This is a story about libido...

You're probably not aware of the role that your sex drive plays in your thoughts and actions, but it's the most fundamental force in your human behaviour. It's programmed into your DNA to procreate. It's essential for the survival of the species.

Ask yourself the philosophical question why are we here? What is your answer? If it's something about watching TV or getting fat and dying or going to work, then you're clearly not a very elevated thinker. If it's something to do with children, then you're at least able to identify that you're basically just an animal under your fancy clothes.

Personally, I want to figure out as much as possible about how the Universe works. I want to answer questions about the fundamental nature of reality. I want to know the answers to unanswerable questions. But how do we know they're unanswerable unless we search for answers?

Theologians from all religions were content to come up with some hand-wavy claptrap theory that wasn't backed by any experimental evidence. They attempted to come up with convenient ideas that dumb people could grasp, and could be neatly packaged into sermons and soundbites, so that the ideas would spread like a horrible virus of stupidity.

People like to spread ideas, just like they enjoy spreading their genetic material. Being influential, being a thought leader... it brings you more power & status, and therefore the better potential mates. If you are a powerful thought leader, you get to have a pretty girlfriend or a hunky boyfriend. It comes down to sex, again.

Every time you get a new Twitter follower, or a retweet, or a like on Facebook, or a post shared, or a friend request, or a comment that engages with something you shared or liked or posted yourself... you get a dopamine hit. Your brain rewards you for spreading seeds.

Internet memes and email chain letters. These kinds of things are just somebody wanting to test the reach of themself as a cult personality. You see loads and loads and loads of pictures of teachers being shared, holding a piece of cardboard that says "Let's see if I can get this shared in Australia. Do it for your kids!" or some other lame patheticness.

If you don't have kids of your own, you feel acutely aware that you're dying, and you're not going to leave any mark on the world. Yup, you'll be gone and forgotten, because you have no genetic heirs who might carry on your name and your teachings. Parents are very influential in their kids lives, beyond the genetic material they give to them. They shape their values and their fundamental ideas.

Because I don't like my parents, I reject their ideas and values. Instead of history, I studied geography. Instead of religion, I study science. Instead of the piano, I learn the guitar. Instead of being a Conservative, I'm a socialist. Instead of being a selfish c**t, I'm a humanist. You get the general idea.

So it looks like I'm very down on parents, but really I'm not. I see lots and lots of great parents out there who give their kids a brilliant life. I see lots and lots of parents out there who love their kids and make them feel loved and cherished and cared for and happy. I see lots of my friends with smiling happy looking children, and I know that because my friends are caring and nice, they are caring and nice parents too.

It looks like I'm being down on teachers, but I'm really not. I had some amazing teachers who I can still remember the names of, and loads of really important things that they taught me. I had teachers who really went the extra mile, and taught me the things that are really important in my life and allowed me to distance myself from my parents and escape a horrible life.

I'm a big believer in planned parenthood. If you're not going to go the distance with kids, don't get involved in their lives. Kids need consistency, reliability, inspiration, praise, love & care. The world has plenty of things that are going to kill kids and injure them and knock their confidence and destroy their self-esteem. It's not a parent's job to add to a child's woes.

In the UK we have a nanny state. However, that doesn't mean that you're a rich Victorian who has employed a nanny to rear your children. What it is supposed to mean is that there's a safety net there if you f**k up. You're not supposed to f**k up. Having a safety net there does not mean you can just take drugs and not work, and spawn as many children as you want.

It sounds like I'm having a go at a tranche of society, but I'm not. I'm aware that there are a huge number of young people who just smoke dope and play computer games. It looks to the untrained eye like they're lazy and idle, but the fact is that they have no prospects, no opportunities.

Those kids who sit around smoking dope and playing computer games have been failed by parents who decided to have children without thinking about their future. The time to plan for a child's future is before they're born. You line up your ducks and then you shoot them down. You don't just risk it and hope for the best, unless you want to go back to living in caves and bashing each other over the head with clubs.

Earlier this year, I was sent this photo from a girl I knew. I looked at the date stamp of the image. The photo was taken in 2006. I put the image into Google Reverse Image Search and found that she had taken the image from another woman's blog. That's rather strange behaviour.

The strangest part was that she claimed to be pregnant by me, even though I hadn't ejaculated in her vagina. The thing about being pregnant is, that it usually involves ejaculation into a vagina. Some sperm have to be ejected near enough to the cervix for those little tadpoles to swim to an egg and fertilise it. I'm not sure if I have super sperm, but I'm pretty sure they can't travel through time, get another woman pregnant and then transport the foetus forward in time and implant it in a different womb. Maybe I'm just a bit too heavily reliant on this science stuff though?

Yeah, I put my faith in technology and science, rather than religion, and it turns out that I was right. You do have to ejaculate in somebody's vagina for them to become pregnant. It turns out she wasn't pregnant. What a bizarre turn of events. Who would have thought that I could have planned to not get somebody pregnant like that?

There have been other times when there's been a risk but there's this thing called the morning after pill, which is an exceedingly unpleasant thing to have to take. I'd never recommend or suggest a woman should take it. I imagine that you wouldn't take it unless you want to be really careful that you don't have a baby after a moment of drunken madness.

Babies are for life, not just an inconvenient mistake.

Yes, if you decide to keep your baby, you should really prepare yourself to go the distance. You might have to look after that kid for up to 18 years. That's a long time. They're also not cute like a kitten or a puppy. They scream and shit and vomit everywhere. Your fanny will get ripped to pieces and all your nice things will get covered in snot.

Babies also grow into little children who need trainers and a tracksuit or whatever sub-culturally appropriate clothes they need to wear in order to not be beaten to shit for non-conformity. They can be your special little angel, who is unique and is going to be a brain surgeon. Yes they can be your fantasy, but only in your f**king dreams. At least let them not be bullied their entire f**king childhood if you send them to school rather than locking them in a basement.

I don't know if you can tell from this photo, but I wasn't very well. I had been sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath. I bumped into this friend when I was looking for a warm bed for the night and she was very keen that she get this photo of us together. I was very keen to get some sleep. Sleeping rough is hard.

So why on earth would a woman want to get pregnant by a homeless guy anyway? It seems ridiculous. Probably the very least likely person to be able to provide a happy stable home for a growing infant. Well, my theory is that women's caring instincts are activated by seeing a proverbial bird with a broken wing.

It does work to a certain extent. If you can't find Mr Perfect, you can find somebody who's heartbroken and in trouble and help to fix them up. You can fix a man and make him happy and healthy. I don't recommend or condone faking a pregnancy though. You shouldn't take things that far.

Because my parents lied about supporting me, I had to turn to friends and girlfriends. My parents told me they would help me get through my difficult divorce, until my house was finally sold and I was back on my own two feet again in London. They are liars. There was no support. They just lied. They liked saying the words "we'll support you, we'll help" but they had no intention of helping anybody. They are liars and c**ts.

Luckily, there is a peer-to-peer support network. Friends and girlfriends helped me out when my parents lies were exposed as nothing but hot air.

My parents are always looking for an excuse not to help. They are masters of the reason why they aren't going to do what they committed to doing, or just lying. They will say something and then deny they ever said it, if it's more convenient to just lie. They figured out that it's easier to just tell the world you're a good parent, to lie about being a good parent, than to actually do the hard work of being a good parent.

Being a good parent is hard work. Alternatively, you can just concentrate on lying, then you don't have to do the hard work. If you just concentrate on sitting around taking drugs and lying and training your kid to hide your guilt, then you have a lot more time & money for drugs and alcohol.

The problem is, that you are dumping your child onto the state. The child doesn't expect it, because your child trusts you and believes your lies. The state doesn't expect rich middle class parents to dump their kids on the state either, which means that those kids end up stuck in a precarious position.

The state can't really afford to support any broken homes. I don't feel entitled to state support, but I do feel aggrieved when people who supposedly care about me break their promises. Especially when those promises are repeatedly and insistently made. If you make some throwaway remark about "just let us know if there's anything we can do to help" then I understand that you just like the way those words sound. You just like the warm fuzzy feeling you're giving yourself by making some empty offer you have no intention on making good on.

My parents work very hard to demonise me. To ruin my good standing with people. To blacken my name. Family life is much easier if you've picked a black sheep to be the one you blame for your own shortcomings.

My Dad had previously used his own brother as the black sheep. He liked to spread negative gossip about his own brother, and generally ostracise and antagonise him. When his brother sufficiently distanced himself from my unpleasant father, he moved on to me. I'm now the guy who he likes to bitch and whine about, while with his other face pretending like he's a supportive Dad.

The fact of the matter is that he perpetuates a co-dependent abusive relationship with my Mum. He's horribly abusive to her. They managed to numb themselves to the destructive nature of their horrible relationship, by taking loads of drugs and getting drunk all the time, but they're horrible spiteful people when they're together. They hardly have any friends because they're so horrible to be around.

So, I've decided to break the cycle. Because I have a brain. Because I have self-awareness and I can self-direct my actions, I have decided that I'm not going to pass the buck. I'm not going to pass on the blame. I'm going to shove it right back to where it belongs. My Dad needs to stop abusing his girlfriend (my Mum) and stop being such a critic and a liar and a spreader of malicious crap. He needs to support my Mum and her kids or f**k off and die.

Obviously, it would be pretty hard on me to force his hand on this matter, so it's probably best if I just distance myself from him. However, I do worry that he will make my Mum's life even more hellish, or find another victim for his abuse. I feel responsible for stopping him from spreading any more human misery.

One way I have decided to stop the spread of his influence, is by considering my own potential fatherhood very carefully. It's very important to me that I'm absolutely nothing like that complete c**t. It's very important to me that if I do decide to have kids, that they have a really happy childhood and they're well supported when they need support.

Just having sex and then lying about taking responsibility is not acceptable. Abandoning your kids onto the state is not acceptable, especially when you have promised to help and misled your kids into believing they can count on you.

I've always planned around the idea that my parents are a complete waste of space and I'll need to make my own way in life, which is why I paid for the deposit and mortgage on my house and fully furnished it and spent loads of money on it, all without a single penny of parental support.

However, when I was going through a horrible divorce, moving from Bournemouth back to London, trying to find work, working on a new startup idea, reconnecting with friends and my business network... my parents were interested in earning money from me, while I waited for the equity in my home to be released. It was easier than going to a commercial lender. The problem is, that my parents are liars.

I could have arranged a bridging loan, but my Mum, on multiple occasions, reassured me that I didn't need to go through all the hassle of arranging a bridging loan. Given the fact that I had a huge pile of equity in my home, and we were only talking about a very small amount of money, and a potentially very healthy rate of interest for them, it seemed to be a win:win situation.

The problem is that my Dad's a c**t. He talked my own Mum out of helping her son and left me high & dry. What an utter c**t. They waited until the last minute and then pulled the rug out from under my feet. What total c**ts.

Don't make promises you have no intention of keeping.

I wonder if it's some Munchausen by Proxy thing. I wonder if my parents like keeping me sick and desperate. They are certainly a couple of irrelevant shrivelled up junkie alcoholic c**ts who should be kept away from the world. They certainly have nothing of value to offer, except to die and finally allow my sister and me to stop being beaten down by their harsh criticism, laziness and unrealistic expectations.

Anyway, I'm exhausted by it all. If they think they have won, and they get to label me for life and die smug, buried with their hoarded wealth but hated by their kids, because they totally failed as parents, then f**k them. I will shame them as much as I possibly can. I've done enough to prove my value. I've done enough to prove my work ethic, my ingenuity, my resourcefulness, my kindness, my caring. I've done enough.

I'm done, I'm through, I'm fed up, I'm p**sed off and I'm at the limit. I'm at the bitter end. I can't take it anymore.

I've been strung along. I've been lied to and had enough promises broken. I've had enough of the smug cunts telling everybody they're doing everything they can when really they're just undermining me and leading me on.

Yes, I've been led on. I was sold a lie. I was told that parents should be respected. I was led to believe that parents care. Throughout my childhood all I saw was that they cared more about having enough drugs and booze and cigarettes. They cared more about sitting around with their few friends or arguing with each other. That's where the time went. That's where the energy went. That's where the money went.

Sex is a dangerous thing if you're having it unprotected and you're not prepared to take the morning after pill or get an abortion for a child who you have no intention of loving and caring for. If you're not going to love your kids, kill them in the womb.

I'm going to abort myself, age 36. It's the abortion my mum should have had.

You like coffee for the same reason why you like sex and you like drugs... dopamine is released in your brain. You're just chasing a high, and you might be doing it so recklessly that you're making unhappy little children (October 2013)

Tags: #parents #childhood #divorce #addiction #alcohol #mentalhealth #suicide

This is a story about anger management...

I like to nurture. I like being with nature. I like to mow the lawn. I like to plant things and water them and watch them grow. I like to look after animals. I like knowing that I'm helping living things.

When people were shitty and mean to me, I liked to be with my cat in my garden. I liked to take care of my lawn. I liked to get rid of the dead leaves and dead flower heads, and feed the plants.

I'm a pretty simple character really. If you make me sad and anxious and afraid, I will be depressed. If you keep attacking me, I will withdraw more and more and more. You will back me into a corner.

What do we know about cornered animals, that are beaten and stressed and anxious? Well, it's time to stop being unpleasant to them and either leave them alone or be nice to them, unless you want to get bitten.

I'm not out to bite anybody. I just want a little garden and a cat. If you take those things away from me, you'll make me very sad.

I don't have a lot of opportunity to nurture anything at the moment. I don't have any plants or kids or pets. I treat my girlfriends nicely, but those relationships tend to be a lot more complicated than boy & cat.

My Dad thinks that rearing a little boy is just like owning a dog. He thinks that little boys are members of his pack, and they will respond like a pack animal would to the leader of the pack. Humans are not pack animals. Humans are advanced primates with complex social and emotional needs. You shouldn't try and 'train' them like you would with a dog. They're not performing animals, like dancing bears or dogs that roll over and play dead.

Respect is a two-way street with humans. If somebody orders me to respect them, they will lose my respect. Respect is earned. I don't respect anybody who doesn't respect me back. There is no automatic entitlement to respect. Everybody's opinion is equally valid. When my Dad's car broke down, my sister opined that it might have run out of fuel. He dismissed her opinion immediately. She was right, he was wrong. More fool him.

One of the few times that my parents came to visit London was because they had gone to go away on holiday, but then discovered that their passports were not in date. I can tell you exactly when my passport expires, and I'm not such a drug addicted disorganised lazy layabout that I would fail to be able to take my flight because of such an idiotic oversight.

Yes, this one-way-street is a source of a lot of anger. I have been disrespected a huge amount by my parents, but when we examine the evidence it becomes clear that they are hypocrites and there is no excuse for such disrespectful behaviour.

I need to be the bigger person, and vent off this anger at such injustice, mistreatment and damage to my identity, self-confidence and happiness. Ideally, I would like to forgive and forget, but it's very hard to forgive somebody who is not at all sorry.

I've had to be sorry all my life. I've had to be very sorry that I was so inconsiderate as to become a fertilised embryo, grow and eject myself into the world. What terrible poor planning on my part. How grossly irresponsible of me to not think of the impact on my parents plans for drug taking idleness.

I've come up against anger that has been misdirected against me time and time again. Recently, a girlfriend started to physically attack me and throw objects at my head, when she threw a tantrum about the fact that she had strewn rubbish all over my flat and didn't want to clean up after herself. She wanted me to 'admit' that I was the messy one, and flew into a rage when I told her the true origin of every sweet wrapper and crisp packet, that she had absentmindedly thrown on the floor.

I have an atypical reaction to stressful situations. My pulse slows and my blood pressure drops and I calm down. I get very cold and rational. I've been in life and death situations enough times to know that losing your head will get you killed.

When my ex girlfriend started hurling plates and knives at me, I didn't react, except to make sure I protected my head. When she left, I was glad she was gone. When she slammed the door of my flat on the way out, I was relieved. Obviously, I didn't want to date her any more after that. That's rational, right?

When my ex wife started getting aggressive, I would put a door in-between her and me. Some kind of physical barrier to stop me from being physically attacked. Sure, she would attack the door - punching and kicking - which only further confirmed that I was right to put some protection around myself from somebody with a streak of violence in them.

My ex wife would sometimes scream that her human rights were being infringed by her not being able to enter my prison cell, in-between beating the door with her fists. It seemed more like an infringement of my human rights, that I wasn't able to move around my home without fear of physical aggression against my person.

The psychological trauma of being trapped in a room with an angry person trying to kick the door down is not healthy for your mind. The more it happens, the more if affects you. You are attempting to retreat to safety, but some cruel and abusive person is rattling your cage, banging on the bars of your prison.

Why didn't I just leave? Well, if you're in a corner, you only tend to have one escape route, and that's right through the arena you're trying to escape. That means running the gauntlet right past your persecutor(s).

Trust me, if you want to help a person who is cornered, harassing them and being menacing and aggressive towards them is not going to coax them out of the corner.

My solution is to either wait for starvation or the police to release me from the trap. I have never called the police to come help me. I once had to threaten to call the police, in order to be allowed to be released from my cell to go to hospital for urgent treatment. That's not right.

Here's the bottom line: don't persecute people. Don't harass people. Don't stress them out and corner them with aggression and threats. Don't relentlessly bang on the door to their cell and kick and stomp and tantrum. They're in there, starving. They're in there, cornered and alone and dying.

Yes, I can tell you a lot about dying from starvation. I chose to die of starvation rather than be beaten by my abusers. That was a rational choice that I made.

A person doesn't retreat into a corner for no reason. A person doesn't starve themself to the brink of death for no reason. There is no 'carrot' or 'reward' in being trapped in a corner. It's being beaten with a 'stick' that drives them into a corner. It's verbal and physical abuse that makes a person cower in a corner.

I don't feel very safe, because my parents and my wife all abused me. They all put me in hospital and none of them give a shit. They're not sorry. They think it's my problem, not theirs. Well, isn't it strange that now that I've got away from those abusive people, my life has improved?

They will blame drug taking, but I'm not a drug addict and I'm going to show you in the coming weeks, it's them who are the drug addicts, and who act abusively. I'm going to show you conclusively that I'm not a drug addict and that their accusations are an attempt to cover their own guilt.

I'm going to show you that paranoia is not something that just exists in the mind of a sick person, but a reaction to extreme stress and mistreatment. Can you imagine being shut in a room with no food, drink or toilet, and having violent aggressive people pummelling on the door and screaming abuse night & day? Can you imagine what psychological impact that would have?

I'm going to show you every part of the psychological trauma and abuse that I sustained, and how that drove me to suicide attempts and mental illness. I'm going to show you how mental illness can be induced in somebody by mistreating them. I'm going to show you how the human mind reacts to bullying and abuse.

You're going to have to be a really clever smarty pants with a good memory, and remember that there is such a thing as cause and effect. You're going to need to remember the sequence of events, otherwise you're going to get confused. You're going to start trying to make quick and easy assumptions.

The main thing you're going to need to remember is this: abuse nearly killed me, and I was abstinent from drink & drugs. You just need to remember this one thing: I was driven to suicide, and there were no drugs involved, and I wasn't an alcoholic.

See if you can remember that, as I tell you the rest of the story. It's important that you do, because otherwise you might get confused.

It's easy to get confused when you're drinking and smoking and having tea & coffee, because you're manipulating your own mind. You're muddying the waters. You are confusing yourself and your perception of reality.

I'm able to make an accurate appraisal of reality, because I am speaking about periods where I wasn't on any medication, drugs or drinking. I'm able to rationally analyse all the facts and evidence now, because I'm completely abstinent from any psychoactive substances whatsoever, including all medications, legal drugs, illegal drugs, caffeine etc. etc.

The only time that you tend to have a clear mind in modern society is when you have kids. Becoming a parent normally sharpens the mind a little bit, and good parents decide to clean up their act (mine didn't). However, you also become filled with irrational fear, because you have children that you want to protect. You start to become afraid of the boogeyman.

Actually withdrawing from alcohol can make you very anxious. Being a parent is very tiring, and it's easy to try and compensate with tea and coffee and other wakefulness agents. However wakefulness agents make you very anxious and paranoid. You start to imagine that the world is full of dangerous people out to hurt your child.

This is the power of nightmares. You get pregnant because you're fucked up on booze. Perhaps you were so pissed that you vomited your contraceptive pill. Anyway, you end up pregnant even though you're right in the middle of being a massive binge drinker.

So you not only have the anxiousness of becoming a new parent, but you also have to give up alcohol and cigarettes. That's pretty hard on your anxiety levels, which you had been self medicating for with booze and fags. Now you don't have those crutches and you've got a kid that's going to need a stable home, but you haven't sorted your life out... you were still in party mode.

Dad has to give up on his dreams of being a footballer, Formula One driver, professional gambler or whatever idle fantasy he had been secretly harbouring. He's going to have to put on a grey suit and go to a dull concrete office until the age of 65 doing something very boring. That's stressful. He's also going to get a lot less sex, because his girlfriend/wife is going to be busy raising kids. It's an anxious time for the new Dad. He should probably show support to his partner by also quitting smoking and drinking, but he's not going to.

So, the home environment is filled with stress and anxiety before the screams of an incontinent midget have even pierced the tranquility of sitting around getting drunk. This isn't how that drunken night was supposed to turn out! What a little bastard for inseminating itself. Let's load it up with lots of blame and stress and teach it a lesson for arrogantly getting born.

It's a shame I'm so exhausted by it all. I have enough energy to finish the story, to prove the point. The point is simple: I'm good enough to achieve some cool stuff. I'm good enough to make a difference, to make a contribution. I haven't got enough energy to fight all the bullies though. I haven't got enough energy to fight the stigma and the presumptions and the lazy assumptions and the prejudice. I haven't got enough energy to be ganged up on. I'd done, I'm over.

When I've finished my story and killed myself, you can cut me open and you'll see the truth. You can dissect my body and see that I was physically healthy. I have written this text so that you can dissect my mind and see that I was mentally well, but driven to suicide by relentless abuse and a lack of apology or opportunity to beat my oppressors.

People like my Dad and ex-wife could just say sorry, but I know they never acknowledge their own guilt.

I'm guilty of lashing out. I'm guilty of reacting to stimuli. Sorry about that. Sorry for being a human being.

My parents and ex wife think they're saints, so I will be the martyr, in the hope that somebody else might get to avoid being killed for other people's sins.

I asked you to stop being mean and abusive. I asked to be set free. I asked for help. You failed me. I forgive you.

If you pile unmanageable stress and pressure on somebody, they will go wonky, they will get bent out of shape. You will put their world into a downward slope that they can't escape (1994)

Tags: #childhood #parents #divorce #addiction #drugs #alcohol #unpleasant #bipolar #suicide

This is a story about clinging on for dear life...

When you are hounded to the edge of the abyss, you will fall to your death if you allow yourself to be pushed one single step more. You shouldn't push people that hard. You shouldn't be so harsh, critical, judgemental, presumptuous. You don't know how close somebody is to the edge, until they're gone.

I don't want to go on about this, but I'm dealing with suicidal thoughts on a daily basis. If you think that's because I'm mentally ill, you're wrong. My brain has correctly judged the circumstances, and it's telling me that I have very few options. My brain is correctly informing me that I'm on the edge of a precipice, and the other side is a jeering snarling crowd who don't care whether I live or die.

People accuse suicidal people of being attention seeking, or selfish. It's actually neither. You have all the time in the world to hurl those accusations at a gravestone when they're gone. They won't be receiving any attention or anything for themself when they're gone. They won't even be stealing a single precious breath of your oxygen anymore, so how can it be selfish?

I've got a life insurance policy that covers suicide. My family are literally better off if I'm dead. That's cold hard cash in their pockets, rather than the rather draining task of repeatedly telling me I'm not good enough and I'm selfish. Yes, it's hard work to have to keep telling somebody to keep taking steps towards their demise, to keep hounding them until they're dead.

In Oxford, I'm pretty sure I came up with the term pushy parents. It kind of stuck with my friends, and their parents, and the phrase entered the popular vernacular. There were a lot of high-achieving kids at my schools in Oxford, and living nearby. My parents had big plans for their only son. They were going to make me achieve everything that they had failed to ever achieve, by force.

We all want our kids to do well, to get ahead, to achieve their greatest potential, but you have got to realise that they're still children. If you push them hard their whole childhood they won't thank you for it, if you push them beyond their limits and make them sick. You will struggle to judge how hard they can work, and how much stress and pressure they can handle, because you are a mature adult, and they are a developing child.

A child's attention span is different from yours. A child's knowledge and experience is different from yours. A child's ability to express distress and protect themself is different from yours. A child's capacity to experience daily stress and pressure and bullying and coercion is different from yours.

You might think that you are bringing up baby Einstein, but in fact you might be twisting that child's personality into somebody who's very bitter and resentful about being kept in from seeing their friends in order to study more. You might not be aware just how deeply etched childhood experiences are in that child's memory. You have no idea what is important to that individual child, especially if you don't listen.

Why am I bitching and whining about this stuff? Well, let me remind you: I'm living with the desire to commit suicide. I can only act on this once, and then I have no further opportunity to tell you who I really am, to tell you what makes me tick. This is a time capsule. It tells you everything you didn't want to know about me when I was alive.

This is the inconvenient truth. This is the smoking gun. This is the postmortem analysis.

I read a few books that were posthumously published after the author's death. The anguish, the distress, the emotion of the authors, thinly concealed behind passive agression and satire, oozes out from those works of literature. The words are soaked with emotion. Every sentence packs a punch, swung wildly at an unseen enemy.

I was systematically re-programmed to believe that my life was worthless, which is why I take huge risks. It's not selfishness if the self has no value. The more that you tell a person that they're shit and they're a burden and they're not good enough, the less risk-averse they become. They will go to great lengths to prove themself or to feel some connection to life.

I don't care what anybody says. Extreme sports are not stupid... they're brave. I can barely express to you just how cold, hard & rational you have to be to step into an extreme environment. You are literally weighing life & death with your every action. You are making decisions that can barely be comprehended by somebody who hasn't willingly laid their life on the line.

My Dad's a real coward. He's abusive to me and my Mum, and he won't admit he's in the wrong. He's such a coward that he hid behind his front door and got the police to deal with me when I went to confront him. He won't even face his own son, on the level, like an adult. He's never done anything brave in his life. He's a real disappointment to me.

I'm actually very calm and rational. I realise my Dad's an old man, and he's good to my sister and my niece, so I wasn't going to risk his life by pulverising him. I just wanted him to stand and face his own son, and confront the issue of him abusing me and my mum. I wanted him to admit he was wrong, to my face. I didn't demand it, but I felt that only a coward would shy away from an honest face to face conversation about his wrongdoing. I was right. He's a coward.

My Mum gave me life, and actually helped save my life and give me hope when I had my back against the wall, but my Dad is poisonous. He actually talks my Mum out of helping me. He probably thinks he's being a protector, a hero, but he's wrong. He's protecting nobody. My Mum will be hurt when I'm dead, and his son will be dead. My sister won't have a brother, and my niece won't have an uncle, and he won't accept any responsibility.

Yes, responsibility. Let's talk about responsibility.

On a daily basis, I'm responsible for my own life. I need to eat, sleep and not throw myself off a tall building. Yup, that's pretty much my entire existence at the moment. I'm trapped at the edge, and the route back to safety is blocked by my Dad, the 'protector' so I'm desperately trying to find another route back to safety, while my Dad is busily telling everybody not to help me.

I have no idea why somebody would step in and tell a caring person not to help a desperate person. I have no idea why a Dad would tell a Mum not to help their child. It's really upsetting. It's upsetting for me, and it's upsetting for my Mum, to have my Dad driving wedges in-between family members. Why can't we all just get along?

I'm not a defective toy, and you can't just return me to the store. I'm not broken, you just have to accept that I'm a human and I have my own identity, and I have identical needs to any other human. I need glucose, water, oxygen, salt, protein, fat, fibre and emotional sustenance. Cutting me off from my own mother by trying to poison her opinion of her own son, to compensate for your own shortcomings, that's patently disgusting.

I can have a lovely conversation with my Mum. Then, the next time we speak, her views will have been completely tainted by my Dad. I have no idea what his big problem is, but I suppose I should try harder to get to the bottom of it. It's no longer the case that I should assume that his 30+ years more on the planet means that he should be the more mature one.

Yes, I've always wanted to look up to my Dad. I've always wanted him to be a role model for me. I've always wanted him to lead by example.

My Dad doesn't really follow through though. He's a quitter. He's never had a career like I have. He's never achieved anything academically like I have. He's never been able to provide enough for his family. He's a real failure. A drunk and a drug addict, he's a bit of a loser, and I guess he feels pretty bad about himself.

Yes, he took his parents money and squandered it. His parents were wealthy and sent their kids to private school, and he messed up his chances of achieving anything of note. He mucked about with drugs and decided that was his priority in life... to take drugs. Even after the arrival of his son, he decided that the pursuit of drugs was still the most important thing in his life.

One of my best friends was a drug addict. When his son arrived, he cleaned up his act. He got himself a mortgage and a steady job. He quit drugs and smoking and keeps himself fit and healthy for his son. He's my role model. I look up to him. I admire what he's done. He's the gold standard that I aspire to emulate.

Men need father figures in their lives. They need masculine identity, which is about strength, leadership, trust, providing for loved ones, consistency, resourcefulness, reliability, dependability. You can't depend on a drug addict. The only thing they love is drugs.

My Dad actually destroyed his health with drugs, and had to go to hospital for a series of operations at around the time that my niece was born. I'm not sure whether fear of death or the arrival of a grandchild was the reason why he cleaned up his act, but he did finally quit drugs, in his sixties.

Nobody preaches louder than a convert, and I imagine that my Dad is very pious now that he's no longer abusing drugs. I don't drink or take drugs, but my Dad is pretty insufferable about many aspects of my lifestyle. He assumes that because I live in London I'm high on cocaine all the time. He assumes that because I have high earning potential, I spend it all on drugs. He's completely wrong.

Because he's a fuckup, he assumes I'm a fuckup too, but he's wrong. Because he's made mistakes in his life, he assumes I've made the same mistakes. Because he let people down, he assumes I'm going to let people down too. He applies his own guilt to me. He makes me carry the guilt for his wrongdoing.

I've got a brilliant title for a blog post lined up for December 26th, so I can't tell too much of my story at the moment without spoiling the surprise. There aren't actually any surprises. Everything is here, somewhere, but I'm going to spell things out for the world. It's extremely frustrating that I have to pace myself, to tell things little by little, but patience is a virtue.

I'm currently writing 2,000 words a day, and it's already swamping people. Hardly anybody is still engaged with my writing. It's gotten a bit unbalanced, and there are themes that are beginning to be a bit like a broken record. I'm actually dragging things out a little now, because I picked some milestones, and I'm making sure I don't give away enough to allow people to think that they can extrapolate and guess how the story ends.

I'll tell you how and when the story currently ends, according to my plan: I kill myself on New Year's Day, having told my tale but without the energy, support or resources to be able to continue living. It's exhausting being beaten for your 'sins' which are actually a result of taking abuse for somebody else's guilty conscience.

I'm going to tell you how somebody gets driven to extremism. Extreme risk taking. Extreme behaviour. Extreme moods. Death, which is at the other extremity from birth.

When a child is born, you write their future, based on the opportunities that you offer them. Choice is an illusion. Free will is an illusion. We can only play the cards that we are dealt.

Tags: #childhood #suicide #parents #depression

This is a story about my cyclical nature...

When my tale is finally told, I hope you will understand why people enter a mood disorder cycle. It's not about broken brains. It's about abused children.

Does abuse have to mean being kiddy fiddled by your uncle? Does abuse have to mean being touched in private places? Does abuse have to mean sexual abuse? Well, everything links back to sex in some way, but the web of life is incomprehensibly complex, so I suggest you just listen for now.

I went to playgroup from the age of 3, went to school at the age of 4, and stayed in school until the age of 17. It was horrific. Every single year, my Dad did something to f**k up my chances of having any self esteem and avoiding relentless daily bullying.

Yes, I'm singling out my Dad, because he's a total cunt. My mum is loving, and has tried very hard to make her children feel loved, but she's got the shittest taste in men imaginable. My surname - Grant - comes from her ex-husband, who was a heroin addict. That's lovely. Instead of being Nick Newton - perhaps a descendent of a famous physicist - I'm Nick Grant, named after a heroin addict. Brilliant.

Keith - as I very clearly remember him telling me - does not want to be called "Dad"... "who's Dad?" he would say to me, when I was only about 3 years old and learning to talk. "I'm not Dad, I'm Keith" that's a lovely thing to say to the little boy you're looking after isn't it? That's definitely going to make them feel loved and secure. What a cunt.

I think the main problem is that my parents were never outnumbered, until my sister gave birth to my niece. The penny hadn't dropped until then, that my parents lives and disgusting lifestyle needed to change, because children had arrived. Keith was so lazy, that he sat around in a house that my Mum's Mum bought for them, drinking and smoking, and sending my Mum out to work full time in order to pay for his lifestyle. What a cunt.

Yes, my mum was the breadwinner, while my Dad was at home, telling me how resentful he was at having to rear a child. He thought he had solved the riddle of life the universe and everything, and got to take drugs, get drunk and have sex with my mum. Sadly, sex leads to children. Denying that you're a Dad isn't going to get you anywhere, except making little children very sad.

My Mum and my Granny were lovely, and I do have lots of happy memories of time spent with them. Sadly, if you're a full time working mother to pay for your lazy drug addict partner, you don't spend as much time with your child as they'd really like, especially if the main childcare is hungover or on a comedown, and saying "who's Dad?".

I wasn't really prepared for social interaction with other children. I didn't used to go on playdates or have friends over. My parents had their friends over instead. And they sat around taking Cocaine and doing jigsaws. Yes, drug taking and getting drunk were my parents passtimes, not doing things with their kid. By their own admission, they used to stick my carrycot on top of the jukebox when they were down at the pub. They definitely weren't going to let a little accident like a child get in the way of their big ambitions to be drunks and drug addicts.

What happens next is you go to school, and you don't have a frigging clue how to relate to other children. All you know is how to interact with adults who tell you to fuck off because they don't want you to interfere with their high, or they're cranky because they're hung over or on a comedown. You know how to speak relatively articulately, because you've been trying to make yourself heard and understood in an adult way - because all you know is fucked up adults - but you don't know the rules of the jungle.

If you're going to be a drunk and a drug addict, at least have a bunch of kids, so that they can play with each other when you're getting high and drunk. Being outnumbered might also make the penny drop a little earlier, that your life is now fucked, and you're going to have to make some lifestyle adjustments unless you want to fuck up innocent lives too. Is that too much to ask?

Playing on your own is no fun, and you're not learning how to socially interact with your peers. It's not normal, for the development of a child, to have no other children of similar age. Humans are social creatures. We weren't evolved to sit around getting drunk and taking drugs, which is why people's lives are destroyed by those things. We were evolved to be part of a clan or a tribe that was socially cohesive. Drugs and alcohol don't glue things together, they make things fall apart.

So when I went to playgroup and school, I really wasn't properly prepared for social interaction with other children. I remember whichever toy I picked up, somebody would indicate they wanted to play with it, and I would hand it over of course, because I could understand English and adult interactions very well. After a while it became very confusing. I didn't understand that the other children enjoyed taking toys away from me more than they enjoyed playing with them. They wanted to fight with me, to test boundaries, but I was used to the adult world of co-operation. I lost, they won, and I didn't understand why.

Yes, I 'played nice' from the very outset. I just couldn't understand why other children didn't. I expected them to be little adults like me. They'd call me names, and I'd say "why are you calling me that?" and get upset rather than calling them names back. I took things right in the feels, because I never learnt tit for tat. I never learnt retaliation. I was raised to be a liberal adult pacifist hippy, by spending all my time in the company of adults.

My Dad very much discouraged friendships. I wasn't allowed to be friends with Andrew, because he was a picky eater. I wasn't allowed to be friends with the little boy a couple of houses down the road, because he was too immature. Too immature? Are you totally fucked in the head? HE WAS A FUCKING CHILD, OF COURSE HE WAS IMMATURE.

Throughout my childhood, I was reprimanded for anything approaching childish behaviour. Yes, it's good to teach your kids good manners, but they really don't understand the subtle nuances of adult society, and things get very confusing indeed for them when you're abusing drugs and alcohol, because those things are forbidden to the child and you have surrounded these revered substances with mystery and lies.

Children are naturally inquisitive, and ask questions. When I asked my parents questions about their drugs, they lied to me, and they told me to lie to teachers and other children about their drug taking. Being the keeper of your parents secrets is very confusing as a child. It's not a responsibility that you should put on a child.

You think that photo's cool? Grow the fuck up. Drug dealers go to prison, and my Dad already had a criminal record for drug possession, so the courts were not going to go easy on him. The children of criminals often go into foster care. Being such a drug addict that you're prepared to go to prison and have your children taken into care is fucked up.

Am I building up a clear enough picture of what my parents life priorities were? Am I spelling it out in plain enough English for you to understand what the consequences of fucking with your child's life are? Am I laying out my case for where a big chunk of responsibility lies, where the proverbial buck stops?

Yes, I'm shaming my parents, but why the fuck shouldn't I. I had to guard their secrets and lies throughout my miserable childhood. Why so miserable? Well, you try being bullied every day for 12 or 13 years and see how you like it. You try having your friendships destroyed and self esteem taken away, by a total cunt of a Dad. You try dealing with selfish self-centred drunks and drug addicts instead of sisters, brothers and friends of a similar age.

I changed schools 6 times. That's 5 times more than is supposed to happen. You just can't disrupt a child's life that much without fucking up their life. Especially if you do extra stuff to fuck them up too.

Lots of kids have to wear glasses, but do all their own fathers bully them about it? How many Dads out there think it's a good idea to call your kid "4-eyes" and "brains" and take the piss and laugh at your son? Let's have a show of hands. Hands up if you think it's a good idea to bully your own children, in the same childish way that they're going to get bullied at school. Nope, wrong answer, Dad. Get to the back of the class, in the corner, wearing the dunce hat. See the headmaster after school. Very disappointed with your behaviour.

All kids get bullied to some extent, or at some time or other. When it's relentless, at home and at school, around the clock... yes, life is fucking shit. I can't express to you just how shit life is when you're being bullied. I used to look forward to getting sick. I used to be overjoyed when I was throwing up such vast quantities of projectile vomit that it was pretty clear that I wouldn't be able to be in school without getting chunks of half-digested carrot all over the classroom.

I used to cry and cry and cry, when I got well. I remember breaking down crying on my way to school, after a day or two off. I was so upset that my parents actually decided to let me have another day off, which I clearly remember with crystal clarity as one of the moments of my childhood where I felt pure relief flood my entire body. I felt a 100 tonne weight of anxiety be lifted from my entire body.

One thing that my Dad used to do, was to price everything in terms of bags of drugs, rather than pound notes or the abstract measure of child happiness. Yes, child happiness is hard to measure, especially using bags of drugs. Let me give you an example. At primary school, it was close enough to cycle there as a little boy. My Dad is very clever, and he figured out that girls bikes are cheaper than boys bikes, because lots of Dads want their little girls to be like little boys, and they buy them bikes that they never ride. This oversupply of girls bikes creates a great opportunity to save the price of a bag of drugs, for merely the immeasurable cost of childhood happiness.

Yes, my Dad has done that a few times. Don't give your kids enough pocket money to be able to buy a bike, because pocket money is the same money as should be used to buy bags of drugs. Instead, you can save the money and buy more bags of drugs by simply buying the cheaper girls bike, or stealing bikes. Yes, stealing bikes is the cheapest way to get a bike of all, and it leaves the most money for bags of drugs. Drugs come first. Childhood happiness can't even be measured on the all-important drug bag scale.

Do you know what happens when you send your kid to school riding a stolen girls bike? One of them even had a FUCKING BASKET ON IT FOR FUCK'S SAKE. What a cheapskate drug addict cunt. It's a reasonable presumption that mature adults might think it a little eccentric, or even consider it to be a conversation starter. For children IT'S THE END OF YOUR FUCKING LIFE. Do you think kids forget that kind of shit? The bullies at school certainly didn't FOR THE ENTIRE FUCKING TIME I WAS AT SCHOOL YOU CUNT.

If a trick's worth pulling, it's worth pulling a couple of times. Yes, my Dad managed to pull this stunt a few times and RUIN MY ENTIRE FUCKING CHILDHOOD.

It's a Catch 22. Without a bike you can't go and see your friends and get to school independently. But then the FUCKING CUNT hasn't even thought about how you need to get to school anyway. Did I tell you that the FUCKING CUNT bought a house at the top of a massive hill nowhere near any fucking busses, in the middle of fucking nowhere?

But it's OK, because I'm not upset about having had to go through living hell. It's not affected me at all. On the surface, everything seems absolutely cunting fine. I look, to the untrained eye, like I'm well adjusted, successful, happy and content in life. Cunt.

Hmmmm. Could edit this. Not going to.

There's the smug prick. I would only piss on him if he was on fire because he seems to be an OK granddad to my niece. What a piece of shit. He only finally sorted his fucking life out once and for all when my niece was born (photo circa 1995)

Tags: #parents #bullying #childhood #bipolar #depression #mentalhealth

This is a story about my best friend...

The first 10 years of my life were pretty lonely. Then along came my best friend in the whole world.

Naturally, my parents were harshly critical of me for not being some male nanny, perfect parent type figure. I was, strangely, more of a brother to my sister. That was a disappointment to them. They thought that having more children meant more free time to get drunk and take drugs.

Anyway, let's ignore my parents. They were very much of the Victorian mindset that children should be not seen and not heard. Maybe it would have been better if children were not born, but I'm very glad that my sister was. Having a sister is the reason why I'm clinging onto life with my fingernails.

Having a 10 year age gap is a bit strange, but I think it's kinda got advantages. My parents can't be bothered to imagine how hard it is being a young person today, and they get a particularly warped view because I was always very independent and a high-earner from the age of 17. Sadly, the opportunities for the majority of young people are rather bleak.

Yes, the challenges faced by me and my sister in day to day life are really chalk and cheese. While I battle with my mental health, in order to be able to work, my sister also has to battle a highly competitive job market and low pay. While I have to ensure that I earn enough during my hypomania in order to survive during my depression, my sister has to stretch her budget beyond any feasible limit.

Yes, our parents generation really screwed things up, and life is very hard for my sister. I went through a horrible divorce that nearly killed me, but that was due to a single vicious and mean person who had not a care in the world for human life, and couldn't act with a single shred of decency. My sister not only has to deal with a horrible divorce, but her rent & bills as a proportion of her income are totally unmanageable. That's not her fault. She works 6 days a week.

So, tomorrow, during the Chancellor's Autumn Statement, tax credits and other benefits are going to be cut. People like my sister are going to be horribly affected, and there's no way she could possibly work any harder to fix her own finances. She rents a very modest property for her & my niece, she works 6 days a week, she's very dedicated to her job, there are no better paid jobs... she is being shafted by politicians and society.

As a working mum, who did nothing wrong and is doing everything right, why should she have even more financial woe and stress heaped on top of her? She's working her arse off but she is being destroyed through exhaustion and stress, by a government that just doesn't care about the wellbeing of its citizens.

The net result is pretty much what the Tories want. My parents will have to work for longer and have less money in retirement, in order to support their daughter and granddaughter, despite the fact that they've worked hard all their life and their daughter is already working 6 days a week. That's bullshit.

Our family has not racked up huge debts buying crap. Our family has saved money and bought property and done all the things we were supposed to do. We've played by the rules of society, and my parents and sister have ended up diddled by the system. They paid in, with their income tax and their national insurance and their council tax... they're not acting like they're entitled.

My parents just want to have their pension. My sister just wants to work. My niece just wants to be a toddler. It's outrageous that my parents' pension goes to pay my sister's bills. My sister's 6-day-a-week job is not enough to pay for her bills. My niece hardly gets to see my sister because she's working so hard. Is that the kind of society you want, Tories?

Throughout Britain we see examples of how people are being asked to fend for themselves. While the richest members of society contribute a pittance of their net wealth, so many are having to dip into their life savings, their pensions, just to survive. I actually phoned JPMorgan's pension scheme administrator to ask if I could have any money released for hospital treatment I desperately needed, when Camden council bungled my case yet again.

I've managed to limp through and get myself to the point where I have survived an ordeal that would have killed most people. However, I had to borrow money to do that. Why am I borrowing money to pay for lifesaving treatment, when I have paid staggering sums in tax and National Insurance? It's all been pissed away on tax breaks for the wealthy.

Why should the National Health Service be facing a funding crisis, because we wanted to line the pockets of the super-rich? Why should state schools suffer? Why should our brightest children be cutting short their eduction and looking for crap jobs because we wanted to make the rich richer?

We are asking each generation to work a lot harder than the last. Our grandparents lived through a war, so they knew about austerity. They knew about make do & mend. Unfortunately, too few of those people are in positions of authority now. Their kids - my parents generation - think that life is easy, because they lived through the post-war boom. They are wrong. Life is hard.

So, take a note of the date and remember that today was the day that the government went too far. They cut too deep and they hurt people who were already hurting. They scapegoated the wrong people.

Anger will rise up. It will start with the young people who have been frozen out of the job market, who are marginalised and demonised by the media. It will spread to the hard working mums who are struggling to balance the books already, struggling to stretch their budgets. Then it will hit the grannies who are providing free childcare and cash handouts from their pensions in order to keep their kids and grandkids afloat.

There will be a groundswell of public opinion against being told how to live our lives with more frugality from some vintage wine swilling toffs who like nothing more than to admire each other's art collections, and ponce around the country telling the great unwashed masses to stop complaining. Let them eat cake, right?

Things are a lot worse than you can see from within the echo-chamber. Get your head out of the statistics. Get your arse out of your Tory party circle of friends. You're out of touch with reality and it will come and bite your ass.

The problems in society are being masked and things will come crashing down quicker than you can say "Poll Tax Riots".

That is all.

Tags: #politics #childhood #parents #civildisobedience

This is a story about breaking point...

I don't believe in 'rock bottom'. Instead, I feel that I have either run out of fuel or suffered some kind of mechanical failure. You can't drive yourself at the absolute limit forever without some kind of blowout. I have melted my tyres by cornering at high speed.

When I was younger, I pushed myself very hard because I was bored and not at all challenged by what was asked of me. I needed to work many many times harder than my colleagues to prove that my age was no limit to what I could achieve. I've been programming since I was a little boy, so why shouldn't I be better at it than somebody who's been doing it for less years than me?

I had a couple of brilliant teachers growing up, one of whom taught me boolean algebra. If you can master boolean algebra, then there's not much you can't do with a computer. Else if, you're not cut out to be a programmer. End program.

So, I've been doing more or less the same thing in my full-time career for 19 years, because it's a skilled job and is very highly paid. However, there are so many asshats that I must endure in order to get on with my job, which is rather trying. Eventually, the pen-pushers grind me down and I lose my patience with them.

What's really heartbreaking is that I have worked so hard for so long in order to have some time & space to do some things which I actually love and I'm passionate about. However, just when things were seemingly working out for me, people came and picked my pocket.

Now, it's my own fault for being so open and trusting and generous. I have always refused to stop treating others the way I would like to be treated myself. Just because other people are mean and selfish and steal from each other, doesn't mean that I'm going to be like them too.

I imagine that they must feel pretty rotten about themselves, knowing that they have profited from other people's hard labour. I know that we all think of ourselves as relatively hard working. Just remember to look at the evidence. Think about how many 100+ hour weeks you have racked up in your life.

So this isn't about boastfulness, or oneupmanship. It's just about an attitude adjustment. I know that many baby boomers who are in the process of thinking about retirement feel pretty tired and that they have worked pretty hard. Well, I would advise you to look at some hard numbers about just how hard your sons, daughters and grandchildren are working and will have to continue working in order to fund your retirement.

There is a "screw it let's just drown our sorrows" attitude amongst the young, who have no hope of job security, not enough money to buy a house, not enough money to support a family without state support. This is a rational response to a world that has few opportunities left for them.

Underpaying people below the age of 25 is obscene. I was working as a contractor for Research Machines and Lloyds TSB at the age of 20 and they paid me top dollar because my skills and youthful energy got shit done.

It really depresses me, just how many layers of idle and out-of-touch management there are sitting uselessly on top of the toiling youth, while they wait to collect a pension that they didn't contribute enough towards to justify what they are going to withdraw from the system.

The future of children and grandchildren has been mortgaged by profligate baby boomers who were too busy getting stoned and taking LSD to actually ban the bomb and prevent British industry from being asset stripped and having our competitive edge completely destroyed by myopic idiots. Nuclear arms proliferation is not my legacy... it's yours, old people. The lack of jobs for young people is not my fault... it's yours, old people.

Ok, so you might be feeling rotten in your old age, but maybe your body wouldn't feel so bad if it wasn't full of cancer from all the radioactive particles floating around from your nuclear testing? Maybe you'd feel a lot better if the nation hadn't been totally bankrupted by you and your cronies, so we didn't have to cut medical research budgets?

My suggestion? Well, Soylent Green seems a little unpalatable, so perhaps we could just make sure that the burden of austerity falls on those who are responsible. It wasn't a debt binge by young people that caused the current crisis. It was a complete lack of political and social responsibility from the baby boom generation, that meant that the landed gentry had their hands in the safe, helping themselves to all the loot, while you sneering arrogant wannabe pensioners were drinking and smoking and taking drugs.

So, we have a very cold bitter winter ahead of ourselves. Everything is going to hell in a hand cart. Please please please remember not to blame your children for the implosion of the world and the collapse of society. Your pension is a privilege you get for leaving the world a better place than you found it, and I'm afraid you have no right to take something you didn't pay for.

I'm really reluctant to do another round of propping up a broken system, for the benefit of a bunch of ungrateful twats who show no appreciation. I think I'm going to stand back and watch the whole thing burn down.

That is all.

This is my sister's cat, Calcifer. He was catnapped. Us young people are struggling to look after our loved ones, because we are under too much pressure to work 6 or 7 days a week on hardly any money... baby boomers have no idea how hard it is being young (September 2014)

Tags: #career #parents #childhood

This is a story about doing the right thing for the wrong reasons...

I had 3 options: hospital, suicide, support network. Thankfully, I still have the latter.

I really didn't fancy another inpatient hospital admission. I probably would have had to accept stronger psychiatric medication, as it's pretty clear that my life hangs by a thread. One rash, hot-headed decision and it could be snuffed out in the blink of an eye. Think that sounds melodramatic? Screw you.

If you think that people say that they're depressed and suicidal because they're attention seeking, you're wrong. If you want to understand suicide a little more, you should watch The Bridge, by Eric Steel. It will cost you £2.49 and 90 minutes of your life.

I watched The Bridge as an inpatient. My suicidal plans to take Potassium Cyanide, changed. I decided that jumping off the Golden Gate bridge would have much deeper personal meaning, seeing as I had to cancel a San Francisco trip because of my horrible divorce. If you're going to die, do it quick & clean, or do it in some meaningful way, right?

Does it seem irresponsible? Well, actually I took out life insurance that covers suicide, that will leave a small legacy for my sister and my niece. I'm sure they'd rather have their brother/uncle, but suicide isn't really a choice but instead it's a reaction to unmanageable factors out of the control of that suffering individual.

So, instead of going back to hospital and being put in a chemical straightjacket, I made a video explaining what I was going to do and why. Then I booked a flight to San Francisco, packed a bag and headed to the airport. I was a man on a mission, but also a man on fire.

My friends have been scattered fairly far & wide. My friend John came back from Australia relatively recently, but we have been out of contact for years & years, and I struggled to support him - paying his rent and wages - when my need was very much vice-versa. We fell out when I grew impatient with his adoration of TV rather than job-hunting.

My friend Dave lives near Bristol. I would love to spend more time with him, but it's away from my work in London. That was one of the problems that was a coffin nail in our startup: Hubflow. I'm super grateful that Dave is such a great guy that he forgave me for becoming a complete sociopathic a**ehole as the pressure and stress of it all became too much, when I was CEO, and that we still seem to have a good friendship.

My friend Tim lives in Bournemouth. I really want to avoid that place. Bad memories linked to my divorce and startup failure. London is home. I like London.

My parents and a few old friends live in Oxford. I was dragged there against my will, and then my ex cheated on me, while I was temporarily evicted from my home. Bad memories. It's not my life... I live in London, not Oxford.

My sister and my friend MG live in Nottingham. I'd like to give it a go, but I haven't let London run its course yet. I will probably try and have a little pied-à-terre up there soon, so I have a base nearby my sister at a way lower cost than London. It's good to have an escape plan in case sh1t goes bad. Don't have one at the moment... hence suicidal thoughts.

I really want to get up to the North-East of England to see my friends Andy and Jim. It's a strange land for me though... I've been to the USA more times than I have been in the North of England, in my adult life.

So, when I booked my flights to California, USA, I knew that I was at least going somewhere with relative familiarity, even if that familiarity comes only from the movies I have watched and technology companies (Apple, Google, Oracle, Facebook etc. etc.) that I worship.

Also, I knew that there might be a chance to see long-lost friends, Ben & Jakub, who are business founders in Silicon Valley. Now, I feel very very embarrassed about the way I have conducted myself while things have not been going very well. I feel most embarrassed of all in front of these role models of mine, who have handled the same pressure and stresses. They have done it without vindictively and publicly blaming their shortcomings on their ex and/or parents.

Embarrassment drove me into my shell, made me withdraw. I didn't want the London Kitesurfers and my Cambridge peers from the Springboard Program to see me - an enthusiastic, happy-go-lucky, extroverted, capable and entertaining guy - so subdued by unhappiness in a destructive relationship. 

I stopped talking to my friends.

That was nearly fatal. Social media is the reason why I have maintained a toe-hold in life. Friends have reached out to me, when I'm clearly fumbling around without a bloody clue as to what the heck is happening to me, except that I'm loosing my grip on my will to live. That's made the difference. That's why I didn't chuck myself off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Thanks.

Jakub lent me the Apiry.io bike so I could cycle to Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge. Another thing ticked off the bucket list (Friday 30th October, 24 hours after making the video)

Tags: #suicide #depression #bipolar #startup #entrepreneur #parents #childhood #oxford #london #media #mentalhealth #friends

This is a story about burnout...

Here I am, back in Cambridge, after 4 years of ups & downs. What happened?

Well, I got hit by a perfect storm. I could see the storm coming - I'm a sailor after all - but I couldn't sail fast enough to get out of the way. Part of the reason for the sudden breakdown was uncontrolled self-medication with the GABA agonist, ethanol, which had suppressed my natural anxiety response until things were literally unbearable. The other reason is a lack of support from my parents. In fact, they actually undermined me and lied about supporting me.

Life is stressful. My sister is a single mum on a low income, working 6 days a week, going through a horrible divorce. That's stressful. I was a startup founder, in conflict with my co-founder and my girlfriend, who were both pulling me in different directions and away from my investors in Cambridge and my customers and talent pool in London. That's stressful too.

Our parents are always looking for the easy way out. They are not good at taking any responsibility, but I don't blame them. Whatever it is that causes them to be so slippery at accepting that they have 2 children who need their support, I want to find out and help them. My sister is a supermum to her daugher, my niece.

Even though our parents don't realise or appreciate it, we have been working so damn hard all our careers to make sure we don't place any financial burden on them. My sister and I have suffered in our adult lives as a result.

Something had to give.

You should give your children enough to do something but not enough to do nothing. It's as simple as that. If you don't give enough to allow your kids to do something then you're not a good parent. Simples.

My sister gives my niece a brilliant life.

So, I want to help my parents with their alcoholism. I want to help them see that projecting their inadequacies onto their kids is over-pressuring them. I want them to see that their kids are nice people who care about family and want to look after their parents in the manner to which they have become accustomed, but we are living in an age when the government has bankrupted the country.

Life is hard as a young person.

Baby boomers had it unbelievably easy versus the prospects that a young person faces today. The chance of a young person being debt free, owning their car, buying a house... these are pie in the sky dreams that will never come to fruition unless your parents are able to comprehend that their dreams of being idle pensioners are of lower priority than miserable deprived grandchildren and stressed anxious children, who have become parents themselves.

We have known about contraception and family planning for long enough, that there is no excuse for not thinking about the wellbeing of any children you might spawn. Having a baby does not make you clever. It means that your body did something that it was evolved to do... just the same as a slug, a pig, a fish, a bird. Reproduction just means that you failed to use your higher brain function, and acted instead, no differently than a fly laying eggs in putrid meat. Well done.

There are a great number of barely educated and underprivileged kids who are bored on housing estates and have no hope of escaping these sink holes. They are incentivised to perpetuate generations of welfare dependent and economically inactive families. These people have been robbed of the things that would enable them to work their way out of poverty and deprivation.

My parents both went to University, so they have no excuse.

I delayed starting a family until I had done more research into the genetic factors in Type II Bipolar Disorder, and had verified whether I could consistently manage my own illness in a stressful environment. Only when I know that I'm not going to pass on bad genes and I'm not going to have another stress-related burnout, will I consider stopping using contraception.

Condoms are a good thing.

My parents enjoy looking after my cat, Frankie, until I'm ready to be a good human to him again (August 2012)

Tags: #university #career #divorce #parents #depression #suicide #alcohol #addiction #bipolar #youth #sex #politics

This is a story about unquantifiable needs...

It takes a lot of effort to keep up with somebody in distress. If you're not going to go the distance, you are just guessing, and you will be wrong on every conclusion drawn from lazy presumptions.

Whenever my homeless friend Frank phoned me, I would get on my bike and travel from Kentish Town to King's Cross to meet him. This might have been rather inconvenient for me, but I had started so I was going to finish. That's the first thing you need to know about me & Frank: we are determined people who finish what we start.

I had decided to take a trip to Prague, Czech Republic, to see a friend from the Springboard Accelerator Program, Cambridge. In so doing, I wasn't there for Frank. The consequences for him were nearly disastrous.

Did you know you can't keep one single solitary crab in a bucket, because it will crawl out and escape? However, you can keep two or more crabs in a bucket, because as soon as a crab tries to escape the other(s) will pull it back down into the bucket. They keep each other imprisoned. Mutually assured destruction.

Frank is a happy-go-lucky kinda guy, like me. We trust people. We give people the benefit of the doubt. We ran into some of Frank's 'friends' just before I had to catch my flight to Prague. They tried to mug me. Luckily I was streetwise enough to see what was happening and I cycled off. There was nothing else I could do. They stole Frank's iPhone, so I couldn't contact him. I had no idea what had happened to him.

When I got back from my trip to Prague, I got a call from Frank's friend, Paul, saying he had just been discharged from hospital.

There was a significant disparity between Frank's story and his hospital discharge notes. He told me he had been discharged from St. Pancras Hospital, but his discharge notes were clearly from UCLH. He told me that he had sustained a head injury, but there was no mention of that in the notes.

However, what did check out was that Frank was an alcoholic and he had gone through untreated withdrawal that could have killed him. Delirium Tremens killed the famous singer Amy Winehouse and it nearly killed Frank. The notes didn't seem to draw much attention to the fact that he did not receive treatment for his withdrawal. I guess London hospitals see a lot of homeless alcoholics though... mainly in the morgue.

When I first met Frank, on Primrose Hill, the first thing I noticed was that he was clean shaven, well dressed, had a tidy haircut and spoke articulately. The second thing that I noticed was that he was drinking at 7am. When we went to get a cup of tea later, I noticed that he started shaking quite badly... it was time to skip the tea and get him an alcoholic drink.

Buying alcohol for an alcoholic? Had I lost my mind?

You are ignorant about the dangers of abrupt alcohol withdrawal syndrome for an alcoholic. It's not a perfect solution, to buy them a beer, but do you really want somebody having a Grand Mal seizure and dying right in front of your eyes, because you are too stubborn to educate yourself about the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you don't trap that an alcoholic can't escape.

So, alcoholics are abandoned by society, begging enough money to self-medicate for their physical dependence with the threat of horrendous withdrawal syndrome and possible death, if their blood alcohol level drops too abruptly.

How do I know this? I've known alcoholics, I've seen people get treated, I've read books and papers and online resources. You can do it too, if you care. It's certainly a lot easier to be wilfully ignorant, though, and incorrectly say "why don't they just stop drinking and use some willpower?". It's certainly a lot easier to not know any facts and just be wrong about everything.

What if that person was your son, daughter, brother, sister, husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, friend? Just let them die, right?

Well done.

First, do no harm (October 2013)

Tags: #frank #homeless #alcohol #addiction #NHS #friends