This is a story about getting out of practice...

My friend Ben taught me how to program a computer when we were kids. I floundered on my own for a while when our family moved away from Oxford, to Dorset, but eventually I had managed to write a couple of computer games before I even had any proper lessons at school and college.

I've been a professional programmer for the best part of 20 years, but my recent ups and downs really hurt my confidence, and also meant that my skills got a bit rusty. It is a little bit like riding a bike, but the jargon changes and the syntax of what you have to type looks subtly different, but it's all still the same binary ones and zeros underneath the covers.

I nearly had a meltdown today, when I was set a programming test that's the sort of thing that you'd give to a first year Computer Science student. I feel a little insulted that I'm being asked to do things like that, when I've got such a strong CV. However, IT is riddled with managers, architects and other people who haven't touched code for years and years. I guess it's a test to see if you can roll your sleeves up and get hands on or not.

I'm getting really worried that there's a tech bubble that's going to burst, and bring down the whole economy. When I think that there are so many jobs that are centred around social media marketing, digital campaigns and mining the vast amounts of data that are gathered about website users and their browsing habits... it's all a lot of bullshit. At the end of the day, people have lost sight of the fundamental principle of creating products and services that add value to the real economy.

Why is it that a company can have a massive valuation and raise loads of money, just because the number of people using their website is growing exponentially? Why is it that a bank, or other financial services company, can be one of the most profitable enterprises in the world, when they don't actually produce anything of tangible value? The markets are just supposed to route money efficiently around the real economy, to grease the wheels of commerce.

I started to get panicky all of a sudden, and worry that I won't be able to get myself into a position to weather the storm before it hits. But then, when you think about it, it doesn't matter unless you're just coming up to retirement and hoping to cash in your casino chips and sit on your arse for the rest of your days until you die.

I don't begrudge people their retirement, but considering the huge population growth, the massively extended life expectancy, plus the low birth rates, retiring at the same age as the previous generation is just not feasible.

It is really sad when somebody retires, and they're so burnt out that they hardly get to enjoy it. It seems that life is very much lived backwards. When we are young, fit, healthy, energetic and full of life, we are also heavily indebted and have to work as many hours as we can just to pay the rent and try to keep a car on the road so we can get to work. Then, when we retire, we have heaps of time and money (hopefully) but our health is failing and death is stalking us.

But I'm only talking in abstract terms, because something different happened to me. I didn't quite catch the ultimate wave, but I caught the tail end of a pretty wild ride. For those lucky enough to get into IT at some point from the 1960s to the 1990s, we have enjoyed boom times that seem to have kept rolling.

Perversely, I was a little disappointed when the millenium bug didn't cause every computer in the entire world to explode, as the clock struck midnight and we rolled into Y2K. By the year 2000, I was already bored and disillusioned with programming, and I had even applied to University to retrain as a Clinical Psychologist.

It seems churlish, to be dissatisfied in my position. At the age of 20 I was an IT contractor, taking advantage of the fact that there was a huge brain drain, as most of the best programmers were working on fixing the millenium bug. I had a 20 minute phone interview, and then started work a few days later... doubling my salary in the blink of an eye.

In a way though, you have to consider the bigger picture. How many years of my life were spent locked away indoors, hunched over a keyboard, because I was unpopular and ostracised at school? The bullying I endured was pretty relentless until I finally got to college, so in a way, I have always felt some entitlement to the wealth that compensated those miserable years.

Money doesn't buy you maturity though, and it doesn't repair low self-esteem. It does, however, broaden your horizons. As the year 2000 rolled into 2001, I was taking 5-star luxury holidays around the world. I didn't rub people's noses in it, but I hadn't yet begun to feel that the debt of karma that the Universe owed me had started to balance out.

I bought a yacht and moored it in an expensive marina in Hampshire, age 21, but this still didn't seem exceptional to me. I still felt that I had somehow missed out on a lot of what other people had done: to feel popular, to feel fashionable, to feel loved, and have girlfriends that you really fancied. I still had crushing inadequacies and a poor self-image.

Getting into kitesurfing gave me work:life balance and brought me a social group that finally meant I started to feel like I had friends I'd chosen, rather than just the group of geeks, thrust together for strength in numbers, against a world hostile to us outcasts.

The dead time at work, when I had previously just been struggling with boredom, was now filled with planning kitesurfing trips and chatting with my friends on the kiteboarder forum. My bosses were still happy that the work was getting done, but I was spending 80% of my time and energy looking at wind and tide forecasts, reading and writing forum posts.

Moving to the coast meant access to the beach every day, and eliminated the need to experience kitesurfing vicariously midweek, through an internet discussion forum. However, it also meant I no longer had anything entertaining during the boredom.

Eventually, the boredom led to me obsessing about my job, and pushing hard for promotion, and then to burnout. Work:life balance is important.

I've been trying to piece everything back together again in a way that's not simply hopelessly nostalgic for bygone years. If I can get on an even keel again financially, of course I can start going on kitesurfing trips again, but the really important thing that I lost was the social aspect, and having another passion as well as work, that could keep me busy midweek.

A lot of my fear of getting back into the working routine is that I know that simply living to work is not healthy or sustainable, and I really have very little passion for IT anymore... it's just a job, and a job that I can do blindfolded with one arm tied behind my back.

I am sorry if I come across as ungrateful for my opportunities, but there's more to life than a well paid job, and I have so few of the other elements that make up a happy little life.

Would you believe that some of my happiest times in recent years have been when living in the park or the hostel? There was at least a group of other no-fixed-abode bums like me, and we formed strong social bonds. Having a group of friends turns out to be a lot more important than a healthy bank balance.

So, getting back to work is a necessary evil, but it won't stabilise me and give me any quality of life, you might be surprised to learn.

I overcame that fear, and did that technical test, and I impressed myself that I can still apply myself when I need to. However, it seems a shame that our modern lives drive us to live to work, rather than work to live. I feel certain that this must be behind the mental health epidemic that is sadly getting worse and worse.

I'm going to grow carrots, come the revolution

Tags: #computing #career #bullying #childhood

This is a story about tl;dr...

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some other delightful highlights:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last year in a single graph

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

This is a story about an unholy trinity...

At a hotel I was given a voucher to connect to the internet. As you can see, it was foe pawn. I'm not sure if I used it foe pawn, but I possibly used it for porn, amongst my other general internet browsing.

Let me tell you about something that's a fairly irresistible combination: drugs, pornography and masturbation. Drugs and sex - i.e. chemsex - are bad enough, but there's a limitless supply of pornography out there on the internet, and given a limitless supply of drugs, you can get seriously messed up.

People who are dealing with the chemsex crisis talk about an unholy trinity of drugs: GBL/GHB, Crystal Meth and Meow Meow (M-CAT). These drugs are endemic amongst a group of promiscuous homosexual men, seeking to reach unimaginable highs from drug-fuelled sexual congress.

What happens when the secret is out? What happens when the wider, mostly heterosexual community finds out that having sex on drugs is many, many times more enjoyable than sex or drugs on their own?

Let me tell you, from bittersweet experience, that once you have tried chemsex, your ideas about pleasure and sexual ecstasy will be irreversibly corrupted. You can't un-experience things like that. You can't forget what you know. You can't un-feel what you felt.

Of course, 99% of people know that drugs are bad, and dangerous and will kill you just from looking at them, right? Well, unfortunately, people are discovering that the hard-line propaganda just isn't true, and the warning message is somewhat lost in the prohibitionist bullshit. So every cautionary tale is regarded with suspicion, or completely disregarded altogether.

In actual fact, there is so much taboo around drugs, sex, homosexuality, masturbation, fetishes... even just feeling horny is something we don't talk about openly. We are almost stuck in the Dark Ages when it comes to feeling guilty about our sexual desires, and the fact that we are inescapably driven to satisfy them.

At the end of the day, you can't fight hunger, you can't fight thirst, and you can't fight your libido. Those are the 3 things that ensure the survival of humanity as a species of animals. I know a small handful of us try to rise above the level of beasts, and act a little less like animals by using our higher brain functions, but we'll still die if we don't eat and drink, and we will actually devolve if the intelligent members of humanity don't reproduce.

Masturbation and drugs are the ultimate ways to thwart nature though. Once an animal has found something it prefers to eating, drinking and fucking, it's pretty screwed in terms of its survival prospects, and the likelihood of it passing on its genes. You could see this as a good thing: eventually addicts and wankers will die out. However, evolution is ridiculously slow, and chemistry is ridiculously fast. Checkmate, humans.

The above picture is an advertising campaign, suggesting that people don't try Crystal Meth "even once". The advice is quite reasonable. Meth is highly addictive, and the best way to not become addicted to drugs is to never take them in the first place.

By the same token, beating addiction sounds fairly simple. Just don't take drugs "even once" and hey presto, your addiction is cured. But things aren't that simple, unfortunately.

The brain is amazing at making connections between things. I would hope that everybody is familiar with Pavlov's dog, that started to salivate whenever a bell was rung, because it knew it was going to get fed. The brain had connected the sound of a bell ringing with getting food, and something that is normally completely unconnected with food and eating, became linked in the brain of this dog.

I would hardly consider eating food to be an orgasmic experience, but small amounts of dopamine - the pleasure chemical - are released in the brain every time we eat. It's natural that we should have evolved a brain that teaches us to eat... eating is what keeps us alive. Eating food is a kind of addiction, if you like. We eat because we get a pleasurable reward from doing it. We are satisfying a craving.

Sex and masturbation are a bit easier to understand. We get a much bigger dopamine hit every time we are sexually stimulated in a state of arousal, and another big hit of dopamine if we achieve an orgasm. It's much easier to see that sexual behaviour is the same as any other addictive behaviour. We feel a craving for pleasure: we get horny, we want to fuck or masturbate. We then satisfy this craving, with sexual acts, and then we are rewarded with pleasure.

However, the brain has natural systems to curb our enthusiasm for round-the-clock eating, masturbation and sex. After food or orgasm, a protein called prolactin is released from the pituitary gland, which signals to the brain that it's time to take a break from those pleasure-seeking activities. The amount of dopamine that's released if you continue to eat or fuck, is virtually nothing... you get no pleasure out of it, until the prolactin levels drop again.

The problem with drugs is, that they're almost always rewarding, provided you take enough of them. Sure, a tolerance builds up in your brain, but you can usually take bigger and bigger doses, and still get high.

If you combine drugs with sex/masturbation, you've got a problem... just like Aaron on his injected Crystal Meth, you might want to fuck or masturbate until the drugs wear off.

Now, if we imagine that Aaron is like that dog that salivates whenever the bell is rung... poor Aaron is going to want drugs whenever he gets horny, or he's going to get horny whenever he gets high on drugs. It's a vicious circle.

The only way that you're not going to feel horny is if you have your sexual functions interfered with, by medication or surgery. Castration for a man, removal of ovaries for a woman... the elimination of the sex hormones: testosterone, oestrogen and progesterone. That goes some way to eliminating your libido, but then, what are you if you're no longer a sexual being? You're certainly no longer human.

Drugs produce a temporary and mostly reversible effect, but the longer that you abuse drugs for, and the more of a link that is made in the brain between drug-induced pleasure and other actions, the harder it will be to undo those drug cravings, given the same stimuli.

When the stimuli is your own libido, you probably don't fancy becoming a eunuch. The only option is to de-link sex and drugs. That means having a lot of mediocre sex and joyless masturbation.

Once you start to realise how the brain works, you can start to disentangle why you do the things that you do. Why do you drink coffee? Because it contains the bitter plant alkaloid called caffeine, which causes dopamine to be released in your brain, which is pleasurable, rewarding. Why do you smoke cigarettes? Same reason. Why did you copulate for 30 seconds and produce a screaming shitting incontinent midget that can't even feed itself? Same reason.

If you truly want to elevate yourself above the level of the beasts, you would have to make yourself asexual and release yourself from the tiresome bother of having to eat and drink. However, you'd probably get so engrossed in some interesting area of research that you'd forget to eat and die of starvation. Plus, you wouldn't have any kids, so you'd just die in obscurity as some kind of eccentric hermit.

Of course you don't have to take things to the other extreme, and test the very limits of human ecstasy, pleasure... to get as high as it's possible to get. I really don't recommend it. It's bad for your health and probably pretty deadly. Everything else in life will be compared to that gold standard forever afterwards, and it's hard to get over the disappointment that nothing in your life is ever going to be as enjoyable.

This is a cautionary tale, but it's more an honest conversation that people are running screaming away from, because they're prudish, repressed, uptight, shamed by taboos and social norms into a culture of silent guilt about normal, natural human things that every person feels.

But there's another reason why some people go down the path of hedonism, while others go down the path of quiet family life: oxytocin. The bonding hormone is released when you stroke your dog or your cat. The hormone is released when you see your kids, and give them a cuddle.

Oxytocin is responsible for curbing our urge to seek pleasure, by giving us a warmer, longer-lasting kind of pleasure. If the dopamine hit you get from an orgasm is like injecting Crystal Meth, then the opioids that are released due to oxytocin are like injecting Heroin. You're happy to sit around, monged out in your pyjamas all day with your kids, because you're wrapped up in the cotton-wool opiate hit of a Heroin-esque oxytocin ride.

Nature wants you to change modes once you've reproduced, from the pleasure seeking fuck machine, into an obedient servant to your helpless infant(s). As a parent, your life is over. It's time to concentrate on stuffing calories into the greedy mouths of your offspring until you finally expire from exhaustion. It's a marathon, not a sprint, so having your brain calmed down and full of satisfying all-day pleasure chemicals while you're fulfilling your parenting duties works perfectly.

The most tragic thing is when these world collide. When children are conceived in the middle of a period of drug abuse fuelled sexual activity, it's going to be nearly impossible for your brain to switch modes. The amount of pleasure you get from your shitting, vomiting, snot-covered offspring is not going to be able to compete with powders and pills.

It might sound unpalatable, but if you're going to be a drug addict, you should be gay or be a wanker. Becoming a parent might provide an incentive to get clean and sober, but you're going to have a tough job kicking a habit and bonding with your child. That tiny bit of chest-swelling warm fuzzy feeling you get when you put your tiny baby on your chest... yeah, you're not really going to notice that if you're on a massive comedown.

It might seem like I'm a reckless risk-taker, and that I've come dangerously close to ruining my life, but that's the whole point: I've got no dependents. I've actually been really careful. The main thing to be careful about is to not spawn any offspring you're in no position to look after, because you're struggling with addiction.

But this isn't a lecture. This isn't me being holier-than-thou. Actually, it's me saying that I understand why families fall apart, why parents don't love their kids enough, why babies get born to junkies and hopeless drug-addled fathers.

One of the main reasons I have such a high metabolism, I believe, is because my Mum wasn't expecting to get pregnant with me, and when she found out she was pregnant, she then decided to lay off the booze and the fags. The withdrawal from nicotine and alcohol while I was in the womb would have meant that highly elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, would have passed into my developing body, through the placental blood.

As an organism, whatever advantage we can get in our environment would have been crucial to our survival in a world that was out to kill us, 10,000 years ago. A baby that is going to be born into a world with little food and many predators should have a completely different metabolism from a baby that's going to be born into a land of plenty. You can't run away from the wolves very fast with a big fat blubbery baby, and there's no point in having a baby that's really good at storing energy in fat reserves if there aren't any excess calories around.

Addiction is just the same as hunger or thirst, and so, babies that are born to mothers who are recovering addicts will be affected as if they were starving: low birth weight, and the epigenetic expression of genes that cause features to create a skinny scavenger, constantly in a state of nervous tension, high alertness.

While it's easy to look upon me with ignorant, stupid eyes, and assume that my life has been directed by my choices, in actual fact, so much of what we think and say and do, and how our body and brain responds to circumstances which are very much out of our hands, is a result of a chain of causation that is far more impenetrable than a trite oversimplification.

What does it tell you that I've been able to take drugs like Cocaine, Heroin and Crystal Meth and not become addicted? What do your simplistic ideas about drug abuse tell you about that particular fact?

Drug addiction is a more complex relationship than simply a person and a chemical. Drugs are social. Drugs are sexual. Drugs are societal. Drugs are cultural.

Yes, it's true that the right combination of a drugs and activities associated with drug taking can form a nearly unbreakable bond in your habits, behaviour and actual brain programming, to the point that escaping addiction will be virtually impossible.

However, only a fool would write people off and say that somebody can never change. One thing is for certain about the brain: it's a plastic organ, that can adapt itself in amazing ways. One thing is for certain about humans: they're adept at handling almost anything the world can throw at them.

To stigmatise a huge group of people, to ask them to hang their heads in shame, to ask them to shoulder other people's guilt, to pay for crimes they're not responsible for, to be the black sheep, to be the scapegoats... it's a horrible thing to do, to sit in judgement over somebody who is 99.5% identical to you.

Ok, so you bought a dog, and a house, and copulated and made some kids and now you feel all smug and fulfilled, and you'd like to tell other people how they made bad choices and you're morally superior. Well, guess what? You're made of the same stuff. You'd respond just the same as the people you're judging, if you were put in their situation. Your brain works in exactly the same way.

You should really learn about how to lead people back to the right path, rather than trapping them onto the path they're on, which can only lead to their early death... a death that you share collective responsibility for.

I had to complain to the manager of this coffee shop that I couldn't see my veins in the toilet. Caffeine good, Heroin bad, right?

Tags: #drugs #sex #addiction #parents #childhood

This is a story about the value of life...

According to my anecdotal observations, people are taking more and more unnecessary risks with their lives and health. I've been heavily involved in this trend, since my teens, when I fought a fairly cowardly childhood with some fairly extreme stuff.

Everything from adrenalin sports to body modification seems to be going through exponential growth. The limit of what is survivable by a human seems to inspire a new generation of people who are pushing the envelope further than ever thought possible.

Let's talk about extreme sports, firstly. The guy who taught me how to rock climb had himself learnt using unimaginably dangerous equipment. The ropes had no stretch to them, and a fall could break your back just from the hard shock of the rope stopping you so suddenly. A lot of the equipment was improvised: large engineering nuts were threaded through with a bit of thin rope. People didn't even use harnesses to abseil and belay a lot of the time, they just let the rope slip around their bodies.

Kitesurfing might look extreme to you, but 15 years ago you basically hooked yourself up to an enormous kite that you couldn't release in an emergency, and you couldn't 'de-power'... that is to say that you couldn't let the wind go out of it in a strong gust, you were just yanked into the sky or dragged along.

I can't really talk about skydiving too much, as I've only done 21 jumps, but I was pulling my parachute at 5,000ft... plenty of time to pull my reserve parachute if I had a malfunction. Special care was taken to ensure that every skydiver was far apart from each other in the air, and it was scary when somebody fell past me and then opened their parachute only a few hundred metres away. If somebody crashes into you at 125mph, thousands of feet in the air, it's not going to end well.

Now we have climbers who will happily jump off a suspended platform and fall the whole length of their climbing ropes, just for the thrill... like a bungee jump. They trust their equipment so much that they actually choose to fall. Most of what I was taught as a climber by my old-school mentor was simply "don't fall".

Now we have kitesurfers who are jumping over hard objects that could kill them. One of the UK's best known kitesurfers famously jumped over Worthing Pier. I've had two close encounters with a pier myself, one of which destroyed my kite, and the other involved a jet-ski rescue of a friend's kite. When I learnt to kitesurf, the idea was to stay away from rocks, cliffs, buildings and anything hard that you might be splatted against by the pull of your kite.

Now we have skydivers who are wearing wingsuits and flying within a couple of feet of rocks, trees, cable cars, bridges, roads, houses... just about anything on a steep mountainside. When they open their parachute, they have barely enough time to unzip their arms from their wingsuits so that they can grab the control toggles, let alone pull the cutaway and reserve handle... but the reserve parachute would never open in time if they had a malfunction anyway.

Given that a parachute will malfunction every 10,000 jumps, and there's hard data that supports that statistic, then you can precisely say what the probability is of you dying from a BASE jump or wingsuit flight with a low canopy opening.

I've known people who've had accidents climbing, kitesurfing and skydiving, so why would I continue to do these dangerous things? Well, there has been incredible improvement in the quality of the equipment in just the last 15 years. However, I think the main reason is that us adrenalin junkies never think that an accident is going to happen to us... we tell ourselves that we're too skilled, too careful, too lucky... accidents happen to other people because they made a mistake. We all think we're infallible.

By my mid twenties I had experienced plenty of close calls, but thankfully never been hospitalised.

Getting into the extreme difficulty grades of rock climbing starts to be a game of russian roulette. The 'protection' that you can place to save your life if you do end up falling, starts to be very inadequate in certain parts of the climb. You have to accept that injury or death is going to occur if you fall in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Pulling off the hardest kitesurfing tricks can actually injure you pretty badly, even though you're doing them on water. One of the first times I tried to do a 360 degree spin, I accidentally looped my kite and hit the water going at about 40mph. It doesn't sound like much, but it could have easily broken a rib. The higher you go, and the stronger the wind, the more chance of you crashing into the water at high speed, and the more the water acts like a solid surface.

Waves are probably the biggest danger to a kitesurfer though, and without your kite you can be in big trouble. I once got pummelled into the seafloor down in Brighton, catching waves that had reached the size of houses. It was only because my kite pulled me to the surface and onto the beach that I didn't drown. Sadly, somebody we used to kitesurf with in Southbourne was not as lucky when he lost his kite and perished trying to swim to shore in big waves.

For a skydiver, you can obviously calculate the risk of having a double parachute failure, but most injury and death seems to occur when trying to land, when your parachute is actually open. At the place where I learnt, there was a motorway, a high-speed railway line, loads of buildings and trees and all sorts of other hard things that you could fly into, that would injure or kill you.

The very first time that I jumped, my lines were all twisted up. Not exactly a malfunction, but sometimes people have to cut away from their main parachute and open their reserve because the line twists are causing them to turn in a tight spiral downwards. Why was it not more off-putting that I actually had a problem with my parachute to sort out, while dangling in a harness, thousands of feet above the hard ground?

As you can see, I'm above a fairly major road junction, and heading towards a nearby town. The ground is approaching at over 120mph. I chose to jump out of the plane. Nobody made me do this. I decided to take the risk. An accident will never happen to me, right?

What I can say about all of this, is that personal experience is a very poor way to judge risk, but it's an unavoidably human thing to do... to base our perception of danger on our own individual lives, rather than looking at the wider statistics.

I've had a lot of hospital visits during my recent troubles, but I have no lasting health damage. Obviously, I never died. I didn't even feel much pain or discomfort that I can remember. To all intents and purposes, life has taught me that no matter what ridiculous risks I take, I seem to be immortal and virtually indestructible.

If I look at all the times I've put my life on the line, put my head in the lion's mouth, as it were... statistically I shouldn't be around to tell this tale. I should be more mindful of the fact that I'm one of the lucky ones... the one that got away, by the skin of his teeth. However, that's not how my psychology works. For every brush with death, that just seems to reinforce my belief that I can get away with unimaginable risk taking.

Why should it not be that way? For every harrowing event that you survive, why shouldn't it make you braver, less risk-averse. To all intents and purposes, the Universe seems to be speaking to you... that your life was spared, that you escaped catastrophic injury or death, just proves that you're special, you're different... you can put your life on the line and get away with it.

Here in the UK there are no predators, no wars, no unavoidable hazards. The biggest risk to your life is a road traffic accident. So, does it therefore seem logical that my latest adrenalin sport is playing in traffic? Deliberately dodging black cabs, red double-decker busses and Toyota Priuses driven by people who can barely drive.

I sawed my bicycle's handlebars down to the same width as my shoulders, so that I can fit through ridiculously small gaps, provided I keep my elbows in and ride like hell. Occasionally I see a gap, and then decide to abort at the last minute because I sense that something's not quite right. The sensible thing would be to avoid those touch-and-go situations altogether, but more often than not I'll lay my life on the line simply for the thrill of it.

I never really think that living on the edge like this is disrespectful to those who haven't been as lucky as me. I do feel guilty about wasted NHS resources where I've been treated in hospital, but when doctors have told me how close I came to dying, it doesn't really have the intended effect.

Trying to scare somebody into taking less risks doesn't work, as we have seen with smoking. Printing "SMOKING KILLS" in big bold letters on cigarette packets looks particularly ironically ineffective, when a smoker is reaching into that packet twenty times for a 'cancer stick' before discarding the empty wrapper, and purchasing another box of fags.

I mentioned body modification, right at the start of this blog post. People are willingly submitting themself to the tattoo artist's needles, or the plastic surgeon's knife. These procedures are not without danger, but they are also painful, uncomfortable, as well as producing irreversible bodily changes.

You would have thought that people would have seen tattoo disasters, or had one of their own, and decided that making a permanent alteration to your body is a foolish thing to do. However, we find the opposite... once people have one tattoo, they often get more, and some people are going further, with piercings, stretched earlobes & lips, subdermal implants, deliberate scarring of their skin.

Ok, so London is gritty and urban, but there's a whole subculture where huge tattoos are totally normal and accepted. In every hipster cafe and trendy bicycle repair shop, you're likely to be served by people who have whole arms covered in richly coloured tattoos, necks, hands... these aren't the kind of thing you can cover up.

If you earn shit wages as a coffee shop barista or whatever, and there is literally zero hope of you ever being able to afford to buy your own home, why wouldn't you do something with your money that feels good? Blast all your cash on booze and tattoos. Money is just fun tokens... it doesn't buy you a lifestyle anymore, for most young people.

The long-term hopes of people have been dashed. There's no career ladder anymore. There are no good jobs full stop. There's just student debt and some low wage, and whatever you can do to fill the empty void. The idea of saving money for a rainy day is just insulting, when it's a hand-to-mouth existence.

This counter-culture of piercings, tattoos, beards, moustaches, vibrant hair colours and extreme haircuts. This fixation on image. So many selfies... I can empathise. I feel that I know where it's coming from. What have you got, other than the skin you live in, and the clothes on your back? Feel good in your own skin, because you'll never have a home to call your own, to feel good in.

You might as well get that big tattoo on your neck, because you're never going to work in an office, hoping to get that big promotion, like your Dad did. You might as well spend all your disposable income on alcohol and drugs and expensive coffee, because you're never going to be able to afford to settle down and start having kids in a nice big family home, as a housewife, like your Mum did.

The extreme sports are pretty much banished for those on a low income, so extreme drinking, extreme drug taking, extreme risk taking on your bike in traffic, extreme sexual behaviour... extremely short-term decisions. That's the only life opportunity that's offered. People have to get by however they can, and part of getting by is seeking reward, pleasure.

I don't think we're living in an era of hedonism at all. In fact there's a certain bleakness to everything. There's a certain amount of sorrow that is being drowned. Young people's lives are harder than you think, and those lives are very sparsely punctuated with what few highlights they can afford.

What was once a subculture, something extreme, something for the minorities, something for those who were excluded from the mainstream, is actually now becoming the mainstream. The "jocks" who are flawlessly good looking, fashionably dressed and are following the prescribed path of academic and sporting prowess, followed by a great career in a big company... these people are the freaks now.

I forget who it was who once said "if you want to be different, to stand out, then don't get a tattoo". Those words are ringing very true today.

I chose to get into extreme sports because I was bullied and ostracised a lot at school. Now it seems like anybody who's got the money is an off-piste snowboarder, kitesurfer, skydiver or whatever. It's no longer an exceptional thing to risk your life in pursuit of your little moment of happiness in an otherwise bleak existence.

A strange thing starts to happen when you pressurise and threaten somebody who has spent a long time contemplating life and death decisions. Instead of being bullied, cowed, pushed and shoved in the way that you want them to, they double down: they will raise the stakes.

As danger approaches, I find that I run towards it rather than away. I don't try and make the last few pounds in my bank account last as long as possible... what would be the point of that? To disappear off the face of the planet with a whimper?

I'm a very bad person to play chicken with. If you think that risk of death, or anything inbetween is going to instill fear in me that will control my decisions, then you're very stupid and deluded.

If you think I'm the stupid one, you're wrong. Obviously I avoid pain and discomfort. It's actually the smart thing to do, to avoid the unwinnable battle, but at the same time to not submit yourself to a life of sustained misery. I'll avoid the fistfight with somebody who just enjoys the thrill of violence, but yet I'll use the very last of my energy, money - whatever I've got left - in some final roll of the dice that will leave me far more beaten and broken than any battering I could receive from somebody's fists.

You think that decisions like that are stupid? Well, you simply haven't calculated the odds. What do you do when you're dealt weak cards? Go all in. Push all your casino chips into the pile with an icy calm. Fortune favours the brave, and a life of cowardice is no life at all.

Some people are able to eke out a life, continuously looking over their shoulder in fear. Some people are able to live under Damocles' sword, with a continuous threat of redundancy, bankruptcy, mortgage default, reposession... not being able to feed and clothe their kids, not being able to pay the bills. Even though this miserable existence was once possible, the route is now barred. Why would you want it anyway?

Do I hanker for a time when I was drawing a regular salary, hoping for a big pay rise and bonus every year, paying my mortgage, trying to save enough money to put me ahead of the game? It's bullshit, you're never going to get your nose in front. You've been set up to fail from the start.

My instinct to nurture is rather unfulfilled, especially now that I no longer live with my cat, Frankie. However, I've got no skin in the game besides my own. There's absolutely no incentive to curtail my risk taking. There's absolutely no incentive to be subdued, beaten down into submission, and to accept an intolerably miserable existence. Of course I'd rather die.

It's not even about depression or mental illness. It's just a response to the world, to circumstances, to my environment. It's sane and rational to consider the final solution: a premeditated suicide.

Actually, when I think about my quality of life, I wouldn't give up the last few years for anything. I've had the ride of my life. If I skid into an early grave as a crumpled mess, then at least I lived. I know that "live fast, die young" is such a horrible cliché, but I 'get' it now. Having had both lives, I choose the one with extreme risk every time. Dying a long drawn out death of anxiety over whether my pension fund is big enough, is my idea of torture.

I wonder whether those young people, with their complete fixation on the short-term, share my lack of fear of death. I wonder if they have also made a rational decision to reject a life of constant anxiety over an unknowable future filled with pathetic threats... torturous death by a thousand cuts.

Why on earth would I want to be wealthy in my old age, when I'm stalked by cancer, cardiovascular disease and other age related shit that's going to make an active lifestyle increasingly improbable? I'm glad that I've lived and loved and lost, and now life hangs by the slenderest thread.

Am I being melodramatic? I don't care what you think, actually. You can call my bluff... I can't lose. I might end up without any fun tokens left, but that's all part of the thrill, the adventure... the joy of living your life, rather than waiting to die.

Cut the thread, and I'll fly

Tags: #adventure #kitesurfing #climbing #capitalism #career #suicide

This is a story about feeling bad...

The person who is my harshest critic, puts the most pressure on me, never lets me relax, is always on my case to either be working, or feeling bad about not doing anything productive... is me.

For the best part of 6 months my life revolved around 2 rooms: my bedroom and my lounge, and I didn't even spend much time in my lounge. A combination of winter, plus depression, plus a gap between contracts, meant that I've been in a heightened state of stress and anxiety, not allowing myself a moment to relax.

I can tell you, it's pretty exhausting being hard on yourself 24 x 7. People tell me to go easy on myself, give myself a break, but it's not really been part of my upbringing. Naturally, after I got my first job and left the family home, I carried on the established pattern of being harsh with myself: pressuring myself to be a high achiever, reach career goals, feel that I'm being productive and useful with every waking second of the day.

It's pretty hard to unwind, when you're under that kind of pressure, whether it's coming from your parents, a partner or yourself. I would say that it takes two weeks in order to gain just a few days of proper rest & relaxation. You also can't do it at home, where you are surrounded by the piles of paperwork and other reminders of things you're supposed to be dealing with.

When it's simply the rigours of your job and commuting that you need a bit of a break from, I remember that a couple of weeks in the sunshine used to do the trick. When it's the near-lethal disintegration of your entire life leaving you destitute and homeless... yeah, you kinda need a bit more than a day at the seaside.

I'm going through a staged recovery. I had the job, but nowhere to live. Then I had the home, but no work. The next stage will be to have a home and some work. With the combination of all the elements that most people would call a 'life', I take a step closer to stability, to recovery.

If you're looking for an idiot-proof guide to when my recovery is complete, it looks like this:

• Place to live
• Paid employment
• Safety buffer of savings (rainy day/emergency money)
• Friends
• Outside interests (i.e. hobby)
• Exercise (e.g. riding my bike to work)
• Holidays & weekends relaxing

Do you know how long it's been since I've had all those pieces in place? Do you know how many times that somebody has taken away one of those pieces just as I've managed to get another one in place? It's been like nailing down a bent floorboard: when you nail one end down, the other end springs up.

Anyway, this isn't one of those "poor me, poor me, pour me another drink" blog posts. I just thought I'd share some of the reasons why people lose their will to live.

There's a picture of me hitch-hiking for the first time in my life, age 36. I never had a gap-yah (gap year, to those who don't speak in the spoilt brattish posh voice of the middle class Home Counties types) or took up the University places I was offered. When I eventually ended up at Cambridge University's Institute for Manufacturing, I was working 100+ hours a week. No extended student holidays for me, for 3 or 4 years, while I fart-arsed around getting into debt.

The point is not that you should feel sorry for me, but merely that you should understand that I've never taken my foot of the accelerator pedal. I've had that pedal firmly jammed to the floor of the car for as long as I can remember.

My parents might tell you that I was lazy or whatever, but I always got good exam grades and I was in the top classes. I got a good job and supported myself... what the f**k more do you want from a son or daughter? I think if you're looking for the lazy ones, I'd say that'd be my parents, who didn't work hard enough to provide comparable opportunities for my sister and me, versus our peers. Too much money spent sat on their arses, intoxicated on alcohol and drugs, would be my verdict.

Recently even my own sister criticised me going to San Francisco, on a business trip to see people from the startup community. She thought it was a holiday. If you think that I slept for 7 hours on the floor of New York JFK airport, and 5 hours on a bench at Seattle airport, for just a few days in the USA, then you've got a funny idea of what a holiday is.

I must confess that I did have 4 nights in Tenerife, nearly 2 years ago. I even went kitesurfing. This, I do count as a holiday, although it was a pretty short one. I'm not complaining though. It was sunny and warm, and I only had to wear a shortie wetsuit in the water. It was relaxing and I had a great time. Didn't have work or a place to live though, at the time.

I'm not sure why anybody would begrudge me just about any joy at the moment, when I spent 14 weeks in hospital in 2014, plus I was hospitalised twice in 2015, and then I decided to attack my veins with a razor blade early this year. I'm not owed a holiday, or indeed anything at all, but why sit in judgement over me and my lifestyle, when it's quite clear that things have hardly been going swimmingly for me in recent years.

I find it hard enough to be kind to myself, so anybody else who feels like criticising my decisions can pretty much back the f**k off. I'd prefer it if you actually lent a hand, actually. Some words of encouragement certainly don't go amiss.

You know, I've adopted this general "let it go" attitude to life. I'm owed quite a lot of money by friends, but I don't pile pressure on them to repay their debts. Some people have damaged my expensive stuff, or taken it without permission, but I haven't made them give it back, or to pay to have things repaired.

What's the point in just bickering with each other? Are you so perfect that you can sit in judgement over other people's lives? Is it worth damaging the relationship with friends and family, because you put money and possessions ahead of those personal connections?

From what I can see, my parents have put sitting around in a house that's way too big for their needs, bickering with each other, with no friends, in an alcoholic stupor, ahead of the happiness of their children and grandchildren. My Dad has put personal financial security ahead of making my Mum feel loved and cherished. Even my sister has fallen foul of sending me an extremely unpleasant email, despite the fact we barely have enough contact as it is. All of this is about money and possessions. What a load of bullshit. Surely family relationships and being a kind compassionate human being has to come before greed?

So, I'm making every effort to not feel guilty about allowing myself to recover, to regain my mental health, to regain strength and stability in my life, to regain my will to live. If you don't like that, tough shit.

Here's to all the haters

Tags: #depression #mentalhealth #parents

This is a story about a fresh start...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #divorce

This is a story about the best advice you can get...

Why write to your younger self? You won't be able to act on that advice. It seems like that letter could be concealing regrets, and things you'll never be able to change. That younger version of yourself has gone, and is not able to receive mail anyway.

So, I've decided to write a letter to myself, today. Nobody knows me better than myself. I can't even fully remember what I was like 5 or 10 years ago, let alone 20 or so years ago. I can probably offer some pertinent advice, from a very well-informed vantage point, to my present self, so that sounds more rational to me.

So, here's my letter:

Dear Nick,

Don't freak out, but this is a letter from you, to you. I mean, it's from me, to me (you). Oh, you're smart(ish) so you can probably figure out what I (we) mean. I'm going to write it from me (you) to save confusion, otherwise this letter is going to get very silly.

I'm writing to you to give you some advice, because I'm probably the best placed person to advise you, given that I know everything about you, even your darkest secrets and innermost desires, which are probably one and the same thing.

I know there's this trend of writing to your teenaged self, but you're quite different from 12 or 16 year-old you. You really went through quite rapid changes around age 19, and then another load of big life changes in your early to mid twenties, so writing to that earlier version of yourself doesn't make much sense.

While your childhood shaped who you are as an adult, to some extent, it's not who you are today. You already managed to overcome your shyness talking to girls and your tendency towards introversion and isolation is now something you recognise as unhealthy, which is good.

Your handwriting sure has improved a lot, although it looks to me like you're cheating and using some font that looks a bit like a person has hand-written this. Actually, I know that your handwriting is still terrible, but in the age of computers, smartphones and tablets, who really cares? You're right to not be swayed by dying traditions, like mainstream education & dogma, physical books and rote-learned facts.

You used to be very ruled by insecurity, and it's good that seems to have gone now. You were really trapped into situations that made you very unhappy in the past, because you feared being alone, but now you just seem to go for what you want. It's good that you cut away the things that aren't working for you, although you're still too hesitant to do it, and then you do it in quite a quick and brutal way. Try not to get yourself involved in things you really don't want, and then have to later extract yourself from those situations.

I know you really want to feel loved and like you've got friends there for you. I think you still feel unworthy, and like you have to go to extraordinary lengths to get people to take an interest in you. You're not a jester or a clown, and you don't need to bribe people to like you. It's up to them: if they can see the value in being your friend, you're a rewarding person to know. Getting used by people and then feeling resentful, and acting out passive-aggressively is not a healthy way to get rid of klingons.

You probably need to tone down the way you talk to people at times. I know that you have incredible empathy for people from all walks of life, and you're very mindful that other people might not have had the same life opportunities as you, but you still seem to have this way of making people feel insecure, inferior. I don't know what it is about you, but you can be quite intimidating, even though you don't mean to be.

Frankly though, you're a half-decent guy who tries hard to please everybody. I'm sure you'd benefit from not being so hard on yourself, so self-critical. There's a queue of people around the block who'd like to take their turn telling you what a bad person you are, or criticising your life 'choices' when they don't know their arse from their elbow, so you don't need to join in their ignorant bullshit... be kind to yourself. The world certainly isn't going to be kind to you, even though you try to be kind to people.

Certainly, judging people by your own standards is a disaster. Just because you trust people, try to give people the benefit of the doubt, try to give people chances, try to contribute rather than just taking whatever you can get... that doesn't mean that anybody else is living their life that way. You need to protect yourself.

You're actually pretty vulnerable. People recognise that vulnerability, and try to take advantage of it. I know that you've decided that you don't really care, and you'd prefer to live your life properly, rather than being another mean, selfish, grasping, horrible idiot making up the seething mass of a disgusting majority of people. Make sure you don't turn bitter though. Don't give away more than you can afford to lose. Nobody is ever going to repay those favours or that kindness. Reaping what you sow is bullshit when it comes to being kind and nice to people. The only bonus is that you can sleep at night knowing you tried to make the world a better place.

I'm sorry you haven't had a great deal of luck in recent years in hanging onto a group of friends who you see on a regular basis. It's really not your fault that your supposed support network dropped you in the shit at a critical point in your life, and you sank into depths that put you in a position that not a lot of people come back from.

There was always going to be difficulty in rising back up from a place that nobody expected you to recover from. It's other people's shame that they let you down that is the problem that means you're having to rebuild your life from scratch, not anything bad that you did to them: you owe those people who let you down absolutely nothing.

It's a hard thing, rebuilding your life and making a new group of friends in your mid thirties, and not having any family support. Remind yourself that it's impressive how much you have achieved virtually entirely on your own. Remind yourself how strong you must be as a person to go through hell without a support network close to you.

Try to forget about the pressure you're under to magically become "steady Eddie" again. I know that your family are expecting you to magically become the reliable and dependable member of the family again, in the regular job and doing all the travelling to see everybody plus not requiring any support yourself. I know that your family expects that a magic wand gets waved and everything in your life goes back to normal, and that's an enormous burden, but just forget about them... they're just living in their own selfish little bubble and looking out for themselves. Your life is so perilously fragile at the moment, so you don't need that kind of bullshit.

You know you're lucky to be clinging onto a few things with your fingernails, and you are extremely fortunate to have another chance at getting back on your feet, thanks to a couple of very kind people who've been there for you during your hour of need. You need to make sure you don't screw up that opportunity, even though you're under extreme pressure and stress, sorting everything out in your disintegrating life.

There are a couple of things you've got going in your favour that you didn't have a year ago, and summer is coming soon, so there's a slim window of opportunity. Don't self sabotage!

I know that nobody else understands just how much pressure and stress you're under to fix all the things that got very broken, because you were simply under too much strain. Forgive yourself for breaking down, for cracking under that load. It's not your fault. Anybody in your situation would have reacted the same.

Try to ignore those ignorant idiots who talk about life 'choices' and bad decisions and things like that. They are just smug c**ts who simply have a more comfortable existence and better luck than you. We are all a product of circumstances, rather than good vs. evil. Forget those moralising, judgemental little shits and get on with doing your own thing. You know in your heart that you've always tried your hardest and done the best you could in the circumstances.

If people don't want to hear your story, try to empathise, walk a mile in your shoes, then they're unworthy of your love. They can't sit in judgement over you, when they're no angels themself, and they're just being unpleasant and unhelpful. Why would you want them anywhere near you? Why would you want somebody like that in your life? Good riddance, I say.

Surround yourself with nice people who are kind to you and you value the opinion of, because you know it's not driven by judgemental ignorance. You know deep down that your gratitude and deep drive to reciprocate the love and support you receive means that you're a good person, and you deserve to have friends, companionship, care and some attention.

You're right to keep reminding yourself to be humble, and making sure you don't become too self-absorbed. I know you always think about things in context though, and you do care about what other people are going through too, but just remember to keep it up. You know that it's not a competition, and on the grand scale of things, you've been lucky. Don't fall into the trap of feeling too sorry for yourself, and painting a picture of yourself as some hard-done-by character who's had a really hard life: it's not entirely true, although you have had some shitty stuff happen to you.

People might say "grow up" and "get a life" and "stop going on about old news" or "stop living in the past" but it's OK to go through some stuff, as long as it's part of moving on, developing, letting go. Don't hold onto grudges about the shitty way you've been treated. Just let those people go out of your life, and find positive, inspiring, kind people to replace them. Try and forget about everybody who has trampled you, badmouthed you and written you off... you don't need them.

There are a lot of people out there who feel very entitled. They think about what they want and what they can get and what they need, and don't put any effort into understanding those who are easy targets like you. I know you take things to heart when somebody jumps to the wrong conclusions about you. Forget about those people. They're just trying to destroy other people's lives in order to make themselves feel self-righteous and improve their own self-esteem at the expense of others. You've wasted a lot of time and energy on those narcissists and leeches, and it's time to forgive yourself for trying so hard to be nice to them, and make a relationship work.

You need to learn to be a little more selfish, self-protecting, guarded, while at the same time, you should also remain as humble as you can, grateful for those who have stuck by you, and those very few who are close and have actually stepped in to help you. You need to spend less time and energy trying to convince horrible people of your worth and trying to make them see how much they're using you and hoping that they'll act with some common human decency... it's a waste of time. Try to forget... don't even bother forgiving: they certainly have no forgiveness in their dark little hearts. Instead, concentrate on being positive, and building on those few green shoots that you're really lucky to have. Those people who are kind and care, you should keep close to you, and try to build on that with those who are still there for you, to some extent, because they still care and haven't judged you. They understand, they empathise, they sympathise, they actually care about you as a person, no matter where they are in the world.

I know it's hard, living in this day and age when everybody gets scattered far and wide around the globe, but you're an interesting person who's kind and caring, so you should find people to be in your close support network, wherever you go. Just remember to not turn bitter, not to feel entitled. Remember to keep giving back, feeling gratitude. And don't let insecurity get the better of you. When you find something good, don't grip it too tightly.

Try to slow down a bit. Approach things with a marathon pace, not at a sprint. Everything will get sorted out in the fullness of time.

I know it's frustrating, to have had it all and then lost it, and you want to get back to that happy place you were in age 24 or 25, when you had the friends, the job, the girlfriend, the hobby... your life was quite fulfilling and you felt secure and happy.

You can't fix everything overnight, and even when you start to get things back together, it's going to take time to get back into the rhythm and routine of normal life, and start to build up a safety buffer, to protect you from bumps in the road.

There are going to be setbacks, and I know that you're really fragile and it wouldn't take much to completely wreck your life, but you need to just have faith and act in a positive way, instead of throwing in the towel when you're faced by insurmountable problems. You've added to your own problems when you've decided that everything is ruined, and that you're going to kill yourself as an act of spite.

Everything has been ruined, several times, but you can see that something fairly miraculous has happened every time, but it's dumb to keep deciding that everything is over. You should have learned by now that somehow, everything kinda works out. You are worthy of help, and help does eventually come... even if it is rather late, and not from those people who supposedly love and care about you.

If there's one thing you should have learned from 36 years on the planet, it's that life will always surprise you. Stop trying to second guess, to imagine what the future holds. Even when your future looks bleak as hell, you should know by now that you can turn a corner almost overnight.

Killing yourself would be really stupid: you won't get to find out how the story ends if you do that, which would frustrate the hell out of you.

I know that people think you're attention seeking and stuff, but just forget about those idiots. It's totally like you to do something just to prove people wrong, but you won't exactly be able to say "I told you so" when you're actually dead. Sure, they're total c**ts for calling your bluff and being unfeeling, selfish horrible arseholes, but hurting yourself to hurt them is not a great plan.

If you do end up killing yourself because existing with a world that just wants to be mean and cruel and selfish and ignorant and generally descend into base animal bullshit, where people are just rutting and raping, stealing and generally acting like a bunch of prehistoric beasts... I forgive you, and I understand why you did it. I'm certainly not happy with what I see in the world either. Somebody has to take a stand, and I applaud you for thinking about the big picture. Keep doing that, but try to act in a positive way. You can't actively improve things if you're not around to play a part.

I know you want to make a grand gesture. I know you want to make a big contribution to society, to humanity, but try to do it in a positive, constructive way. Protest suicide, hunger strikes... people are becoming so heartless and beastly that quite possibly nobody would give a shit. It would be a terrible waste of your life, your talents, your energy, your creativity.

You go a little mad at times, and start imagining grand schemes that are maybe a little crackpot, but there is good stuff in there. You'll find a project that is important, and was made for you. In time, you'll make a difference and feel like you're doing what you were made to do. You'll find your true calling, just give it time.

You're impatient, and that's OK because I do understand that you need to rush at things, because certain parts of your life are on fire, or like a ticking time bomb. You only have a short amount of time to shore things up, to lay the foundations and make sure that things are strong enough to withstand the inevitable problems that will crop up over a longer stretch of time.

It's frustrating, I know, dealing with people who don't understand the urgency of making repairs and getting a safety cushion ready, so that you can keep moving forwards. Don't waste your energy chasing any help from those who don't understand the fragility of your situation. Don't waste your breath on people who aren't really going to help... they just like to pretend they're there for you.

It's a tricky time, but remember, if you can do it, you've got plenty of happy contented life ahead of you, and a big chance to achieve something, to make a difference, to make a contribution.

Don't let guilt or judgemental bullshit get in your way. I know you want to be everything to everybody, and you'll have your chance to be there for those people who have helped you, supported you. You have a sense of debt, of karma, of right and wrong. You will make everything right again, and more besides, if you can turn those green shoots into a mighty oak again. But it takes time, don't rush at it.

It's a shame I'm not from the future or anything, otherwise I'd just give you the lottery numbers for tonight or tell you who's going to win the Super Bowl or something useful like that, to give you a buttload of money to solve those cashflow problems.

I think it's good that you're comfortable with everything that's happened up until today, and accept that it's shaped who you are, so it would be ridiculous to wish to change history. It's good to want to be who you are, not somebody else, because it's impossible to change who you are. Keep telling people who think you made bad 'choices' to go fuck themselves. The illusion of free will and all that, yeah?

I like you. I think you're interesting and funny and you try hard. Keep up the good work.

Lots of love,

Nick

Tags: #childhood #parents #friends

This is a story about verbal jousting...

Summer is coming and London is starting to fill up with tourists and language students already. Thankfully, most of these people have the good sense to not travel at rush hour, but the irritation of human congestion will be a growing problem until October, when the Big Smoke starts to get quieter again.

I can't really complain. I choose to live here, and I love it. I love the architecture. I love the diversity. I love the food. I love the culture. I even love the noise a bit... when it's a constant background drone of traffic, aeroplanes and sirens. I hate it when it's mostly quiet, and then that silence is interrupted by something. In London the noise is just continuous, so you kinda cease to be aware of it.

There's a weird kind of pleasure you can take from dodging your way through the crowds. Knowing where to stand to be next to the tube doors, and get off near the exit from the platform. Knowing which way you're going, so you never break stride, never waste time looking for signs and deciding whether to turn left or right. When things become a reflex, you find yourself automatically taking the shortest possible path from A to B, and there's a certain satisfaction derived from being ahead of the crowd.

I don't think London really welcomes the aimless wanderer. When 3 people are walking along the pavement, more engrossed in their conversation with each other than achieving even normal walking speed, it's frustrating. Particularly when those people fan out wherever the pavement widens. You're forced into stepping into the road to overtake them, rather than be stuck behind them, at a crawl.

It's a very London habit though, to never actually engage anybody directly in conversation. Even when a large family plus their luggage have stopped at the bottom of the escalator, to the point where bodies are just piling up in a human log-jam caused by inconsiderate ignorant and downright stupid behaviour, nobody says anything. There might be some aggressive tutting and huffing, and Londoners can even walk around an obstacle in an aggressive way that indicates to the feckless idiot, that they have gotten in the way... not that they notice.

Transport for London started introducing posters showing all the annoying things that tourists do, like not letting people off the tube before trying to get on board the train, not moving down inside the carriages and smacking people in the face with their backpacks. These posters featured cartoon characters and had a whimsical rhyme for each different problem. For example: "We really don't mean to chide, but you really must move down inside..." etc. etc.

Lately, there have appeared Banksy-esque stencils on some tube escalators, reminding the unhurried & feckless to stand slack-jawed and gawping on the right, so the scurrying commuters can climb the steps past them on the left. The tube is already at breaking point though, and at the most congested tube stations, they are having another go at introducing standing only on the descending escalators, in an attempt to prevent dangerous platform overcrowding.

It seems that on a very regular basis, Oxford Street tube has to close its entrances in the evening, because of overcrowding. Perhaps this problem has reduced now that Bond Street and Tottenham Court Road are getting back to normality, but Crossrail and station improvements have certainly caused chaos in Central London.

My blog has become one big outlet for all that pent-up aggression and frustration with the world and its halfwits. I had found that cycling around London was very good as an outlet, but my life-expectancy was surely cut drastically, by cycling through heavy traffic with absolutely zero tolerance for even a second of hesitation from drivers and fellow cyclists alike.

There's something so thrilling about cutting through a swathe of rush-hour gridlock in record time, on a bike. Everybody wants to kill you or be killed. Pedestrians want to throw themselves under the wheels of your bicycle, by jumping into the road without looking, or from leaping out from between parked busses or other things that would obscure your view of them until the last possible second. Motorcyclists expect to have the central reservation all to themselves, and pop out in front of you from side streets, or arrive up your rear end at high speed. Motorists and van drivers obviously see you, but think "it's just a bike" and continue their manoeuvres knowing that they're unlikely to die, safe inside their metal box.

It's crazy just how infuriated and aggressive you can make a driver, when they are stuck in a queue of traffic, and you just zoom straight to the front at the traffic lights and leave them for dust. They desperately and dangerously try to overtake you, but always end up hitting another queue of traffic. They beep their horn aggressively, trying to get you to move into the gutter, and scream abuse out of their windows, but then they hit the back of another queue of traffic and you never see them again, because you leave them far, far behind.

Once you've started cycling in London, even though it pretty much just turns you into an organ donor, it's hard to go back to overcrowded public transport and the congestion that slows down busses, black cabs and Übers. Sure, there are certain journeys that are OK by car in London, if you choose the day of the week and time of day correctly, and you have good local knowledge, you can dodge a lot of traffic. You're still going to get caught at a lot of red lights though. Red lights are just for guidance if you're on a bike.

Driving in London is hard. The above picture shows a mark one Toyota MR2, which was the 4th car I ever owned, and the first car I ever drove in London. Trying to navigate on my own, with the particularly low driving position and poor visibility, the first time ever in the busy conurbation, was pure hell. However, it's taught me 360 degree awareness when driving.

Now, I like driving in London. I like the fact that it's slightly lawless. You can get away with some pretty aggressive driving that would surely only lead to road rage attacks in the provinces. The most fearless driver, who acts without hesitation is the one with right of way, most of the time, and that's respected. The only time you'll hear a horn being blasted is when somebody's reactions are a second or two slow. You'd better be moving when the lights turn green, or else you're going to piss off a lot of people behind you.

You'd be surprised what you can get away with in London. Everything from rolling your eyes, huffing and tutting, to driving super aggressively, late braking and cutting people up, is somehow tolerated more readily. You're unlikely to find yourself in a fist fight in London. There are the cattle, and there are the cheetahs, but you won't find the lumbering walrus that expects to hurt you with its fat blubbery hide. London won't tolerate the uncultured townie, with their poor dress sense and easily offended sensibilities. The "wot you lookin at?" thick skulled fight starter is a fish out of water in the capital city, thankfully.

Ok, so you might think it snobby, but I like to think of it as urbane.

Taking London busses is a black art. You need pretty excellent knowledge of London at a street level, and over a fairly wide expanse of the capital in order to figure out what bus you want, and it's even harder to figure out when is a good time to take a bus. They're certainly no good for commuting, unless you like sitting in traffic.

Tags: #london #cycling

This is a story about getting things in perspective...

When you're climbing a mountain, you can't think about the summit too much. You have to take things one step at a time. If you are much too fixated on reaching the top, you will feel disappointed every time you reach a false summit. You will feel disheartened when you see how far there is left to climb.

I'm quite familiar with mountainous tasks. I started my full-time career at age 17, and I had my challenges with immaturity, but also with age prejudice. I sacrificed a huge portion of my teens to learning programming, so I was pretty ready to start work, unlike some of my peers who had done non-computing degrees at University. However, my youth held me back for many years.

Around the time I turned 30, I built a couple of cashflow positive businesses. Taking something from the idea stage to the point where you're taking customers' money is not something that should be underestimated. It's easy to do one deal, and just keep dealing in that same way, but it's quite something else to put together an established business, with multiple customers, suppliers, and create a trusted brand.

Then, as I've written about at length, my mental health started to be the mountainous task in front of me. Or rather, I was at the bottom of a deep dark pit and had to climb my way out. Facing a collapse in your sense of wellbeing, your ability to cope... that's a fairly big thing to tackle, when you've had nearly 30 years of steady stability.

Most recently, dealing with drug addiction is probably one of the hardest challenges a person is ever likely to face in their life. Addiction can consume a person so quickly. It's like a fire. If you don't put it out fast it will spread, and if you leave it to develop into a raging inferno, it will be virtually impossible to extinguish and it will just consume everything with its flames until there's nothing but charred remains.

It seems really stupid to me, how long we let people flounder and struggle for. We just turn our backs and pretend stuff isn't happening. We just hope for the best, hope that the person doesn't bother us, hope that some miracle happens, hope that the person who's in trouble sorts themself out, hope that somebody else will deal with it so we don't have to.

There's a really nasty streak of "look out for number one" going around more and more. People live their lives in an increasingly isolationist manner, critical of other people's choices, and only thinking about their own wellbeing. We are encouraged to trample on each other in order to get ahead. We hoard and do not share.

People can't see the wood for the trees. They fail to recognise that pushing their kids to get good grades at school just creates an arms race. Pushing your teen to think about 3 or 4 years University education when they're just a child. Pushing your young adult kids to get a good career, a profession, when they're just developing their own identity, deciding what they want to do with the next 40 or 50 years of their life. Can't people see that at every stage of this funnel, things are getting more pressured, more competitive?

I received an email today from somebody who is already struggling with the pressure of University. Think how much pressure that person already endured to get the exam grades to get that University place. Think about how many exams they have had to sit, in order to stay in the system, and be allowed to continue with some hope of getting a well paid job at the end of it all.

We're tested, and then we're tested some more, and then we're tested again and again until the end of our days, nowadays. Now that we have established this over-competitive bullshit arms race of a life. There are too many lawyers, too many doctors... too many of all the professions that are desirable. An exam might look like an ordered, disciplined, academic thing, but we might as well have our kids duking it out with pointy sticks in the middle of a jeering snarling crowd of bloodthirsty onlookers.

In the zero-sum game that we have invented, for every winner there's a loser. That means that whenever a kid gets a bunch of "A" grades and a place at an Oxbridge University, some other kid has to leave school without any qualifications and be considered unemployable. There are only a limited number of places for the elite: both in academia and professional life.

We're not building a longer table, we're building higher fences. The pressure on kids to not make a single slip up, from the moment we start pressuring them to beat their peers throughout a gruelling school, college, and University life. One black mark can derail your entire future. Screw up one set of exams, and you'll be tossed into the 'undesirable' bucket, and find it very hard to rise above your peers ever again. You'll be trampled underfoot.

Schools can only give out the same limited percentage of "A" grades each year. Universities can only give out the same limited percentage of firsts and 2:1 degrees each year. Companies can only afford to hire a small number of entry-level people - the very best - each year. We drive huge amounts of people into a funnel that's just way too narrow.

Opportunities just suck right now for young people. It was pretty sucky when I was a kid, and there was always hell to pay whenever my teachers spoke to my parents, even though I was always in the top sets and getting good grades. There were plenty of sharp-elbowed pushy parents who ruined plenty of childhoods back then... today it must be bloody miserable and awful. No wonder we are seeing a spike in teen suicides and self harm.

And for what? Do you think your kid is going to get a good job after they finish jumping through those academic hoops... doing all those exams and essays and dissertations? Do you think your kid is going to happily couple off with some lovely partner, buy a house and start raising a family of their own? How the hell could they afford to? Have you seen the disgracefully low wages and the sky-high house prices?

You can do a 180 degree turn and still take a step forward. You don't have to feel like it's a backwards step to admit you're wrong and start going the other way up the dead-end alleyway that you led your kids and grandkids down. OK, so school and work was OK for you growing up, but that doesn't mean it's working for your kids and grandkids.

What worked for a world of 2 or 3 billion people doesn't work for a world of over 7 billion. There are just too many people competing for a finite amount of bullshit qualifications and jobs. We've set our young people up to fail, and it's not because they're stupid or lazy. It must be incredibly stressful and hopeless, being young today, with so few prospects and such a hard struggle to get ahead of your peers.

At the moment, the human condition is not being advanced. The ship is being steered by a rudderless drunk of a captain, in selecting our political and commercial elite from the greying middle-aged nostalgic fools who've had it way too good for way too long.

The current set of elitists kowtow to the pensioners, because everything is owned by institutional funds: every company is majority owned by pension funds. The grey pound is the only pound. The kids don't have any money. The corporations worship those who are in God's waiting room, just hanging around for their time to die. It's a system that's leading the whole world to its death.

We should be looking down, to those little kids and their energy and optimism, and thinking about their future, not looking up to the heavens and thinking about our death. You might have a comfortable retirement, but you'll be riddled with disease and old age. Would you not be more comfortable knowing you left the world a better place for your kids and grandchildren?

Build no store of wealth on this Earth.

I feel sorry for working class people who have worked hard their entire life, and they've still been cheated out of a living pension, but their health is failing. Their voice is silenced by the deafening boom of the ones who've had a cushy life with a golden parachute final-salary pension at the end of it all. We can't see the wood for the trees

Tags: #politics #childhood #mentalhealth #capitalism

This is a story about warped perceptions...

The world in which I inhabit is vastly different, depending on the state of my broken brain. Mood fluctuations cause me to interpret things very differently than a supposedly 'normal' healthy individual would.

I've written a lot this year about drug abuse, but I'd like to talk about a time before drugs even entered the story and made the water muddy. I'd like to talk about what it was like from 2008 through to 2012, when my brain was just doing its own thing, without drugs or medication.

If you're a person of prejudice, it won't surprise you to learn that drugs mess you up, but you might be surprised to learn that my mental health problems predated any drug abuse. You might also be surprised to learn that people can recover too, and go back to ordinary life, with nobody any the wiser as to your dark past.

But this really isn't about drug abuse, remember? We're talking about a period of 4 years that predated any psychoactive substances making things all messy and confusing. We're talking about when I first went to my doctor, because I was struggling with my mental health.

I spent just over a minute of explaining to my doctor that I felt completely exhausted, overwhelmed and unable to face friends, family, work or anything... I had drawn the curtains and switched off my phone, and retreated under the duvet, and could barely make it to the doctor's surgery.

"Have you heard of Fluoxetine?" my doctor asked. I said that I had, and that I knew that the trademarked name that it was more commonly known as was Prozac. I said that I had read very bad things about emotional blunting and ruined sex lives of those people who were taking Prozac. I had read Elizabeth Wurtzel's biography, Prozac Nation, where she didn't exactly speak highly of the 25 year old medication.

How sad that the National Health Service (NHS) would be offering some cheap generic pills after only a minute of getting to understand a patient's problems. It takes 6 weeks before an anti-depressant SSRI medication like Prozac takes effect, and it's a fairly serious decision, to put somebody on long-term medication. I think it's a little ridiculous that we don't offer more talk therapy, as a first line of defence.

So, I was diagnosed as having Clinical Depression, within just a few minutes. Something I also knew, but didn't have the time to discuss with my doctor, was that SSRIs can be very bad for people with Bipolar Disorder. I knew my moods fluctuated up as well as down, so I had my suspicions that I was Bipolar, and that was another reason to avoid Prozac.

When you're depressed, everything seems hopeless. I had decided that I was useless at my job, that I hated working in offices, that I hated computers and software, and that I couldn't handle a career in IT anymore. I also lost interest in going out, sex, food... I pretty much just slept, or lay in my bed feeling anxious about the fact that I was off work sick.

After a couple of months feeling like this, I hit upon the idea that I was going to write a computer game for the first generation iPhone, to be ready in time for the launch of the App Store.

Although I had decided that my office-based IT career was over, the idea of programming on my laptop in my garden in the sunshine didn't sound too bad. I knew that the early limitations of the first iPhone meant that I could make a fairly basic game, and compete with other developers. I decided that if only a few people bought my game, it was still a fun experiment.

And so began a period of intense activity. I would work for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, in order to capitalise on those precious early days of the App Store when there were hardly any apps on there. It seems incredible now, that there were only a few hundred or few thousand apps for the iPhone. There was no Android. There was no iPad. There was just one smartphone that created a billion dollar market, overnight.

When we look at that crazy period of my life, when I was churning out apps, it's pretty clear to see that my mood had swung to another extreme. I didn't have time to explain things to people. My thoughts were racing, speech seemed like a frustratingly slow way to communicate, eating and sleeping were an inconvenience, certainly I didn't want to do anything other than work on my apps. I was single-minded to the point of obsession.

In economic terms, things paid off. I got a couple of my apps to number one in the charts, briefly. One of my apps was downloaded 8,000 times in a day once, and another one racked up 500,000 downloads in a month. This was clearly a brilliant gold rush.

I knew that the quality of the apps being released was increasing steadily, and the opportunity for one fast burning out dude in his garden were rapidly diminishing. I started to really hate the work anyway. I had a whirlwind affair as an indie games developer, and it happened so fast that I started to hate it, just like you start to hate any job that you've mastered and has become easy.

Possibly this was a sign of my mood turning again. I had managed a period of several weeks, working at a ridiculous level, and what goes up inevitably must crash down. I hadn't been able to exert myself to such an extent since the school holidays in childhood. There's no way you'd ever be given 6 to 8 weeks to concentrate and just get on and hammer out a project, in a corporate environment.

My mood started to alternate between depression and hypomania (as described above) and I would turn each episode of frantic activity into a period of opportunism, to make money or produce something tangible.

Getting myself back into an office environment and doing some IT contracting re-stabilised me a little bit, and getting a boat so that me and my friends could go wakeboarding was something I was passionate about, and consumed my lunchtimes, after work in the summer, and weekends. My life got back to normal, for nearly 2 years.

During that first depression, I had set certain wheels in motion, however. One particular scheme was retraining as an electrician, while I was working as a programmer still. When I had finished my training, I quickly quit my job.

Going back to an unstructured form of making money, I started working too hard again. Building a business from nothing, to breakeven and hopefully to profitability is not quick and it's not easy. I managed to start getting good clients and increasing my turnover very quickly, through some shrewd partnerships and advertising choices. However, I was extremely inexperienced, and took on way more work than I could manage, sustainably.

I got my new business to the point where it was profitable, and had paid back the initial capital expenditure on training, van, tools etc. but I was burnt out again. I had lived and breathed my business, and only because it was hard physical work, had it lasted slightly longer before my brain was finally frazzled.

Depression reared its ugly head again in 2010, and I realised that I had made a mistake in cutting away from the easy money that a career in IT had to offer. I failed to recognise the importance of a stable working environment though: restricting your hours to 40 or 50 a week, giving yourself weekends off, having the occasional holiday, working with other people who share some of the responsibility and workload... those things are important.

My hypomania started to get a bit more extreme. After reading an enormous pile of books on Particle Physics and Quantum Mechanics and other theories & models of theoretical Physics, I started to read huge amounts of academic papers from Cornell University's online library.

Some of the academic papers that I read were extremely interesting to me, and I emailed the authors to ask them questions. To my surprise, most of them responded, and we started to correspond via email.

Spurred on by this, I started to believe I could author my own paper and get it published, and I developed a hare-brained idea of my own, around a thought experiment that was particularly hard to test in the real world. I eagerly sent my paper off to several academic journals. A couple of the journals even responded... unsurprisingly to say that they wouldn't publish something that hadn't been peer reviewed.

Obviously, it's on the border of a delusion of grandeur to imagine that you might have anything of merit to contribute to a field, after only a few months reading the literature and educating yourself about the deepest mysteries in the Universe.

These delusions are something that I've always been wary of, and I try to be self-aware, but it's fairly clear that there was a progression in the difficulties that I was having with Bipolar Disorder, and the regulation of my moods. I wasn't imagining that I was the next Einstein, but I was having to say to myself "be careful, you're not the next Einstein" and give myself regular reality checks.

I still cringe when I think about some of the emails I sent to very important academics, and how, even though they indulged me, it must have been with slight tongue-in-cheek, to respond to a complete layman such as myself.

After yet more time lost in a pit of despair and hopelessness, where I did very little except for mow the lawn and feed the cat, the iPhone App gold rush cropped up again. This time I decided to sell picks & shovels.

Depressions are very similar to one another. You sleep a lot, you don't do much, everything looks shitty and you hate yourself. My depressions were clearly getting worse, as I started to think about suicide more and more. I started to accumulate more and more paraphernalia with which I could kill myself: inert gas, razor blades, Barbiturates, Cyanide etc. etc.

Periods of hypomania are easier to tell apart, because I can tell you what I was obsessed about in each one: iPhone Apps, boat, megashed, electrical business, physics and then my picks and shovels for the iPhone App gold rush.

I formed another company - Roam Solutions - which was later to become MePublish.com and Hubflow.com. I talked a couple of friends into joining me on my mad escapade, and generally threw everything and the kitchen sink at this particular endeavour.

My new company put on an exhibition stand at London Olympia, Learning Technologies conference, only months after I first conceived the idea for the service we sold. Delivering eLearning was something I knew nothing about, but that wasn't going to stop me.

By the time the winter was over, I had managed to get the company involved with the TechStars network, and we relocated to Cambridge in order to do a 13-week technology accelerator program, where we would be introduced to billions of dollars worth of investors.

13 weeks is just longer than the sweet spot for one of my hypomanic periods, and I was really struggling by the end of the program. Suicidal thoughts were quite intrusive, and I was drinking like a fish. I hated myself, and what felt like lies that I was telling to potential investors. It was a struggle to keep going to the end of the program.

I feel bad that I let 2 co-founders and 11 investors down really badly, when I imploded in September 2011. I never got back on my feet, because of relationship problems and a number of things that eventually led to very bad life choices and a whole world of pain, destruction, devastation.

I don't feel too bad because I'm clearly unwell and because nobody risks their money and a stable job unless they want to try and get rich quick. I genuinely didn't pull the wool over anybody's eyes. There was a big opportunity there, and I'm only partly to blame for everything going tits up. The biggest part, perhaps, but still only partly.

Writing code for iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry, as well as the back-end (serverside code in PHP, Linux administration, database etc. etc.) plus rebranding, raising money and everything that goes with a startup is a hell of a lot to fit into 13 weeks. A crash was inevitable for me: I was too close to the detail, too close to the coal face, too close to the customers, too honest with the potential investors.

At the end of the day, I got my arse handed to me. I was completely spent. I've never experienced such hard work and stress and pressure in my life, although there was a lot of fun too, and I had an incredible time meeting some of the most inspiring people I have ever had the good fortune to cross paths with.

The main lesson I learnt though, was that I really can't ignore my mental health. Even if I avoid clinical labels, like Bipolar Disorder, I definitely have a predisposition to mood instability if I make bad choices. I can't ignore the number of times I've swung between extreme depression and extreme 'highs' which are characterised by massive productivity, and increasingly delusional hopes of being rich and famous.

Things are obviously still very 'up and down' for me, but there is seemingly no end to things that spur on my hypomania. Most recently I ended up working on HSBC's number one project, and being made responsible for a really critical part of that project, by the CIO at the project townhall, in front of the entire team. The facts as they are presented to me, do little to discourage a kind of boom & bust lifestyle.

I guess I could reshape my life around working for 3 to 6 months, and then taking 3 to 6 months as a break to recover from my over-exertion, but I don't think it's very healthy. I'm now faced with the challenge of how to manage my own mental health in a more sustainable way, before I really run out of luck and tread on some toes that get me in super big trouble.

Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.

I really didn't sleep very much while I was at HSBC. Naturally, this started to be detrimental to my mental health. Eventually, I was very sick indeed, and it was hard to continue... I had to go into hospital

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #career #banking