This is a story about my secret diary...

Now that my friends have responded so brilliantly to my distress, I feel quite bad. I feel like I've taken up people's time, worried them and been self-absorbed. However, I guess that's partly because I now see light at the end of the tunnel, so I feel less panicked and in danger of something pushing me over the edge, back into suicidal thoughts.

I was thinking to myself about my motivation for writing so much private and personal stuff. The fact is, I want people to like me. I want to feel understood, and that people can empathise with me.

Where do we draw the line between somebody with dangerously low self esteem, and somebody who is egotistical and self-centred? I centred in on one particular phrase:

"I think people like me"

Why should that be so controversial? Well, in lots of literature that deals with psychology, thinking of yourself as likeable is linked to pathological conditions, like narcissism. From things I've read, I'm actually supposed to think of myself as unlikeable, or else I'm a narcissist, I'm dangerously self centred and egotistical.

But, if you think you're unlikeable, worthless, not worth knowing, then this is the basis for low self-esteem, and suicidal thoughts. If you think that nobody likes you, then the world would be better off without you. We all consume a great deal of precious resources - food, energy - so why should I stick around wasting oxygen if I'm somehow unlikeable? This is how I arrive at the decision to kill myself.

Clearly there's a contradiction here. We're telling people not to like themselves and not to feel liked or loved, or else they're some kind of horribly self obsessed, preening egotistical narcissist. However, without feeling like you have some value in other people's lives, you think that you might as well be dead.

I look at the precocious children, the ones who were loved and popular, showered with praise from all quarters... the ones who had their egos polished every day... the ones whose parents told them that they were special, talented... the ones who felt loveable, and as if the world was interested in their talents and ideas. I look at those children, and instead of feeling envy, I simply see the glow, the smile, the cotton wool that surrounds them, and I think that it's a good thing.

Life is going to be brutal. How do we even know we're alive, unless there is sadness to help us appreciate the happiness? Without darkness, we could never appreciate the light. However, it makes no sense to me to add extra shit to the life of a child. Why tell them they're a bad person, worthless, selfish and stupid? The world is going to do that for their entire adult life. For god's sake let them have a childhood.

So, I've grown up with this ridiculous idea of 'original sin'. I've learned to feel guilty about feeling happy. I've learned to feel guilty when luck goes my way. I've learned to feel guilty when somebody shows me love or affection. I've learned to feel guilty for craving friendship, companionship. I've learned to feel guilty for wanting any kind of external validation that I'm alive. I've learned to feel guilty for wanting to feel that there's a reason for living.

Nothing crystallises the issue quite like selfies and Facebook/Instagram. Do you have friends who post endless pictures of themselves up on their social media accounts? What do you think about them?

For pretty girls, they must get an ego boost, putting on their selfie pout and photographing themselves, with lots of 'likes' from horny boys. But surely things can be a little more innocent than that, or even mask deep-seated psychological issues.

Parents like to see photos of their kids. Families like to see photos of their relatives. Friends like to see photos of their friends. With the collapse of local communities, the geographical scattering of families, the decline of villages, clans & tribes... we need photo and video services to have any social bonds over these unnatural distances. Human evolution hasn't caught up with the automobile, the train, the boat and the airplane yet.

Equally, we know that glossy magazines, advertising and hollywood, paint a picture of perfect glamour. The most attractive people on the planet are paraded in front of our eyes, throughout our waking hours. How can we avoid comparing them with ourselves, and feeling inadequate?

We just don't measure up, and we feel ugly. We dislike our mis-shapen noses, sticky out ears and unruly hair. We look in the mirror at our spots and birthmarks, our pockmarked skin, our crooked stained teeth, and we know we can never measure up to the airbrushed beauties who are shoved in our faces.

For me, selfie culture is like grass-roots activism. Publishing directly onto the web takes away all the power and control that the newspapers and book publishers have, and allows anybody to become a writer. Putting pictures of yourself onto Facebook and Instagram allows anybody to become a glamour model, a famous face. It's reclaiming your sense of self-worth, from powerful media forces that parade unrealistic body images in front of us.

I've obviously wrestled with the idea that only rich, famous and powerful people are allowed to publish memoirs and biographies. Who would want to read about the life of a thirtysomething white middle-class IT consultant who went to state school and doesn't know any celebrities? Who would want to read about the very ordinary trials and tribulations of trying not to run out of money, getting a job and finding a place to live?

Am I supposed to feel guilty about the fact that I've been clamouring for my friends, and strangers from the Internet, to engage with me and give me even the tiniest indications that I'm being heard? Should I feel bad, when I admit that it's had a profound psychological effect, having a flurry of people 'like' my content on Facebook and Twitter, and getting a load of comments on Reddit and in the comments section below?

I'm not coercing people to continue to read, and to give me more 'likes'. I kinda feel like writing this has achieved what I wanted, which was to feel noticed. When you're struggling with suicidal thoughts, a big component is that nobody seems to care whether you live or die. The more you wail in distress and get ignored, the more it reaffirms your belief that the world would be better off without you.

I had a big response when I told people I was in hospital, and that was super nice, but I've been wary of spamming Facebook. People are often accused of being attention seeking, when they share shocking stuff on Facebook. Is that fair, if they're genuinely in danger of committing suicide?

To be admitted to a psychiatric hospital in the UK is not easy. You don't just turn up and say you need to be 'committed'. The number of places in hospital are very limited, and "care in the community" is always the preferred option. I had 4 or 5 section assessments, but I've never been 'sectioned'. It's really rare to have your liberty taken away, and be put into a secure facility for the protection of yourself and others.

My point is, that if mental health professionals thought that it was safest if I was admitted to hospital, then my life was in very real danger, and I have independent confirmation that I'm not just an attention whore. Surely it's OK to reach out to the world and say "I don't feel good. I feel alone. I feel unloved, unliked. I don't feel like I have any value. I feel worthless" no matter how you do that?

Personally, I think we should be paying attention to the drama queens, attention whores and people who seem self-obsessed. In actual fact, they probably have very fragile mental health, and are desperately trying to connect with the world and feel that they have some self-worth.

I'm not going to feel guilty about posting the occasional selfie.

I drew a big cock & balls on the beach, and nobody told me to "stop showing off" but I did hear those words in my head.

Tags: #childhood #friends #suicide #depression #mentalhealth #socialmedia #writing

This is a story about how to lose friends and alienate people...

It's remarkable what we assume, and what we're unaware of. It's remarkable how our opinions can be coloured, and prejudices triggered, which completely change our impression of a person, and the way we treat them.

I had declared myself as "fighting mental health stigma" but in actual fact, things like Clinical Depression are so damn commonplace that nobody bats an eyelid if you say you're taking powerful psychiatric medication to stop you from killing yourself. In actual fact, I get more criticism for being medication free and letting my brain achieve its own homeostasis.

When I moved back to London, one of my oldest friends was incredibly sweet and understanding about the fact that I was struggling with my mental health. He took time out to read a bit about what Bipolar Disorder was, and was actively concerned with my wellbeing.

My friends are always playing catch up. By the time I was diagnosed with Clinical Depression, I was already having hypomanic episodes that were beyond the 'healthy' and 'normal' range of moods. Spending copious amounts of money, working ridiculously long hours, hypersexuality, risk taking... these things are not conducive to good health, wealth and stable relationships.

By the time I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, I was already trying various forms of self medication. Depressions had gotten so severe that suicide was a very real risk, and hypomania had reached the point where I was starting to get delusions of grandeur, and was at risk of getting into money problems.

By the time I got free from the horrible relationship that was stoking my mood disorder, substance abuse was a big threat. When my divorce sapped my energy and sucked me back into the nightmarish world that I was trying to escape, I gave up and just decided to be a total junkie.

By the time I got cleaned up and back on my feet, word had been spread by my unpleasant family, that I was somehow untrustworthy, a waste of space, a lost cause.

So, I'm pre-empting all of that. This is a pre-emptive strike. I'm telling the world my very worst things, so everybody can get all that prejudice out of the way. I'm putting my worst foot forward.

I'm still here.

My friends and family are still stuck in the position of trying to deal with their prejudice, even though I've already moved on. I'm dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts, while people think I'm probably scoring heroin on a street corner and injecting drugs in some crack den.

This 'lag' is extremely annoying. It means I have to deal with a shocked silence. It means I'm isolated, alone, with people who should know me better, thinking terrible things about me. The culture of fear that we've grown up in is powerful, and all those images that the media has put into your mind are suddenly applied to me... it wouldn't surprise me if my own family has imagined me stealing car stereos or mugging grannies.

There's a lag with me too. It messes with your mind, being homeless one minute, and then working for a massive bank on a really important project, all dressed up in your suit with people giving a shit about your opinion.

How can you go from being the lowest of the low, to the point where there are people who actually think that death's too good for you, to suddenly one of the highest paid people in one of the world's most profitable enterprises, because the market value for your skills and experience is so high?

Is it any wonder that it messes with your mind? Is it any wonder that your brain doesn't know whether you're a worthless piece of shit, and the world would be better off if you were dead, or if actually you deserve a 6-figure salary, and people are telling you that what you're doing is really important and you're a key figure in the delivery of a super important project. How are you supposed to reconcile that?

Just saying that I should remain "grounded" is ridiculous. I have no frame of reference. I have no evidence to suggest that any possible conclusion I could reach would be the right one. Everything that my experience has taught me has been counter-intuitive.

Working hard, being humble, keeping my head down has gotten me nowhere. It hasn't led to greater happiness, more stable mental health, nor has it repaired damaged friendships and improved my relationship with my family.

Equally, taking reckless risks with my health & wealth has brought surprising results. Instead of being dead or destitute, I actually ended up making a fantastic group of friends, as a result of winding up homeless on Hampstead Heath, just after my birthday in 2014. In actual fact, being chucked onto the street by Camden Council ushered in one of the happiest periods of my life in many recent years, probably since I was in Cambridge in 2011.

I don't see any of what I've done as wrong. I've not resorted to lying, cheating, stealing. I've not screwed people over, manipulated them or in any way committed any offensive act against anybody.

However, people seem to take it very personally, when I apparently screw up my opportunities. One of my closest friends was absolutely besides himself when I lost my contract one Christmas. He thought I had deliberately sabotaged it. He was angry that I had seemingly chucked away a golden opportunity.

Things aren't so clear-cut. I'm rarely in a fit state to work. Either I'm suffering from depression, hypomania, or the exhaustion and cognitive impairment of recovery from stimulant abuse. I just don't have the time and money to properly prepare my mind and body for work, so my colleagues and bosses get a rather fucked up version of me, with all the weird highs and lows associated with an extreme mood disorder.

It's not a moral choice, whether I work, whether I relapse, whether I just collapse in a heap and don't do anything.

I know that people like to judge, and I've given away so much ammunition that it's really easy to think you know my character, my morality. I'm very easy to label, to criticise, and to apply your prejudices to.

I'm fed up of feeling guilty, just because people are shocked and unable to see beyond their prejudice and preconceived notions. I'm fed up of having to carry the can for a load of blame and scapegoating that doesn't even apply to me.

In some ways, I'm tempted to rob, to steal, to lie, to cheat... I'm being treated as if I do those things already. If I'm already 'the bad guy' then I guess I should act the part?

People are more sympathetic to mental health problems like depression and bipolar than they are to substance abuse, even though the latter can be a feature of both of the former. I think the problem is the fact that people try and view it as a moral issue

Tags: #depression #bipolar #suicide #homeless #career #banking #friends #family

This is a story about seeking attention...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a story about conspiracy theories...

Can a homeless person with a drug abuse problem get off the streets and make a better life for themself, or are they a lost cause? Are we right to discriminate? Are we right to only let the 'right sort' of people get ahead in life?

What would happen if we were entirely honest in our job applications? What would happen if we put our darkest secrets onto our CVs and were completely transparent about the chaos and turmoil in our private lives? Would employers be understanding? Would we find our opportunities to work, to earn money, and to restore our self esteem, were abruptly curtailed?

I was speaking to a film-maker friend about the high rates of burnout & alcoholism in the banking community. It was hard for me to be overtly critical, because my experience is that once you're 'in the club' banking does tend to look after its people.

Drinking culture used to be ubiquitous in banking. Having a hangover in the morning, being tipsy in the afternoon, getting absolutely smashed out of your mind with your boss... these things were quite normal, and indeed encouraged. Everything and anything would be celebrated with copious amounts of alcohol, and virtually all sins were forgiven.

My first proper job in the City was with HSBC, and while I was there, a colleague was so drunk that he collapsed in the revolving doors and passed out, blocking the entrance. While the story was well known to everybody, this colleague suffered no disciplinary action. The tale simply entered folklore, and would be recounted to tease our colleague.

I was once running a team for JPMorgan, and I was so often drunk myself that I was unable to smell the vodka on the breath of my team member who sat opposite me. It was well known that he was an alcoholic, which is a bit like giving out speeding tickets at a Formula One race. He did eventually lose his job, but it took many years before he had spiralled downwards enough to have become completely ineffectual at his job. There were many, many second chances.

I myself, benefitted from having most understanding employers, in the banks. I have been rescued from fairly dire situations, not once, not twice, but three times now by these generous institutions. It should be a case of 3 strikes and you're out, perhaps. Besides, I have been biting the hand that feeds me.

I'm conflicted over the banks. I had felt like they were acting with immorality, kind of like a big conspiracy. However, on reflection, I think they just employ the best people they can get, and because they pay well they get great people who are very efficient at making money. There's no conspiracy: people are simply incentivised to help their employers profit, and the companies do better if they help their employees to prosper.

The banks have helped me, despite mental health problems, homelessness and drug abuse. Without them, I would be dead and buried or swigging methylated spirits on a park bench.

Obviously, my former employers don't know how charitable they have been. What would be their reaction if they did know?

Tags: #homeless #alcohol #addiction #drugs #banking #career #london

This is a story about the power of truth...

We love to jump to conclusions. In fact, our brains are designed to predict, rather than to simply present reality, as it really is. There's no way that a professional tennis or cricket player could respond to the ball, once it's left the racquet or hand of their opponent. Human reaction times are actually quite slow, so the brain makes predictions, based on the available information.

I'll re-iterate that, because it's quite important. When a tennis ball is served up by a professional opponent, there is not enough time for the eyes to see the ball, the image to be processed by the visual cortex, your brain to make a decision about whether to swing your racquet left or right, and then your motor cortex to move your muscles to intercept the ball. In actual fact, a professional tennis player makes all their decisions based on the body language of their opponent, in advance, before the ball is even struck.

The reality that you experience is a perceived reality. It might seem like a crisp and colourful 3-dimensional world around you, full of sound and smell, but actually, your brain is just feeding you the tidbits that are interesting, that you might want to make a cerebral decision about. That's why you can ignore a dull hum - white noise - but you can't ignore a scream or the sound of breaking glass.

There are far too many stimuli in the world around us for us to evaluate every single one for signs of danger. It was evolutionarily advantageous to keep the brain a reasonable size, so we could at least run away from things without being completely weighed down by a massive head. There's an optimal ratio of brain power to weight. The really brainy kids got eaten by predators, because they had the capacity to perceive, but not the brawn to evade. These brainy kids were most acutely aware that they were going to get eaten by a sabre tooth tiger: the ultimate realisation of the expression "ignorance is bliss".

I'm not saying that I'm brainy, but what I am saying is that your perception of me is incomplete. You have made more assumptions about me than you're aware. Your brain has taken the few fragments, the breadcrumbs that I've given you, and it's tried to present a complete description of who I am to you. This is an illusion.

We often talk about being a "good judge of character" and this is probably correct. Through life experience, we learn body language and facial expressions that allow us to guess when we're being lied to, deceived. We learn who the wrong 'uns are in life, and who harbours malice in their hearts.

An addict's brain has been hijacked. Reward systems in that brain are causing the addict to award a toxic chemical with an importance normally reserved for food and sex. There's a belief that an addict will murder and steal in order to support their habit, but it's easier to understand things in these terms: what would you be prepared to do if you were starving?

You feel like you wouldn't murder if you were starving, but you might be prepared to steal an apple from a highly profitable supermarket chain, right? Besides, you'd pay them back when you could, right? Here's where that perception thing comes in. Even though you think addicts would murder somebody to get their next fix, they actually think just like you do. Drug withdrawal is exactly the same as hunger, starvation, in the brain.

Does it surprise you that the handful of pills in the first picture actually turn out to be a load of dietary supplements that are not psychoactive? The chemicals in the pills are vitamins, minerals, proteins and amino acids. They are the building blocks that your body is made from. They are no more toxic than a salad, some beans, some turkey, some juice. They're certainly not drugs, even though they're packaged similarly.

Some people believe that drug use is a victimless crime. Adults are allowed to go off-piste skiing, kill themselves with alcohol, race motorbikes, climb dangerous mountains... these things are a risk for the individual, but they are permitted under law. When we look at the antisocial harms of drug use, alcohol is by far and away the biggest offender in society, yet it's legal and its use is enshrined in culture.

My guess would be that the majority of people think that drug use has its victims. Whether it's those who are victims of thefts and burglaries or those who are caught in the crossfire of the drug war, gang warfare for the desirable turf, for trafficking and drug dealing. One of the main reasons for spending billions of dollars on drug 'crime' is because we believe that drug addicts are bad people, as opposed to starving people. We wouldn't attack the victims of a drought, but we do attack those people whose hunger and thirst for drugs has reached a level where their brains tell them to obtain chemical substances at all costs.

But what about choice? Didn't addicts choose to become addicted? Well, you tried beer didn't you? You had some wine, didn't you? Did you choose not to become addicted, or did you find that you can just naturally stop drinking when it's not socially or economically appropriate to do it anymore? You have no problem stopping drinking, but why does that mean that an alcoholic chooses to have a problem with booze? Who would choose to destroy their liver, their livelihood, their family and ultimately their life?

So, we can understand that alcoholism is not a choice, but something that afflicts a small proportion of alcohol users. Drinking alcohol is not the same as being an alcoholic... surely we all see that? Therefore alcoholism is a result of genetic or environmental factors, outside the control of the free will of the addicted individual. That is to say, if it's a choice, there's something so awful about the life of an alcoholic, that they prefer the damage they are doing to themselves, instead of a life without the numbing intoxication of their chemical crutch.

Empathy is required to understand the mechanisms of addiction, but from your initial knee-jerk fear and mistrust, we can even move towards a position of sympathy. We can see addicts as the victims of starvation, rather than predators out to murder and steal.

You got hungry and you craved food. You went and got food and you ate it to satisfy your craving. Does that make you an addict? A food addict?

Tags: #addiction #drugs #alcohol

This is a story about how people respond to incentives...

The last time I was in the Accident & Emergency department of a general hospital, I got a ticking off from the consultant. It was almost as if he didn't understand that the threat of kidney failure and early death was no disincentive to the path through life I was taking. It shouldn't have been a surprise to him: I hadn't gone to the hospital through choice, but instead the police had taken me there.

This was my life for a while: being passed from pillar to post by people who didn't understand what I was going through or how to deal with me. One thing that everybody seemed to agree on though, was that tough love was probably the best option. I should be ridiculed, shamed, talked down to and ostracised until I "saw sense" and decided to change the course of my life. Why would anybody choose the life that I had?

Actually, the police were excellent, seeing as they deal with society's dregs day in and day out. The well-to-do Royal Free hospital on the hills of London's exclusive Hampstead, was perhaps less used to dealing with those who have lost their way in life. Certainly, those who were struggling with drink and addiction, that I met, were sent to more central hospitals, like UCLH on the Euston Road.

I certainly don't see hospital as the first port of call, to rectify issues, and I bandaged my own massive leg wound and would have tried to avoid hospital, had paramedics not insisted that I was admitted, on another occasion.

It is only with regret that I have consumed NHS resources, but I certainly don't feel that there was any choice in the matter. When I injured my leg one night on London's streets, alone, I pulled out the broken glass and let it heal as I lay in agony in a bush for several days, with the blood-soaked wound sticking to my torn trousers. It needed stitches and I needed antibiotics to avoid infection, but I was lucky. I saved the NHS some money and I've got the scars to prove it.

Passing the buck, and driving somebody away from their home, family and friendship groups... making somebody feel ashamed, turning them into an outcast, demonising and villainising somebody... that's ridiculous!

I picked the wrong life partner: somebody judgemental, violent, abusive. That's my fault. I wasn't equipped with the life experience to know that I should walk away. My own parents relationship was full of verbal abuse and psychological warfare, but they stayed together: commitment to a partner was all I knew. I was naïvely optimistic that things would finally work, if only I tried hard enough.

When depression worsened and became bipolar disorder, when bipolar was overshadowed by addiction... things were chaotic, and consumed my sanity, temporarily. I was heavily dependent, trusting, of my partner and my Dad, and my GP. They acted with ignorance and without consideration of my wishes. Later, my partner would act with spite and selfishness.

It's hard to recover if your partner is working against you, and has your Dad in co-operation too. But, I'm going over heavily trodden ground. I don't mean to re-iterate this. I mean instead to talk about another approach: carrot, not stick.

I was dealing with something, in technical terms, called a clusterfuck. A combination of mental health problems, an unsupportive partner, unsupportive and even obstructive family, sex addiction, drug addiction, having to find a new home, new friends, new job... it's too much to ask of somebody. A breakdown, a major relapse, becoming completely dysfunctional: this was made inevitable by the circumstances around me.

Only the police acted with any restraint. The police see lives ruined, and people enter into the revolving-doors of criminal justice. The police know that slapping a criminal conviction onto somebody makes their life harder, rather than improving their chances of rehabilitation into society, so they are reluctant to condemn somebody to that fate. However, many in the rest of society are keen to label and ostracise and destroy their fellow human beings.

We are living in an increasingly isolated society, where we are mistrustful of each other. We avoid listening to anybody's personal story, lest it instil some sense of sympathy within ourselves. To view every stranger as a potential murderer, rapist, paedophile, thief and dirty junkie, is easier than just seeing other human beings, and feeling compelled to hesitate in the rat race for a second and give somebody a hand up.

We are all competing with one another so fiercely, that we believe that it is only with intensely selfish and self-centred actions, to the detriment of society as a whole, that we can get ahead, that we can succeed. We believe that we are helping our family, by turning a blind eye to the beggars, the homeless, the poor and the addicts and alcoholics.

The welfare state is being dismantled. The sympathy of society and the basic human instinct for care and compassion is being eroded. Instead we have a culture of "every man for himself" and we'll allow incredible human suffering to be perpetrated in our names, because we are sold good vs. evil fairytales by a wealthy elite, intent on turning us into scared, isolated consumers.

I feel with certainty that the depression that I feel - the dissatisfaction with what I see in the world - stems directly from an unpleasant attitude that's prevalent everywhere I look: the collapse of social bonds, and the mistrust of strangers, neighbours, fellow human beings.

I've paid over £30,000 just to be treated like a human being, by some kind and compassionate, non-judgemental people. That's all it takes to help somebody on the road to recovery: just don't be an arsehole to them. Be consistently nice to each other, and the world won't be such a shit place that people get depressed in, want to get intoxicated and want to kill themselves.

Yes, it's true that when my life is absolutely appalling, I will probably run to drink & drugs. What's the alternative? The razor blade and the noose.

They feed you in hospital. You could try starving people, to punish them for getting sick, but seeing as that's how I ended up in hospital I can't see why that would work. Carrot works. Stick doesn't

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

This is a story about an inevitable crash...

If you're under too much pressure for too long, eventually you'll crack, you'll crash & burn. Making hay while the sun shines is all well and good, but when you enter a cycle of boom & bust, it's very hard to restabilise things.

My school year was one of the first to do the dreaded SATs exams. These exams turned out to be incredibly important for the next set of exams that followed hot on their heels: my GCSEs. My SAT results pretty much decided which stream I would be in for Maths, English & Science. Being in the 'top set' was important, to not get dragged down by those who didn't want to learn.

Education and a corporate career is just unrelenting. The mindset of continually challenging people with arbitrary measurements never goes away. Whether it's A-level exams, University or your performance reviews at work, life is one continuous game of sorting and sifting, presided over by little hitlers who want to confine everybody into neat little boxes.

I never felt particularly stressed about exams and getting good grades, at the time, but there was a heavy culture I was being indoctrinated into, which I didn't realise until it was too late, and I hit a brick wall and could no longer continue on the same bullshit path.

We tell our kids that they need to work hard at school and get good exam results so that they can continue into further education, get a better job, have a better lifestyle. It turns out that's simply wrong. Society certainly benefits if we are all unthinking slaves, simply parroting the same identical bullcrap, and unquestioningly following our allotted route: KNOW YOUR PLACE is what's drummed into us, for 40 or 50 hours a week.

Playing the game, playing by the rules, believing in the value of pieces of paper above talent and experience, believing that there's a place for everybody, and that if you try your best, you can do better than your peers, and it'll give you and your family a better life. At some point, the bubble bursts, you become disillusioned, you see that it's all a lie.

I felt cheated out of my childhood, with such an unhealthy fixation on academic achievement placed ahead of playtime and social activities. Nobody would ever tell me off for reading too many books, completely isolated in my room, but playing games with my friends was not a good use of time, apparently.

My parents pulled me away from my peers at every opportunity. Whether that was visiting their friends all over the country, or spending weeks at a time in a dilapidated house in a tiny French village. I did make a friend in this village eventually, but he was younger than me, and I was criticised for being "immature" and the effect this friend had on me.

Some of my parents friends had children too, and I tried to be friends with them, and indeed I felt closer to these children than I did with a lot of my schoolfriends. I was kept away from schoolfriends so often during weekends and holidays, when there was less emphasis on homework, but I could never get close to any group of friends before I was dragged away.

I started to value material possessions above social bonds, because I had been taught that social bonds were not something I would ever be allowed to cultivate. I changed schools 6 times, instead of just once, because of my parents' lack of care about how my social development was being affected. In the end, I gave up, and saw friendships as totally transient, meaningless.

It's a real tragedy, when somebody is taught not to get attached to anybody, not to make meaningful bonds, not to value friendships. I fixated on career achievements and money, believing that there was no value in staying with my peer group, having a group of friends, being socially bonded.

It was quite by accident that I ended up with a group of kitesurfer friends. For me, the appeal of kitesurfing was that it was a loner sport. Most people who have been socially normalised enjoy team sports. It's the camaraderie of the sport that is most of the fun, rather than the sport itself. That brotherhood (or sisterhood) between team members is something I never experienced growing up.

Given that I was socially under-developed, and even cynical about friendship and human relationships, it was easier to develop relationships through technology, the internet. I started to read and contribute to an online discussion forum, about kitesurfing, and from this I got to know the online nicknames of a lot of people, as if they were people who I knew intimately.

As my confidence with kitesurfing grew, I started to get more outspoken on the online discussion forums, and this developed into arranging to meet up with people at the weekends, to go kitesurfing where the wind and the tides were best. There was a social meet up every Tuesday night, at a pub in central London, which was popular, and cemented a lot of real friendships.

Having access to a group of friends, a peer group that I felt bonded to, was something that was very new and alien to me at first, but it completed me: I felt secure and happy for the first time in my life. For the first time in my life, I was living for more than just exam grades and good feedback from my bosses at work. It was healthy, it was stable, it was sustainable and it was happy.

Sadly, my underlying mindset was still one that placed ambitious career goals and risk-taking ahead of valuing the social group that I loved and who gave me great joy and security, a deep-seated sense of wellbeing, of connection to the world. I didn't miss it until it was gone.

I was driven to find a girl, to fall in love... having been so socially insecure, awkward, such a late starter, I hadn't had the opportunity to meet that special lady, and I felt like that was the most important thing I had to do, since I had become happy in the rest of my life. I put all my energies and efforts into trying to make it work with every girl who I thought I was madly in love with.

There are few words to describe just how immature I was, in some very vital and 'normal' areas of life. You can't bully and pressure and cajole your kid into being an academic bookworm without damaging them as a rounded person. Who gives a shit if they're grade 8 on the violin if they had a miserable childhood and can't relate to their peers or find any happiness in the world? Who gives a shit if they've got a first-class degree from Oxbridge, if they're shy and awkward and depressed?

It seems inevitable that I would go astray, with no peer group, no group of friends to compare notes with, to keep each other safe.

I cannot possibly express to you just how isolated and alone I am.

I walked the tightrope for a long time, believing that good qualifications and work experience would lead to a stable life, but as soon as I looked down I realised that there was no safety net

Tags: #bipolar #childhood #parents

This is a story about an unholy trinity...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cut the thread, and I'll fly

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

This is a story about verbal jousting...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #london #cycling