This is a story about unhealthy coping mechanisms...

I've been surviving on a combination of barely concealed loathing and contempt for my job, copious amounts of alcohol, occasional use of tranquillisers and a lot of passive-aggressive blogging. It seems to have worked, according to my bank balance and my CV.

In four months, I had one day off sick and a one-week holiday. That's not bad. Just 6 working days that I was unproductive. 1 out 82 working days unwell is only 1.2%.

It's been killing me in unusual ways though.

I've been comfort eating a lot. When I first started my contract, I was munching my way through loads of sweets and nuts at my desk. I was having a great big lunch. I was having cakes and pasties. I was having super-size meals at McDonalds. I was coming home and stuffing my face with crisps, ice cream and unhealthy meals.

I've been drinking far too much. To begin with, I was picking up a bottle of wine on my way home, every single day. I switched to beer because I could drink more of it, but there would be less alcohol in it. There's 94ml of alcohol in your average bottle of white wine. There's 75ml of alcohol in 3 cans of lager, even though the beer is double the volume. Then, things got out of control briefly. I was having two bottles of wine, or 6 cans of beer. The alcohol was a real problem, but then so was the job. Sobering up at my desk was a way of getting through the day.

Early on in my contract, I decided that I wasn't going to blog at work. I wanted to do my best to look busy. I didn't even want to surf the web and read the news websites that I like. I certainly didn't want to be looking at Facebook on my phone all day long. However, that just made things worse. Getting through the empty boring days was excruciating agony. By the time I got home, I was so relieved, but so stressed out, that I felt I needed alcohol to relax and face the next day.

Then, I started to read the news. I found myself constantly clicking refresh, willing something to happen. The summer months are fairly dreadful anyway. The politicians have gone off on holiday, the markets are quiet. Not a lot was going on. Brexit provided a very unhealthy obsession for a while, and I took great delight in trolling the closet racists and xenophobes. Post-Brexit was quite anti-climactic, and just tragic.

I decided that the only way that I was going to stay sane was to write 3 times a day. I was briefly mailing short stories that I was writing to a couple of friends. They helped to keep me sane by being the willing recipients of my bleak allegorical tales of wage slavery: read Alan the Alcoholic if you want to know what I mean.

Finally, I decided I would allow myself to blog at work. I had the additional problem of being told I could no longer use my personal MacBook and I would have to have some piece of shit PC "because data security" or whatever. Anyway, I then didn't have access to my photo library - I try to use images that I own the copyright for - and I didn't have Photoshop to be able to make high quality edits. There's also a slight worry about what kind of corporate spyware is watching what I'm doing.

Somehow, I've nearly limped through to the end of my contract, and I even managed to work my notice period, which is something I haven't done for 6 or 7 years. I'm even getting a couple of leaving dos, as opposed to being escorted off the premises by security (that's never actually happened, but things haven't been wrapped up 'neatly' in recent years).

Obviously, I'm on really dodgy ground, because I'm going to be looking for a new contract in a fortnight or so, and I suppose prospective new employers could stumble on my Twitter profile, Facebook page or this blog. So, to be sensible, I probably have to blog "nicey nicey" for a couple of weeks, so that all the juicy gossip is buried deeper than most miserable corporate drones would ever dig.

I'm not sure what the magic formula is for recovery from clinical depression / major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, substance abuse (dual diagnosis), borderline personality disorder, functional alcoholism and all the other labels that get bandied around. However, I'm pretty sure that it looks like this:

• An absolute imperial fucktonne of cash. I mean LOADS.
• Rest & recuperation. I don't just mean a couple of weeks. We're talking months or years
• Surround yourself with addicts and people with mental health problems. Nobody else 'gets' it
• Cut horrible toxic people out of your life
• No compromise
• Force yourself to do things you don't like very much
• Do something that requires discipline and routine, and stick with it for months, if not years
• Set yourself some achievable goals, where you're in control

That last one is probably the most important. I absolutely love the fact that I've been blogging for over a year, and I'm on track to write 365 blog posts and 450,000 words in less than 13 months. I've blogged from psychiatric hospital. I've blogged from San Francisco. I've blogged from a desert island off the coast of North Africa. I've blogged through a couple of projects from hell. I've blogged through depression. I've blogged through addiction. I've blogged through isolation. I've blogged through loneliness. I've blogged through suicidal thoughts and self harm.

The only thing I haven't quite done yet is to blog through happiness and contentment, but either that's coming or blogging is keeping me trapped in a certain mindset and stopping me moving on with my life.

I don't think writing like this is keeping me stuck in a rut. I can't imagine my life without writing now. Writing has become such a part of me. I'm more a writer than anything else. There's nothing else I live for, as much as writing. There's nothing else that I put as much passion and energy into. There's nothing else I'm as enthusiastic about.

I guess for many people, work is what defines them. "What do you do?" is the classic middle-class party icebreaker question, when meeting new people. What do you even say if you hate what you do, or you're flailing around to find something new? What should I say, on Thursday, when I'm out of a job again?

If I tell people I'm an IT consultant, that's slightly misleading, because that's a thing that I do just to get money when I'm desperate, and I won't even be consulting for any clients on Thursday, or for at least a fortnight or so after that.

However, I'm not going to stop writing when I finish my contract. I can't see me ever stopping writing, now I've started. What would I do with myself? How would I structure my day, without writing?

Obviously, writing is not a panacea, and it's a dangerous strategy to turn yourself into an open book. So many people will gleefully abuse your honesty, in order to gain a competitive advantage over you, put you down. So many people are looking for an excuse not to hire you, or to sack you. I'm giving my enemies all the ammunition they could possibly want.

However, isn't there something poetically wonderful about loading the gun, handing it to your enemy and turning your back on them? If they choose to shoot you in the back, with the bullet that you loaded in the weapon that you gave to them, isn't that going to eat away at them for the rest of their life?

Isn't there something exciting about deciding to say things that you're not allowed to say because of the conspiracy of silence? People are so afraid about becoming unemployable, and tainting their professional reputations. I almost want to start linking to this blog from my LinkedIn. Of course, every time I write the word "LinkedIn" the higher up the Google search index I will climb when somebody types "nick grant linkedin" into the little search box.

I'm not sure how much the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday routine has given my life some useful structure. I think, on balance, it's been more damaging to my mental and physical health to have a shitty project and an offshore team, than any benefit that I have gained by forcing myself to get out of bed every morning. I have no difficulty getting up and getting on with being productive, when I'm working on something that isn't mind-numbingly boring and depressing anyway.

The suffering has been worth it, financially, and with money comes opportunity: the opportunity to find something better to do with my limited time on the planet. Life is short: too short to be working a job that's like death itself.

Who knows how I'm going to feel when I wake up on Thursday. Will I feel elated, depressed, motivated, anxious?

I'm not exactly in a rush to get my CV out into the marketplace and find myself in another shitty contract. I want some time out, and I want to be more picky about the project I choose next time, even if I am still in a precarious financial situation. It's unwise to become complacent about your employability. Catastrophic market events can happen at any moment, and work can dry up overnight.

Will I be able to cut down my drinking, eat less, exercise more, or will the task of job hunting loom large and make me unbearably anxious? I certainly lost a lot of sleep during the week that my contract was terminated early and my flatmate revealed that he didn't have any money to pay his rent & bills for the 4th month running. Life's never straightforward, is it?

Health vs. wealth. That seems to be the battle that is being fought. Is it possible to have it all? Watch this space.

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

This is a story about being a writer...

I can hear the sound of a pencil snapping. I can hear the gnashing of teeth. I can hear the foam frothing at the mouth. I sense the fingers, poised over the keys, ready to launch into an angry tirade against me.

"You're not a proper writer"

You're right. I'm not.

I don't get paid to write. I don't answer to an editor. I'm not dependent on anybody else to decide whether the work that I produce is worthy of publishing.

So much of what I write is unworthy of publishing.

I wrote an eBook earlier in the year. In fact, I stayed up all night writing 12,000 words in one marathon sprint, because a literary agent had asked to see the first few chapters of a book I was planning on writing. It was total garbage and I'm ashamed of myself. I'm ashamed of the crap that I produced.

In my defence, I was in the middle of a crisis. I had been sick for several months and I wasn't able to pay my rent. I couldn't face re-entering the rat race. My flatmate had offered to make introductions in the book world - he's well connected - and it seemed to make sense to my exhausted and drug-addled mind at the time. I would get an advance from a publisher and then write a book. Simple!

I really don't think that you can write a high quality work of literature when you're burnt out, depressed and you're on a comedown from the best part of 3 months of drug abuse. I cringe at what I wrote and who I shared it with, even though it was semi-coherant and just about readable.

The concept behind this blog is sound: it's a place where I can get the jumbled up things that are racing around inside my head into some structured form. I've tagged everything so that I can go back later and edit things. The reason why it's done publicly is so that it's not an isolating and lonely exercise. I not only have to tell the stories of the past, but I need to weave in the thoughts and feelings that threaten to derail me in the present day. In so doing, I'm able to keep moving forwards.

The concept behind the book I hope to eventually write is sound. The world has plenty of happily ever after tales, fantasies and fiction. When I have been unwell, what I have found to be in short supply has been well written tales about navigating and surviving the underworld of mental health services, hospitals, government agencies, living on the streets and drug addiction. Who are you, if that doesn't match the demonised images we have of the junkie, the hobo and the madman?

We love it when mild-mannered Clark Kent tosses aside his geeky glasses and tears open his shirt, to reveal a superhero lurking underneath an unassuming veneer. Plenty of rich bankers snort cocaine in the toilets, but how many people can say they've been all the way to the bottom and back up again? Those who are 'in recovery' keep their dark past shrouded in secrecy and anonymity. We are so fearful of our reputations being tarnished and us becoming unemployable, that authentic stories are in short supply, unless you want to join the Alcoholics Anonymous cult.

What I've written to date is full of bitter angry rants, blame and finger-pointing, lamentations about what might have been and endless repetition of the pain I feel over things I can't fix.

While what I've written is too unwieldy and repetitive, and filled with harsh words directed at my perceived persecutors, it's about as honest and candid version of a "stream of consciousness" text as you're likely to find.

Many people consider themselves to be 'curators' and prefer to share links and quotations. So many texts will be peppered with the references to the source text that informed the author, as if we wouldn't believe what was written without such things. I like to think that what I write is original content, but of course I have my influences. Of course I will be falling into the pitfall that every 'new' writer must also do, which is to think themselves original also, while producing very much the same work as those who went before them.

The main reason why I'm not a writer - aside from the fact that I never attended some creative writing course - is that I don't get paid by anybody else to write. I'm my own patron. I'm not writing for advertising revenue. I'm not writing for royalties. I'm not writing to impress my editor. Writing is a job I'm told. Well, that must suck.

I wrote a piece that I thought would be popular, and published it. It was popular. It was really depressing just how popular it was. I decided that I would stop writing for me, and write something that I thought other people would like. They really liked it. That depressed the hell out of me.

I absolutely loathe my day job. I feel unbearably compromised in my life, because I have to spend 40 hours a week bored out of my mind, trapped somewhere I don't want to be. However, I'm well paid and I do have enough spare time to write a lot. I'm not happy about this, you understand? But it's an arrangement that works a hell of a lot better than being completely flat broke, and also having to write crap that somebody else thinks is a good idea.

I guess I have no artistic compromise at the moment. Soon, perhaps I will have the time, energy and good health to write the book that I want to write. Although the fear that it may be rejected by the gatekeepers - the literary agents and publishers - means that I would be more likely to write something popular than authentic, which isn't the point at all.

It's important to me that I get to tell at least one story in a coherent way, well edited and with a dedicated investment of time, to produce a piece of work that can be easily picked up and read by anybody.

Arguably, at the moment I have something better: a living document that is also an invitation for people to collaborate. I'm literally begging the world to reach out and connect with me, by sharing my very innermost thoughts and feelings, darkest memories, worst fears, frustrations and my hopes & dreams.

I know I have gone rather off-piste at times, and I regret the period circa mid-December 2015 to the start of April 2016, but it's still an interesting record of my messed up brain and horrible consequences of what was going on at that time, which can be read in-between the lines of those blog posts.

Now I feel I am writing with fluidity and perhaps a little too much verbosity, but at least it's hopefully clear that my mind is now unclouded and my mental health is markedly improved, even if I'm desperately depressed and suicidal.

That sounds like a contradiction, but I do feel that I'm my truest version of myself that I can remember being for a long time. The depression and suicidal thoughts are very clearly linked to how trapped I am in a situation that feels desperately unpleasant.

Yes, it would be easy to point at my well paid contract, my lovely apartment and the fact that in a couple of months my debts will be paid off and I'll be free again. But, I feel like I already have everything I want: all I want to do is sit and write. The day job is a horrible distraction from the thing I really want to be doing: writing.

Who knows where it goes from here. It certainly doesn't seem like the right economic climate to be giving up a good job to enter into a highly competitive arena that's notoriously badly paid. However, perhaps I've already arrived, because I just about have the means to bootstrap myself.

I'm very grateful to both friends and strangers who have encouraged me in saying that they think I could write professionally, but perhaps I already do. I certainly put zero effort into my day job, and I'm putting every bit of spare time and energy I can into writing.

Perhaps writing will never pay the bills ever again, because of the willingness of people like me to 'work' for 'free'.

To me, writing does not feel like 'work' and neither is it 'free' because I do get an enormous kick out of the feedback I receive. Writing is immensely rewarding. Not in terms of money I could use to pay my rent and bills, but in terms of making a tangible contribution to people's lives and having that validated in the things that they tell me and the conversations that it starts.

Perhaps I'm going to stop calling myself an IT consultant and start calling myself a writer, given that it's where the bulk of my time and effort is invested.

What do you think?

Can I call myself a writer yet?

Tags: #writing

This is a story about fact vs. fiction...

It's hard to defend yourself when you're sick. It's easy for people to take advantage of a soft target, and invent their own version of events. It's easy to discredit somebody, when you've left them dead and buried. The dead can no longer speak up for themselves.

I needed to break up with my abusive ex-wife and rebuild my life in London. London is where all the good IT contracts and jobs are. London is where I have a good chance of reconnecting with significant numbers of friends and business contacts. London is where good stuff happens.

I had an excellent credit rating. I was going to arrange for a bridging loan to cover the expenditure of relocating back to London from Bournemouth. The loan was risk free, because I had such a large amount of equity in my house. The credit risk was underwritten by the fact that as soon as the house was sold, the loan could be repaid.

I was going to arrange credit with a commercial lender, so that I had the security of knowing that I had the funds to cover me until I got a new job back in London. However, my parents insisted that I could count on them. My parents told me that I didn't need the extra stress and hassle of arranging credit, and worrying about money and administrative affairs, when I had the extremely upsetting task of leaving my home and setting up life again in London.

However, when I then said that I needed to borrow the money - secured against the large lump sum of equity tied up in my house that was being sold - they then reneged on their promise. They left me high and dry. They dumped me in the shit. With no excuse, they fucked me over. Unacceptable.

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

Don't offer to support vulnerable people, and then screw them over.

It's not a fucking joke.

It's not fucking funny.

It has consequences.

Far reaching consequences.

I never got an apology or an explanation from my parents for fucking me over like that. I can only assume that they liked the idea of sounding like real parents, but actually they don't have a single shred of decency. They don't have an ounce of honesty. They are untrustworthy. They are liars. They are utter c**ts.

It wasn't like I'd asked them for support. I was putting my own commercial borrowing arrangements in place to cover my relocation. My parents insisted that I could count on them to bridge the gap. It made sense... there was no risk, because the debt was underwritten with the equity in my house, which was vacant and being sold. It made sense that they should profit instead of a commercial lender. I was doing them a favour, because they would earn a better rate of interest off me than they would from any savings interest.

But.

Let's assume that they decided I was going to blow all the money on drugs.

My drug of choice - the one I got mixed up with by accident during the agonising destruction of my relationship and my business - is something that I've jokingly nicknamed "supercrack". As the name suggests, it's highly addictive. It used to be legal, not so long ago.

A strong dose of supercrack is 15mg. That's 0.015 grams.

The length of time that a dose of supercrack will last is about 18 hours. It's an incredibly potent stimulant.

On the dark web, you used to be able to buy 5 grams of supercrack for $150, including postage. That's enough to last 333 days, assuming you sleep 6 hours a night.

If you take supercrack around-the-clock you will not sleep, and therefore your immune system will get very low and you will soon die. The longest I ever took supercrack in a round-the-clock binge was 10 days. That's 10 days without sleep or food. I don't think you could go much longer without dying.

When I moved back to London, I was no longer using supercrack.

If I was using supercrack, from the day I moved back to London to today, I would have spent the princely sum of $450.

In fact, to use supercrack for 50 more years - long past my natural life expectancy - would only require 274 grams of the dangerous drug, which would easily cost me less than $10,000. In fact, I could probably have bought 1kg in bulk for $5,000, which would have been enough for 200 years of drug abuse.

So what did happen to all my money?

Well, I made it to my first Christmas back in London by buying Bitcoins on my credit cards and with my overdraft, which then increased 1,200% in value. I hadn't been able to work, because the stress of not having any money, and having your parents and ex-wife completely dicking you over, while also having to move the contents of a 3 bedroom house into storage and rebuild your life again, was rather too much to ask.

My parents expected me to go to their house for a jolly fucking family Christmas, when they had royally fucked me over. What a joke.

December was all too much, and by the 27th I was in full-blown relapse (which only cost a few dollars in drugs).

However, rehab doesn't come cheap... and guess who was going to pay? ME!

I've paid around £30,000 for private treatment. Guess what? It doesn't work.

Unless you have a supportive environment, treatment doesn't work. Don't bother going into rehab, unless you're going to get rid of toxic people, toxic places and toxic jobs from your life.

My first stay in rehab (The Priory) was long enough for me to see that I was being abused by my ex-wife and we needed to break up. My next stay in rehab was long enough for me to get over being dicked over by my parents. My last stay in rehab gave me just about enough strength to make a plan to cut my toxic parents out of my life altogether.

Since then, I now know the knack of quitting drugs.

Amino acids such as 5-HTP, L-Tyrosine and Phenylalanine replace the depleted neurotransmitters in your brain. Bupropion and amphetamines (like dexedrine) can cushion the cravings and depression, lack of energy and cognitive impairment.

Benzos and Z-drugs are a great way to amplify an addiction. Sleeping off the comedown by taking 'downers' to take the vicious edge off the 'uppers' means that you start to believe you are able to get all the upsides without any of the downsides. However, all you're doing is storing up the mother of all comedowns for a later day.

Coming off benzodiazepines is the single most awful thing you are likely to ever experience in your life. I'm not sure if you've ever had a panic attack or insomnia. Certainly, you must have experienced stress and anxiety. Imagine having a round-the-clock sense of horrible unease, fear, dread. If benzos calm you down, the payback is in rebound anxiety. What goes up must come down, and living with anxiety is terrible.

Something like diazepam is very long acting, so you find it's in your bloodstream for ages even after you stop taking it. The withdrawal from it lasts weeks: insomnia & anxiety.

Coming off stimulants isn't that bad. You're exhausted, suicidally depressed, physically weak, uncoordinated, slow witted, and cognitively impaired. You might be in terrible physical shape from lack of food, lack of sleep and over-exertion. It's nothing that a month in bed can't fix.

Obviously, coming off all drugs at the same time is a clusterfuck, because you'll have anxiety and insomnia, keeping you awake through your exhausted suicidal depression. But, this is the payback for polydrug abuse. What goes up must come down.

In September 2013 I escaped addiction by swapping from supercrack to dexedrine and then tapering my dose down. I further cushioned the blow by using zopiclone to get my sleep back on track. It was relatively easy and painless, especially as I also completely changed my whole environment by moving to London and reconnecting with old friends. I got a new girlfriend and started helping my homeless friend, Frank.

Drug addiction is a teeny tiny bit about the brain chemistry, and it's a whole lot more about toxic environments. Believe me, the more stress, disruption, isolation and mistreatment is perpetrated against me, the more I'm itching to pull the "fuck it" trigger.

Drug addiction is both an easy and a difficult existence. If you haven't got the guts to actually end your life quickly and cleanly, it will get you to your grave faster than you think. I think every addict knows where they're headed, but they don't give a fuck because everybody else is pushing them down that road too.

You would have thought that addicts would be our most cared for and nurtured members of society, because they're pretty much walking around with a noose around their neck, advertising their intention to kill themself. However, my experience was that my own parents and ex-wife couldn't wait to see me dead and buried.

When I eventually accepted that experimentation had become addiction and I needed professional help, I said to my ex-wife that I needed a 28-day detox. She said she would rather that I died. She actually categorically said that she would rather be a widow. These were her words. This was not a general comment. This was her saying that she would prefer it if I didn't have 28 days treatment and get better. This was her saying that what she wanted was for me to die, not get better.

When I got clean and moved back to London, my parents essentially made the same choice. Rather than honour their unsolicited offer to profit from my need for a bridging loan, they saw the opportunity to pull the rug out from under my feet and plunge me back into chaos, stress and destruction.

When things are going wrong now, I assume that I'm totally alone, and that everybody is totally hostile. I assume that doors are going to be kicked in by an abusive and violent ex or parent. I assume that treatment is going to be withheld. I assume that people would rather that I was dead.

Abuse leaves psychological scars. Calling somebody a liar, and treating them disrespectfully denies them any self esteem. Pulling away a person's means of supporting themself, and generally attacking their opportunities to escape and recover is not proof that the person is a failure and vindication of your decision to fuck them over. Let's take a look at cause and effect.

Drug addiction is a place that a person turns to when their life is unliveable. The more you mistreat a person and deny them any opportunity to recover, the more they're going to say "fuck it" and go back to killing themself slowly.

Recovery can be quick and painless if action is swift, decisive and early intervention is taken. Addiction is like a house on fire. The sooner you put out the fire, the more of the house you save. There's no point sitting around to see if the fire goes out, and then putting out half the fire. "The fire is mostly out" or "we'll just put a bit of water on the fire and see if things improve" is just utter bullshit. You're looking for an excuse to fail that person if you act like that.

I'm angry.

I don't know if this is coming across. I'm really fucking angry.

I'm spinning everything like I'm a victim. Well, that's because I'm sick of victim blaming. I know that taking the position of the victim is not a good place to start, but it's maddening because the facts are clear: the strong have exploited the weak, and tried to kick a vulnerable person into an early grave. Secrets die with a person, and it's a lot easier if a victim is dead.

I made plans for my business and my future based on the idea that I had a loving, supportive partner. I made plans based on a "for richer, for poorer" and "in sickness and in health" marriage vow that we made to each other. I made divorce and recovery plans based on an unsolicited offer of support from my parents. Parents are supposed to support their children. People are supposed to honour their word. Plans are based on agreements.

How can you make any plans or do anything if nobody keeps their word? How can anything function without people acting with a shred of integrity.

I paid for nonjudgemental reliable support, at great personal expense. The rest I did on my fucking own. Who the fuck got me out of the park and into a hostel? Who the fuck got me out of the hostel into a contract and a hotel? Who the fuck got me out of the hotel and into a flat? Who the fuck got me more contracts when the previous ones didn't work out for long enough for me to get ahead?

Recovering from depression, bipolar disorder, the destruction of your business, ruining of your career reputation, divorce, the selling off of your home and the giveaway of many of your precious possessions, having to relocate across the country, having to re-establish your life again. You think that comes easily? You think that comes cheaply? You think that can be done all on your own? You think that can be done while people jeer and take the piss from the sidelines, calling you horrible names and creating additional obstacles for you?

Now, sprinkle in substance abuse.

Drug addiction is the easy part. I should be getting a fucking ticker-tape parade for what I've been through. I should get a fucking gold medal. I should get my picture in the motherfucking paper, with lots of quotes from all my adoring fans.

Some drug addicts are driven to lie, cheat and steal. We are told that addicts leave dirty needles in children's playgrounds and try to sell drugs to your kids to get them hooked.

What exactly could anybody's problem be with me? I've paid for all my own treatment. I've never stolen any money to buy drugs. I never even bought drugs from anybody who could conceivably be accused of putting money into crime and terrorism. All I've ever wanted to do is get back to London, and restabilise myself.

What does stability look like?

Like this:

• Place to live
• Income to pay for food & accommodation
• Social contact
• Free from debt and financial stress

And I've come to realise it also means:

• No more toxic people in my life: especially my parents
• No more klingons: I can't carry any dead wood
• No more arbitrary measures: being teetotal is unnecessary. I'm going to do whatever works.
• No more shame: I've got nothing to be ashamed of

The compromises, sacrifices and things that I put up with to keep hope alive are not inconsiderable. My adherence to integrity and personal standards means that I am taking on additional challenges that I could easily circumvent by simply declaring bankruptcy and depositing myself in the care of the welfare state.

I've paid an absolute fucktonne of tax in my life, so I should feel entitled to a handout, but I don't. I don't want a life that's dependent on the state giving me a small amount of the money back that I've paid into the national purse. I'm proud and I've worked hard all my life. I've worked hard to dig myself out of a very deep hole, and I deserve a fucking break.

I'm writing this now, completely free from any drugs. My mind is my own. I have let my brain recover, and now I have nothing but pure rational thought.

Where's my money gone? It's been spent on surviving. It's been spent on keeping the possibility of recovery alive.

Recovery from drugs?

No.

Recovery from the shit that drove me into the arms of addiction.

Will I be able to recreate the past, and get back the things I lost? No, never. Of course not!

So, am I bitter and full of regret?

Actually, I'm working my bollocks off just as hard as I've always done throughout my life FOR THE FUTURE. In 4 or 5 months I could be back in the same financial position that I was in before everything imploded, except I will be in pole position to continue at a much accelerated pace. I have a much greater chance of building a happy new life, now that I am rid of the toxic people who sabotaged everything I had worked so hard to build.

Every day in the rat race is an unpleasant reminder of the fact that I got screwed over, and this is the source of my bitter rants. I am tired. It has been exhausting to rescue things.

But, it's in my nature to build and repair. It's in my nature to look to the future, not look to the past. The only reason I do look to the past, is that I'm saddled with the consequences of being dumped in the shit by people who let me down and broke their promises.

In the world of startups we talk about a pivot. Take your lessons learned from going in one direction, and take them in another to find your sustainable competitive advantage.

Through this fucked up world of pain that I've been through, I've found several important stories that need to be told.

There is the story of the people who are disadvantaged. Those who are discriminated against because they have mental health problems or who have struggled with addiction. There are society's undesirable members. There is the issue of homelessness, and the harsh and uncaring world that waits for single people who fall on hard times. There is the arms race in the war on drugs, with legal highs and the cat and mouse game between chemists and governments. There is the battle that rages inside our heads: mania and depression. There are the differences in perception: who is mad and who is sane.

A rich white middle class investment bank employee, IT consultant, software engineer, homeowner, husband and neatly presented boy with good manners, well educated and well behaved. Young, fit and active. Adventurous, outgoing and gregarious.

If it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody.

The stories have got to be told.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #divorce #parents #legalhighs #mentalhealth #homeless

This is a story about the jungle...

What you have to understand about being a human male, is that the competition never really went away. We are all still fighting to be able to fuck the hottest females.

I was searching to find an image of me with swollen muscles. God knows why I would have swollen muscles. Perhaps because of the harsh physical demands of survival. But instead I find a comparative photo. This photo compares my friend Posh Will with myself, in the clutches of self-destruction mode. I probably haven't had a decent meal in several weeks, in this photo, taken around Christmas day 2013. What does this image tell us?

My friend Posh Will is obviously credited with pulling me from the rubble of my botched attempt to relocate to the beach and live the dream.

At the wedding of Posh Will and Space Girl, there was the concept of the "conversion project". Both Posh Will and I were particularly keen on the idea of finding girls who were enamoured with kitesurfing and outdoor pursuits. While I chased girls who were already engaged in extreme sports, Posh Will sought a life partner who held the right temperament to be able to cope with the rigours of being wedded to an adrenalin junkie. His strategy clearly paid off, for he is now happily married, while I am a shattered remnant of the man I used to be.

The friendly rivalry between two old friends persists. I used to joke about our hourly rate. While Posh Will used to work all the hours that God sent, I have always been an expert in dodging responsibility. Despite the eye-watering salary that PW commands, it doesn't actually look that great when you work out how hard he has to work, compared with my hourly rate of pay.

However, now that PW and I work within a few hundred metres of each other, PW's work schedule has become a lot more reasonable. While my own working week looks particularly lax, it's clear that PW has won. I turn up, keep my office chair warm, but PW is doing similar hours to me and getting far more job satisfaction that I am.

I've lost. On every level.

I love PW and his lovely wife. They took me into their home and nurtured me back to health. They opened the door of possibility for me and recovery. I'm not actually in direct competition with PW. I love him to bits, even if he won't return my calls.

So, male competition is utter bullshit. It will destroy friendships and make you insecure and unhappy with your partner. Fuck male competition We don't need it. Yes, it might make you and your girlfriend horny that you might have beaten somebody in your game of squash, but remember the zero-sum game.

For every winner there must be a loser.

Tags: #friends

This is a story about self healing...

Does brain damage mean game over? Is it right to write off somebody who has suffered brain lesions, neurotoxicity, a stroke etc. etc.?

At one time, my left eyelid had started to droop and I had a pretty bad facial tic. My body jerked and shook with pseudo-Parkinsonian symptoms. My speech was slow and slurred. No wonder I was treated as if I was as good as dead, right?

But you know what? With good diet & sleep, you can quickly recover your heath, depending on the severity of your situation.

Bizarrely, I was able to get a job and get through an eventful and highly stressful re-entry into the working world, while my poor brain was busily trying to repair itself. How is that even possible?

I've done the same job for the best part of 20 years. In fact, my friend Ben taught me how to program a computer when we were 12 years old, and I'd been messing around with computers since my first forays onto my friend Joe's Dad's Apple Mac, in 1985.

With repetition, your brain lays down pathways that become more permanent with age. Neural pruning - the loss of less used connections between brain cells - makes your brain into something that has become well adapted for the common tasks you perform. Some people call this "muscle memory" but of course it's your brain, not your muscles, that has the memories. Practice makes permanent, as they say. Just like riding a bike.

So, I relied on instincts and techniques, knowledge and experience that has been unchanging for my whole working life. I still use the same job search technique, the same interview technique, and the job of developing software is unchanged, despite the constant creation of new acronyms and jargon for things that do exactly the same job in exactly the same way.

Just like riding a bike, I was able to navigate the corporate landscape and just about get away with a day job that involved my damaged brain pulling the levers to operate the battered mince-puppet that was my body, in a vaguely convincing way, to cover up the fact that I was basically at death's door.

With physiotherapy for the body, your recovery can be improved, and I'm sure that brain training exercises would be useful for those with brain injuries, but the stimulation of trying to get myself off the streets and escape bankruptcy and destitution was challenging and stimulating enough.

Fundamentally, time is the great healer. The brain is a homeostatic organ that will try to restore itself to a stable base state, once external forces are no longer pulling it hither and thither. I was able to have nearly 6 months abstinent from stimulants and over 3 months abstinent from alcohol, in order to give my brain a fighting chance of finding equilibrium again.

But, just as important as cessation of putting powerful narcotics into my body, was stopping drinking tea & coffee, as well as other caffeinated beverages. Even though my brain screamed out for stimulants, because it was going through withdrawal, they are terrible things when your brain needs to adapt and heal.

Caffeine is very bad for your neuroplasticity. That is to say, the ability of the remaining undamaged neurons in your brain to try to compensate for whatever trauma it has suffered, and repair itself. Caffeine impairs your ability to recover.

If you have some boring repetitive task to perform again & again, then caffeine is your drug. Once you've mastered the simple steps that most jobs require, the boredom becomes unbearable. Caffeine solves this problem, and allows us to maintain concentration on the most mind-numbing dumbarsery that ever disgraced the working world.

Most of the world is just doing stupid shit, time & again, because they're in a trance-like state performing repetitive actions and making the same old mistakes over & over, because they've medicated themselves up to the eyeballs with the powerful stimulant called caffeine.

By stopping my caffeine intake, I was able to recover from the symptoms of fairly harrowing neurological damage, spot patterns in my behaviour and even re-learn new healthy behaviour. I genuinely believe that this would not have been possible, with caffeine in my life.

I did supplement my diet heavily with amino acid building blocks:

• 5-HTP to help my serotonergic system
• L-Tyrosine to help my dopaminergic system
• Phenylalanine to help my adrenal / epinephrine system

I ate vast quantities of biltong (dried beef) and other protein supplements, to give my body everything it could possibly need to repair itself, and replenish its stores.

In theory, I should have been left in a permanently psychotic state, with delusions, paranoia, inability to emotionally regulate, facial tics, poor concentration, poor memory, nerve damage on one side of my face etc. etc.

However, I put out the fire before it consumed me. When somebody is sick, you don't write them off and watch them wither and die. That's immoral!

I was watching a Louis Theroux documentary, and one hospital patient they followed was declared brain dead after he asphyxiated from a heroin overdose. The doctors were absolutely certain there was no hope, and that the life support systems should be switched off. I agreed, and I thought it was madness that the family were holding out any hope at all. After 37 days, the young man in a coma woke up. His family saved him from a premature and unnecessary death, by refusing to cut off his life support.

My life support has come in the form of kind strangers, policemen, nurses, doctors and indeed unwitting work colleagues, who have been willing to overlook the immediate situation and imagine that things can and will get better, given time and opportunity.

I'm physically, neurologically, a completely different beast to who and what I was a little over a year ago, when I was totally fucked.

Tags: #drugs #addiction #recovery #mentalhealth #bipolar #career

This is a story about helping each other...

How does one go about putting Humpty Dumpty back together again? The idea of some patriarchal figure - e.g. a king - has largely failed. Instead, we see that complex psycho-social problems are better solved by a community that is filled with mutual support and respect.

In order to get me to the point I am at today, it's taken a social worker. But not a social worker who was employed to help me, but instead a loveable Kiwi who was sleeping on my couch, who took it upon himself to think about my welfare.

It's taken a psychologist. Not a psychologist who I pay to sit on the couch of, while I pour my little heart out, but actually my beloved flatmate, who listened to me while I brain dumped in the small hours of the morning, or coaxed me out of whichever corner I was backed into, suffering almost PTSD-like symptoms.

It's taken a bunch of fellow people with mental-health problems, who "get it". They know that a "positive mental attitude" is just utter bullshit, and you can't just snap out of a severe depression or whatever ails you, when you already know that what you think and feel is irrational, and you would really rather not be feeling the way that you do, if it was a simple choice.

It's taken a bunch of addicts. Not necessarily needle-wielding junkies in the throes of active addiction, but people who aren't so holier-than-thou that they don't admit to their own fallibilities and judge you, lest they acknowledge the demons within themselves. Non-judgemental support is essential, for any way forward.

It's taken all my friends, from all corners of the globe. You might not think that a simple 'like' on social media would mean much, but the implied support has been my lifeblood. To say that I've been attention seeking is plain wrong. Everybody needs to feel that they have people that like them, support them, wish them well.

It would be massively premature to declare things a done deal. I need to make it through a winter somehow, without incident. Current thinking is simply to take off for the Southern Hemisphere for a while... follow the sun.

The plan has always been the same, since I decided to cut and run from my ex wife and Bournemouth: get back into IT contracting for the banks, go kitesurfing. Obviously, you also need a place to live and be on top of your finances. Obviously, you still need the occasional bit of midweek socialising to get you through to the weekend.

Am I some Goldilocks type character, who demands that everything is "just right"? No. I don't think that's true at all.

I accept that there is going to be loneliness, boredom, stress. I accept that things are going to take time. I accept that things are going to go wrong. I accept that it's highly improbable that everything will be going OK all at the same time. However, my basic life formula is pretty simple: work & play.

I tried to take direct action in somebody's life - Frank - when I returned to London. That was a relatively short burst of time & effort, and I can't tell you precisely how things worked out there, although I did see Frank about 18 months later and he was doing really well.

To round off my own story in a satisfactory way, I need to show that things are sustainable, I need to show that I'm not just mooching off people in order to continue on a reckless and irresponsible path through life. I need to close things out neatly: with integrity.

I know people are rooting for me, and it's nice to say that presently, I have a great place to live, a well paid job, and I'm getting back into the hobby I'm passionate about. I'm also increasingly getting back in contact with long-lost friends, as well as hopefully improving the tone of my communication: from bitter and negative, to philosophical, positive & hopeful.

My friend who drove me to the coast today, and has consistently been a pillar of support for me this year, always reminds me that recovery is nonlinear. I know that bad days and setbacks will follow an amazing day at the beach. Monday morning will be miserable, and life has a fully stocked arsenal of slings & arrows... but things seem a little bit better when your skin is salty from the sea and glowing from the sun and the wind.

It's oh-so clichéd, but that Beatles lyric seems apt:

I get by with a little help from my friends 

If it doesn't seem like I've acknowledged your help & support here, I apologise. Every little message, text, email, comment... it all adds up. I do appreciate it. I do appreciate, respect and love every one of my peers. Thank you.

Tags: #friends #kitesurfing #frank #mentalhealth

This is a story about bouncing a dead cat...

How does one break an addiction to supercrack and benzodiazepines? How does one go from certain bankruptcy, destitution, madness... back to normal life, complete with 9 to 5, Monday to Friday office routine and all the outward appearance of having one's shit together?

Well, it's not through abstinence.

I tapered off the benzos, using a combination of, Zopiclone, Diazepam, Nitrazepam, Mirtazepine, Valerian and bucketloads of wine.

Getting off the supercrack meant simply hitting a brick wall of depression, lethargy and anhedonia. I could have used weaker stimulants to stop myself from going off a cliff edge, but I just sucked up the cognitive impairment, extreme exhaustion, and rebound depression.

Because I abstained from all stimulants for nearly 3 months, I've been able to re-addict myself to caffeine in the last couple of weeks, in order to limp myself through the difficult period of getting back into the working routine.

I now have a flat white coffee every morning, pre 10am, and I sometimes have wine in the evenings, although I have pretty much managed to cut out midweek drinking. Ideally, I'd just like to drink on a Wednesday night when I meet up with a friend at the pub, and on Friday & Saturday nights.

However, it's not adequate. I'm struggling to get up in the mornings, even though I addicted myself to coffee with the idea that it would be a 'treat' for getting up and going to work, and incorporating addiction into my routine would mean that I'm kinda addicting myself to work. But it hasn't worked.

In the evenings, I could easily polish off one, two bottles of wine. Bizarrely, I find it easier to get up in the morning with a stinking hangover than I do when I'm stone cold sober. However, alcohol is a horrendous drug for your health. I hope that perhaps my brain is still getting used to life without tranquillisers. Coming off benzos is the most horrible thing that can happen to anybody, ever. Imagine just feeling on edge, anxious, the whole frigging time.

I'm not sure what I can do to lift my mood. I've flipped my suicidal thoughts from being something I felt all day, when I was at work, to now being something that I feel as I repeatedly press the 'snooze' button and hide under the duvet, putting off the start of the day.

I literally feel in two minds whether I'm going to get up and have a shower, or get up, run a hot bath and go fetch a sharp knife in order to slit my veins.

Things are supposed to get easier, aren't they? I keep waiting for my mood to lift, for the anxiety to dissipate, for the days to go quicker, for the routine to feel sustainable, for the demotivation and lack of enthusiasm to subside, for energy to return, to start enjoying things again. I'm still waiting.

I've tried to give myself some things to look forward to, to give me some light at the end of the tunnel, but perhaps I've been too ambitious in putting them way off in the future. My perception of time is totally warped. Weeks seem like months, years even.

I keep telling myself I gave my brain a hell of a beating, and it will recover in time. I'm so close to giving in and marching to the doctor for some happy pills, and some medically sanctioned tranquillisers, as opposed to just continuing to drink far too much alcohol.

This is the difference with this recovery: I've decided to do whatever works, and ignore the bad advice of people who've never been there, never done it, don't know what it's like. I'm ignoring all the failures - the pill-poppers and alcohol abusers - who hypocritically tell me that I'm doing it wrong, despite their own substance dependencies.

Complacency is a big danger, and I keep having scary moments where I become aware that addictions don't die easily, they just hide in your subconscious and try to tell you that life is terrible and you should just give up and relapse.

I found myself having dreams about using drugs, and thinking about how I could maybe employ strategies to use drugs in moderation, but I've been around the block enough times now to know that those are just addict's lies we tell ourselves, as we backslide into addiction.

It feels like cravings have well and truly gone, but what's left instead is a miserable life of quiet desperation, where I'm barely able to get through the day without thoughts of suicide or running away to Timbuktu.

It's all too much to bear, rebuilding your life. It takes so long. There are so many things you take for granted, in your ordered existence. Rehabilitation is just that: so many things are neglected, broken.

Something as simple as changing your address on all your post might seem simple to you, but when you've also got to get a job, a place to live, reconnect with friends, get back into a hobby/sport, fix broken stuff, replace lost stuff, get back into a routine... plus all the things that got neglected: the unpaid bills that piled up, the passport that needs renewing, the zillion and one little bits of admin that didn't get done, which include everything from a tax return to a request to tell some bureaucrat the name of my first pet, so that they can justify their pointless job.

One day at a time the idiots say. Fuck the hell off. I can extrapolate. If every day is going to be as hard, and it's going to take a zillion of them before I'm getting anywhere, how am I ever going to sustain it? Counting the days is so disheartening - not that I do it - when you think, jeez, I should be feeling a lot better than I do, after 101 days already.

Perhaps there's a simple desire for a time when I had abandoned all responsibility, and knew I was on a collision course with disaster, destitution. I enjoyed the fatalism of it. I enjoyed being relieved of the relentless struggle to get, where? Where did all that struggle get me anyway? What was the point in struggling, in stressing?

The current plan is to tidy up my affairs, and then leave this shitty lifestyle behind. Not the drug taking, but the wage slavery, the working to simply pay rent and consume crap, get fat and die of old age or stress/obesity-related illness.

It's strange, when your fantasies revolve around being destitute, homeless, penniless again.

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

This is a story about body shopping...

What's the difference between a temp, a freelancer, a self-employed person, a contractor and a consultant? What's the difference between an employee and an entrepreneur?

Last year I was working for HSBC, along with a bunch of nice folks from several different consultancies, plus a handful of permanent members of staff. The teamwork was brilliant, but the surprising thing was that we all had different agendas.

Given that I had gone back to HSBC as a contractor, having been a permanent member of staff there for over 4 years, it was somewhat of a mindset change. I was also homeless and still very much in the vice-like grip of drug addiction, which wasn't a good start.

I was exhausted, and I had somewhat induced within myself, some fairly major symptoms of mental illness, which caused me to make some rather outlandish interpretations of the reality I experienced.

Imagine being plucked from the park, where you are living and contemplating bankruptcy and the coffin nail that will drive into your career, your business. Imagine facing up to the reality that everything you're qualified and experienced to do, since you started IT contracting at age 20, is now going to go down the shitter, and you're homeless, abandoned by the state - the council have sent you a one-line email saying that you're not even worth a hostel bed to them.

Then, imagine that almost overnight, you're working on the number one project for the biggest bank in Europe. You're so exhausted that you are sleeping in the toilet. Everything seems surreal, from the moment you put on your suit in the morning in a hostel dormitory paid for with a credit card you can't afford to pay off, to the moment you turn up in the headquarters of a prestigious Tier 1 bank that you used to work for, when you were clean, sober, young, happy, ambitious, energetic, enthusiastic and respected.

The challenge was to get through 60 days of working, without running out of credit completely. I had to get to work every day and pay for my hostel bed, for a whole month before I could submit my first invoice, which would be paid 30 days later. Obviously, it also looks rather unusual to your colleagues if you can't afford to eat lunch or socialise. The pressure was immense.

What does a poker player do, if they have a weak hand? They bluff, obviously.

To compensate for my fear, and the odds that were stacked against me, I turned the dial up to 11. I tried hard. Far, far too hard. I told the team that I'd take responsibility for a critical piece of work, and deliver it in a short space of time, along with an extremely capable colleague, who actually knew that it was a monster piece of work.

I should have been laughed out of the door. I can't believe that nobody particularly picked up on the fact that I was shooting from the hip, out of a combination of fear, exhaustion, drug withdrawal, mental illness and a touch of arrogance.

How on earth was my ego not going to be stoked? I had just cheated death, bankruptcy, destitution, and now I had the CIO of the number one project in the biggest bank in Europe surprising me, by naming me in person, as the team member responsible for one of the pivotal pieces of the program, in front of the entire town hall. I looked around - "is he talking about me?" - yes, it appeared he was. How surreal.

As a drug addicted homeless person, you're kind of invisible. People would like it if you just crawled into some dark hole and died, quietly. You're nobody's problem but your own, and everybody pretends not to notice you, as you drag your bags through the street, swatting at invisible flies and talking to yourself incomprehensibly.

Suddenly, people not only seem to value you, listen to you, but also look to you for some kind of professional guidance, leadership. Is this the state that important IT projects have reached, where the hobo junkie is the one calling the shots? I realise that I wasn't actually calling the shots, but that's what it feels like when you've been scraped up from the pavement, stuffed into a suit and now you're working in a fancy office full of glass, steel and granite.

It embarrasses me, but also pleases me that I'm still on good terms with a few respected colleagues, and they can tease me about "the time when you said you were going to deliver X by Y". However, not everything I said was worthless tosh.

This is where the difference in mindsets comes in.

As a permanent member of staff, your best shot of getting pay rises and promotions is to raise your profile. Given an hour to do some work, you might as well spend 50 minutes writing an email about what a brilliant person you are and how clever you are, and 10 minutes actually doing some work, rather than the other way around. People who just knuckle down and get on with the work they're supposed to be doing, tend to be overlooked when it comes to the end of year review.

As a contractor, you're all about contract renewals. When your contract is coming up towards its end, you're on best behaviour. You try to shine and make yourself a key-man dependency, so that you can demand a big rate increase, because you're indispensable. Personally though, I hate making myself a key-man dependency. It's unprofessional, however you are economically incentivised to do it, so many contractors dig themselves into little fiefdoms.

As a consultant however, you have the worst of both worlds. You have to kiss the arse of both the client and your consultancy. There's a huge conflict of interests. The consultancy want you to stay on your placement, and for as many headcount as possible to be working with you on the client project, if you're working time & materials. What exactly is consulting about being a disguised employee? Where is the value-add from the consultancy, when the client wants you to be embedded in their organisation, like a permanent member of staff?

The reasons for using consultancy staff, contractors, temps, freelancers, is that you can get rid of them when the project is done. However, the other reason is that you don't have all the headache of having to performance manage underperforming and difficult staff members out of your organisation. In theory, it's a lot easier to hire & fire... with the firing being the desirable bit.

It used to be the case that you could get a job as an IT contractor with just a 20 minute phone interview and start the next day. If you were shit, you'd just be terminated on the spot. Never happened to me, but that was the deal you struck... you'd be on immediate notice for the first week. Then you'd be on a week's notice. Then you'd be on 4 weeks notice, just like a permie. However, I always used to get my contract renewed, because I know how to play the game, kiss ass and keep my lip buttoned at the right time.

So, what happened? Well, stress, money, recovery from addiction, relapse, housing stresses and everything in-between conspired in my private life to mean that I was living life by the seat of my pants. I was running for my life.

After only a week in the new job, I decided that it was an impossible mountain to climb, and that there was no way that I could live in a large hostel dormitory and work on a stressful project, plus get myself clean from drugs, plus dig myself out of near-certain bankruptcy. There were just too many problems to face, working full-time in a crisply laundered shirt and a nice suit, while hiding the crippling problems in my private life.

You can't just go to your boss and say "I'm sorry I didn't mention this before, but I'm a homeless recovering drug addict, who suffers mental health problems at times of extreme stress and exhaustion, and I'm practically bankrupt as well as barely able to keep myself clean, sane, out of hospital and off the streets". Contracting doesn't work like that. Your personal life is nobody's problem but your own... you've signed that deal with the devil. You get paid more, but you're also expected to not get sick and not bring your personal problems with you to the office.

I disappeared on my second week in the job, getting mixed up with the police, thrown out of the hostel where I was living, and ending up in hospital, as the pressure was simply too much to bear, I thought that my lifeline was pretty much spent. The odds of being able to get off the streets were too slim anyway. It couldn't be done. I gave up, and relapsed.

Do you think you can just pick up the phone and say "errr, yeah, I need two weeks off to sleep, an advance of several thousand pounds, and I'd like to come back to work part-time for a little while until I'm up to full strength, because I've been dragging bags all over London, living in parks and on heathland, in and out of hospitals, rehabs and crisis houses, addicted to some deadly shit and battling mental health problems. It seems silly that I didn't mention this at the interview, as I'm sure you would have been just fine with giving me an opportunity to get myself off the street and back into the land of the living"?

You know what though? I did get a second chance. There's no denying that certain allowances were made for me. A blind eye was turned to the fact that I was basically either shouting at people or nodding off in meetings for the first week. I went AWOL twice. Once for a whole week where I basically decided that everything was f**ked and there was no way I could ever make things work, and once for nearly a whole day, when I was swept up in the euphoria of working with nice people and got paralytically drunk with my colleagues and couldn't face telling my boss that I was sick again.

Through my divorce, I lost heaps of friends who were shared with me and the ex. I decided to move back to London, because I knew I could find lots of work. However most of my London friends had moved out of town, in order to start a family. Also, you don't make many friends when you're living in a park sniffing supercrack, and getting hospitalised for 14 weeks a year. I can tell you more about the private life of a friendly police officer that I know, than I can tell you about some other acquaintances from that turbulent period.

Anyway, I was desperately trying to cement things - get my own flat, get some money in the bank, get into a working pattern that was sustainable - but it was too much to ask. 'Friends' sensed that I was recovering, and decided to come asking for favours : lend me some money, let me live with you, give me a job etc. etc.

When you're desperately lonely, because you've split up with the two loves of your life - your wife, and supercrack - you're vulnerable to wanting to people-please. I risked my reputation, when I got a so-called friend an interview, because he pressured me. I overstretched myself, renting a flat that swallowed up all my money, which was my safety net. I didn't even pick my flat... my friend did, and he thought he was going to get to live there rent free. I put up with a lot of shit, because I was desperate for friends, for acceptance, to be liked.

If you think all this can be boiled down to a 'drug problem' you're wrong. In order for a person to feel whole, they need friends, they need a job, they need a place to live, they need to feel that they're living independently : paying the rent, earning their money, able to pay for the essentials of life, and not always just hustling, on the run.

There are quite a lot of pieces to the puzzle that is a complete life that's worth living. Do you really think I just want to be kept alive, in a straightjacket in a padded cell. Is it unreasonable to want to work, to want to feel like I'm making a contribution, to want to feel like I'm liked, loved, to want to feel like I exist, and that I'm valued somewhere, by somebody?

I loved the instant social connection I had with the "winners" who were a group of fellow consultants at HSBC. There was good camaraderie, and they were young and enthusiastic, not bitter and jaded like me. Their enthusiasm for their job and inclusive social circle was exactly what I needed, along with cold, hard cash, and a place to go every day that wasn't a bush in a park, with a wrap of supercrack.

Somewhat unwittingly - although I don't know how much people were able to guess or find out behind my back - the Winners bootstrapped my life. Even though there were the usual commercial rules of the game, about being a disposable contractor who's supposed to keep their mouth shut and not rock the boat, there was still bucketloads of humanity there. People were kind to me. They invited me into their lives, and in doing so, they saved mine.

When a colleague texted me while I was in California, to say that we had to go back to work doing the shittiest possible work for a scrum manager we didn't have a whole heap of respect for, it was pretty clear that it wasn't sustainable. I busted my balls to get cleaned up, off the streets, into a flat of my own and to restabilise my finances. However, I've never been the best at buttoning my lip and allowing myself to be 'managed' by somebody I have barely concealed contempt for.

I knew that all I had to do to get my contract terminated was to send one or two fairly outspoken emails to the project's management team who were insecure and relatively incompetent. They'd actually started to listen and change things though, so there was no purpose to the emails I sent, other than to try and elicit an email saying "don't bother coming back to work" so that I could spend some more time with my friends in San Francisco.

The pressure of having to try and cement the gains that I had made, while still carrying some of the burdens that had been accumulated, was too much. I was in no position to be the responsible guy, picking up the phone every time things went wrong and having to mop up messes. I was in no position to be paying 100% of my rent, with a lazy flatmate who shared none of the risk and none of the financial burden or responsibility for making sure the bills got paid and the household ran smoothly. I was in no position to face months and months more, working at the kind of breakneck pace that was inevitable on a project that I had been forced to take out of desperation.

I had done far too many 12 or 14 hour days. I was on email around the clock. I never switched off. I had driven myself insane, pressurising myself to fix all the broken things in my life, and shore up the gains that I had made. Insecurity and fear had given way to delusions of grandeur. I wanted to do everything, for everybody, immediately. I was very, very sick, because of the enormity of the task of not only the project, but the problems I was overcoming in my personal life. A breakdown was inevitable.

Managing things elegantly was unlikely to happen. I dropped hints about needing a holiday, but I needed to be firm, to assert myself. People expected me to manage my own personal needs, but what they didn't realise was that my needs were conflicted: I needed a financial safety cushion just as much as I needed some time off. When the offer of overtime was wafted under my nose, and the management team wouldn't stop phoning me up at weekends, they didn't have to twist my arm very hard to get me to work Saturdays, Sundays, nights. I needed the money, and I needed to feel like I was important and valued again, having only just escaped being an invisible homeless bum, tossed out of civilised society, never to return.

My experience as an IT contractor, my seniority as somebody who's run large teams, as a Development Manager, an IT Director, a CEO... I'm no fool. I knew that I was working at an unsustainable pace, making myself sick, but what choice did I have? I had so much to fix, and money and hard work can fix most problems. I knew that I needed a holiday, but I was vulnerable to being pressured into doing things that I would never do, under normal circumstances, due to the fragility of my situation.

My colleagues were kind enough to drop hints, and to tell me the tricks that they were employing to avoid management pressures and the general panic that was endemic on the project. They could see I was tired, and going slightly mad. They were worried, and it was kind of them to think of me, on a personal level. However, they didn't really know just how bad things were in my private life. They didn't know just what a journey I had been on. They didn't know what I was running away from.

When I snapped, I didn't know where to run for safety. I thought the safest place would be hospital. I was desperate. I could easily have run for drugged-up oblivion again, even though I was 5 months clean at that point, and one month sober. I could easily have run for the kitchen knife, and slit my wrists in the bath. I was desperate. So close to recovery, and yet so far.

I needed to chuck my freeloader flatmate out of my apartment. I needed to quit my contract and get something easier. I needed to not have the expectation, the weight of responsibility I had unnecessarily brought upon myself, in my desperate insecurity and desire to feel wanted, needed, useful, important, after my entire sense of self had been smashed to a pulp by the dehumanising experience of destitution.

Hospital was a safe place to do it.

Then, unable to grasp the nettle of what needed to be done, which could have been as simple as saying "I need another two weeks off work, to go on holiday, because I'm fucked", I decided to just run away. I booked a flight to San Francisco, leaving myself just a few hours to pack my bags and get to the airport. What was my plan? I had no idea. Even suicide seemed preferable to continuing to live with such crushing pressure, fear and hopeless odds stacked against me.

After a few days amongst friends, I decided that I wanted my contract terminated, immediately. I fired off a provocative email to the CIO. Jackpot! The guy who was responsible for us consultants emails me to say that he wants to see me... in Wimbledon, miles away from HSBC headquarters. I mail back to ask why, but he deftly avoids telling me my contract is terminated via email, despite me pressing him on the matter. Does nobody get the hint?

I come back to London, pissed off that nobody has had the guts to actually call me out to my face, or even by email, and that I've not been able to extend my stay in California. Out of spite, I decide to embarrass the consultancy and the management team, by going into HSBC HQ, blagging my way in even though my security pass has already been deactivated. I march up to the program director and ask him if he's happy with my work, is there a problem? In front of the whole team, he says he's happy with my work and there's no problem, he's pleased to have me back at work.

I milk a few hello-goodbyes with colleagues who I like and respect, while watching the people who want me gone squirm with discomfort. I'm loving every second of watching who's got integrity, humanity, and who's decided that I'm no longer flavour of the month. It's a masterclass in office politics, even though we're all contractors, all consultants. I'm committing every exquisite detail of my final minutes in the office to memory, as I deliberately waste time having my breakfast, before making my way to Wimbledon to wind up the poor messenger whose job it is to try and help the consultancy and the management team save face, by terminating my contract.

By this time, my access to email has been revoked, even though a colleague who accompanies me out of the building, pretends like everything is normal and like we're just having a friendly chat - as opposed to being escorted off the premises by a security guard. I know. Do they know I know? Surely they must.

Unable to send a goodbye email, I ask a colleague who is also called Nick Grant, but who works in Leeds, to send an email on my behalf to a mailing group that contains everybody on the project. It's naughty as hell, but I'm enjoying twisting the knife. What is it that I've really done wrong, other than getting sick and having to go to hospital? What is it that I said, other than what needed to be said, the truth? But I know the game. I know that nobody wants a loose cannon. Nobody wants anybody rocking the boat. I didn't play by the rules. Does anybody realise that this is my way of quitting with immediate effect, and without having to work my notice period?

It might seem like sour grapes. I needed that job. I liked my colleagues. I loved that social scene. That contract saved my life.

However, how do you reconcile your social life, your personal difficulties, your needs, with the role you've been forced into?

What's the difference between a contractor and a consultant? A contractor knows they're a mercenary. They're there to earn as much cash as quickly as they possibly can, and they accept that they can be terminated at the drop of a hat. A consultant just doesn't realise they're getting a bum deal. There's no such thing as an IT consultant. It's just a made-up thing now that software houses and long-term IT contractors have fallen out of favour, with the dreadful rise and rise of outsourcing and this stupid idea that software is ever going to be cheap and easy.

So, to the Winners. Thank you for saving my life. Thank you for putting up with my rocky start, my dreadful ego, my shouting. Thank you for putting up with my arrogance, and for laughing at my over-ambitious ideas. Thank you for trying to keep me humble, and remind me of the rules of the game. Thank you for taking me into your lovely social world. Thank you for the emotional support. Thank you for treating me like a human being, not a software robot. Thank you for dealing with the fallout that I inevitably caused, when implosion happened. Thank you for not hating me, as I wandered into the territory of delusions of grandeur and heroics, and self-important jumped-up craziness.

You might not realise this, but you saw a rather twisted, weird, screwed up version of me, as I clawed my way up a cliff face of recovery, from the bankrupt, homeless, junkie, friendless, single, lonely, unhappy, insane husk of a man that I was, in mid-June last year.

It's been quite a year. God knows what happened with the Customer Due Diligence project, but I'm glad the due diligence on me didn't work, because the Winners and HSBC ended up unwittingly saving my life and getting me back on my feet. I don't think I would have ever had that opportunity if my dark private life was known in advance.

I'm sorry if it feels like I used you. Hopefully, it feels like a good thing happened. Hopefully you feel happy to have played a role in bringing a person back from the brink, even if I was a sneaky bastard, and somewhat underhand about the whole thing, as well as going a bit bonkers at times.

Silver linings, eh?

The photos I've put up include some rather unflattering images of a rather battered and bruised body, that just about hung together with sticky tape to somehow carry me through some brutal times. My private life wasn't exactly 'healthy' leading up to last June.

Tags: #career #banking #hsbc #computing #london #suicide #addiction #homeless

This is a story about avoiding anonymity...

Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, Crystal Meth Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Sex Addicts Anonymous. Why are you hiding in anonymity?

I feel like former addicts are cowering in shame, fearful that the world might discover their dirty little secrets. People are tucked away in church halls, community centres and other meeting places. Tea and biscuits are served, and the ostracised members of society discuss the trials and tribulations of sobriety and abstinence, amongst their peers.

I've been to my fair share of 12-step meetings, and I know the format, the stories. I know that people are grateful to "the fellowship" for the lifeline they've been given. People reel off the number of days they've been clean & sober, and collect some kind of token for significant periods of time - 30 days, 90 days, 1 year etc. - as well as receiving a round of applause from the audience.

Families are quick to take advantage of a weakness, and to blame one member for their own shortcomings and failures. The addict or alcoholic is a convenient scapegoat, whenever things are not going exactly swimmingly for the family. Transferring all your guilt, as a failed parent, as a terrible partner, as an impotent sibling, onto a designated individual, is a damnsight easier than taking any individual or collective responsibility. Victim blaming is convenient.

Friends don't really want to get involved. When the chips are down, you'll find that most of your buddies are actually fair-weather friends. Very few people actually want to stick around when shit gets ugly. All those people who you thought were like your brothers and sisters... when the cash runs out and the drugs & alcohol run dry, you find yourself quite shockingly alone.

Providing peer-to-peer support, from one black sheep to another, is a genius stroke. Amongst those who have fallen, you're all equals. Everybody is tarred with the same brush. You can't bullshit a bullshitter, and so you're stripped of all the usual protocol that has to be observed as an addict or an alcoholic, in order to elicit human empathy that should be taken for granted.

If you tell somebody that some tragedy has happened to you, and you've fallen on hard times, sympathy is forthcoming as long as you're "clean & sober" but as soon as substance abuse enters the picture, suddenly your woes are believed to be self-inflicted, and therefore you're not a 'worthy' cause. The suffering addict or alcoholic has to start with a preamble, where you attempt to convince a hostile world that you're abstinent from the very things that comfort you, when you've been kicked to the gutter by society, friends and family.

Of course, it's enticing, to cluster together in groups of similarly excluded and misunderstood people. There's so much in common with these people, in particular the prejudice that you face on a daily basis. People talk about 'dirty' junkies, 'winos', 'drunks', 'tramps' and other derogatory terms. How quickly forgotten, the fact that at one time these trampled individuals were once somebody's cute little baby or smiling child in a school photograph.

The reasons for retreating into anonymity are obvious. Who's going to employ a former junkie? Who wants to live next door to a former addict? Who would trust their kids near a former alcoholic? Who would waste their time talking to a former pill popper?

When you hide the things that trigger people's prejudices, surprisingly they discover that they can actually get along with each other, they can like each other, and live together, despite the shocking stuff that happened in the past. When you go to an Anonymous meeting, you hear some hair-raising stories of the depths that people can sink to... but they're still people. We all bleed the same. We are all subject to the same weaknesses, the same faults.

I think that society is weakened when we allow the media to continue to portray an increasingly demonic view of the 'dirty junkie' while at the same time the fallen angels hide themselves from public view. When it becomes "us" and "them" and nobody's standing up and saying "I'm normal, just like you - we are the same" then the good vs. evil bullshit is allowed to perpetuate.

Isn't the whole point of rehabilitation to reintegrate into society? I don't consider it recovery, to have to stick amongst my 'own people', who are merely those who have been labelled and cast out of society due to life 'choices' that they made.

Do I really want a life of having to go to meetings, praising the fellowship, and sponsoring other "recovering" addicts and alcoholics? I hate that word - "recovering" - in the context of addiction and alcoholism. When do you become recovered? As far as I can see, the whole bullshit of a society hell-bent on labelling people, means that former addicts and alcoholics will never be considered recovered. They'll always be labelled. They'll always carry a black mark.

So, I've marked myself. The semicolon tattoo behind my ear tells the world that I've struggled with depression, suicide attempts, and then later, drug and alcohol abuse problems. And you know what? I still drink too much. I still take stimulants and 'downers'. Is it abuse, addiction? Is it fuck. We're all just doing what we've gotta do to survive.

Part of survival for me is making life bearable. Of course people who are abused and mistreated are going to self-medicate. Of course people who have unbearable lives are going to reach out for whatever makes life a little bit easier.

Frankly though, if we're serious about treating each other well, helping each other, we could start by letting people be honest about their 'mistakes' and past misdemeanours.

I'm taking a big risk, by having myself so obviously marked, labelled. I'm taking a big chance, having a public blog in my own name, covered with photos of myself, and making full disclosure of my entire history of mental health problems and substance abuse. It's either a gutsy or a stupid thing to do, but I hope it's the former, not the latter.

Somebody has to stand up and be heard, because silent and anonymous addicts and alcoholics are too much of a convenient group to scapegoat for the world's problems, when in fact the existence of substance abuse is symptomatic of a depressing, lonely and abusive world, full of hateful humans who have no empathy for one another.

While I don't advocate the use of drugs and alcohol, I strongly believe that people who have had to suffer should no longer have to hide in the shadows, and be punished additionally for their pain.

The burden that the addict or alcoholic must carry is more than any man or woman could possibly manage, and that's not fair.

Do you think I give a shit about how long I've been 'clean' for? I was never 'dirty' in the first place.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #alcohol #notanonymous

This is a story about friendship...

I had a truly awesome week - the best in a very long time - thanks to my friends. People have been scattered to all four corners of the globe, but through social media and the pull of the capital, we managed to reconnect. I can't stress enough how grateful I am to those people who've made the effort to stay in touch, and not to judge and disown me.

The week kicked off with a couple of friends making a last minute dash up to London. Doing touristy things with them really made me appreciate where I live. I can jump on the tube whenever I want and travel all over London very easily, but sometimes you don't appreciate your home town until you're seeing it through the eyes of visitors, and playing host.

The really cool thing about seeing my friends was having face-to-face conversations. We sat out on the bench in my garden, and we had a conversation that was way easier to have in person, having spent the day together. Chatting online is nice, but it's rarely more than checking in to make sure each other is OK, and just renewing that bond. I'm not complaining, but it was great to see some old friends, and for them to challenge me on some of the bitterness, regret and resentment that's been very unhealthy, as well as just having a really nice chat.

Chatting with my friend's wife, who is a social worker, she shared some really interesting stuff about the importance of a sibling relationship in the life of a child. The big hole in my life is my sister. I spent the first 10 years of my life as an only child, and they say the first 7 years of a child's life are the most formative. Obviously, I've tried hard to re-adjust, and I'm genuinely overjoyed to have a sister, but it's never good enough for my parents. They wanted me to tread a hard line: being both a mature parent figure to my sister, but at the same time I was still a kid and a sibling, not actually an unpaid babysitter. I wanted to play with my sister, not raise her.

If you think I'm a bit cold and brutal with people, a loner, unafraid to cut people off if they're taking the piss... you're right in a way. I was always taught not to bother forming close bonds with people. Being pulled out of so many schools and kept away from my friends, taught me that I would never be allowed to retain my friendships, my relationships. I learned to develop shallow friendships and remain emotionally detached. I learned to protect myself from the inevitable time when my parents would drag me off somewhere else, away from my friends.

In adult life, I've bonded with a new set of friends and found great happiness and comfort in having those friendships last more than a couple of years. Things slowly fell into disrepair with one set of friends, as I moved away from London and got sucked into an abusive relationship. Friendships were neglected during my descent into mental illness and addiction, which kinda poured cold water on another set of friends, and meant further declines in the quality of my older friendships.

However, quite a lot of people are still tentatively connected to me, and by co-incidence another friend was coming up to London for a visit. We met up in a pub on my last day as a free man, and played a card game, just like we used to do on a random midweek evening in the good old days. We then sat in his friend's back garden playing cards and drinking beer, under the watchful gaze of a zombie garden gnome, with the light fading to the point where we could no longer tell which cards were which.

I started a new job, and the guy who showed me the ropes turned out to know a guy who I met at my very first full-time job. He's a friendly fella and it certainly took away a lot of those first day nerves, plus the feeling of trepidation that builds and builds, the longer you have off work. Having taken 6 months out of the game, I was filled with self-doubt, so it was a big relief to meet somebody friendly.

Some friends from my homeless days came over to visit. It was nice to show them my flat, and a real point of pride for somebody who was really down on their luck only a year before. Entertaining and hosting are so good for my self-esteem. I know it's probably not healthy to pin my sense of wellbeing on wowing people with something so materialistic as a nice place to live, but it does make me feel good to say "look how far I've come". It was nice to chat to a couple of people who also keenly felt the sense of loss, as our little social group crumbled, when we all started to get jobs and places to live, and move on with our lives.

I went out for dinner with another friend. It was nice to feel like there was some reward for working. Social bonding over food & drink is the reason for living, for going to work, to me. I always valued the social time with people rather than the excuse, the 'sport' or 'hobby' or whatever it was that supposedly tied us all together.

It was a totally unexpected twist, that when I got into kitesurfing - which is not a team sport - that I would actually end up with one of the largest groups of friends I've ever had the fortune of having in my life. I felt truly cherished and blessed, during those golden years of the London Kitesurfers, when we jetted around the globe together and threw wild parties.

Friday, I scheduled a 'date' with my 'bro'. It was nice to arrange a phonecall with a very supportive friend, and have good news to report. He's a sensitive guy and has been particularly concerned about my wellbeing, especially during my very suicidal moments. It was nice to have a somewhat more positive phone conversation.

Technology and social media is priceless in my life, and I rounded off the week with a video-chat call with a friend in New Zealand. At one point, I was struck by just how amazing technology is. I was having a face-to-face conversation with a friend who I haven't seen for 5 months, and there we were having a chat... midnight in the UK on a Saturday night, and 11am on Sunday morning in Auckland. Truly a globe-shrinking experience, to think that I'd have to be on a plane for 24+ hours if I actually wanted to shake my friend's hand, but yet we were able to speak as if we were almost in the same room together.

I completed the week, 10 weeks clean from the drugs, 3 days of my new job without being sacked, having seen 8 or more friends and made an ally at work. Given that recovery is a function of a healthy life, not sobriety, this bodes well.

I expect that things will get harder before they get easier, and the last week was probably a blip. I'm slightly scared to say "I'm feeling a bit better" because I fear that friends who are looking out for me might back off, believing I'm fine. You know, every little message in chat apps, every like on facebook, every text, every email... they all add up to a cushion of support that keeps me afloat. This is not emotional blackmail. Please think of it as a Thank You.

I still need to put regular social contact, exercise and some kind of hobby or passion into the mix. I'd like to get my kites repaired and buy a new wetsuit so I can go kitesurfing at the weekends again, just like I used to.

Don't move, improve!

Look: I even got a new bed, thanks to my guardian angel driving me across London in a small car, overburdened with a massive piece of furniture. This reparation is a good metaphor for the damage repairs that my friends have enabled.

Tags: #friends #career #suicide #addiction