get caught in the trap of thinking this is a simple case of ingratitude.

My values and my work are really not at all aligned, and it grates with me, to the point where I really don't give a shit if I lose my job, but I'm not stupid... I know that I only have to play by the rules for a short amount of time, and then I can let the world know what I really think and who I really am, before my horrified bosses get rid of me. Please just kill me.

Tags: #career #capitalism #banking #suicide #depression #parents #family #childhood

This is a story about addictive personalities...

We all know what the root cause of addiction is, don't we? It's taking drugs. It's the chemicals that cause addiction, by getting their 'hooks' into us. We get hooked by these chemicals, and we're then going to be a filthy addict, until the day we die, right? Wrong.

Nobody would think that a sex addict injects prostitutes and pornographic DVDs. Nobody would think that a gambling addict would inject a pack of cards or casino chips. Nobody would think that an 'adrenalin junkie' would inject a snowboard or a mountain bike. Clearly, there's something else that's going on, apart from the chemicals that we put into our bodies.

In fact, none of us can survive without a whole chemical cocktail, of vitamins, minerals, amino acids and proteins. We put myriad chemicals into our bodies every day, and if we don't we are in some way deficient. I don't just mean in our diet that we consider 'food'.

Your morning cup of coffee is not food. If you were to have it black, with no milk or creamer, without any sugar, then you would find it very bitter. Espressos are very small. There is probably negligible calorific value in black coffee, so why would you drink it?

Similarly with tea, which is an infusion, very little nutritional value has passed from the tea leaves into the hot water. There is some value in drinking the water, but you'd be more hydrated if you just had it in unadulterated form.

Why do we put milk, creamer and sugar in our tea & coffee? To make it taste nicer. Why would you want to drink something that doesn't have any nutritional value, is less hydrating than water, doesn't taste very nice and needs something in it to mask the taste? Answer: because you have been habituated into drinking it.

Habituation is not the same as addiction.

I gave up all caffeine, and it was an incredibly hard thing to do. Once I had gotten over the headaches, I then had to suffer cognitive impairment, sluggishness, and tiredness. Then came the cravings. I used to fantasise about having hot drinks or an ice-cold Coca-Cola.

The combination of caffeine and sugar is certainly a nice thing to get habituated to, unlike cigarette smoking, and the chemical hooks definitely play a part in both - nicotine and caffeine - but it's the habituation that is the hard thing to break.

Are you bored? Have a cup of tea or coffee, or smoke a cigarette. Are you anxious? Have a cup of tea or coffee, or smoke a cigarette. Are you waiting around for somebody? Have a cup of tea or coffee, or smoke a cigarette. Are you trying to concentrate on some work? Have a cup of tea or coffee, or smoke a cigarette. Are you travelling somewhere? Have a cup of tea or coffee, or smoke a cigarette.

The habit-forming things that we do become the punctuation in our life. Our dirty little habits become a measure of time. We get through our days with a remarkably similar amount of cups of tea or coffee, diet cokes and cigarettes. We know we've had a super stressful day when we've ripped through a packet of smokes. We know we've had a super boring day when our bladder is full of tea. We know we were super exhausted, when we load up on coffee.

What about downers, sedatives, relaxants? Well, we need those to calm down from all those stimulants that get us through the day. If you've loaded up on caffeine - which is identical to amphetamine in the brain - then you're going to be full of nervous energy, and could even potentially suffer from insomnia if you've been having it late in the day.

Eventually though, you'll become tolerant of both your chosen uppers and your chosen downers. These habit-forming things will be woven seamlessly into your daily routine. Coffee with breakfast, tea breaks throughout the day, can of cola with your lunch, and wine, beer and spirits to relax after work.

All these things cost money and have either negligible nutritional value, or are actually bad for your health, so why don't you just quit? Well, you'll find it very hard to do if you try. You might think to yourself "there was that one time where I didn't have any coffee, so I can give up anytime I want" but actually, caffeine is everywhere in your life, and you're unwittingly topping yourself up, at least every couple of days. You probably didn't count the coffee you had after dinner at that restaurant at the weekend, or the can of cola that you had when you were out shopping.

Gamblers are notoriously bad at only remembering their wins, and forgetting about their losses. If you ask a gambler whether they've made money or lost money, over the course of the years they've been betting, they'll probably tell you they're "up" overall. This is nonsense. The more you play, the more you're down: it's a statistical inevitability. In much the same way, people just aren't able to admit to themselves how many cups of tea and coffee, cans of cola and cigarettes they consume. They have no idea how habituated they are.

But, is this addiction? No, it is not.

Addiction is the point where something becomes detrimental to your life but you're unable to stop. It's true that 50% of smokers will die as a result of complications associated with their habit, but at any one time, only a small percentage of smokers will actually be in immediate danger of dying of cancer, heart disease and other smoking-related diseases. It's easy - in the short term - to say that the bad stuff hasn't yet happened.

Most smokers, drinkers and consumers of caffeinated beverages, don't steal to support their habits. They are holding down jobs and providing for their families, even if they're spending a proportion of their income on their poisons. In this way, they're not actually addicts.

When we look at 'adrenalin junkies', many of them actually have toned and athletic physiques from a healthy outdoors lifestyle. What could be further from the life of a heroin junkie, who is pale and emaciated, than a surfer with their tanned and muscular body? A surfer wants to look after their body, because it provides the power to catch waves. An injecting heroin addict's body is ravaged by abscesses and collapsed veins, as the suffering individual places higher importance on intoxication, than on preserving their health.

So, language is failing to capture what exactly addiction really is. Loving your family or your pet is not an addiction. Enjoying sex is not an addiction. Playing poker is not an addiction. Being passionate about a hobby is not an addiction. Even drinking tea, coffee and smoking cigarettes is hard to call an addiction, until you develop a problem where you can't afford your habit or you have actually developed a disease.

I was once asked in rehab, where I was recovering from a binge on benzodiazepines and stimulants - whether I thought I was an addict. I replied that I didn't think I was an addict. I was going cold turkey from a horrible cocktail of about 5 different drugs, all of which I had paid for with money I had earned in my job. I had paid for the rehab out of money which I had saved up. When I got cleaned up, I went back to work as if nothing had happened. No lasting health damage. Nothing to suggest I had ever come off the rails.

It's stigma and ostracisation that creates 'addicts' in the conventional sense. For most people who struggle with drug addiction and alcoholism, we label them and make life extra hard for them to get ahead, get back on their feet. We put extra stresses and strains on them that other people don't have to face. We demonise and scapegoat them.

We are always asking how to free people from the chemicals; how to release them from the 'hooks', but we're asking the wrong questions. We should be asking what's so awful about a person's life that theft, prosititution and terrible health consequences are a preferable fate to whatever crappy alternative is seemingly offered.

Are there alternatives? We say that people should clean up, get a job, and live like 'normal' people. You mean the 'normal' people who drink poisonous bitter liquids in order to quench their thirst for something with no nutritious value? You mean the 'normal' people who inhale toxic smoke? You mean the 'normal' people who imbibe fermented fruit and grains in order to become intoxicated? Who the hell are these people to judge others who are merely less fortunate than them?

Would you employ an addict? Would you let them look after your kids, your money? No, I didn't think so. You've been indoctrinated into this culture of demonisation, where we're looking for convenient scapegoats, whether it's immigrants, blacks, Jews, the poor, the mentally ill, the sick or the needy. It's playground politics, where we pick on the weakest members of society, nothing more, nothing less.

My employers would shit a brick if they found out that I'd recently had my struggles with substance abuse, despite 30+ years of squeaky clean living. It doesn't seem to matter that I don't smoke, I don't take drugs, I quit boozing for the best part of 4 months. It doesn't seem to matter that I can start and stop at will. Nobody seems to take the blindest bit of notice of the obvious difference between me and a 'filthy junkie': it's the fact that I have opportunities that meant I was able to quit cold turkey and resume my normal life.

If I was to become labelled, and hamstrung by stigma, then I would without doubt just give up and while away my days in an intoxicated state. What would you do if you weren't able to get a job because you were no fixed abode, and the truthful answer to the question "what have you been doing with yourself recently?" was "getting ridiculously fucked up"? Try saying that at a job interview and see how it goes down.

I'm risking my entire career, my prospects, my future, by writing this so publicly, but why should I continue to prosper from my advantages when so many people are crushed underfoot for no more reason than because they're more honest and less fortunate?

What have I learned from my little trip to the bottom? I learned this: we're all the same under the skin. We all respond the same to stress, misfortune and every external circumstance that is beyond our control. Do people choose to get addicted to drugs? Only as much as they choose the colour of their skin, or the wealth and privilege of the family they're born into.

You'd probably choke on this giant pill. You wouldn't die because of the chemicals.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #homeless #career #caffeine

This is a story about being strung along...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #homeless #frank #career

This is a story about channelling energy into something positive...

Buckminster Fuller was going to commit suicide, so that his family could benefit from his life insurance policy. After an epiphany, he found his purpose in life and went on to publish over 30 books.

In a month or two, I will have written the equivalent of 5 novels. Obviously, most of it is garbage, but I hope it serves as a warm-up. The point is to see if I have the discipline to sit down and write every day. Writing gives my life structure, routine.

I normally have 3 or 4 things I want to write about each day, and I struggle to keep under 1,000 words. Browsing statistics tell me that people read for between 3 and 4 minutes per day, on average... even when I've broken my rules and have written 6,000 words, which means that they're probably skim reading or getting bored and stopping reading before the end.

There has been real violence & venom in my words, as I've struggled with a sense of abandonment and real anger and frustration at being let down on promises at a really critical time, and when my life really hung in the balance.

My writing did nothing to sway the people who I targeted, to act with any decency, but now that I know they're no longer reading, I do feel satisfied that I have at least put my side of the story across.

In actual fact, I feel like I made myself look like quite a bitter and angry person, quite immature and unconstructive, negative. It might be well overdue, and the damage is already done to my image, my reputation, but now it's time to stop grinding the axe and start writing in a more positive way.

Behind every rant, every acerbic scalding word, was a lot of emotion, but it was all focussed & fixated on a few individuals. Not very healthy or productive. Unlikely to lead to pieces of writing that are interesting for people to read.

I've read a couple of posthumously published satires where the author's frustrations with the world are barely concealed. They are repetitive and almost cringeworthy to read, but the passion makes the books hard to put down. However, they are good works of literature, unlike me just slagging off my drug addict, alcoholic, loser parents and abusive ex-wife.

It's difficult to know how to act. My school days were dominated by bullying. My working years have been dominated by age discrimination and people who've been promoted to a position of incompetence, where they are completely useless and concentrate exclusively on stopping anybody else from getting ahead. My longest relationship was with an abusive bully. I've had relatively few good role models.

I've picked a few people who I like and respect, from around the world, and I've tried to learn what I can from them, and to emulate their life philosophies, some of their thoughts and teachings, to be interested in things they're interested in, to try and understand what is important in their lives, and how that makes them tick.

I'm a long way from where I'd like to be. I've made a poor account of myself, blathering on like a fool while in a messed up state. I've exposed my darker side: the rage and frustration has bubbled over and I've revealed human characteristics that are less than desirable.

It's good to connect with people but I've been very exposed. I fear that I've lost the respect of some people I really idolise, and others that I could learn a lot from. I fear that I have taken something that had a lot of potential to reach a broad spectrum of people I wanted to connect with, and I have corrupted it into a nasty weapon to try and beat up on just a few people, and that's kinda shameful.

You know what though? I don't have a healthy outlet, other than writing this, and nor did I learn any ways to deal with frustration and anger as a child and young adult. I was the one on the receiving end of other people's shit. I took the blame for my parents' shortcomings. I was the recipient of my ex-wife's viciousness. I was the victim of daily bullying and abuse.

I've soaked up all this shitty abuse for years and years and years and now it's all got to come out somehow. I'm fed up of being the punchbag. I'm fed up of being the scapegoat. I'm fed up of taking the blame for everything. I'm fed up of being the quiet keeper of secrets.

Yes, I've got to find a more positive way to channel this negative energy. Hitting back at the people who hurt me, in particular my parents and ex-wife, will never lead anywhere. The bullies and abusers never feel any remorse. They'll never back down. They'll never say sorry.

Retaliation & tit-for-tat... I know that it's a dark path to go down. I know that the secret is to rise above it all. It's hard to be the bigger person. It's hard to just let things go when you've been wronged, even if the hatred is destroying you from the inside.

Some of my friends' parents taught me to believe that two wrongs don't make a right. They're probably right, but the main problem is that retaliation is punished more harshly than bullying and abuse. We reward the bullies and the abusers and the bigger stronger people, and hand out trite platitudes to their victims.

But, it's true, I am the bigger person. I know the chain of violence and abuse has to be broken. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

I always thought that society would cleave itself in two, with the sensitive and intelligent beings creating a super-race that would have all the best technology, while the thick-skulled idiots would just slowly devolve into some more basic animal creature, which is quite well physically endowed but only uses its muscles to fight over food scraps and compete for other similarly dumb animal mates. These creatures would obviously very easy to herd and to keep separate from the elite.

When life was going well, I lost all the bitterness about my shitty childhood. At last, I was tasting the rewards for that abuse... I had risen above the herd of idiots. Sadly, as a horribly ironic twist, I ended up dating and then later marrying a bully, and she dragged me down to her level. It's taken me a long time to realise that I need to distance myself from such people as soon as I can, and to get myself back into safe space, away from the herd of idiots.

It's really hard to not be bitter & twisted, when you know you've got to rebuild so much. It's really hard not to be angry and resentful at people who have profited from your labour, your industriousness, your ingenuity, your trust, your kindness.

I'm remarkably close to either a breakthrough or capitulation, suicide. Things are on a knife-edge. I have the opportunity to earn 3 or even 4 times what I could have done, weighed down by the abusive numbskulls. With money comes opportunity. With opportunity comes the benefit of all those tough experiences.

Now, I'm so passionately against bullying and abuse. I'm so passionately against living miserably. I'm so passionately against brutality and cruelty.

It would be easy for me to become cruel and bullying, as a result of having suffered so much shit myself, however my future hasn't been written off by a few horrible and small-minded people. There's a glimmer of an opportunity, and every chance I might rise above the herd of idiots once again.

I've got 6 months ahead of me before any kind of sense of security will return to my life. 6 months living under threat. 6 months where one thing going wrong could screw everything up. That's a lot of pressure to live with every day. Everything has to go right, during the next 6 months, or else it takes me beyond the limit of what I can handle. There is no contingency. There is no safety margin. There is no excess fat.

As you can imagine, that makes me very tense, very highly strung, very anxious. That pressure comes out in a negative way sometimes, directed at those who dumped me in the shit, but I know that's no use. That pressure comes out as hopelessness sometimes: a sense that I can never overcome the obstacles, and luck will never be in my favour for long enough to break free again. The hopelessness leads to suicidal thoughts.

So, tomorrow I start something that has real tangible value, to rebuild my life. However, don't be surprised if the pressure is unbearable, and I fly off the handle at seemingly minor setbacks. Don't be surprised if I'm still not quite able to bury the hatchet and stop being so aggressive, so violent in my communication towards my persecutors.

I'm a long way from breaking free again.

The geeks will inherit the earth

Tags: #bullying #parents #childhood #divorce #writing #career

This is a story about seeking attention...

How many likes can I get? How many times will my content be shared? How many Twitter and Instagram followers do I have? It's easy to transfer an 'addictive personality' into the world of social media, although it's obviously a lot more physically healthy than drinking, smoking or drugging yourself to death.

I've actually been pushing people away. I've been writing the most gruesome gory details about my life, in an attempt to sort the wheat from the chaff. Who will disown me? Who will recoil in horror? Who will judge me and decide to distance themselves from me? It's a test.

But what is it about people who are seeking external validation? Why am I driven to reach for something outside of myself to feel a connection with the world, a reason for living? Clearly there's something missing in my life. I'm incomplete.

How long have I been bleating on about my distress for? Surely I should have rectified things by now? What about those lengthy periods where I was making things worse not better?

Well, what actually happened is that I was barely coping before Christmas, and I was perhaps being a bit un-subtle. I mean, I only spent a week in a locked psychiatric ward of a hospital. I only travelled 5,351 miles in order to make a point about how suicidal I was feeling. They were things that could clearly be misinterpreted. I mean, Christ, even my own sister thought I was having a jolly holiday.

Anyway, that's something you should know about me: when I reach the end of my rope, I don't run away from danger, I run towards it.

Why should I be risk-averse and act in some predictable way, when cold hard rational sums tell me that there's no way that things can get any better? If you're mentally unwell, completely unable to work and you've got no financial security, you're looking at bankruptcy and living on the streets. Bankruptcy means no more being a company director and an IT consultant working in banking, which is almost all I know in my career of nearly 20 years. Why on earth wouldn't I go out in a blaze of glory?

Loss of status is a big deal. I've lost my wife, loads of friends, my house, my cars, my boats... all that material shite that you don't really need, but is a hell of a millstone around your neck. Just getting rid of heaps of shite is stressful. I've only just emptied my self storage unit, but I needed it, as it's the only way that a homeless person can at least keep a few valuable things safe.

"What do you do?" is the middle-class dinner party cliché question. What do I do? Well, my family's impression is that I'm on a jolly fucking holiday/drug binge. Actually, if people were to extrapolate from the breadcrumbs that I've given them, they'd have to assume that I'm either dead, in hospital, or sleeping rough on the streets. How do you think I survive from day to day? How do you think I pay my bills and avoid addiction? The truth is, you don't really know, which means you don't care.

Perhaps I live in an airport terminal, like Tom Hanks in that movie? Perhaps I'm on benefits... how else would I survive for over 6 months with no income?

The fact is, that the only window you have into my life is what I tell you in this blog, and it doesn't make for pretty reading. According to my sister, my mum did try phoning a few London hospitals, when I said that I needed to be admitted because I was suicidal. Too little too late, I have to say.

Yes, this is an aggressive angry lecture, but it's also a goodbye in a way. Either it's goodbye because it's good riddance, or it's goodbye because I've reached the limit of what I can stand. Rebuilding my life is a major challenge, and I'm tired. I'm exhausted by being nickel & dimed, strung along, and let down by people.

What struck me was the interviews with the people who knew the suicide victims, when I watched the film The Bridge, which is about people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. What was most striking were the people who said that they got used to the person saying how unhappy they were, before they took their own life.

I have a friend who lost another friend to suicide, and he 'gets it': the fact that you don't get to influence the outcome anymore after somebody is gone. He realises that the time to act is now. Hand wringing and mumbling "but what shall we do?" to yourself in lame procrastination is just pathetic.

There's an arse-covering culture, and we are sure to give ourselves loads of excuses, most of which are victim-blaming. "I blame the drugs" or "he drank too much" or "he never told us what he needed until it was too late" look pretty silly when a person makes a big effort to try and show themselves as worthy.

You would have thought that 115 days abstinent from alcohol or 6 months abstinent from drugs would be applauded, but instead there is hostility that you're not more normal, that you're not suddenly the world's best son, brother, uncle, friend... whatever.

Abstinence is bullshit. Once an addict, always an addict, seems to be the bullshit attitude of people.

Quitting substances is meaningless anyway. It just proves that I have far more willpower than many people will ever know in their lives. Abstinence is just a lifetime penance for other people's guilt. Yes, I do want a fucking medal for what I've been through. Yes, I do want a fucking parade. Not a lot of people come back from the horrors of the war on drugs, and I'm a fucking veteran.

There's a clear frustration here, an impatience. That's because sobriety is not recovery. I've managed lengthy periods of abstinence - like the first 30+ years of my motherfucking life - and yet, it somehow isn't a life: breathing fresh air. We need food, shelter and social contact. In modern society, we need clothes and money too, which means we need a job. I've tried the fresh air only thing... it leads to starvation.

Currently I'm socially starved. It might seem unhealthy and strange to have this attachment to writing, and use it as a means to reach out to the world, but I'm so fearful of more knockbacks, more rejection. I feel enough rejection as it is, given that my family know how much distress and danger I'm in, but roundly ignore it.

You've got to ask yourself, do you really want a person to survive, to thrive, or do you just want them to shut up and die?

Maybe I live on a fucking train. Choo! Choo! You must be fucking loco.

Tags: #suicide #depression #mentalhealth #career #drugs #addiction #homeless

This is a story about golden handcuffs...

You would think that riding the Wall of Death would not be an attractive prospect, but once you've started, you can't back off the throttle and slow down, or else you will crash. Round and round you go, and people say "why did he even start?" and "why doesn't he stop?" but they're fundamentally not understanding what drives a person to take risks in the first place.

Adrenalin 'extreme' sports give some kind of thrill, but in a controlled environment. There are brakes on your mountain bike, ropes for rock climbing, and reserve parachutes for skydiving. We try and mitigate the risks, and stay within a 'comfort zone' where we don't end up out of our depths.

I ended up out of my depth, but the thrill of surviving can't be denied. Why do you think so many movies get made about drugs and crime? I think it's because we want to experience a more exciting life, vicariously. We would never dare to take the risks that these screen antiheroes take, but there's a little part of us that wants to be the gangster, the hustler, or to know what it feels like to take powerful narcotics.

There's a lot of romanticism, glorification, of risk takers. Increasingly, there's an amorality in Hollywood, where bad guys get away with stuff and the drug takers don't always get locked up behind bars, just to teach us - the audience - some trite moral lesson. There is even the occasional movie where the antihero is fighting the system. Modern day Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich and corrupt, with us cheering them on in their lawbreaking activities.

I should say, upfront, that I don't believe I'm above the law. I don't think I'm special, and deserve any special treatment. I don't think rules don't apply to me.

However, it's undeniable that I have received special treatment and rules have been bent. The full force of the law has not been brought to bear on me. I've been in a police cell a few times, but yet I've retained my liberty and a clean criminal record. Other people in similar circumstances have not been so lucky.

The fact is, that I've been trying for a while to get back on the straight and narrow, but circumstances have not exactly been favourable. When things start going wrong, it tends to cause other things to start going wrong too. You might lose your job, and because of that you get into rent arrears or default on your mortgage payments, which impacts your credit score, so you can no longer cheaply refinance your debts or borrow in order to pay your bills while you look for a new job. Now, you start getting fines and paying punitive interest rates, and before you know it you're in a death spiral.

Is it right that the punishment for not having any money, is penalty charges and higher interest rates? Maybe you sell your car and your laptop in order to raise money to cover the shortfall, but now you can't look for work or travel to a job that's inaccessible by public transport.

It's a modern-day Merchant of Venice, where we extract our pound of flesh, but the cost is the entire society.

The cost to me of the last couple of years should have been my right to work. Had a criminal record and a bankruptcy been forced upon me, I would be virtually unemployable in the field I'm highly qualified and experienced to work in. As an added ironic twist, it only took a couple of months of employment to rectify my deficit and satisfy my creditors. If they'd been allowed to get what they thought they wanted, they would have had to write off a big chunk of debt.

When we come to criminal justice, would justice have been served if I now found my employment options curtailed, because I had a black mark against my name? The UK system at least has some safeguards, where convictions become 'spent' and are therefore not supposed to affect your employment prospects after a few years, but what are you supposed to do during those years where you're a leper, shunned by mainstream society?

We say "if you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime" but what if you're trapped by circumstances? Do you think somebody wakes up in the morning and decides to become a drug addict, with full consideration of the consequences? Do you think it was a rational decision made with completely free will?

About drug addicts, Dr Gabor Maté writes "a person driven largely by unconscious forces and automatic brain mechanisms is only poorly able to exercise any meaningful freedom of choice". Do these people sound like they should be treated as criminals, or as patients?

But what about pleasure, what about the 'thrill' of scraping together the money for drugs, scoring and then taking them? Yes, it's true... drug addiction is an alternative lifestyle.

The problem is, the man who has nothing has nothing to lose. I found it immensely liberating being suddenly bottom of the pile, not caring about keeping up appearances, no longer harbouring unrealistic aspirations and living with the daily threat of redundancy, eviction and destitution. When you're already destitute, there's no way you can fall any further... for the first time, you are free from relentless crushing fear and anxiety.

My family decided that cutting me off, showing me 'tough love' and me hitting 'rock bottom' would be some kind of 'cure'. They were wrong.

Frankly, there is no rock bottom. Rock bottom is something somebody else thinks they'd find intolerable, but no matter how bad things get, when it's you who's going through that shit, you find a way to adjust to it... you find a way to cope. I can laugh about some of the shit that happened to me now... that's not supposed to happen.

The fact is, that stick doesn't work. You can't beat someone into submission. You can't truly break a man's spirit, their soul, crush them completely... if they're actually not doing anything wrong. Is it wrong to want to survive? Is it wrong to want some dignity? Is it wrong to expect to live without debilitating stress, to expect more than a miserable depressing existence?

Yes, it looks like I have choices, opportunities, but I've also tasted freedom. Freedom from boredom, freedom from oppression, freedom from stress, freedom from relentless exhausting pressure. Is it any wonder that I consider my forays back into the rat race and so-called 'civilised' society to be the real prison? A prison for my soul.

I'm not the first to rattle the bars of the cage and rage about being trapped into mechanisms of societal control. I'm not special, I'm not different. I just know what I've experienced

Tags: #career #drugs #addiction #police #politics #capitalism

This is a story about conformity...

I can tell you a lot about the pressure to fit in or fuck off. I can tell you a lot about conforming. I can tell you a lot about bullying, and other mechanisms of coercion, to get people to fall in line and all march to the same beat.

At school, I wanted to keep a low profile. I wanted less attention from the bullies. This required astute observation and imitation of what was considered 'normal'. You needed to be wearing the right clothes and sneakers, you needed to act a certain way, appear to think certain things and talk in a certain manner. Any deviation from the norm was harshly punished.

I didn't receive a lot of sympathy for the daily misery that I endured, due to having the wrong sort of trousers or shoes, or something so obvious as a reason to bully a kid, such as a bike that didn't conform to gender stereotypes. Kids are excellent at spotting differences, and turning these into the basis for social exclusion, teasing and bullying.

This isn't going to be one of those tear-jerking "oh what a miserable life I had" type rants. Instead, I'm going to tell you what I learned, being pushed to the margins, the fringes.

Most people are blindly unquestioning of the rules of life, the structure of society and the expectations placed upon them. Most people are unaware of their inbuilt tendency to play along with unwritten rules. What is it that stops you talking too loudly? What is it that causes you to walk, when it'd be quicker to run? Why is it that you're stressed and unhappy in an unfulfilling job that barely pays the bills? Why is it that you bottle up all those emotions, when you really want to scream and yell and raise hell?

I'm not very tolerant at the moment. I'm not very good a putting up and shutting up. I made the decision in 2008 to cut away from the mainstream, and actually put some of the talk into action. I had become extremely cynical about what I was doing at the time, and it was clear that simply changing jobs wasn't going to be an extreme enough change. I needed to forge my own path. It was conformity that I was sick of.

We'd all like to be our own boss, right? Well, there are a huge amount of downsides, and you're probably right to stay in your cushy salaried job, but for me there wasn't really a choice: I had reached the limit of my patience, and there was a sickness in my soul from too many years of repressing frustrations.

You do ruin yourself, having had a taste of freedom. It's hard to get the genie back in the bottle. Once you know what you can achieve, when you take away the millstone of the organisations and institutions that sap your energy and discourage innovation, it's very hard to re-enter the corporate or academic world, which is the backbone for modern society.

Society can't handle the free thinker, the nonconformist. The way the systems and the processes are set up, the way our preconceptions and prejudices are programmed... if you don't fit the mould people are going to find you very hard to handle.

Trying to explain gaps in your CV or periods where you ran your own business, will boggle the mind of the drones who need to try and shoehorn you into their neat little boxes. How are you supposed to get a reference when you were your own boss? How do you describe your job title and employment dates, when you're not actually an employee... you cut away from that system and you went in your own direction.

Do you have performance objectives, and reviews with your boss? What would you do if your boss blocked your promotion aspirations? Would you just wait for your turn, to be promoted to the next rung on the ladder?

This is important: it's not a ladder. The ladder is a lie. It's a pyramid, and there is less space on the next step up, than there is on the step below. What do we know about pyramid schemes? Well, it's pretty clear that it's sweet for the person at the top of the pyramid, and we'd all love to be there. But what's less clear is the simple mathematical trick that means that you're never going to reach the top of the pyramid by conventional means: exponential growth.

By the time that 3 or 4 layers of management have been employed, between you and the guy at the top, the number of people vying for even the next step up has exponentially grown to the point where you have tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands even (I've worked for companies with a quarter of a million employees) and they're all hoping to get promoted. It's a con.

Society and the companies you work for stand to gain far more from you, than you will gain yourself, by you behaving yourself at school, doing your exams like a good little robot child, and then getting yourself into a job, where you will slave away until the end of your days, never quite reaching the aspirational targets that are just out of reach. Don't you feel a little cheated?

You can look at the big picture, and the greater good, and say that sure, we can't all just do what we want. There have to be rules, and we have to do things we don't like doing. However, have you stopped to think whether you're perpetuating human misery? The best you can hope for with your children is that they won't be very bright or very emotionally attuned, so that they won't be troubled with deeply philosophical questions about "why are we here?". If your kids can avoid questioning authority, and just neatly conform to the world around them, then happy days... they'll probably clone themselves and the whole motherfucking cycle continues.

However, the more you give them the freedom to think and explore their own identities, the more you give them the capability to differentiate themselves, to have independent thoughts and resist indoctrination... well, they might end up having a difficult time. Our society is so highly leveraged, geared up, pressured, that there's no time to stop and consider the alternatives. Nobody has the time or the inclination to say "hey, is there a better way?".

Fit in or fuck off. Fit in or fuck off are the only choices that you have, unless you're going to be an eccentric outcast.

Tags: #career #mentalhealth

This is a story about worthy causes...

How do you decide who is worth helping, and who has made their own problems? It's easy, right? People who drink and take drugs are the architects of their own misery, or so we think. Homeless people have to be clean & sober before they're worthy of our help and support. Alcoholism and addiction aren't symptoms, they're the root cause of problems, we believe.

But what if we got it wrong? What if people drink and take drugs to escape problems? What if people's lives are so miserable and hopeless that they need something to anaesthetise the pain, the discomfort and the fact they're treated like dirt, shunned by society and even their own friends and family.

Once somebody has the label attached to them as a waste of space, a lost cause, it's hard to shake it off. We don't like to see our own shortcomings, our own demons, reflected back to us in the eyes of the suffering addict, alcoholic. We'd sooner that the person just disappears into obscurity or dies, so that we can repaint them in some kind of idealistic light. We want to remember them as an innocent child, and having them hanging around as a living adult is rather inconvenient. The living embodiment tarnishes this false image we want to remember.

Some homeless people have poked fun at the ridiculous notion that giving them money will only 'enable' them to continue with their habits. We see images splashed all over the internet of signs begging for money to spend on drink & drugs "but at least I'm not bullshitting you" the signs say. This is confirmation bias. We have preconceived notions about a homeless person, a bum, a junkie... we find it hilarious, and pleasing, to see a sign that confirms our prejudices.

When I met Frank, he was keen to tell me that he wasn't an opiate addict. Because almost all of us have an innate fear of needles, the heroin addict is very bottom of the pile. Almost every non injecting drug addict will tell you "at least I'm not a junkie" as if it somehow makes them a better person. Every stoner will tell you "at least I don't take hard drugs". Every alkie will tell you "at least I don't take drugs". Every person on antidepressants or anxiety medication will tell you "at least I don't drink". There is a clear hierarchy here, but it's no different than a bullied person finding somebody weaker than themselves in order to bully, in order to make themself feel better.

This infighting amongst humans is uncivilised, inhumane. Where did the empathy go? Where did the sympathy go? Where did all this ignorance come from?

You really think you could make things any worse by helping? In actual fact, charitable giving is far more likely to make you feel smug about yourself, and feel like you've done your bit for society, so you don't need to feel guilty about your comfortable existence. The fact of the matter is though that going on a sponsored fun run was something you wanted to do anyway. The fact is, that the coins in your pocket aren't amounting to even 1% of your wealth. You're buying a clean conscience very cheaply.

To actually sit down with people, hear their story, get involved in their lives, take a risk... that's a big deal. We all have busy lives, so who has the time to do that, and aren't charities so much better, more qualified? Well, no, not really. Charities have salaries to pay. Charities have offices and need to pay bills. The amount of money that actually reaches the front line, through charitable giving, is clearly not making any difference. The levels of poverty and deprivation are bigger than ever. The rich:poor gap is the widest it's ever been.

Economists trumpet the fact that a large number of people who were living on $1 a day are now living on $2 a day. An increase of 100% in somebody's wealth sounds like a lot in percentage terms, but would you honestly feel happy if your pay rise for the last 10 years was just $365?

Perhaps we should just be happy and content to even have a job. But why? Why should we be content to live with insecurity? Why should we "count ourselves lucky" to have a job where we're exploited, and we don't even have enough money to comfortably pay our rent and bills and have anything left over in case the car breaks down?

Don't you think that living with Damocles Sword dangling over us is unhealthy? Worrying about unemployment, and the ensuing rent arrears or mortgage defaults is not a healthy way to live. The stress and anxiety of working all hours, commuting for long distances, being away from our families, the uncertainty over our finances and the security of our homes and livelihoods... surely it's this constant stress that's destroying countless numbers of people's mental health.

We can't shy away from the fact that there's a mental health epidemic. 5 million Prozac prescriptions get written in London alone, every year. A quarter of Londoners feel like crying on public transport at least once a week.

City living can be isolating and lonely, but it doesn't get any better outside of London. There are less jobs and wages are lower outside the capital. Rents are a bit lower, but bills are just as high, and public transport isn't as good so you probably need to own a car to get to work. Food costs much the same wherever you are in the country. Many towns and suburbs can be just as isolating, and there's always the fear that you don't want your friends and neighbours finding out how unhappy you are, how stressed and anxious, how depressed.

If you live in some poxy little town with only a few major employers in the area, you can't risk burning your bridges. If you get sacked because your mental health got unmanageable, you can potentially make yourself unemployable in the place where you live. You can potentially end up labelled amongst people. If it gets really bad, you can be known to friends and neighbours as a "troubled" individual. You'll be a joke, a laughing stock.

London offers some anonymity at least, and a much bigger pool of jobs, to compensate for the fact that you can feel totally overwhelmed by the impersonal and seemingly uncaring nature of the dog-eat-dog rat race. People do stop and listen, and can be very kind and compassionate. Sometimes, it feels like we're all clinging onto the pieces of our wrecked ship in a storm. There is gratitude when you connect with another person who understands the sheer terror of facing a hostile world, out to label you, to shun you, to try and trample you.

In a way, London has led the way for the country to adopt a kind of blinkered attitude, where we're all working too hard, and our communities have been destroyed, families pulled apart by the need to spend hours at work, commute long distances and live with unbearable stress. However, London has passed the point where it was completely unable to continue any more, and I actually find it far friendlier and caring than anywhere else I've been.

London has provided, where even my own family has failed me.

Many homeless and addicts are fleeing a life of blah

Tags: #homeless #frank #addiction #alcohol #drugs #london #mentalhealth

This is a story about becoming self obsessed...

Things have gotten pretty weird, haven't they? I've shared some stuff that would surely be better off buried, deep deep down in a pit of shame. Writing has become central in my life in a way that has even outrivalled my relationship with my collapsed trashed bed.

I've kept up the story, through living out of a suitcase in a hotel, working 7 days a week, suffering the trials and tribulations of the London housing market, falling out with an ineffectual scrounger friend, ending up in a secure psychiatric ward of a hospital, flying round the world while warding off suicidal thoughts, seeing long-lost friends, visiting every geek's Mecca (Silicon Valley), losing my job, financial armageddon, replapse into drug addiction and then starting the whole motherfucking cycle again, job hunting and fixing up stuff that got broken, like my life.

So, I'm back on the park bench again. Only this time it's in the garden that belongs to the apartment complex in a gated community where I live. However, I'm technically homeless as I have no means to pay the rent or bills, no job, no income.

Yes, it's true that I have good employment prospects, provided my prospective employers don't Google me and read the truth about how chaotic and traumatic my life has been. We can't be giving people chances to redeem themselves now, can we? One strike and you're out. Put a black mark against my name for having lived, for having tried... forget it... I'm used & dirty, tainted. We only employ shiny perfect plastic corporate dolls, who've had their brains removed.

I did start to feel that I'd overstepped the mark. I did start to feel like a bit of jackass for having poured my heart out onto the public internet. I did start to get fearful that I really had made myself unemployable, and had alienated friends and family.

I'm reading a book by Dr Gabor Maté at the moment, and his son wrote a letter to him, describing his addiction to blogging. His son said he initially loved the frisson of excitement, when sharing more and more intimate personal details, until finally Dr Maté had to point out that his son had gone too far. He'd overstepped the mark.

I considered this very carefully, in the light of my own obsession with writing down my story in all its gory truth. However, I've come to a different conclusion. I feel worthless, and isolated from the world. This website is an invitation for people to connect with me, and it's worked: people have reached out and gotten in contact. On balance, people have shown that they care about me, unlike my family who have only got in contact to try and gag me, to try and protect a fake image.

But the point is, it's not all about me, me, ME, is it? The point is that all this is so self-centred, and apparently doesn't consider the feelings of other people. Apparently, this is purely egotistical, narcissistic, self-obsessed. Wrong. You need to consider it in the context of my life at the moment: I have nothing, nobody. I'm all alone. I'm trapped with my thoughts, isolated... what else would I write about? How else should I conduct myself, when I'm so ostracised?

Think about the regular, healthy, face-to-face contact that you have with your family, friends, girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband, co-workers and even the people you buy your coffee from, shop assistants. Contrast this instead with a housebound depressed guy, unemployed, unable to pay rent & bills, paralysed by anxiety and stress... just waiting for the day I hit the limit of my credit and I'm evicted onto the street.

What would you do? Well, to say that you would never have let things get so bad is churlish. To say that you'd just fix the broken things in your life is ignorant. I am fixing things up, but there's only so much you can fix up at any one time. The bulk of my effort is currently being expended on job-hunting, which will bring structure, routine, human connection as well as easing my cashflow crisis. To say I should be out socialising, making new friends, pursuing a hobby... well, that just doesn't consider how dysfunctional my life has been, how destructive things like depression can be. Besides, how would I pay for those leisure pursuits?

It's certainly true that I squandered a few months, falling back into drug addiction. What you need to understand about addiction is this: it's slow suicide. I obviously didn't have the guts to actually push slightly harder on that razor blade, when I was slicing my forearms open. I was covered with blood and making quite a mess of them but I was still holding back slightly, stopping short of actually making a deep incision into my veins.

You need to understand though, that this isn't attention seeking, and it's not emotional blackmail. The time to save a suicidal person's life is when they're alive, not some pretty words in commemoration of their life, at their funeral.

Yes, I use very emotive language and imagery. Yes, I even took some pretty clear actions: travelling to San Francisco and going straight to the Golden Gate Bridge, and cutting my arms to ribbons with a razor blade. If you think it's just alarmist, I wonder what's wrong with you? How did you become so desensitised to human suffering? How can you ignore somebody in distress?

My Mum told me that I was "better than" the alcoholics and addicts at Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. In actual fact, it's my peers who are the most kind and compassionate. Yes, it's true that a lot of addicts are liars, cheats, fraudsters, hustlers... but they're also open & honest about shortcomings that are present in every human being, as well as being very empathetic. There's a refreshing lack of hypocrisy amongst my peers.

There's a clear hierarchy in society. Those who are keeping a lid on their mental health problems look down on those who have become unwell. People who are taking psychiatric medication look down on those who are self medicating with alcohol and drugs. People who are using alcohol and 'soft' drugs look down on those who are self medicating with 'hard' drugs. Only the hard drug user says "mea culpa" but the truth is that these people are the most bullied, abused and scapegoated.

It would be easy up to try and sum me up as reckless and irresponsible, but what about the 30+ years of getting good exam grades, not getting in trouble, being a good little worker bee and dressing up in my grey suit and going to work, Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, paying my mortgage, bills & taxes and being a regular guy, just like you?

I'm telling my story because there's a dichotomy here, and I don't trust my family to tell it truthfully.

I meant to try and keep to 500 words a day, but there's too much to say at the moment. Instead, here are some pretty pictures to hold your attention while you read for a whole 5 minutes.

Tags: #homeless #career #depression #london #suicide #mentalhealth