This is a story about losing my way...

I've kind of screwed everything up since my suicide attempt. Why did I tweet when I was really sick? Why did I piss my readers off by live-publishing the draft manuscript of my dreadful second novel? Why am I struggling to find my voice again, and reconnect with people?

It feels like there's a lot of pressure to write very profound and meaningful things, having cheated death. It feels like whatever I write should be a decent contribution to society. However, I'm missing the mark. I'm falling short of my own expectations. I feel like I'm letting everybody down.

I feel considerable embarrassment that my story does not have a nice linear progression. Why doesn't the tale read like a straightforward rags to riches fairytale? Why are there flies in the ointment? Why is there bad stuff in there, mixed in with what I dearly desired to be good? What's my message anyway? Where am I going with this?

Writing another novel took me down a peg or two. It was hard, and my arrogant belief that I'd be able to just sit down in front of the keyboard and crank out something decent, was a delusion that was shattered. I've had to face the very real conclusion that I've still got a long way to go if I want to produce anything decent. I'll need to pre-plan more. I can't just shoot from the hip and expect everything to go my way.

Writing these stream-of-consciousness blogs has become quite easy. If you do aspire to be a writer, writing needs to become a daily habit. I've developed the habit, but writing a journal, a diary or a stream-of-consciousness blog is probably the easiest option. Writing short stories is fun and not that hard. Dedicating even a mere 30 days to a single work of fiction, turned out to be very hard. I thought it would be easy, because my first novel came with little effort and I've managed to write this blog for two and a half years, but the construction of characters, plot, scenes... it's tough going when you get up to and beyond the 30,000 to 35,000 word point. It's not about the word count, of course. You have to write the right words, naturally. However, I can't understand why anybody would write the wrong ones. Just edit as you go.... except that's hard when you're doing creative writing.

I'm trying to recover my raw and uncensored voice. I'm trying to rediscover myself; my identity. I briefly thought I would own the moniker: novelist. I wrote "thinker" on my bio because I thought it would piss people off. Aren't we all thinkers? How dare I declare myself to be some kind of intellectual philosopher type chap. "Show me your certificate immediately!" people demanded. "Show me your credentials!" they screamed.

I'm backing down.

Although I hold a balanced set of opinions, have lived a varied life that's given me first-hand experience of almost every aspect of human society, and I can string a sentence together, I'm surely not entitled to write on whatever topic takes my whimsical fancy, and expect people to read it? Who the hell am I? What's my job title? What position of authority do I hold?

I think my readers are figuring out that I'm just a guy; just an ordinary person. These are not the words of a superstar celebrity CEO chairman chief lord god. These are merely words. Where are my citations? Why am I not quoting people you've heard of? Who the hell am I to hold my own reasonable opinions, and dare to express them as if I'm somebody of any import?

There isn't enough room in this world for the rich and famous, and the likes of us. Make room for the celebs. "SILENCE, PLEB!" scream those who are entitled to an opinion, because of their superior status.

It would be OK, but what the hell am I going on about anyway?

I feel like I missed my chance. The spotlight was on me briefly, but I choked. When I had the attention I craved, what did I do with it? I screwed up. I wasted my opportunity. When that chance came, I didn't have anything profound to say. It's time to shuffle red-faced back into the audience. It's time to shut up and let the stars of the show resume their performance, isn't it? Make room for the celebs!

I lost 2,000 Twitter followers in the weeks following my suicide attempt. I've lost 500 Twitter followers since getting a job. If I was cynical, I could argue that it's not very interesting to read about somebody who's succeeding; somebody who's safe and is probably going to be OK. Where's the drama? Where's the jeopardy? Where's the suspense? I'm not cynical though, so I take it personally: my message must be wrong. It must be something unlikeable about me. I must have changed. I failed to say anything profound and interesting when I was passed the microphone. I had my moment of fame and I've screwed it up. Next!

What frustrates me is that I know there is something profound to be found in my writing. I know that my story does contain an interesting and exceptional tale. I know that there's a message that can be teased out, and it might prove useful for other people who are going through hell. The odds were stacked against me - as they're stacked against so many - but what's different about me that's allowed me to pull through? Why am I alive when so many others would have died? I certainly don't want to piss anybody off by smugly declaring myself a success story - it's a different message from that... it's about what lessons can be learned, even if that's not an original thought or idea at all.

I've had to sit and listen to cult-leader type characters, while they talked about their spiritual awakenings in sweat lodges or in South American jungles, intoxicated with ayahuasca. I've had to listen to endless amounts of people who've wanted to share their stories of recovery. Nobody who's listened has been able to emulate them though. It's all well and good going on about your own success in recovery, but it's not helping anybody, is it?

There are a lot of very desperate people out there. My website is visited by the suicidal, alcoholics and drug addicts. There are millions of people out there who are looking for solutions to their problems. There's a temptation for me to start writing as if I've got the answers. I know that there's an eager audience for any kind of self-help material. I know that it would be incredibly popular, if I was to start writing a prescriptive guide for how to cure yourself of your depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse. I know that people are desperate and they haven't found anything that works.

Nobody's a done deal. Nobody is a finished article. It would be dishonest and misleading for anybody to write as if they've got the answers; they've found the cure.

During my treatment for mental health problems and addiction, I discovered a world of non-judgemental people, and people who will listen to your story. Your story is interesting. You deserve the chance to recover - every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. It seems as if there's a monopoly on storytelling - only the celebs get to tell their stories, and the rest of us should silently cower in a dark corner, filled with shame and regret; convinced that we're worthless sinners; eternally damned. I wouldn't be surprised if we discover that the secret to recovery is to allow people to recover, by allowing them to no longer feel as if they must pay a lifelong price for their shortcomings; by allowing people to revel in their own identities and their actions, rather than apologising and thinking of themselves as useless and flawed.

You may notice that there's rather a different code of morality applied to celebrities, than is applied to the general populace. You will see a great outpouring of sympathy for celebrities who are affected by mental health, alcohol and drug addiction issues. You will see that celebrities are celebrated for their faults - it makes them more relatable. However, the ordinary likes of you and me will become black sheep - scapegoats for the ills of society - if we stumble and err. Nobody's going to forgive our sins because we're not celebrities. Nobody wants to hear your story.

However, you should write like you're already famous. You should own your story. You should tell your story, because nobody else is going to tell it correctly. Nobody but you should own your identity. You decide who you are; you decide how your story gets told.

I'm having a wobble. Why are people disengaging? Why are fewer people connecting with me and my story? Why am I losing Twitter followers? Why do all my graphs trend downwards?

I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know where the hell I'm going with this. If I was going to be a writer, why am I not punting my novel manuscripts to every literary agent I can find? If I was going to be a writer, why am I not relentlessly pursuing a writing job? If I was going to be a writer, why am I not promoting myself through every avenue? It must be clear to my audience that I'm confused; directionless.

Often times when we're consuming content on the internet, we wonder what the commercial angle is. All those lovely webcomics that you read have usually got associated merchandise - T-shirts, coffee mugs etc. - and all those silly Buzzfeed lists that you love, are paid for by the advertising that's plastered all over the website. The deal you've struck is pretty clear - your eyeballs are being traded. However, what's my angle? What do I want from you?

I guess I need attention to feel valued; worthwhile as a human being. Without an audience; with nobody listening, who the hell am I? Who really cares whether I live or die?

My social media success is inversely proportional to my real-world connections. As I've made new friends, reconnected with old ones and impressed my new work colleagues, my social media identity has suffered. As my health, wealth and prospects have improved, my digital footprint has declined. I suppose I should be happy, but this blog and my Twitter followers provide me with a comforting safety net. If all else fails, this blog is something that would be hard to take away from me. This website - and my writing - is something that's inexpensive and provides stability; support; self-esteem. I suppose I could dismiss my virtual life as unimportant, and concentrate on real face-to-face human relationships, but I'm loathe to do that when I'm fragile; delicate. Why would I cut off one of my biggest sources of security?

A blogger friend has recently completed a year of sobriety, got herself a regular spot as a guest blogger and now has a boyfriend. Writing has been staggeringly successful for her, as a healthy coping mechanism. Blogging has been her constant companion, and she's proud of what she's produced. She's buzzing with the excitement of getting noticed. She's thrilled that she's achieved so much.

I remember when I started writing this blog, I suffered the usual thing that most bloggers do, which is to believe that I was writing amazing stuff that needed to be shared. I was a blogospammer. I would share my content as far and wide as I could. I exhausted every avenue, trying to get exposure. I wanted readers, like a junkie wants drugs. I obsessed over my stats; my metrics. I quickly came to believe that I was a serious writer, and that I'd produced a significant contribution to the literature.

Now, I beaver away in relative obscurity. I put very little effort into self-promotion. I cringe a little when I think about how I spammed every social media site I could, trying to get readers. Now, I'm passive - read if you want to... you know where to find me.

I'm still a bit hooked on my stats though. It upsets me when I have fewer readers this week than last week; fewer followers.

I imagine that I'm going through an important developmental phase though. To write every day for a year is necessary to develop the writing habit. To write for a second year is to prove that the first wasn't just a fluke. To write for a third year is to discover why you're really writing. What is it that I'm getting out of this? Where am I going with this?

It's incredible that there are some people who've read everything I've written here. I've written 770,000 words, which is the same amount as in the King James Bible, more or less - it's my next milestone, to have written as much as is in the Bible. Then, I want to write a million words, just because it's a cool number. How cool would that be, to say you've written a million words?

So, I don't really know what I'm writing about. I don't really know why I want followers; readers. I don't really know what I've got to say that's profound and interesting and useful and entertaining and moving and helpful and original and all the other things that I vainly want my writing to be. Why am I doing this? I don't know yet.

I imagine that people reach the end of these sometimes lengthy brain-dumps, and they think "that's 10 minutes of my life I just wasted". What knowledge have I imparted? How have I improved anybody's life?

I am going to find out where this is going. There is a purpose, I promise. I just don't know what it is yet.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia

This is a story about routine...

I used to write every day. Where did I go wrong?

It's been costly, not writing every day. I write because it allows me to keep more people informed about my fragile mental health, than would otherwise be possible through all conventional communication mechanisms. The phone is the worst: being tied up talking to just one person, and having to listen to what they had for lunch, just out of social etiquette. Email is not at all a good one for me: I tend to segue into angry rants about matters which I'm deeply unhappy about, but have managed to repress emotional wounds for the sake of everyday functioning. Texts/instant-messaging/direct-messages: these are so throwaway and only useful when both conversation participants are actively involved... do you know any greater frustration than seeing that your message has been read, but no response is forthcoming?

There are three things that are driving considerable self-censoring. 1) I live with friends who I love dearly, and it would not be acceptable for me to talk about that private life. 2) I'm working again and a friend helped me get the job - I can't risk losing the cash or letting my friend down. 3) I tried to write a 50,000 word novel in a month, while publishing the draft manuscript live... I haven't recovered from the exertion of the demanding feat yet.

On the subject of the novel, it was of considerable embarrassment to me to have failed. A mere 42,000 words in 30 days. Also, a sex scene crept into the first chapter and then the whole thing went totally berserk. Having told the world that I was going to write another novel in November, I had put considerable pressure on myself. It seems apt that I would have confused the homophones taut and taught, in the very first sentence - if ever there was to be a lesson in overhyping, I learned the hard way that it's so easy to turn your audience off. Those subtle mistakes that get picked up in the edit are glaring errors when somebody reads your quick-fire draft. One slip-up and your readers can decide that you're an illiterate idiot and move on.

Why didn't I write every day? When writing my blog, there have been considerable advantages to writing every day. A gap in my otherwise daily writing habit has tended to indicate periods when my life has become unmanageable. Writing daily has served usefully as a kind of 'heartbeat' for anybody to know whether I'm alive or dead. The gaps during my latest novel writing escapade were only due to genuine writer's block - I hadn't preplanned my novel carefully enough, and I was overwhelmed with the task ahead of me on the days I didn't write... there was no dreadful crisis that had consumed me.

Why haven't I resumed my daily writing routine? Well, the obvious answer is that I've been zooming all over the globe with a new job; life's been pretty stressful and disrupted. Also, I disturbed my shoot-from-the-hip stream of consciousness; I disrupted my natural habit of sitting down in front of a blank sheet of paper and pouring out all my thoughts and feelings on whatever eclectic topic I happened to feel most compelled to write about at the time. In short: I got into the habit of hesitating.

I have some of the old habits. I still make notes about things I want to write about in more detail, when circumstances allow. I still wake up and immediately think about what I'm going to write. However, between work and travel and speaking to my friends, I'm not finding the time to stop and pour my heart and soul into these little snapshots of my state of mind.

If I had written every day, I think you would have seen how circular my thinking patterns are at the moment. My thoughts revolve around the paradox of me working, which brings money, but that I'm also running out of money, which brings stress - working will fix the financial problems, but it also causes them, as well as being incompatible with good mental health. It's intractable.

A lot of what I want to write about is in response to banal criticism. However, my critics are so repetitive and their points so invalid that I've started and then erased a whole series of blogs which would have added nothing to the literature. Who really wants to read about homeless people who have tried and failed to elevate themselves from poverty by economising? What is there to learn from those who have unsuccessfully failed to tighten their belts? Why would we imitate failures, when we are trying to succeed?

I write to you now, having polished off a bottle of wine and completed a boring day in the office. It seems impossible to separate one habit from the other. My day job is immensely lucrative, but its soul-destroying nature seems to bring an insatiable appetite for intoxication: how else am I supposed to make sense of the absurdity of the incredibly well remunerated work that seems to improve precisely nobody's life.

My daily habits include sleeping tablets and an anti-anxiety medication which I became hooked upon because of damage to the nerves in my left leg. My daily habits include a dressing-up game where I go to the office wearing a fancy suit and with a poker face that does not betray the contempt I hold for banking and IT. My daily habit is to question the absurdity of existence, from the moment of waking to the moment I lose consciousness.

It upsets me that I've gotten out of the routine of writing every day. It upsets me that I had a hit-and-miss month where I was writing fiction of dubious quality. It upsets me that I have disrupted the relationship which I had with my readers, where I had become part of their daily routine - "I wonder what Nick's doing today". Every time I've turned my back on my blog, it's been a mistake.

If this is an addiction - writing - then it's a healthy one. There's no doubt that writing every day is a good habit, where supercrack is a bad one. [NOTE: you can't take supercrack every day, because you start to get psychotic after about 10 days without sleep]

The story of a man who puts on a grey suit and goes to an office every day is not an exciting one. Where are the pulse-racing tales of police chases, addiction, homelessness, destitution, destruction, psych wards, madness and otherwise going bat-shit insane? Of course, my mind inundates me with imagery of all the most inappropriate things I could do; all the most ridiculously unacceptable things play on a show-reel in my mind, and it sometimes takes concerted effort to not act on my self-sabotaging impulses.

To write today has caused me to override my instinct to bury my blog, as I thought I was going to do earlier this year when I had an employment contract. In fact, it was a mistake to hold back. To own my identity is the most important thing I've ever done. Not writing so much made it easier for me to be exploited - I had deliberately held back, believing it was the responsible thing to do, but I was mercilessly taken advantage of.

My parting thought is one about the effort required to create versus the effort required to consume. While it may take you but a few short minutes to hoover up the words on this page, you should consider that it might have taken me some hours to craft them - there's a considerable disparity. While we live in a society where art seems to be in no short supply, that does not mean that art is worthless. Although I've been driven to a point where it's been impossible to avoid expressing myself, that does not mean that these words are cheap. In fact, I've earned the right to pursue my creative endeavours. I delayed gratification; I waited.

So, I'm considering re-addicting myself to writing. I'm considering a resumption of my daily writing habit.

Tags: #writing

Things I don't reccommend: writing a book in a month without a plan, while live-publishing the draft manuscript.

https://medium.com/high-dependency/nanowrimo-2017-day-twenty-one-81d99267e13e

This is a story about editing...

I decided to re-read my first novel. It surprised me just how well it starts - I was prepared to cringe with embarrassment at something that had not stood the test of time well, but it was OK. Later in the book, I fumbled with a couple of things - perhaps I was hurriedly bashing out a chapter, without a clear plan of how the scene should unfold. Towards the end of the book, there was a glaring error that was due purely to a lack of research: I had been a little lazy. The ending tried very hard to be enigmatic, but I imagine that it would have been confusing for many readers, and a little underwhelming.

Wouldn't it be arrogant to assume that I would be able to sit down one day and pen a good novel? Of course my first full-length story was going to be a learning exercise, and I was going to make mistakes. All I had was the first scene, the general plot outline and a twist - I had no idea how I was going to end the story. Writing dialogue is not something I'd done a lot of, so I had to develop that skill as I went along. I would spend quite a long time trying to remember what I had and hadn't told the reader, so that I wouldn't contradict myself or spoil the surprises I had planned. As a learning exercise, it was brilliant.

As November 1st approaches, I'm getting increasingly excited about starting my second novel. My first book explored an individual, and the other characters were purely set dressing in a story which was about loneliness and isolation. My second book will study relationships; societies - my mind buzzes with ideas, because there's so much scope to play around with multiple actors in my new story.

The opening scene is very important, to set the tone for the rest of the story I'm telling. I keep adding little bits to the image I'm creating in my mind - it's so much more than an image. I think about the textures, the mood, the sounds and importantly, the smells. I want to make the book as much an olfactory experience as is possible to do without having to impregnate the pages with scratch-n-sniff chemicals.

It seems amateurish to break the fourth wall, and to be 'so meta' as to talk directly to you, the reader, about the process of writing a work of fiction. To have hijacked my blog to talk about my next book project, is an indication of just how overexcited I am about writing another novel, such that I can't quite contain myself. I'm terribly afraid that I'll be suddenly overwhelmed by the challenge when I start on Wednesday - the blank page in front of me will intimidate me, and I will be afraid to make the first mark.

As I did last year, I plan on publishing my first draft live, as I go along. I'm thinking that I might publish on medium.com this year, so that I'm sharing a popular writing platform with other authors who are partaking in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo 2017).

Many publishers will tell you to shove your manuscript up your arse, if you are foolish enough to tell them that you wrote it during NaNoWriMo. There's quite a glut of crappy unedited manuscripts that gather in the inboxes of literary agents, during December. Like people who join a gym straight after the Christmas holiday season, as a New Year's resolution, those fat unfit faces soon disappear as the year wears on. I know that if have serious intentions of becoming a bestselling author, I will need to become a better editor.

Like I did last year, I'm inviting edits, improvements and suggestions, as the new novel emerges from the depths of my imagination. It was immensely pleasurable, to have my friends trying to guess what was going to happen next, and to be then able to gauge whether the pace that I was telling the story was too fast, too slow, and whether the twist in my tale was too obvious or not.

I had a wonderful girlfriend and her incredibly supportive family, egging me on to complete my book last year. This year, I'm living with friends on a lovely peaceful farm in the Welsh countryside - the kind of environment which would leave most aspiring authors green with envy.

Completing the project - 53,000 words - was the name of the game last year. To actually finish a novel is very hard - many budding writers won't have the discipline to keep up the word count. The initial excitement and energy can quickly dissipate, to be replaced by a sense of dread, when one thinks about returning to the neglected manuscript. This is the brilliance of NaNoWriMo, which encourages you to finish the project within the month of November, and then worry about going back and editing the damn thing. As a completer-finisher, it suits my personality perfectly: what point is there in an unfinished book? Perfectionism will get you nowhere, if you never get to the point of publishing.

Tomorrow I have boring chores to do and I will write an ordinary blog post, which is a deliberate demarkation between "Nick the blogger" and "Nick the novelist". I'm thinking that I'm going to pause my blog, partly because I want to divert my readers to my draft manuscript, and partly because I don't think that I can context-switch between storytelling mode, and blogging mode.

I'm afraid to lose the comfort of writing my blog. I'm afraid that I'm going to fail. However, it's a really exciting time: I'm like a kid before Christmas.

The working title for my next novel is High Dependency.

Tags: #writing #nanowrimo

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 orotund pontification...

Please excuse my magniloquence, but I'm attempting to brow-beat you into submitting to my intellectual superiority. My ostentatious language is not intended to communicate, but to intimidate. The purpose of my education was not the pursuit of knowledge, but the ratification of my pre-eminence. The plebeians' obmutescence and the academic elites' hegemony is the natural order of things. The lower orders should be seen and not heard.

Our rulers and their mandarins are publicly schooled - Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster and Winchester - before studying PPE at Oxford. Inherited wealth, the nepotism of political dynasties and the inside track - knowing how the corridors of power function - means that we are governed by the elite of the elite, not by our peers.

Education and publishing are dominated by sycophantic courtiers - the landed gentry - reflecting our aristocracy's vested interest in culture and society being fixed and unchanging. Dead languages and classical chamber music are fetishised.

In order to prevent the working class from getting ahead many professions have overtly defended themselves through the use of Latin instead of English. Studying the classics will set you in good stead for medicine and law, although the majority of your patients or clients will not speak Ancient Greek.

Like a virulent disease, the self-interest of those in power, causes every aspect of our society to be shaped to reflect the values of the ruling class. The 'correct' answers in an examination are the ones that parrot conventional wisdom, maintaining the status quo. The 'correct' use of language is the most formal, not the colloquial.

Little by little, the self confidence to freely express your thoughts and feelings, is eroded by a hierarchy that wishes to clip your wings. It's a free country, provided you've attained the prerequisite level of education and write only in a manner which pleases your superiors.

As a little game, sometimes I posh it up a bit. Sometimes I talk like a public schoolboy and do you know what happens? Genuine posh people ask "where did you go to school?" as if I was one of them.

"Your evidence is anecdotal" I hear you say.

What about the Castilian lisp?

"Insufficient evidence"

What about the fact that people watch the Queen's speech or stand for the national anthem? What about the fact that people follow the life of Kim Kardashian?

Wherever we turn, we see ordinary people obsessed with the private lives of the ruling elites - the aristocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy and vapid celebrities - imitating their affectations.

Didn't you fantasise about being prime minister, marrying a prince or living in a castle, when you were a child? You still have those dreams today, but you pretend that you don't. Your desire to be special - number one - has been corralled into some specialist area. Maybe you're the best fudge packer in the factory, or maybe you got a 2:1 degree from a former polytechnic, but your creativity and energy was channelled into something that makes you feel like a king or queen in your little fiefdom.

You read Harry fucking Potter, didn't you?

There's a certain joyful lightness when you read something that's well written and not just written to obfuscate any meaning and stupefy everybody except for your elitist Oxbridge chums.

Why must we struggle through the supposed great works of literature, which are a crime against the enjoyment of reading? Why must we be told at every juncture, that we just don't understand how complex the world is and that we should leave it to the experts, because they know best.

It's extremely easy to come up with exceptions to any rule. It's extremely easy to pick holes in any theory or model. It's extremely easy to find areas where a person's worldview is incomplete. It's extremely easy to be the smug critic. This is the role of academia: to undermine and discredit any challengers, who threaten our dogmatic rulers.

We funnel our children through a system where they learn to kiss the arses of their teachers, lecturers, professors, Ph.D. supervisors, viva voce examiners and those who award tenured professorships. For anything to be printed, it must pander and conform to the preconceived notions of an editor or publisher. Only the most obedient servants will rise to prominence, because they are most complicit and compliant with the will of the ruling elite.

Nothing ever changes - for the better - because of the inherent homogeny created by our education system, which feeds into a political system predisposed to select a public schoolboy - born with a silver spoon in his mouth - with an Oxbridge degree, instead of a normal person who actually knows what it's like to be an average UK citizen.

We aren't choosing our brightest minds to help with the challenge of building a better society for all its members. We're choosing the very worst kind of people: snobs who think that dead languages and chamber music are culturally important.

There's a big difference between being anti-intellectual and being pro-ignorance. Being a great thinker is about having a brilliant mind, not about being able to follow a well-trodden path with your fellow privileged brethren, steered by your sharp-elbowed mother.

We've built walled gardens where spoiled middle-class children can strut and swank, safe from criticism that they're far removed from the real world. We've built robust defences to insulate the intelligentsia from responding to valid critique: only the views of other academic elites will be dignified with a response, and out of courtesy and wilful ignorance, nobody dares to burst anybody else's bubble.

Commentary and satirical magazines - Private Eye and The Spectator, for example - as well as the 'free' press gives the impression that there are some checks and balances. In fact, to have the good fortune to come under the critical gaze of one of these newspapers, is to feel as though you have been given a seal of approval: further endorsement of the importance of your good work.

What - pray tell - does the person who makes your lunch think of your job? Who cares. I doubt they can even string a sentence together.

There's an automatic filter, that rejects anything that sounds a bit common, you know?

On the lead up to the EU referendum, I noticed that social media was awash with rather over-zealous use of punctuation marks, capital letters, as well as a great deal of confusion over common homophones.

"That's unreadable" I heard you say.

Really? Does the use of a greengrocer's apostrophe or mixing up your "you're" and your "their" with your "they're" and "there" really make something unreadable? Does it really alter the meaning if you write "less" when you should have written "fewer"? You must be very stupid if you can't read something and see past a couple of typos.

Writing accessibly doesn't mean dumbing down. It's perfectly possible to set aside your arrogance and write in a manner in which you know you are much more likely to be understood, without a scramble for the dictionary. Are you really so insecure that you need to turn your writing into a demonstration of your extensive vocabulary? Save it for The Times crossword.

The fetish for institutionally issued 'qualifications' has led us to the situation where the vast majority of people are turned off by politics, philosophy and literature. The condescending manner in which our intellectual elites talk, has led to their rejection by the masses. Our finest minds have unwittingly - and stupidly - played straight into the hands of the populists, who write and speak to impress their audience, not their fellow elitists.

Politicians canvas public opinion, so that they can win votes, but they turn to their advisors - Whitehall, think tanks and academia - when they come to rule. Political parties, media and the think tanks are all funded by commercial interests - influencing public opinion by sheer weight of noise. A rising crescendo of contradictory opinion on social media was drowned out by the views of a handful of academic elites, with their puppet strings pulled by those who control the purse.

It offended me the other day when the philosopher A C Grayling wrote that ordinary people are "narcissistic" when they publish their opinions. It was tantamount to writing "STFU, plebs".

We need to have another Gutenberg moment, where ordinary people can finally overcome the barriers that stop them from being heard. Blogging platforms like Wordpress go some of the way, but mainstream media, academia and politics are doing an excellent job of marginalising and discrediting the groundswell of public opinion on social media. The constant bombardment of "fake news" stories in the [non-fake] news seems like an attempt to get us to disregard the opinion of our peers, in favour of the approved opinions printed by newspaper tycoons.

We need to change our society - from boardrooms dominated by wealthy old men, government dominated by privileged elites and publishing dominated by academics - to a society that's representative. I'm not championing ignorance and lies. I'm not suggesting that brain surgery should be performed by amateurs. I'm saying that snobbery and elitism has reached the end of the road and everything that's good in the world will get torn apart by destructive forces, unless we listen to the proletariat: they outnumber the cruel and condescending ruling class.

"My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" -- Isaac Asimov

This quote seems to neatly encapsulate the battle between the stupid & ignorant and a class of people who know better than everybody else. Certainly, the letters after your name tell you that you're a cut above the rest don't they? You studied hard at university, so you must be more knowledgeable than those dimwitted fools who didn't attain the same standard of education as you, right?

As I wrote before, being anti-intellectual is not the same as being pro-ignorance.

Is it possible, that people are sick of being voiceless, unrepresented and talked down to by people who are so privileged that they have absolutely no idea what ordinary day-to-day life is like for most people? Is it possible that people are sick of being told that geopolitical complexities are beyond their comprehension and they should just leave things to the people who crashed the economy and started a bunch of wars, destabilising the world.

Is the desire to simplify problems and put things into terms and language that can be universally understood, the wrong approach? In my experience, jargon and impenetrable complexity exists only to justify pointless jobs and make talentless twits seem indispensable. If I was going to sack one person, would it be the front-line worker or the middle-manager? Is that a hard decision to make?

All this talk about facts and expert analysis: has it truly added any value?

Of course I want my bridges to be built by civil engineers, not amateurs, but I don't want career politicians, political commentators and intellectual masturbation.

The whole point about democracy is that the people govern themselves, through elected representatives. If our government and our media is not representative, because it's stuffed full of elitists, then we've completely failed to create a democratic society. It's not like a bunch of knuckle-dragging ignoramuses are saying they can do a better job of flying the plane than the pilot. It's literally that democracy has been perverted by the plutocracy.

Have a look at this list of autodidacts and ask yourself if they're ignorant fools who've contributed nothing to humanity.

Formal education, an obsession with conformity and the rejection of ordinary people's opinions, on the basis that they are stupid and ignorant, has led us to obscene wealth disparity and untold human misery. The reason why you don't believe it's true is because you're surrounded by people of the same socioeconomic class and you disregard the 'unreadable' comments of the great unwashed masses. The peasants are revolting.

Unless we give ordinary people a voice, they will never be able to develop their own philosophy for the 21st century, explore political ideas and challenge the plutocratic interests that seek to enslave them.

Until we end intellectual snobbery, we are on a collision-course with a popular uprising that will throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Tags: #politics #writing

This is a story about captive thinking...

How long did you have to stay in formal education before you were allowed to investigate your own hypotheses, pen and publish your own papers, unfettered by outside influence?

Your entire schooling was a sifting and sorting exercise, to allegedly find the 'brightest' minds. We have independent and selective schools. We stream children into sets and the 'smartest' are in the top set. The children all sit identical exams which are marked by people who are looking for specific answers: box tickers. The very last thing that our school system encourages is independent thought.

The most obedient and unquestioning children - completely devoid of any free-thinking tendencies - then carry on to university, where they will learn that further education is about massaging egos. The 'right' answer is the one that panders to the person who will be grading the work. You simply need to regurgitate answers that will satisfy the particular academic fetishes of the question setter, re-asserting the status quo and re-affirming the preconceived worldview of those seeking and holding tenure. Nobody ever got anywhere in academia by going against the grain.

Eventually, those who emerge with first-class and 2:1 degrees from red-brick universities, are a single homogenous mass of privileged middle-class people, who have had virtually identical life experiences. Any streak of independent thinking has been thrashed out of 'the cream of the crop' by an education system that attempts to make everything uniform and regular.

If you're learning a dead language - ancient Greek or Latin - then there's a finite limit to what can be studied. You read the classics and then you're tested on a subject which is unchanging, because you're poring over the few available texts. Plato and Socrates aren't going to be writing any more.

Many subjects have a common feature to the academic fetish: the enticement of studying something which you believe you can master, because the pool of available evidence is very unlikely to grow, given that the authors are long since dead.

In order to get published, you need a publisher who is prepared to print your work. Penguin won't even consider authors who are not at least undergraduates. Essentially, the body of literature is shifted away from a reflection of reality and towards the thoughts and views of the handful of people who demonstrated least capacity for free thinking.

Facebook started in universities, as a tool for sharing photos of student nights out. You can't choose your family, but you can choose your friends. All this talk about sophisticated algorithms feeding us fake news and things that we like: utter bullshit.

We have a natural propensity to build groups of socioeconomically and educationally similar people around ourselves. Your Facebook buddies are all from your top set in the selective school that you attended, university friends and people in professional roles just like you. It's your network that chooses what gets shown to you: no fancy algorithms needed.

And so, in this bubble - this echo-chamber - of groupthink, you've learned what to say to get your buddies coo'ing in agreement. You know what is speakable and unspeakable. You have learned never to challenge the status quo or say anything controversial.

If you're looking for a test of this hypothesis, let's look at grammar.

Why is it that when you detect bad grammar, you can't see beyond it? Whoever is expressing their point of view, it doesn't matter how astutely observed and significant their words... if there are grammatical errors, then that's all you can see. There's a kind of force-field that shames people into keeping their mouths shut, no matter how important their contribution.

When Michael Gove said that people don't want experts, in a way he's right. Of course, it's completely ridiculous to suggest that we want a layman flying a plane, performing brain surgery or even fixing the plumbing, but there's a point that's been overlooked by people who consider themselves well educated: you don't know fuck all, mate. Yes... and you did understand the double negative, didn't you?

Just take a look at recent events: a complete failure by politicians, journalists and other professional commentators to read the national mood and have even the slightest idea what's going on right under their noses. To paraphrase the immortal words of Donald Rumsfeld: you didn't know how much you didn't know.

I hate to use this turn of phrase, but ivory towers are rather called to mind. How can you even call yourself an expert, when your expertise is worthless? It's intellectual masturbation. Pointless make-work.

The monopoly that is held on thinking, through the control of publishing, the media and academia, means that there's a single uniform narrative that doesn't chime with reality. Nobody ever got fired for going along with the status quo. Nobody ever failed to get a research grant or lost professional credibility, because they were part of the pack: not challenging or advancing our thinking and theories in the slightest.

For sure, if you want qualifications, kudos and a safe job, it's best if you toe the line and kiss the arses above you. There's bound to be some powerful old man somewhere, who needs his ego regularly polishing. That's your real job: making powerful people feel smart.

This is the fundamental reason why everything gets bogged down with a lack of change: nobody is seeking truth, beauty, simplicity, incontrovertible fact, testable theory matching observable evidence. Instead, we're all just kissing the arse of somebody 'above' us: the question setter; the person marking the test; the old man who controls the money.

There's no place for free thinkers in the academic, political or commercial world.

Tags: #politics

This is a story about keeping a diary...

I nearly wrote about what I had for breakfast. I used to write a blog post and then throw it away and write another one: it was a useful warm-up exercise. Now, there's less quality control: I'm dealing with a lot of competing pressures and I have to write when I really don't feel like writing. It upsets me.

The very last thing that I want to do is start writing about movies and TV that I've watched and other totally banal things that are happening in my uneventful life. I could share pictures of food. Maybe I could write about a really big pooh that I had. No.

There's so much that needs to be written about and so little time. I have no time for shitty diary entries about whatever's grinding my gears at a particular moment. I hate when my writing is so tainted by the immediate demands of bashing words out at a given moment, rather than a natural flow of thoughts that have been slowly brewing and bubbling to the surface.

I was feeling horribly hungover until about now, so I didn't feel like writing earlier. What's the point of doing something when you don't feel like doing it? It's hardly going to be my best work, is it? What's the point of spending your most productive periods watching shitty TV, and cramming your creativity into snatched moments when you've just woken up, or you're tired?

I don't know why I'm so cranky, but I was feeling super annoyed with myself for publishing what I wrote earlier and I deleted it. I actually rewrote my original blog post about not drinking. I'm a little happier with it, but it's a reminder that I want and need to take my pet project seriously. Who wants to read about what I had for breakfast? Who wants to read crap that I wrote when I'm tired or hungover? What's the point of churning out crap?

The Internet is full of crap, and I'm not saying that what I write is great, but you've got to at least try, haven't you? The whole point of my project is that it's something I can be proud of. It might be low quality, but if it's not the best that I can do, then I'm knowingly doing a shit job, which is shameful.

Ideally, I'd like to write at 3pm every day. That feels like the sweet spot. I don't know why, it just is.

But.

Sometimes I want to write at 11am, because there's something I really want to write about.

Also.

I want to write at midnight, because there's a thought bouncing around inside my head and I just have to express it.

And.

I want to write at 8am, because I can't stop thinking about something.

One more thing.

I want to write at 5pm, because I want to write every day and getting it done at five in the evening means that I can relax for the evening.

However.

I want to write at 8pm because that's when it suits me at that particular moment.

Essentially, I'd rather write when it fits naturally, because then I'll write something that I'm pleased with, rather than something rushed. It's not a case of writing for writing's sake, even though it is. Who can possibly say in advance, when they're going to feel like writing?

I've noticed that I have a load of half-finished ideas and forgotten titles: things that I would have ordinarily written about. Instead, those things are lost. I need to start carrying a notebook and to keep better notes. I make a note of the title of a blog post when an idea really speaks to me, but I've written up none of those ideas up because I've not been in the mood when I've sat down at the keyboard.

I feel like I'm losing my mind, because there are so many things rattling around in my head, but they remain unexpressed.

How can I get what I want if I can't express what I want? Am I impossible to please?

It's impossible to know, when my world has been travelling, socialising, fitting in, people pleasing.

Everybody's going to go back to work soon. Time to go back to your job. Party's over.

For me, TV goes off. Writing starts. Writing is my work. Thinking is my world.

Tags: #writing

This is a story about being objective...

If you want to compare two measurements you have to use the same yardstick. If you are comparing two subjective things then how can you possibly draw any concrete conclusions?

At times, I have kept a mood diary. I rate my mood from 1 for worst to 10 for best. Who's to say that if I rate myself as "1" during prolonged depression that's comparable to "1" on a bad day when otherwise I've been feeling mostly normal?

During a lengthy period of depression, where nothing seems to hold any pleasure or enjoyment: subjectively, life is terrible. I also have periods when I'm generally in a much better mood, but something really shitty will happen. The shitty thing might feel like the end of the world at the time, but I'm not going to kill myself over it: I'll quickly get over it and move on with my life... so can it really be a "1" even if it feels like it at the time?

If your mood slowly improves or declines, over the course of several weeks or months, can you spot the trend? If you're suffering a lengthy depression, does your yardstick change? You might have a day where you just feel normal, but now you rate that 10, because it's the best you've felt in as long as you can remember.

Do you even remember how you used to feel, before you got depressed?

This might be why I have a tendency to invite hypomania, because at least it's clearly some kind of polar opposite from depression, even if I don't exactly feel "happy".

Defining "happy" has started to get really hard.

Going in search of happiness has been a disappointing experience. Anhedonia means the loss of pleasure and enjoyment of things that you used to get a kick out of. Finding that you no longer love the things you've always loved to do, is terrifying, because it's further confirmation of the way that you feel: "everything is shit".

I ended up completely rebasing my whole idea about what made a happy day:

• "Got to work only an hour late"
• "Didn't quit my job"
• "Only drank one bottle of wine instead of two"
• "Survived another week without being sacked"
• "Got out of bed at the weekend before it went dark"
• "Went to the shops"

I know that I must be unwell, because I used to have happy days that were more like this:

• "Cooked a healthy dinner"
• "Went for a walk or a bike ride"
• "Took some cool photographs"
• "Went to an event"
• "Made a new friend"
• "Did some work I'm proud of"

Now, I could do those things, but I don't feel like it. Often when I try to force myself to do things, I get very stressed about it and I find it really exhausting. When I get home I feel wiped out and that I shouldn't have bothered. I find myself out taking a walk and nothing takes my interest enough to photograph it. That's weird. I used to live behind the lens.

So, I started to bring in more objective measurements: movement data, alcohol consumption, number of social engagements, number of words written.

When I analyse the data, I think the most reliable predictors of my subjective feelings of depression, are movement and alcohol. Looking at last year, I was averaging 12,000 steps a day, and although I had alcohol binges, my average consumption was reasonably low. This year, I'm averaging 7,000 steps a day and drinking excessively nearly every day.

Now, you might think "walk more, drink less" would be the solution, but this assumes a causal relationship. Perhaps I was more in the mood to walk more and drink less, last year. Perhaps the relationship is the other way around and my poor lifestyle 'choices' are actually due to depression.

We often tell people to eat healthier and exercise more, to improve their mood, but perhaps it's the people who have a happier mood who are the ones more likely to eat right and be active. In actual fact, healthy eating and being more energetic could be a good predictor of happier people.

The cause-effect relationship is not always clear. Psychologists had published a paper that appeared to show that smiling made you feel happier. However, when the experiments were repeated, the results could not be reproduced. If you can't reproduce the results of your experiment, it's not good science.

A friend made the following amusing observation:

"People who are dying of dehydration can't just mime drinking water to quench their thirst"

I think this hits the nail on the head perfectly. While depressed people can eat healthier and go to the gym, they're just going through the motions. They're not getting the benefits that their happy counterparts are getting, and in fact it could be pure torture for them.

There's an experiment where a pigeon is fed at a computer-controlled random interval. What the researchers found was that whatever the pigeons were doing the first time they got fed, they then decided they needed to do again, in order to get fed. Let's say the pigeon was cocking its head to the side when the food was released, the pigeon will then start repeatedly cocking its head, and believe that it is causing the food to be released, when in fact it's completely random. Essentially, the pigeons had become superstitious.

It seems relatively random - unpredictable - when a depression is going to lift. Let's say you were trying acupuncture or homeopathy at the time when your mood started to improve: you might assume a causal relationship between the alternative treatment and the lifting of your depression.

Even a double-blind placebo trial is not exactly fair. Psychiatric medications do make you feel noticeably different. I would be able to tell whether I was taking an inert placebo pill, or something psychoactive. I would know whether I was in the control group or not. Placebos don't work if you know you're taking a placebo, so this could explain some of the mood improvements seen with antidepressants. The antidepressant might look effective, when compared with the control group, but it's the placebo effect.

Antidepressant clinical trials generally only take place over 6 to 12 weeks. Many common antidepressants take 6 weeks before their effects can even be felt. There is no focus on long-term outcomes in these trials, only that the medication should perform better than placebo.

Many trials of longer duration have shown that being unmedicated might be more effective in the long-term, than taking antidepressants. Pharmaceutical companies are not concerned with long-term outcomes. In order for a medication to be sold to the public, it merely has to be safe and proven to be marginally better than placebo.

You would have thought that taking antidepressants would be a lot better than not taking them, right? In actual fact, there might only be a 15% chance of you feeling better, but there's a 15% chance of unpleasant side effects. The very process of going to your doctor, being listened to by somebody nonjudgemental, and then feeling something even if it's not actually better, might convince you that you're improving, when actually your depression could be lifting quite naturally anyway.

Culturally, we have developed a strong superstitious belief in the power of medicine. We believe there's a pill for every ill. We believe that a man in a white coat can wave a magic wand and we'll be cured of any ailment; discomfort.

You only have to go into any pharmacy during the winter, to see signs that say "we have no medication to treat your common cold". The fact that doctors and pharmacists have to tell people not to waste their time with an incurable virus that has unpleasant but non-life-threatening symptoms, shows how strongly we believe in the power of medical science to save us from even a runny nose.

There is a clear difference between "feeling a bit sad" and depression. Depression is life-threatening. Depression has a massive impact on people's quality of life. However, we are often medicalising a non-medical problem.

If somebody who's feeling down visits their doctor and receives some medication that's basically a placebo that makes them feel a bit different - drugged - then their pseudo-depression will lift, because it was going to anyway. The non-judgemental medical consultation will also have marginally assisted.

However, those who have prolonged severe depression - to the point of suicidal thoughts - may find that their quality of life is actually reduced by medication, because it gives no real mood improvement, but it does have unpleasant side effects. The longer-term studies seem to back this up.

Through extensive research, I found a number of medications that are very rarely prescribed, but have been used for treatment-resistent depression. These medications are dopaminergic not serotonergic.

There are a whole raft of medications used to treat Parkinson's disease, that have been shown to exhibit antidepressant effects and can successfully treat patients who had previously been treatment-resistent.

In the most severe cases of depression, deep-brain stimulation has been employed with remarkable efficacy. Deep-brain stimulation had previously only been used on patients suffering from Parkinson's disease, to stop their tremors.

The idea of having electrodes implanted into my brain does not sound immensely appealing. Rats who have had electrodes implanted in their lateral hypothalamus will starve themselves to death, in order to press a lever thousands of times an hour, to stimulate their brains. Do humans who have had the same procedure, just stay at home hitting the button as often as they can? We have wandered into the territory of the neurological basis for addiction.

This is how I arrived at my decision to use a medication that helps people to quit smoking.

My very first addiction was to nicotine. I had no choice in the matter. My parents forced me to breathe their second-hand smoke. Because I was a tiny child, the concentration of nicotine in my bloodstream would have been very high. Second-hand smoke was responsible for inflicting an addiction onto me in my infancy.

In the UK, nightclubs, bars and pubs used to be filled with smoke, until July 2007. My addiction was therefore maintained through passive smoking. The timing of the ban seems to correspond with my first episodes of depression.

The stop-smoking drug called Zyban is actually France's most popular antidepressant. The French have found that Bupropion - the active ingredient in Zyban - is also effective for treating alcoholism. The link between addiction and depression seems clear.

I have a theory that my brain is in mourning. I was subjected to second-hand smoke throughout my childhood, and I spent a lot of time in smoky clubs and pubs. Nicotine withdrawal was something I was used to experiencing again and again, but what I'd never been through was a prolonged period of withdrawal, because I would regularly get a hit of second-hand smoke. It wasn't until the age of 27 that I was finally able to escape nicotine, because of the smoking ban, even though I have never smoked in my life. You would expect that such a prolonged addiction would produce a profound psychological effect, when my brain realised it was never getting any nicotine ever again.

I then experienced a later period of addiction. Although there were periods of abstinence, these never exceeded 3 or 4 months, and the total amount of time that I struggled with addiction is close to 5 years. The addiction was extreme. The drugs I was using have a much more profound effect than cigarettes. Still today, after 6 months of total abstinence, I get shaky sweaty hands and feel sick with anticipation at even the merest thought that I might be able to obtain some drugs.

Although Bupropion is a poor substitute for the addiction I once had, it does at least slightly soothe the aching sense of loss... the mourning.

Thinking about this more now, it seems obvious that I should mourn the loss of the love of my life. My addiction was so obsessive, overwhelming, all-consuming. How on earth can you let something like that go, with just a 28-day detox, or a 13-week rehab, if it's been a huge part of your life for years?

It should be noted that my mental health problems, which predated my addiction, compound the problems. To give an official name to my ailment: it's called dual-diagnosis. That is to say, Bipolar II & substance abuse. Yes, substance abuse is a kind of mental illness. Take a look at the kind of self-harm that addicts are inflicting and tell me that's normal behaviour. That is why substance abuse is classified as a disease.

Bipolar II is a motherfucker, because it comprises both clinical depression and hypomania, which are both destructive. Therefore, I'm actually suffering with triple-diagnosis and trying to fix 3 illnesses... although the hypomania is something that most people with Bipolar II wouldn't give up, and substance abuse is hard to stop because of addiction.

I haven't had a hypomanic episode in almost a year, and I've been abstinent from drugs of abuse for 6 months, therefore the final nut to crack is this damn depression, which might turn out to simply be the fact that - subconsciously - I'm depressed that I can't take drugs anymore. It feels like the love of my life has died, hence why I'm describing it as mourning.

How long it will last, I have no idea, and I've lost patience... hence resorting to a mild form of substitute prescribing. I successfully beat addiction once before using Bupropion. I beat it using progressively weaker drugs, until I was weaned from my addiction.

You wouldn't ask a smoker to quit without nicotine patches. Why would you expect somebody with an addiction to harder drugs could quit with willpower alone? The only slightly unusual thing is that the stop-smoking drug seems to be just as effective for addictions to things other than nicotine.

Perhaps we will one day treat all addictions as compassionately as we treat nicotine addictions. Certainly, there doesn't seem to be a lot of appliance of science, when it comes to treating addiction to anything other than smoking.

Subjectively, cold-turkey & willpower is a fucking awful approach to beating addiction. We have the scientific data to show that smokers are 4 times as likely to successfully quit, with nicotine replacement therapy and smoking cessation medications like Zyban.

Of course, a relapse would be disastrous, but haven't I already relapsed back into depression?

I've been on medication for 5 days now, and Bupropion should start to be effective within a week, so perhaps I will feel an improvement in my mood any day now. Certainly, my suicidal thoughts seem to have stopped, but that could be psychosomatic and also because my horrible contract ended.

You see what I mean about how hard it is to control the variables? Human lives are messy and complex. It takes vast quantities of data to be gathered over many years, not a 6 to 12 week trial with 30 people.

Also, there's an argument to say that your subjective yardstick is altered by your experiences. Your perfect 10 can become unattainable, except through the use of powerful narcotics. Does that also mean that the best you can ever hope to feel is mildly depressed, now that the bar has been set so high? My only hope is that my brain "resets" itself over time. The brain can downregulate parts that are overactive, in order to maintain equilibrium, so it can also upregulate... eventually. The big concern is neurotoxicity: have I irreversibly "burnt out" the reward centres of my brain?

6 months isn't long though. I'm going to see what happens if I can make it to a year. Presumably, there might be marginal improvements that have happened already, but are too subtle for me to perceive. The data actually bodes well: instead of spiking back up into hypomania, things have plateaued during the last couple of months.

This unethical self-experimentation doesn't yield any results worth publishing but it does give clues as to what could be worth researching. A sample size of one is not statistically significant, but it's important to me, because my life depends on it.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #mentalhealth #addiction

This is a story about reality checks...

When you're amplifying a signal - for example, a microphone connected to a public address loudspeaker - then you have to be careful that you don't get the microphone too close to the speakers, or else you will get horrible feedback.

My blog is read by friends who've known me for years & years, but I very rarely meet up with them. Sometimes I get an email or a Facebook message, and it's jaw-dropping that they understand me and what I've been going through so well. The usual trite platitudes (e.g. "why don't you try getting more exercise?") are certainly applicable to anybody and it does show that you care, but it's a wonderful experience when I communicate with friends and they've got all this background info on me.

Regarding my blog, only very rarely will anybody ever present an alternative opinion, or challenge me. I think I have a fairly persuasive manner of putting a point across, and I write with a great deal of certainty; forcefulness. It must be somewhat intimidating: the idea of potentially entering into debate with me.

A strange thing starts to happen when you think about things in isolation too much. Because I work with boolean algebra for a living, I start to think of everything as binary: there's a right answer and a wrong answer. I can use a lot of deductive reasoning to arrive at a set of beliefs that evolved purely from logic - a priori - as opposed to being shaped by experiences, discussions and human relationships. I labour the same points, over and over again, becoming ever more certain in my convictions and better and better at defending my position; entrenched in my stance.

It's quite satisfying to present your thesis quod erat demonstrandum.

Weirdly, if nobody calls you out on anything, then you assume that you must have made a valid unassailable point. When somebody does call you out on something, then things get a bit more fun, because you have to decide whether to dig into your trenches and defend, or whether to concede the validity of an alternative viewpoint that had not been considered.

I used to have a certain attitude that could be surmised as follows:

"Fuck you. You're wrong"

Once you have constructed a fairly infallible piece of logical reasoning, being told "no, I disagree" is the most frustrating thing in the world. You can't just disagree with something. It's point/counterpoint. You need to make your own reasoned counterargument. Contradiction is just stupidity. It's very frustrating to deal with people who don't even realise that they're complete idiots.

I deal with idiots for a job: they're called computers. If I tell a computer to jump off a cliff, it will do it. Computers just follow my instructions to the letter. Computers follow my logic with 100% precision. Being a computer programmer quickly teaches you how to logically reason things, leaving few loopholes. If you leave loopholes, these are called 'bugs'. Bugs will cause rockets to explode, trains to derail or aeroplanes to crash.

And so, a computer programmer arrives in the real world, and they're experts at spotting cognitive dissonance. "Fucking immigrants, coming over here, taking our jobs"... but, but, but you're an immigrant, stutters the programmer, incredulous that somebody could be so stupid as to not see the flaw in what they're saying.

Anyway, I'm not even part of the debate. I'm watching from the sidelines, writing my manifesto; proselytising my theology; broadcasting my dogma. Nobody is questioning the validity of anything I'm saying. Nobody is challenging my assumptions. Nobody has yet said "you're wrong, and this is why...".

Even to say the word manifesto sends a shiver down my spine. I fear that I might have gone mad. There are so many vilified people and policies, linked to a manifesto. In Britain we are not particularly terrified of communism. Being called "red", "Marxist" or "Trot" is not even pejorative, to me. However, if you were to point out that Anders Breivik also wrote a manifesto, and so did Hitler, then I start to feel a little defensive.

But, how the hell are you supposed to develop a political ideology, if you don't write it down? If you can't express a set of values and ideals for the betterment of humanity, then what? Am I only allowed to select from a menu of just a few mainstream choices? Of course, this is what party politics wants. The idea is that we should vote for party, not policy. If we voted for policies that we wanted as citizens, we'd be getting dangerously close to having a democracy.

If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it.

I worry like crazy about how isolated and weird I'm getting, honing my ideas and developing my system of values, without very often discussing what I'm thinking over a pint of beer, with a good friend in the pub. Obviously, one must be mindful that Mein Kampf was conceived while Hitler was in hospital, and started when he was incarcerated. It's mad to speak this aloud, but I'm always asking myself: "am I more like Hitler or Jesus".

Christian values are actually pretty cool. Forget the ten commandments, because, I mean, rape isn't even on there. Graven images: no frigging way! Rape: no problem.

Jesus Christ was an awesome dude. He basically founded the Occupy Wall Street movement when he turned over the tables of the money lenders in Herod's Temple. Does that make him an anti-semite though? Could that have been a hate crime, given that it was an attack on Jewish businessmen, in a holy Jewish temple. Certainly a controversy worth pondering.

Then you get to thinking that Jesus Christ, The Prophet Mohammed and Adolf Hitler, all thought that earning interest should be abolished. Hitler was a socialist, as was Stalin, but then so was Tony Blair and he started an illegal war that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. It's all so damn confusing.

To my mind, if you have a political system that's successful for the vast majority of people, the educated bourgeois can go to hell. To hell with your freedom of speech. To hell with your attempts to pervert government to better serve your own needs, at the expense of the majority. Go buy yourself a desert island if you want to run things in your own selfish interests.

Eventually, I arrive at the decision that it might be better to just write a utopian novel that merely disguises my manifesto. It should be no surprise that I've extensively read Orwell and Huxley. However, the dystopian novels seem to have become instruction manuals for our governments. Perhaps novels are powerfully influential, in all the wrong ways.

I love the Roman idea of the forum. The Internet discussion forum is a wonderful invention. The online communities are a lovely place to inhabit.

My writing and debating skils - or lack thereof - were honed in the arena of the online discussion forum. In a way, I did a lot of growing up, by reading, writing, trolling, debating and very often being shot down in flames.

Now, I have brought those writing skills, and the skill of making a reasoned argument expressed in a succinct and persuasive manner, to bear in the world of blogging.

I deliberately chose a non-Wordpress platform, because I wasn't looking for yet another blog and to connect with yet more bloggers. All the bloody comments sections are filled with other bloggers, link building back to their own blogs. It's such a ridiculous echo-chamber of people all clamouring for readers. How can you compose your thoughts and reach conclusions, when embryonic ideas are critiquéd so immediately?

I could have started to write on Medium, and I'm thrilled that my friend whose startup powers this blog, is now working for them. It might sound like intellectual snobbery, but there is a higher standard of writing and comments on Medium, than anywhere else on the 'Net right now.

But really, the biggest win for my blog has been to inform a bunch of my old friends from my discussion forum days, what the hell happened to me when I "went off the rails". It's been an opportunity to defend myself against malicious rumours. It's been an opportunity for me to ward off the shame and sense of failure, for things that happened.

Finally, the nicest thing happened the other day: I met up with a friend at the pub, and he reassured me that I'm still the same person who he knew, all those years ago, before the whole horrid mess in the middle. It's an immense relief to know your personality hasn't changed, your brain hasn't been damaged and the person that friends once knew, still lives and breathes and hasn't been replaced by some demonic creature.

Life is pretty hard without feedback, but equally, it's been useful to write at length without the debate that so ground me down and made me unwell before. It's a horrible thing, to be so misunderstood, and to feel like the people who are supposed to care about you are working against you. It's so hard to argue with multiple people at once. It's so hard to defend yourself against a mob.

Publishing is super powerful. Publishing is like a megaphone, to shout down the bullies.

However, the occasional reality check has very high value.

Tags: #writing #politics #friends