addiction – Page 8 – Nick Grant

Nick Grant

Tag: addiction

  • Running out of excuses

    This is a story about whether it’s right to stay with an alcoholic and/or an addict…

    Nail clipper door

    Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink. Like every alcoholic and/or addict I have a million and one reasons why I had one too many bottles of wine, or why I lapsed or relapsed into drug addiction.

    I mentioned on Facebook earlier today that I rearranged the furniture in a hotel room in Bournemouth, right at the very worst most moment of my divorce. If you think that “worst moment of my divorce” caveat is me getting my excuses in early, then you’re wrong. Let’s get this straight: I didn’t break anything or chuck a telly out of the window, but I made a lot of extra work for housekeeping.

    I was actually so concerned that I was in such a bad frame of mind that I was actually going to throw a telly out of the window, so I phoned the duty solicitor. The duty solicitor gets phoned after you’ve been arrested, if you don’t have your own solicitor.  I had not been arrested, but I didn’t like the way things were going.

    The duty solicitor was rather bemused by a person ringing up to chat about things before they’re arrested…. in anticipation. He said that he didn’t think the police would arrest me, and I should probably just ring friends and family. I was loathe to involve friends & family in a mess that I had made.

    Eventually, having tried several other local solicitors, I rang the family solicitor, who phoned my Mum, who told my Dad to phone me. He was exceedingly unhappy that one of his longest friends had suggested that I might be in the need of a bit of support during a messy divorce.

    I rang my friend Tim, who texted an ex police constable, who confirmed that the police would not press charges given the circumstances. Tim came to the hotel, and said it wasn’t bad at all and we could fix it up in 5 or 10 minutes, but I just wanted to get home.

    Despite a couple of offers of financial compensation for any inconvenience or damage the hotel manager laughed, being rather experiences with the wrecked hotel rooms due to the large amount of stag dos who visit Bournemouth. His housekeeping staff had not even commented. However, I still feel guilty about that today.

    That was December 2013.

    Let’s make one thing really clear before we go on. My ex wife did not addict me to drugs. She’s not responsible for any of my addiction: then or now.

    My startup company fell to bits because I was under unbearable pressure to deliver Investment Banker lifestyle on startup wages, and base my company in Bournemouth, where there are no angel investors, no venture capitalists, no startup scene, no customers, it was over 2 hours away from my co-founder and his new baby girl. It was an irreconcilable problem, with my ex-wife being least willing to compromise despite having a job she could work anywhere in the country. But, that’s not her fault. It’s my fault. It’s my fault that I made myself CEO instead of my co-founder. It’s my fault I couldn’t handle the pressure. It’s my fault I wasn’t strong enough to leave a toxic unsupportive relationship.

    Drugs – legal highs – appeared on the scene in the autumn, as I sat at home, desperately depressed about the situation. I had already tried about 5 different antidepressants by this point, and had even moved on to trying over 10 extremely rare antidepressants that are extremely rarely prescribed, even in treatment-resistant depression cases.

    It’s not like I didn’t recognise the problem. I accessed local drug & alcohol drop in centres, where I sat listening to teenaged alcoholic prostitutes talking about their children being taken into care, knowing that I owned my own home, cars, boats, hot tub, summer houses and had tens of thousands of pounds in the bank. I left, because it feel like sheer selfishness to deprive the time that could be given to somebody more needy.

    I spent a day in a residential rehab as a day patient. By the end of the day, I had brushed up all the leaves, done all the washing up, hoovered, mopped and done just about everybody’s weekly chores. The people’s lives were fascinating, but most of the day was drinking tea & coffee and sitting around.

    I don’t know if I was successfully hiding my habit, but I gave a talk to a bunch of startup founders in London, and a few came over and said they’d heard me speak in Cambridge, and they thought my public speaking had improved a lot. Go figure.

    The only real problem for hiding my habit was school holidays – my ex being an educator – when I wouldn’t have the daytime to take drugs. Christmas holiday was unspeakably awful, with me sneaking off in the middle of the night to take drugs.

    Getting clean and staying clean is my sole responsibility, but I found it telling that the only book on addiction my ex read parts of was called “Nag your loved one sober”.

    After Christmas, my ex demanded that my parents take me away. Naturally, they resisted and I resisted. My dad came down, and my ex had been nagging our mutual GP about how hard it was on her to deal with my addiction. Deal with my addiction? She didn’t even know about it until a week earlier, when I struggled to hide it during the school holidays.

    I was completely spooked by the sudden appearance of my dad and my GP, through no request of my own. The idea of leaving my home, my friends and everything else I’d spent years building around myself, to go live in a house I’d never lived in, trapped in a village where I didn’t know anybody. That’s fucking offensive.

    Anyway, the psychiatrist I saw just before I left Bournemouth told me to taper off the legal highs gradually – over the course of 6 to 8 weeks – because nobody knew what withdrawal would be like.

    Having gotten rid of me to my parents’ house, my ex then refused to take my phone-calls and generally treated me like dog dirt.

    I would say, that if it turns out you’re dating an addict and/or alcoholic, you should make a decision – based on how long you’ve been together – as to whether they’re the type who’s going to bleed you dry and move onto the next unwitting victim, whether you’re prepared to help them – and trust me, it’s really fucking hard – or whether it’s your moral duty to help them because they became unwell while they were your husband, wife or long term partner.

    Anyway, my ex continued to be a right ***** until someone who isn’t me hacked her email account and found out that no sooner had I left MY house, she had been dating other people. I confronted her with her infidelity, and she started treating me like a human again. Unfortunately, I thought a leopard could change its spots, so I spent £4,000 on flights to Hawaii to get married and £3,000 on an engagement ring. As you can tell, I’m the kind of junkie who spends all their money on themselves.

    I struggled with sobriety, but held down a couple of good jobs and continued to be a good provider. My ex could have called off the wedding at any point.

    The wedding, which was supposed to be stress-free with no guests, somehow became one of the most stressful things I’ve ever had to deal with. The whole holiday was ruined by my bridezilla. In the end, I threw a tantrum and said I could no longer deal with teepees and camper vans that break down and other eclectic but stressful shit that I had to organise, and booked us into the $800 a night Hilton. I had cocktails by the pool and it was bliss, but there were two days until we had to go home.

    I relapsed as soon as we got home. It didn’t help that my then-wife had booked a taxi online, specifying the wrong year. We could have stayed at Heathrow and waited for 4 hours, but having been on a plane for most of a day, I wanted to get home: unexpected £180 taxi ride in a black cab that I managed to negotiate.

    My then-wife must have ordered my parents to come and ‘deal’ with me, because my dad marched into my house and said “you’re an addict. you’re an addict. Can’t you see you’re a dirty addict?” which was rich coming from a man with a history of drug use. That’s not the kind of treatment you should ever receive in your own home, nor did it take account of the fact that I’d been in a lot of correspondence with several specialist psychiatrists who could deal with my specific condition: dual diagnosis. I was bipolar before I was a junkie, and the two do not complement each other well.

    My mum had decided that she could ‘smell’ drugs on me. Unless she has a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer for a nose, she is wrong. You can smell smoke and cannabis on somebody’s clothes, but drugs that you snort, swallow and inject are excreted through kidneys and faeces. It’s a completely disproven hypothesis. Anyway, My then-wife did nothing to vouch for my sobriety when my mum had a go at me on my sister’s wedding day (I was clean).

    I’d gone back to working at JPMorgan, and they coughed up £12k for me to go to The Priory for 28 days, without a single qualm. My general psychiatrist had said I needed treatment in a therapeutic environment, which clearly my home was not. My then-wife said that she’d divorce me if I followed his advice and got treatment, and that she’d rather be a widow than a divorcee.

    On my first day at The Priory, I phoned the local florist near our home, and asked them to leave a different flower each day under the windscreen wiper of my then-wife’s car, before she left for work. She however, joined the dating sites again and decided not to visit or phone me.

    During my stay at The Priory, we established that I was not well supported at home, and indeed, perhaps my relationship did not contain the prerequisite levels of respect, love, care, compassion etc. etc.

    I panicked on day 27 of rehab, realising I had to divorce my wife, sell our house and decide what I was going to do next with my life. I spent the day talking to a few friends about different ideas, and returned for my final day a lot happier.

    Straight after that was the birth of my niece. My loving then-wife did not attend. In fact. I remember her once being extremely put out that my grandmother had the temerity to die at an inconvenient moment. I think my friends had been right all along: she really was “the poison dwarf”.

    Anyway, after being under virtual house arrest, where I must admit I abused a lot of drugs as I tried to grapple with the magnitude of selling a house and downsizing. Probably moving to London. The friends who would take sides. Having to get a new job. I got fed up with my then-wife making me feel absolutely terrified by her unjustified rage and abuse, so I took to cocooning myself into a single room of our ample 3-bedroomed house, and even built myself a man cave in our summer house. She was never content to leave me be, and would hammer and scream all the time at whichever door I cowered behind.

    Then, I sent an SOS email to our parents, to come and force our separation. I was starving. I had no toilet, no shower. Do you think that’s the way that people get clean & sober?

    My friend Posh Will kindly offered his spare bedroom to get back into London life. I was clean & sober, riding my bike all over London, incorporating a new company and touting for consultancy work. I was entrepreneur-in-residence at PlayFair capital and I was loving the London startup scene. I was making new friends and I quickly got a beautiful new girlfriend. I know I wasn’t the first to commit adultery, because someone who isn’t me hacked my then-wife’s email and found out she was fucking a married man with kids.

    Then, divorce turned nasty. A six week house sale turned into a six month sale, simply because my then wife wanted to drag it out, knowing I had no income yet in London. She kept making me do the 4 hour round trip to Bournemouth to do trivial things she could do herself, like get estate agent valuations. Finally, we arrive in December 2013, where I went to a hotel because our house was sold but I was so angry and frustrated by my wife dragging out the sale to the point I almost ran out of money, I was going to trash the place.

    Sure, I then did a 5 days of a 10 day detox, at a place where they didn’t know what a detox was, or how to deal with somebody with a benzo habit. I then did 7 weeks at a proper residential rehab. My parents were on my no-contact banned list, but my mum still wrote to me with Louise’s divorce demands. I told her from the start I wanted to rent out the house, defer the divorce and deal with it all when I had my health. When she refused, I said take whatever you want, but just don’t drag it out. If I wasn’t the kind of person who assumes that everybody’s OK deep down, I’d say that it was all because she’s a vindictive, abusive, greedy, *****.

    Anyway, after a mix-up at my parents about what day of the week it was, my dad demanded that I get dressed in front of him and leave immediately. I agreed to leaving immediately, but I refused to get dressed in front of him, on the grounds that it would be one of the most degrading things you could ever ask a person to do. He manhandled me and a mirror got knocked off the wall, slicing my shin muscle in half along with 4 tendons and 2 nerves. Only then did he allow me to get dressed in privacy.

    After my operation, I was taking fentanyl and tramadol – both strong opiate painkillers – for the pain, and yet I managed to avoid becoming addicted to these drugs. Having to wear a plaster cast kinda means you’re going to have to destroy a nice business suit, and who wants to hire somebody who’s sick?

    My friends said it was time for me to get a place of my own, although I was still on crutches. I rented a room nearby. I went for dinner with Posh Will, and I was honest with him about my addiction struggles, and his attitude towards me changed visibly immediately. Our friendship was almost ruined, because he had such strong preconceived notions about what drug addiction is. He virtually accused me of being at risk of coming round to his house to steal stuff to feed my habit. I had the money from the sale of my house and some successful Bitcoin investments. I didn’t need to steal from my friends. I cried myself to sleep and then tried to commit suicide.

    Hospital discharged me, but I’d lost my flat, so I was homeless. I lived in hostels and Kensington Gardens. I guarantee you that not many people get clean from drugs when they’re homeless.

    Anyway, I finally got a great group of friends at a hostel in Camden, and a beautiful girlfriend. Those were some of the happiest months of my life. I also got an IT contract for Barclays and a room in a student house in Swiss Cottage.

    I did have a couple of ‘lapses’ on mild drugs, but I was clean and I was happy. Then Barclays terminated my contract and I was evicted (the landlord was selling the apartment).

    I tried to put a brave face on things and have a happy family Christmas, but I’d broken up with my girlfriend, lost half my friends, lost my contract, was homeless again. A lovely family in Ireland saved my life, looking after me at one of the most depressing and vulnerable times of my life.

    At the suggestion of Posh Will – ironically – I stayed in a hostel in Shoreditch. Initially I had a whole dorm to myself, but when they realised I had an OK personality and was a long-term resident, they moved me to the infamous ‘Ward P’. The drink and the drugs were off the scale in that place. I had to leave because I was off my face around the clock, but it seemed normal because everybody was.

    I started staying in AirBnB places, because they were homely and I could do short [but expensive] lets. I’d recently reconnected with an old friend, so it was nice to live near him, in the East End.

    I was running out of money again, so I stayed in a really awful hotel that’s covered quite extensively in the blog post called Finsbury Park Fun Run.

    That got me back to the Camden Hostel, but I was still hopelessly re-addicted to drugs. Trust me, it’s hard to hide a drug habit in a ‘regular’ tourist hostel, and the tourists don’t really love it if you’re acting all weird because you’re so strung out you can’t even see straight.

    Somehow, I managed to land the HSBC contract.

    I ran out of money. Working for HSBC while living in a hostel is just not possible either. More drugs – whole week AWOL from work. Got away with it.

    Stayed clean all the way to Christmas pretty much. I was a wreck on Christmas Day. I hadn’t eaten for days. My Kiwi sofa surfer had kindly cooked the turkey but he’d pretty much cremated it, and it’d taken him hours to coax me out of my bedroom. Still, it was super kind of him to cook the world’s most depressing Christmas lunch.

    Then drugs, drugs, drugs to March 21st. I had a bag that could quite easily have kept me supplied for 3 years. That’s the problem with being rich and choosing a cheap and powerful drug – you’re never going to run out.

    Are you spotting a theme yet?

    January, February and March are my nightmare months. If I’m off kitesurfing at some exotic location, no problem. If I’m working a contract, no problem.

    This year, I’ve had acute kidney failure and severe and ongoing leg/foot trauma AND the loss of my contract at Lloyds to deal with. However, I had the best Christmas ever and I’m also dating the world’s most amazing girlfriend, so perhaps these things should cancel each other out?

    I have to think about drugs at the moment, because my leg is so damaged that I need a cocktail of strong opiate painkilllers, nerve blockers and a sleep aid, just to be able to partially function. I wake up every 4 hours in the night in excruciating agony.

    Through the urgent need to re-stock on painkillers, I found myself back on the Dark Web. It was a stupid move. I kinda knew I’d never be able to resist the urge to go window shopping. I tried to order weaker drugs that might satisfy the craving that was instigated by nothing more than buying other products, but lapse and relapse were inevitable.

    My most amazing girlfriend in the whole wide world is somebody I could spend 100% of my time with, and never get tired of her company. We like the same trashy TV. We enjoy the same high-brow movies. We both have an insatiable appetite for feature-length documentaries. We love London. We love the same things and we love each other.

    Why then would I relapse onto incredibly dangerous and destructive drugs?

    The watchword you need to look for here is trigger. When I was with my ex-wife, if she ever went on holiday on her own – which is something she did regularly during the death throes of our relationship – it built a Pavlovian association with an opportunity to take drugs without having an aggressive abusive ***** attempting to kick my prison door in and screaming horrible things at me.

    I found a black market seller who would supply just enough for me to have a moment of fun, but not enough for me to end up in a destructive binge. Then that supplier disappeared, and I ended up buying the next smallest bag I could find: 100 to 200 mild to medium strength doses.

    The net result is that I spent all yesterday evening and all last night trying to jam my locked bathroom door closed with a pair of nail tweezers, because I was convinced that angry neighbours had phoned the police, and even a mob had formed outside my apartment, ready to heckle me when the police led me from the building, cuffed in shame.

    That’s a net result of two things:

    1. Having more than you need of a highly addictive drug is bound to lead to a binge
    2. It’s impossible to measure milligram doses of drugs without excellent scales. The difference between no effect, and psychotic overdose, can not be seen by the human eye

    I sold my scales because I’ve successfully been having long periods of abstinence, and it makes sense to get rid of drug paraphernalia that could ‘trigger’ a craving.

    Of course, I should have controlled my craving. Of course, I knew what the worst-case scenario would be. Of course, it seems to suggest that the love of my beautiful girlfriend is not enough.

    All I can say in my defence is that my life is pretty depressing right now. I’m on such strong pain relief that I can barely even concentrate on writing. I’m not well enough to go back to work. I’ve been stressed about running out of money and being evicted.

    Life is also awesome right now, because me and my incredibly fetching and intelligent and knowledgeable girlfriend both have riverside apartments, and we take turns to spend nights watching sunrises and sunsets.

    She has a really difficult decision to make right now. My longest period of abstinence from drugs is what? 9 months, since becoming addicted. My longest period of sobriety was 121 days. All my money has been frittered away on private healthcare, periods where I was too unwell to work, and yes – perhaps as much a 5% – has been spent on drugs. Would you choose somebody like that for your boyfriend?

    Alright, so my drug habit isn’t going to lead me to a life of crime. I’ve been cautioned by the police 4 times, but there’s not much point in wrecking my career because I’m an addict is there, when I’m not shoplifting, dealing drugs, robbing, doing fraud or committing any other crime.

    However, this weekend has shown that I still have the capacity to get myself in a life threatening mess. I was ready to stab myself in the carotid artery this morning, rather than have my life ruined by a criminal record and have all that shame on top of what has already been a pretty awful February and March.

    Of course, nobody can deny that I brought this on myself and that the behaviour is just the same as it was over the last few years. Is my addiction getting better? It’s certainly not cured.

    If you want to know if my addiction is getting better, you could look at my medical records for 2014. I was an inpatient for 14 weeks. You could consider the fact that the longest period I had without my drug of choice was 2 weeks, for the first couple of years. You could consider the fact that I’m in a meaningful relationship with a kind, caring and compassionate girlfriend who’s sympathetic and well informed. I’m not lying to her to have a drug habit behind her back. I’ve lied to her twice when she went away on holiday, both times shortly after I had lost a contract and was a bit depressed.

    Ask yourself, am I worth knowing as a friend? I could drop a dirty HIV or hepatitis infected syringe in your kid’s playpen. I might replace your salt with cocaine for a prank. I’ll probably take money out of the purse and wallet of everybody in your house. I’ll nick anything that isn’t nailed down. All I want to talk about is drugs drugs drugs and my life story’s not interesting because it just goes addiction addiction addiction. I’ll bring shame on your family and you’ll get in trouble just because you’re friends with me. Not worth it, is it?

    What about dating a junkie? Well, everything they say is a lie, and you won’t like having sex with them all the time because you know they’re probably thinking about a syringe of heroin while they’re doing it to you. They’ll take all your money and ask for more. Nobody ever got cured of drink & drugs. Death’s too good for ’em.

    I do feel terrible about the lies [two] and the betrayal of trust. Also, she knows that a binge could easily hospitalise or kill me. She’s also trying to have a relaxing holiday break, but she knows I’m sick, haven’t had any sleep and haven’t had anything to eat.

    She can’t watch me like a hawk all the time. She can’t spy on me using webcams when she’s on holiday. She doesn’t know what I get up to at home when she’s at work.

    Why take a risk on a loser with such a poor track record?

    I’ve told her if she wants to break up with me, I’ll fight to save the relationship, but I won’t just say anything to talk her out of it. I actually advised her to break up with me, because I’m a month or two away from earning money again, I’ve got depression, bipolar and maybe even borderline personality disorder, along with the death sentence of dual diagnosis. Would you want your kids to have those faulty genes? Would you want your family to find out one day that you’ve been dating a loser?

    Anyway, that’s where I am right now.

    No amount of stick will stop anybody from taking drink or drugs. I need to find a social group to regularly attend. I need to get out of the house more. Through socialising will come enjoyment of even more people’s company, as well as routine. There will be new opportunities. Maybe a new hobby? I’ll get a new contract and throw myself into work. Once the money starts rolling in, me and her can have holidays and plan adventures.

    Could I replace everything and everybody in my life with supercrack? Almost. It is pretty fucking good. Still, how much money would you need? Even if you lived in a tent, I still reckon food & drink would cost you £150-200k over your shortened lifespan. I do however think you get sick of it after a while, but the bastard thing is so fucking good when you go back to it after a little break.

    What can I tell you? That’s the truth?

    So am I honestly comparing a night with the love of my life, with a sniff of supercrack? No. The comparison is facile. If you choose the tent dwelling supercrack life, there’s no coming back from that. Also, I’ve never been in such a good relationship in my life: it just keeps getting better and better.

    One final question to ask yourself? Even if you think you have the perfect partner, perfect friends, perfect job and generally perfect life… do you still occasionally do something that looks totally insane in the context of your amazing life, like get too drunk, or take a recreational drug even though you never do drugs? Do you think the fact that you do that, means you love your partner any less?

     

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  • Pants Like a Japanese Flag

    This is a story about the rising sun…

    Dirty bin

    My toes are literally a bloody mess. I have new smart formal black leather work shoes, that have not been broken in. I have been wearing an ankle brace on my left foot, because the muscle, tendons and nerves are all screwed up and it’s difficult and painful to walk on that foot when I can’t raise it and the muscle at the back of my leg – particularly around my hamstring – is swollen and tender.

    I get up and strap this contraption to my leg, which involved pumping up some inflatable bubbles. One of the little inflatable pouches has developed a leak. Without the pouches being inflated, it seems that the velcro strap around my calf just slides down, and the plastic cover that goes over the top of my foot and up my shin, seems to work its way out of position and start giving me incredible pain. Basically, the ankle brace isn’t really designed for walking 15,000 steps, commuting all over London and having to travel to fucking hospital every night after work for pointless blood tests.

    To cap everything off, what nobody realises is just how close to breaking point, self sabotage, suicide, fucking myself up and everything that entails, I was. It’s almost as if the universe has decided to throw all the consequences of a full on don’t-give-a-fuck supercrack relapse at me, except that never happened. That’s not to say I wasn’t all prepared to press the fuck it button in the event that the job hunting fiasco carried on a moment longer. That’s not to say that I wasn’t already at the end of my rope. I was fucked off with everything. I was stressed and depressed and I’d reached my limit. Life was unsustainable.

    Life is unsustainable if you can’t pay your rent, pay your bills, buy food, afford to leave the house. Life is unsustainable if you’re on collision course with bankruptcy that’s going to make you unemployable. Life is unsustainable if you’re doing everything that’s within your control to do, but those things that are outside your control are not going your way, and there’s no way you can make anything go faster or create a different result.

    I got my result. I got my contract. I started the new job and I like it. I’m very happy with what I’m doing and who I’m working with. I’m overjoyed that my bank balance is moving in the right direction again, and I’m earning more than I’m spending to simply be alive. It costs money just to stand still. It costs money just to breathe the air and look at the moon and the stars. It costs money just to drink the rainwater. Finally, I’m getting money in again, and it’s flowing in fast, which it needs to do because who knows how long my health can take this fucking rollercoaster bullshit.

    Anyway, two weeks ago, I went from being suicidally depressed and giving up, to the point where I literally though there’s no point even bothering going to hospital. I’d been pissing grey-black liquid and then it stopped. I stopped pissing. It was clear my kidneys had packed up. My leg/foot was fucked: numb, hanging limp and useless, and swelling up like a motherfucker. My trouser snake was seriously traumatised and had swollen up to the point where it was an almost unrecognisable blob of badly damaged flesh. There was skin that was literally peeling off, revealing pink rawness underneath. There was plenty of blood, of course.

    The hospital wondered why I was resistant to the idea of a catheter. The doctors puzzled over why there was so much blood in the tiny bit of urine I managed to squeeze out as a sample. The catheter point came up again and again, but ‘luckily’ my bladder was empty, because my kidneys had completely failed. The doctors scanned with ultrasound, and found not a single drop of wee in my bladder. My kidneys were well and truly knackered.

    This is the sort of shit that’s supposed to happen if I go on a 10-day supercrack bender, where I end up hiding under my own bed and barricading every door in the house. This sort of shit only happens when I stop eating and drinking, and only ingest highly toxic chemicals that are known to be super destructive to poor kidneys. I had become so well practiced in the routine of the binges, that I knew exactly what shade of dark brown and metallic smell of blood, my urine had to have to indicate that it was time to either go to hospital or perhaps have a drink of some water and stop killing myself with deadly chemicals.

    The really fucking annoying thing is that all that fucking happened this time is that I sat on my leg a bit funny. It’s so fucking ridiculous. I’d been drinking isotonic drinks and generally looking after myself, avoiding deadly Chinese supercrack. What the actual fuck? How can this be the worst ever fucked up that I’ve ever ever been? Why the fuck does this have to co-incide with my chance to work my way out of the shitty situation I’m in? Why does this have to fuck up my plans for some nice meals out, holidays and to just generally enjoy not shitting myself about running out of money? All I have to do is turn up to work, and not fuck up for 5 or 6 months, and everything’s fucking peachy again. I can do that. I’ve done that loads of times.

    Why do I have to work so fucking hard for this? Why do I have to fight the doctors all the way, to understand that it’s not just a job, but there’s my whole sanity and will to live on the fucking line here. There’s my whole fucking livelihood and future on the line here. It doesn’t matter how much I wave the “serious medical problem” card, nobody gives a shit: it’s a commercial market. I’ll replaced overnight, with no qualms. That’s business. That’s the way of the world I work in.

    The fact that I’m turning up to work, not looking too bad, and just about able to cope with the foot, kidney and cock problem, is a fucking miracle. The fact I haven’t just said “OK, it’s too fucking hard” and killed myself in a blaze of supercrack glory, is a fucking miracle. I’ve got the fucking stuff. I don’t even want to take it. I want this fucking job.

    Maybe that’s the point.

    Maybe that’s the test: how bad can I want a job. I’ve never really wanted a job that badly. I’ve just wanted the fucking money, and really all I’ve wanted is to be able to take supercrack. The job has been just a means to an end; and that end is supercrack.

    How can you just pause your addiction for 6 months, 9 months, 12 months, and then pick it up again? Well, it’s the same skills you develop when you get a boring as fuck full-time permanent job. You learn to put up with you fucking shit job for fucking years don’t you? Same fucking thing. You just count down the hours, minutes and seconds, until it’s time to get the party started. I can pick up and put down my addiction just as easily as you pick up and put down anything: a meaningless thing you didn’t mean to pick up, and you hastily just put it back and never give it a second thought. Scary, isn’t it?

    I’ve got some shit worth fighting for. I’ve got rid of a flatmate who was leeching away my cash. I’ve got a lovely girlfriend. I’ve got a nice place to live – albeit rented. I’ve got this well paid contract on a quite interesting project with quite interesting people. I’ve got money coming in, just in time to stave off any financial problems and replenish my dwindling savings. I’ve got the opportunity to have a nice lifestyle of eating out, travel and generally not stressing about money, and sharing that with a wonderful girl.

    However, it’s a pill that’s too bitter to swallow, to have all that smashed up and taken away, right in front of my very eyes.

    My kidneys will recover on their own, in time. My one-eyed trouser snake is recovering surprisingly fast, although it’s still out of commission. I can live with the foot/leg problem – albeit by using copious amounts of pain relief. I can tolerate the risks. I can do the job. I can make it fucking work.

    The demands of the fucking hospital are tipping me over the edge at the moment. The lengthy trips across London after work for blood tests are the very last thing I need. The stressful arguments with doctors who don’t understand the reality of needing money to pay rent and bills, otherwise being evicted and bankrupted. Didn’t these stupid fucks ever play Monopoly? You can’t stand still. You have to roll the dice. It costs money just to be in the game – to be alive. You’ve always got to pay somebody. There’s always somebody sending you a bit of mashed up tree that’s been pressed into flat thin white rectangles, covered with inky hieroglyphics, demanding your money. There’s always a bill for breathing.

    I know how to win at this stupid game. I know how to get loads of fucking money, so you can beat those cunts who keep sending you envelopes, demanding money with menaces. “Give us all your money or else!”

    I can get in front. I can get to the point where life is enjoyable again. I can beat the stress and anxiety.

    Except I can’t, because my kidneys are being slow to recover.

    Slow to recover.

    That’s all it is.

    I’m pissing plenty.

    My kidneys are making plenty of wee.

    My potassium is safely within the limits.

    There’s not a fucking problem. Leave me the fuck alone and stop making me do extra shit, because I’m maxed out commuting to my job, and making a good first impression on my first week.

    If you want to fucking help me out, you can figure out what the fuck is wrong with my leg/foot. You [doctors] didn’t even scan it, did you? You were far too busy saving my fucking life by getting my kidneys rebooted, but you didn’t realise that my life was already under threat of suicide. It says in my notes that the last time I was in hospital, it was a psychiatric admission because I couldn’t keep myself safe. That was two weeks in hospital, and this kidney shit only lasted 10 days, although I must admit that I discharged myself early. It all matters though. You can’t ignore the psychological damage that you might do, and the risk to somebody’s life that it might create.

    I can tell you with almost certainty that my kidneys will recover on their own. I can also tell you with absolute certainty that I will self-destruct, if my hard won contract gets fucked up and I’m left without that all important income, job, routine, workmates, self-esteem and all the other good stuff that goes along with having a purpose in life.

    Fuuuuck. what have I got to do? Change my mobile number? Move house?

    I just want to be able to nip to Guy’s and St Thomas Hospital – near my work – for any fucking essential shit that needs to happen, after work. I can’t be traipsing all across London for some fucking bullshit belt & braces crap.

    Like I say, I’ve got the gun pointed at my temple, and my finger over the trigger, itching to pull it. Just give me an excuse. Make my fucking day.

     

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  • Rehab: The Inside Story

    This is a story about treatment for drug addiction…

    Lexham house

    Having been to four different rehabs, I feel fairly qualified to give a few insights into what happens behind closed doors. Residential rehabs often hide away in leafy suburbs, where there are large houses that can accommodate human trash: dirty junkies and nasty alcoholics.

    “Death’s too good for ’em! String ’em up!” I hear you say.

    Yes, yes, don’t worry. We’ll get to the idea that an addict will always be an addict, and that we should just write them off as a lost cause.

    Boscombe in Dorset – an area of Bournemouth – is where many councils choose to send their difficult members of society, from all over the country. Supposedly, being by the seaside will be good for recovering alcoholics and former drug addicts. There are certainly plenty of rehabs in the area. Even Paul Gascoigne has found himself shuffling around Boscombe’s streets, buying bottles of gin from the local off-license.

    Ironically, many years after moving to Bournemouth, I became addicted to drugs and found myself in the perfect place to get treatment for my addiction.

    Let’s talk a little bit about drug addiction.

    Having a ‘drug habit’ is not the same as drug addiction. ‘Experimentation’ is not the same as addiction. Partying is not the same as addiction. Addiction will rapidly destroy your health, wealth and prospects. Hospitals, police cells and prisons are the institutional stomping grounds of the addict, on their rapid descent into the fires of Hell. If you’re successfully hiding your habit from your friends, partner and boss, then addiction hasn’t fully taken hold. Addiction is destructive.

    What about detox?

    You can’t really rehabilitate while the drugs and alcohol have got their hooks in you. If you abruptly stop drinking, you might get the shakes, become delirious, have a fit and maybe even die. If you stop taking heroin, you’re going to feel sick and in pain. If you stop taking cocaine or amphetamines, you’re going to be unbelievably exhausted and depressed, to the point where you’re in real danger of killing yourself.

    “You should kill yourself if you’re a junkie” I hear you say.

    What you haven’t understood is that drug addiction is slow suicide. Do you think the addict or the alcoholic isn’t aware that their body is getting utterly fucked up, and they’re going to go to an early grave?

    Detox is about breaking the physical addiction that the body has to drugs and/or alcohol. Detox is about suffering the worst of withdrawal, in an environment where substitute drugs can be administered to make the process safe, humane and tolerable. An alcoholic literally risks death if they stopping drinking without Librium. Is it ethical to ask people to die just because you’re hung up on ideas like “willpower”?

    There’s the term “psychological addiction” that needs to stop being used. It’s better to think about addiction like this: why did somebody get addicted in the first place?

    “Because drugs are fun” I hear you say.

    There are shitloads of people who take drugs all the time but they aren’t addicts. Every weekend, raves and nightclubs are packed full of people taking Ecstasy (MDMA). Vast quantities of cocaine gets hoovered up by the eager nostrils of young professionals in cities around the world. Every day, a huge proportion of humanity smokes cannabis or drinks alcohol. Why aren’t all these people raging addicts and alcoholics?

    If you ever feel like quitting, remember why you started.

    Most addicts’ lives were truly appalling before their addiction took hold. For sure, addiction doesn’t improve anybody’s life, but it’s not like there’s any hope of a better life just because an addict quits drugs. The cycle of petty crime, scoring drugs, getting sick, being hospitalised and being locked up… it doesn’t look great, does it? But what’s the alternative? Flipping burgers and still not having enough money to make ends meet?

    So, it’s obvious that the rehabilitation process will only be successful if it can return a person to a better life than the one they were trying to escape from with drugs and drink.

    The first rehab I attended was in Bournemouth, situated in a grand house at the end of a sweeping driveway, surrounded by mature pine trees, on a road of millionaires’ mansions. The place was full of people from Greater London and the surrounding counties, ejected by their councils to make room for more rich middle-class people.

    The biggest issue amongst my fellow rehab residents was housing. Boscombe has vast numbers of crappy bedsits that can just about be afforded with housing benefits. London and the South-East has no cheap housing for undesirable members of society. My fellow rehabbers were gleefully pushed away from where they were born and bred – and their families – because they were written off.

    A typical day at the Bournemouth rehab would consist of a breakfast of baked beans, white toast and cheap sausages, followed by many rounds of tea, coffee and biscuits, until the ‘therapeutic’ day began. There were two or three sessions a day, where everybody sat in a big room, slouching on comfy sofas, vaping on e-cigarettes and slurping drinks. It was supposed to be group therapy, but it was basically just listening to heartbreaking tales of people’s children being taken into foster care.

    Most of the day in Bournemouth rehab was given over to matters of court appearances, housing office appointments, social worker visits and attempts to obtain various forms of welfare benefits. Almost everybody in rehab was in poor physical health, due to a life of drug abuse. Almost everybody in rehab had some underlying mental health disorder.

    Those were the dregs of society, but they were warm and welcoming and they accepted me as one of their own. I was warned by staff to leave my iPhone at home and watch my wallet, but I never felt for a single moment as if my peers were going to rob or take advantage of me. I was somewhat appalled by the staff members’ low opinion of their service users, but I suppose there’s an element of the gamekeepers and the poachers: anybody who’s keeping you under lock and key is kind of fair game, because resentment is going to build about the power that staff exercise over people in treatment.

    Over the course of the 28-day program, my fellow rehabbers and I would build up special privileges for good behaviour, such as being allowed to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous or Cocaine Anonymous meetings. Being allowed to go into town, accompanied by a staff member, was the next privilege that accrued. Then, trips to town were permitted when accompanied by a peer who had attained 3 weeks of good behaviour. Finally, you might prove yourself to be trustworthy enough to go into town alone or as a chaperone.

    Transgressions could include: not getting up in the morning, not doing your assigned chores, not attending group therapy, being caught with contraband, failing a drugs test and – most serious of all – going somewhere without permission.

    Being expelled from rehab for going into town on your own might not sound like a terrible consequence, but almost everybody was there because treatment was mandated by the courts, as part of parole or an attempt to retain contact with children. Being chucked out of rehab could result in going back to prison, or never seeing your children again. The line between treatment and punishment was rather blurry.

    My next rehab was 5-star luxury by comparison. You might have heard of it. It was The Priory.

    If you’re paying £12,000 for a 28 day stay in the countryside, you’d expect it to be pretty nice, wouldn’t you? The Priory certainly delivered on making me feel special and cared after… for a high price. Therapists outnumbered patients, the bedrooms were very well appointed and comfortable, the food wasn’t bad and there were luxuries like a gym and grounds to take a stroll around. Nobody was made to feel like a prisoner under house arrest.

    Unsurprisingly, my fellow Priory rehabbers were rich compared to the Bournemouth lot. There were six-figure salary earning executives and heirs to multimillion-pound fortunes. Alcohol was also the predominant poison, as opposed to heroin.

    One girl was so desperate for a drink, that she filled a mug with hand sanitising gel – which contained alcohol – and sweetened it with orange squash.

    Therapeutic days were packed full of yoga, mindfulness, art therapy, educational videos, as well as group therapy. Supposedly following the 12-step program we only had enough time to complete the first two steps. AA and ‘aftercare’ meetings were held in the evenings at The Priory, which we were encouraged to attend, but most of us just watched DVDs in our bedrooms.

    In my final week at The Priory, I asked “what next?”

    Turns out that 28 days just isn’t long enough to turn your life around. 28 days is just about long enough to get over the worst of the drug withdrawal and start thinking about how awesome the drugs are going to feel after a little break and three square meals a day. Aftercare programs are almost as expensive as rehab and last 3+ months: who’s got that kind of money and can afford to take that long off work?

    Having been through an acrimonious divorce, sold my house, rescued a tiny fraction of my most treasured possessions, boxed my life up, put everything into storage and suffered a horrible family Christmas, I was pretty fucked up by the whole ordeal. I needed to get cleaned up and straightened out again.

    The next rehab I booked, I asked for a detox. I didn’t want to have to get up in the morning and go to stupid group therapy. I hadn’t slept or eaten properly for weeks. I’d been taking benzodiazepines for months and it was possible that I’d developed a physical dependency that could be life-threatening. I needed professional medical care.

    The rehab I ended up in was like an alternative therapy spa break. There was a hot tub – called the sex pond – and a vibrating massage table, with whale music playing in the pitch black room. The main thing I was there for was sleep, food and a doctor on hand in case I had a seizure. Reluctantly, I consented to have acupuncture and to do some mindfulness: both of which I fell asleep during.

    Most of the staff were kind and caring, but the guy who owned and ran the rehab was a complete egomaniac who clearly wanted his own cult. This idiot tried to force me to attend ‘group’ therapy, which was basically him giving interminable boring monologues about the time when he went into a Native Indian sweat tent. Believe me, the last thing you want when you’re recovering from a near-fatal toxic combo of drugs, is to be a captive audience for some total moron.

    While I was at that third rehab, a man was brought in, smashed out of his mind and covered in red wine. He’d been transferred up from the first rehab I’d been in down in Bournemouth. He’d walked out and gone into town to get pissed. Revolving doors.

    I had to get away from that place. It wasn’t therapy. Fuck knows what it was. Probably just a bit of respite for both family and addict alike.

    Finally, I achieved what I wanted: I got back to London. Bullshit family Christmas was over. Divorce and house sale was over. I was free from horrible destructive relationships and nasty people, but I had picked up an addiction and failed to deal with it. My life to that point had been dictated by people who didn’t care about my welfare.

    I got myself into my fourth and final rehab: a 13 week residential treatment program in Kensington, West London.

    Immediately, the place felt right. Rehabs are supposed to be run by former addicts and alcoholics. The guy who I met on my initial assessment had gold teeth and mean tattoos. The guy who ran the place had a massive scar across his face. These were people whose opinion an addict could respect, because they’d been all the way to rock bottom and back again: they’d seen friends die from overdoses and a lot of other rough shit too.

    My most important lesson in rehab was how to do time. I had already been heavily institutionalised by working my whole career for massive corporations – with the limits that full-time work and education imposes on your freedom – but I still had lessons to learn about liberty. It helped a great deal that one of my fellow rehabbers was a young lad who’d been in prison twice by the age of 21.

    Rehab is literally a kind of house arrest. You can leave anytime you want, but there will be consequences. It was fun to walk up to the gate (pictured above) and put a foot out over the pavement… just stopping short of taking a single step off the property.

    It’s not too hard to white-knuckle 3 or 4 weeks of abstinence. The first couple of weeks you’ll feel awful, but your body is so abused that it’s grateful for the sleep and the food. The next week or two are hard, but you know there’s light at the end of the tunnel: you’ll soon get your fix. You just have to count down the hours, minutes and seconds.

    I don’t believe you can rehabilitate somebody in just 3 months. So many things get fucked up when you’re an addict. You need to get a job and go back to work, pay your bills and any debts that got racked up, repair and replace broken stuff and get a place to live. Everything got fucked up by my addiction: my shoes and clothes were wrecked and everything in my life was in total disarray.

    Imagine being a company director through a period of addiction. My accounts and taxes were all messed up, and important paperwork was lost or misplaced.

    What about my CV? How could I explain those periods of absence from work?

    What about my routine?

    Do you realise how much of your life runs itself on autopilot? You pay your rent/mortgage, council tax, electric, gas, water, sewerage, broadband, mobile phone, home insurance, life insurance, car insurance, road tax, MOT, TV license and a zillion other things. You get up every day, have breakfast and go to work. People know and respect you at work and you know how to do your job. You see your friends and socialise. You have your hobbies and you exercise. Do you think you can put all that stuff back together, running smoothly, overnight?

    When you’re an addict, everybody distances themselves from you. It’s obvious that if you even so much as speak to an addict, they’re going to steal your newborn baby and sell it to buy crack cocaine. It’s obvious that anybody who injects marijuana or sniffs glue is a worthless selfish nasty person who’s out to kill you.

    Rehabs are necessary because family and friends are judgemental gossips who offer you useless advice like: “have you tried not taking drugs?” or “maybe you should just stop”.

    Rehab was a holiday from being judged to be an evil failure, morally weak and simply lacking in willpower.

    Rehab showed me that I do have the willpower to stop taking drugs whenever I want. Rehab showed me that I’m not weak and I’m not powerless.

    By the time I finished my four stays in rehab, I still hadn’t run out of money, I had never been arrested, locked up, hospitalised or homeless. I had been nowhere near rock bottom.

    I never actually reached rock bottom though. I experienced things that were awful at the time, but I needed to have those experiences.

    Stopping drugs is the least of anybody’s concerns. Drugs actually help when your life is unbearably shit. Just ask anybody who suffers from depression or anxiety if they’d like to give up their antidepressants or tranquillisers.

    Obviously, I’m glad I never got a criminal record or sustained any life-changing injuries, but maybe I needed to come close. Being locked up in a police cell a couple of times and spending weeks in hospital, were not things on my bucket list, but I think they were necessary experiences to complete my adventure.

    When the time was right, I got a place to live, a girlfriend and a job. Without those things, life isn’t worth living, but equally, those things don’t create recovery.

    Bullying was relentless and intolerable at school for 11+ consecutive years. Nothing I did was ever right or good enough for my parents. My parents’ relationship was appalling – full of verbal abuse and hostility – and I got involved with a girl who physically and mentally abused me, who I stayed with for many years. I got so used to broken, abusive relationships. Do you think that kind of stuff can get healed by 28 days in rehab? Do you think that all my problems came about just because I sniffed a bit of white powder?

    You might think I act normally and sound perfectly reasonable, rational and able to string a sentence together, but it’s the opinion of the medical professionals who’ve treated me, that I’m dealing with depression, bipolar and even borderline personality disorder. Clearly, I’ve had many episodes of mental health issues… including a period of many years before drugs even entered the picture.

    This is called dual-diagnosis: the clusterfuck that is both addiction and mental health issues combined. The tail that wags the dog.

    I’ve cherry-picked the best treatment and the most humane and compassionate approach to fixing my addiction and now I’ve arrived at the situation where – joy of joys – I’m ‘just’ dealing with depression and anxiety.

    I’m itching to press the ‘fuck-it button’ because life is intolerably stressful, unrewarding and my depression is refusing to lift. What’s the solution? Drugs? Been there, done that.

    Rehab taught me how to quit drugs cold turkey. Rehab taught me that I’m in control, so long as my life seems worth living.

    Addicts and alcoholics are taught on the 12-step program that they’re powerless. I’m certainly powerless, but it’s over things like whether I get offered a decent job that pays enough money to be able to live. Being powerless to influence the things that really matter to me in life, such as whether I can live with dignity or not, creates incredible stress and anxiety.

    I can choose to stop drinking or taking drugs, but why would I, if the alternative is ESA assessments and having my inadequate welfare benefits cut off by somebody who’s not even a qualified doctor? Why would I quit, if I have to prostitute my mind and body, to go and work some pointless bullshit job for somebody promoted into a position of incompetence, if I’m ‘lucky’ enough to be offered a pittance to do the job?

    It’s so hard to escape the things that drove us to drink & drugs in the first place.

    Rehab was important for me to forgive myself for things that weren’t even my fault. I didn’t make a mistake, getting addicted to drugs: it was a deliberate act and I’d live my life exactly the same if I got to start over from scratch. Rehab was respite from those who wish to scapegoat sick people.

    Fundamentally, rehab connected the ‘clean’ and the ‘dirty’ world and allowed me to see that they’re two sides of the same coin.

    Every saint has past and every sinner has a future.

     

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  • Once an Addict Always an Addict

    This is a story about social animals…

    Addiction triangle

    For solitary creatures, there are two drives that ensure they live long enough to reproduce: hunger and libido. If you didn’t feel hungry, you’d be too busy fucking to stop and eat, so you’d die of starvation. In fact you’d probably die of starvation before you even reached sexual maturity. If you didn’t have a sex drive, you’d be too busy gorging yourself on food to have sex.

    There’s a delicate balance between effort, pain and reward. In animal studies, laboratory tests have measured the amount of work – in calories – that an animal is prepared to do to get a food pellet. There’s no point burning more calories than the reward, so animals will only work so hard for something to eat. Tests also showed that animals are prepared to suffer a certain amount of pain if they’re hungry: lab rats will cross an electrified floor to get to a food pellet, even though it hurts their feet. The same goes for sex: the horny rats will work and put up with pain, in order to mate.

    When we examine social animals, like us, the co-operative rewards are harder to understand. It’s clear that individuals will die if they don’t get enough food, and genes will die if individuals don’t reproduce, but what’s in it for us to be social? Well, the lone wolf is very unlikely to be able to hunt and kill prey on its own.

    Dogs are the perfect animal to help us understand praise. A dog will fetch a stick for its owner, even though it gets no food or sex. Humans have figured out that if you can make a dog believe you’re the alpha of the wolf pack, then the dog will go wild for your approval. Through body language cues, such as bared teeth or wagging tails, the message of social approval or disapproval can be sent. Dogs are evolved to seek praise, because it bonds their hunting pack together.

    We can then start to see how different drugs affect our brains, through changes in our behaviour.

    Let’s start with amphetamines (speed, whizz, base, meth etc.)

    Amphetamines suppress appetite. Because one side of the triangle has been suppressed, it leaves room for an increased sex drive and more pleasurable lovemaking. Addicts who inject crystal methamphetamine can masturbate or fuck (or both!) for 12 hours.

    Heroin suppresses your sex drive. Heroin addicts can be perfectly functional people, who eat enough to stay healthy, but they’re getting their kicks from the junk, so they don’t need sex.

    Cocaine removes your insecurity and need for praise. When you’re high on coke, you know you’re the best. Instead of nervously looking around to see who’s approving and who’s disapproving, you act as if you’re the alpha of the pack; king of the hill; top dog.

    Addictions are nothing more than a temporary perversion of our natural urges; survival instincts; drives. We simply retrain our brains to want drugs instead of food, sex and praise.

    Last night, I couldn’t sleep because I had cravings. I was lying awake, daydreaming about going to a dealer and buying the thing I was really craving. It was a craving like every craving I’ve ever had. The craving completely consumed me and I could hardly think about anything else. There was only one thing that my heart desired.

    So, today I went to the [meat] dealer, and bought myself some [dried South African beef] product. I travelled across London with single-minded purpose: I was out to score and feed my addiction.

    I can’t emphasise enough how similar drug cravings are to feeling hungry or horny. The urges are identical. Drug cravings are indistinguishable from the natural urges that keep us alive. Saying “you’ve got no willpower” to somebody, while stuffing your face with a big pie, is ridiculous. How often have you given up food and how long have you fasted for? Try doing it for 28 days. Try doing it for 13 weeks. Try doing it for life.

    Of course, if the brain can be trained to like something, it can also be untrained. Rabid animals get driven mad by hydrophobia: swallowing gives rabid animals painful spasms in their larynx, so they start to fear water even though they’re desperately thirsty. There are several foods that are said to be an acquired taste: it takes some time for our brains to learn to associate the strange flavours with nourishment. Often, an upset stomach or a bout of food poisoning is enough to create a strong link in our brains that causes us to reject certain foods.

    Alcoholics can break their addiction by taking medication that will make them throw up if they drink. This kind of negative conditioning can break the perverted programming of the brain. Instead of eagerly anticipating the reward of a ‘buzz’ every time you get drunk, you begin to associate alcoholic drinks with nausea.

    Unfortunately, the programming can work in reverse. If you have lots of fantastic sex when you take drugs, you can then start to crave drugs every time you get horny. ‘Normal’ sex can start to feel uninteresting and not worth bothering with. Your libido becomes your enemy: driving you to seek drugs every time your nut-sack needs emptying.

    I’ve been well aware for some time, that I need to stay on top of my libido or else it will work in harmony with residual drug cravings to overpower any freedom of choice that I supposedly have. “Willpower” and the feelings of guilt we have about all indulgences of our natural urges, are the attempts to impose morality on an entirely amoral thing: we have no control over our desires.

    Yesterday was a new one on me: a hunger for food that was as strong as any drug craving I’ve ever experienced. Addiction works in strange and subtle ways, inhabiting your subconscious and trying to subvert your supposed freedom of choice. Lots of addicts will relapse ‘by accident’ because the levers being pulled in their brains are powerfully influenced by forces that we rarely acknowledge.

    We rarely talk about showing off or trying to get a shag, but those things are far more influential on our world than almost anything except stuffing our faces with pies.

     

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  • Selected Short Stories of 2016

    This is a story about a year in review…

    Woz Ere

    Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin.

    For anybody following along at home, there are a few highlights buried in the 600,000+ words I’ve written to date. There’s some required reading for anybody making a study of my psyche.

    I decided I wanted to write something more popular and so I drew some graphs explaining mood disorders, like bipolar. It was my most read blog post of 2016.

    Along the same lines, I wrote about the onset of depression and attempts to treat it.

    I wrote a letter to myself.

    I was an inpatient on a secure psychiatric ward, so naturally I came up with a bizarre thought experiment. I even did a drawing of my quantum suicide experiment.

    When I was bored out of my mind at work one day, I wrote a short story called The Factory.

    If you ever wondered why I have a semicolon tattooed behind my ear, this is half the story.

    Everything you never wanted to know about addiction.

    But, is it art? This is a good example of me rambling while strung-out. I’m surprised I could even see the keyboard. I just like the title and it’s a bit of a private joke, sorry.

    There’s a 3-part account of the time I lost my mind and started hearing voices.

    That’ll probably do. There’s a lot to get through there.

    Of course, there’s also the first draft of my novel if you have time to read 53,000 words. I’m going to start editing it tomorrow, so any feedback would be gratefully received.

    I’ve slightly bent the rules, because I have a bit of a warped sense of time, but these are all significant pieces of writing for me, that I associate with the events of 2016.

    Happy New Year’s Eve.

     

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  • GSOH

    This is a story about compatibility…

    Bath salts

    Very often, when you’re acutely aware that there’s something that you need to avoid crashing into, you’ll end up staring at it, unable to tear your eyes away. When riding a board or a bike, flying, driving or otherwise in motion, you tend to go in the direction you’re looking. If you want to avoid a crash, you should look at a spot away from danger.

    Is this the reason why we don’t talk about taboo subjects, because we’re worried about tempting fate? We turn our back on the ugly truth and try to pretend like everything’s OK.

    My Christmas stocking included some bath salts.

    White lines

    Clearly, Santa has the same dark sense of humour as me. That’s great. I think humour is a fantastic way to exorcise the demons of the past. First comes talking, then understanding and finally you can laugh and joke about a topic that was originally quite painful and difficult to remember. Repressing memories and walking on eggshells is no way to move forward.

    If we don’t have honest conversations where we can talk about how we really think and feel, then we build up a load of sensitive topics. Secrets and lies lead to paranoia and weak relationships. Keeping schtum about my parents’ drug use – when I was a child – was too much of a burden. Writing openly has been liberating and has allowed me to move on from shame and regret, to regain my self-esteem and confidence.

    I remember a desperate scramble to cover up my admission to The Priory. My psychiatrist had made a referral to a “private hospital” for treatment of an acute episode of bipolar disorder. All perfectly true, but there was a certain economic use of the truth. What would most people think, if they found out that I was spending weeks in the UK’s most notorious treatment specialist for drug & alcohol abuse? They would leap to the wrong conclusions, surely?

    It’s so bloody exhausting keeping up appearances. One must be aware of how things can be [mis]interpreted and people aren’t likely to share their true thoughts and feelings: “better keep him away from the kids if he’s mentally ill” or “I bet he’s a raging alcoholic behind closed doors if he’s been in The Priory”.

    We’re brought up to believe that our reputation is like a balloon: one little prick and it goes pop. We’re scared to take time off work, because we’ll have gaps on our CV that need to be explained. We’re scared to share details of our private lives, lest our employers decide we’re unreliable and judge us on preconceived notions. Who wants to work with a madman?

    When it comes to dating, the same applies. Who wants to date somebody with flaws; defects? Who wants to take a risk on a ticking time bomb; an unsteady ship? And so, I should have found myself unemployable and undateable. “Take your pills, sit in the corner and shut up” says society.

    However, if you ever meet me in a work or social context, you may gain the [false?] impression that I’m pleasant company: a healthy, happy and capable member of society, engaged in productive endeavours. Strangely, you might have the wool pulled over your eyes so much that you actually mistake me for a normal human being.

    Surely this is thanks to the excellent medication that I take?

    Well, no. I don’t take any medication. I don’t do therapy. I haven’t had a course of electro-convulsive shock treatment. I don’t even have a psychiatrist at the moment.

    “But you’re going to murder everybody if you don’t take your pills.”

    Yes, that’s right. I’m your worst nightmare. I’m out there, on the dating scene, luring unsuspecting vulnerable young women into my web. I’m a dangerous fantasist; a con-man. I’m so good at living a lie that I’ve constructed an elaborate fable that looks, smells, tastes and sounds very much like an authentic real life, but it’s all fake. It can’t be real. What about the secrets we now know?

    If you take your secrets and turn them into jokes, you defuse that ticking time bomb… or at least that’s my working hypothesis.

    I certainly feel a lot happier knowing that I’ve met somebody with enough of a good sense of humour to make a joke on Christmas Day about my chequered past. I feel less sensitive, paranoid and insecure than ever before. I feel like I’m myself, and that’s OK.

    Maybe it’s just a getting old thing: the realisation that we’re all flawed in some way. We’re all human. We all have weaknesses and strengths, and we all have history; baggage even. It seems better to wear my heart on my sleeve than present myself as some whiter than white, holier than thou saint who never put a foot wrong in their life.

    I doubt I’ll ever unify my professional and private identities, but I certainly don’t regret jettisoning the traditional approach to dating. Honesty seems to have been the best policy in this case.

     

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  • Who Do You Think You Are?

    This is a story about family…

    Llethr melyn farmhouse

    I was born in Aberystwyth, Wales. This is the first house I lived in. We moved around lots when I was growing up – I went to 8 different schools – so I don’t really know where to call home. For me, home is where I make it: I have a grab bag in my apartment in London, with a tent and a sleeping bag. I’ll survive, but there isn’t a family home I would visit ever again. Homelessness is the only option.

    I was wondering to myself earlier whether I’m a misanthrope or not. I certainly dislike the stress of rush hour travel and battling crowds. You must wonder why I live and work in London, where it’s so densely populated, but I find that it has amazing people, food, culture and lots of jobs for my skills and experience. I live by the river and it’s actually pretty quiet down on the Isle of Dogs, as is the Square Mile, where I often get contracts.

    I’ve decided that I don’t hate people, but a lot of people seem to hate me. Changing schools so much is disruptive to a child’s life. Instead of learning how to make friends and become popular, there’s little point if you’re going to get yanked out of some place you’re happy with and dumped somewhere else. It’s fairly obvious that the more disrupted a child’s environment, the more they will retreat inwards, in search of some stability and consistency.

    Bullying was a big feature of my childhood. It was a daily feature of life until I went to college. It’s easy to make a child into a bullying victim: just give them something that marks them out as different. Take a look at the way all the children in school are dressed and make sure you dress your kid differently: turn-ups on their trousers, a jumper when all the other kids are wearing blazers, Clarks shoes when all the other kids are wearing Doc Martens. If they’re a girl, dress them like a boy and vice-versa. If they’re a boy, make them ride a pink bicycle with ribbons on it. Et cetera, et cetera.

    My parents’ only hobby was drug taking. In their imagination, there were fucking unicorns and rainbows everywhere and everything they said was profound and important. In their minds they were hard working and intelligent. In reality, they were sat around in a dirty house, dribbling like morons and unable to say a single syllable that was understandable. Their brains were intoxicated by drugs and alcohol and they were antisocial: preferring to spend as much time as possible alone indoors with their drugs.

    I’m not sure if my parents are misanthropes, but they sure as shit don’t have any friends. They have each other and they seem to think that they’re the two smartest people on the planet and everybody else is thick as pig shit. When I feign snobbery and arrogance, it’s easy because I just imitate my parents. They used to talk about friends and colleagues behind their back. I would get in trouble if I ever let slip a “mum says…” which taught me about two-faced hateful nasty people.

    It’s kind of fun to gossip behind people’s backs, but having been the victim of social exclusion, bullying and also witnessed the nasty nature of horrible people who say mean things about people behind closed doors, I now try to stop myself. I’m not getting up on my high horse and saying I’m morally superior: I just mean to say that I have strong feelings about it, as it’s affected my life. It’s almost as if I was the one who suffered for my parents’ desire to be hostile to everyone.

    Evil Child

    There I am. It’s fairly obvious from those murderous eyes that I’m pure evil and had been plotting to do all sorts of dastardly deeds, while I was a sperm and an egg.

    “My girlfriend” is how my dad referred to my mum. He made me call him and my mum by their first names. I wasn’t allowed to call them “Mum” and “Dad”. There was open hostility towards me, as if I had planned to ruin their drug binge and screw up their easy carefree life; as if my birth was some pre-meditated malicious atrocity. That’s a pretty freaky thing to accuse a small child of.

    What else do I know about myself?

    Well, I was lonely. I was so desperate for secure, loyal friendships, that I would get very overexcited when I got to spend time with friends. I was super intense and hyper: I had to pack in all the friendship I could, when the opportunity presented itself. Sleep was always of secondary concern to maximising the time available, so it was exhausting seeing me for the short intense bursts that my parents permitted.

    A number of my childhood ‘friends’ were the children of people my parents deemed good enough to hang out with occasionally, because they liked to take drugs. My parents made all objective judgements of people based on whether they liked drugs or not, rather than on personality or intellect. My dad rather styled himself on a man known literally as Mister Mean, who charged his wife and young children rent to live in ‘his’ house. What a cunt.

    The biggest event in my life was the birth of my sister, when I was 10 years old. Parents are supposed to be outnumbered. Children are supposed to grow up with brothers and sisters. It’s fucking abusive to have lonely isolated miserable children. Guess what? Children like playing together. Children like being children with other children.

    It occurred to me that we spend so much of our time and energy trying to get children to act like adults, which is disingenuous and bound to lead to frustration and misery all round. If you want adult company, go make friends with people your own age. Kids need to be kids, which means play and socialising with their peers. Punishing a child for being childish is abusive.

    Yeah, I’m banding round the term ‘abuse’ quite freely and easily. I’m sorry if there’s a very specific context in which you find that English word acceptable, but it has a definition that you’re at liberty to look up in the dictionary if you need to. I’m calling things abusive, because they’ve had life-altering negative effects on me and caused prolonged periods of abject misery. If you’ve fucked up your child’s chances to form meaningful, secure happy relationships and partake in society as a well-rounded individual, you’ve really fucking abused a kid, OK?

    This is turning into a bit of a “poor me, poor me” whinefest, but it’s the background of the who am I type stuff I’ve been thinking about. I know it’s horribly egocentric, but tell me, which pill do I take to just forget about this stuff and move on?

    “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man” — Aristotle

    Finding myself unable to get along with my peers and finding my parents to be disappointed that I wasn’t born as a grown adult independently wealthy Victorian butler, I eventually found that friends’ parents and some teachers were very nice to me. Having been raised to act with ‘maturity’ many adults found my good manners and strong communication skills to be charming. While I could do nothing right at home, I found that the adult world was mainly about kissing arse and saying intelligent sounding things at the right time. Naturally, my peers saw me as aloof and arrogant, which I guess I was.

    It’s easy to see how I got a head start in life: because I was lonely and isolated. I played on computers when others were playing with their brothers, sisters and friends. When I went to my first job interview, I wasn’t intimidated because I felt more comfortable in the adult world than I did with children. When it came to making a good impression at work, people judged me on the fake image of maturity that I projected. In short: I seemed more grown-up than I was.

    We’re all a little insecure, but I desperately wanted loyal friends and a loving girlfriend. That lifelong damage that you do to a kid when you fuck up their childhood, means that they feel unloved, they don’t know how to make friends, missed out on childhood sweethearts and feel distant from their peers. That shit carries over into adult life. Where’s the confidence, the gregariousness, the outgoing nature? Where are you going to get that stuff, if all you know is bullying, isolation and disruption to your life that destroys every friendship you’ve ever cherished?

    Every time I’ve been clingy, intense or a little too full-on… that’s coming from that hole that was left in adolescence, where most people are swigging cider in the park and having fumbling trysts in the bushes.

    But, I’ve also been affected by drugs. I’m not afraid of drugs. I don’t have a healthy fear and respect of drugs, unlike people who’ve never been exposed to them. I’m in the situation of having in-depth knowledge of drug taking, but I’m surrounded by educated middle-class professionals who know nothing about drugs (except that if you inject a marijuana you will immediately murder a grandmother to steal her money).

    It’s crazy to think that the spotty, nerdy unpopular awkward geek who was bullied as fuck, took amphetamines and lost his virginity at the age of 15. Is it crazy? Well, a lot of people think drug taking is cool. It’s seen by some simple-minded fools as an act of rebellion. Idiots see themselves as being part of a counter-culture movement, when they make themselves dumb and apathetic, spending their money on a trillion dollar commercial industry, never actually doing anything revolutionary or productive because they’re sitting around indoors dribbling and babbling incoherently.

    Small Child with Cannabis

    Doesn’t it seem only natural that with insecurity and isolation, I would follow in the footsteps of my parents? It sounds like I’m blaming my parents for my addiction, but I’m not (directly). The debate about free will and our ability to make choices, is a complex one. 

    “Boring! We’ve heard all this!”

    Yes, but I’m retelling. I’ve been through Hell and I’m trying to understand everything myself. Through my writing, I’m coming to terms with a mind-boggling amount of experiences that I have to slot into place, in order to make sense of the world and where I fit within it. Life is not black & white; good & bad. I can’t simplify things to the point of simply saying I’m a “bad kid” like my parents seemed to decide from very early on. Blaming myself for everything has gotten me nowhere.

    No apology or even discussion was forthcoming from my parents, so it’s up to me to figure everything out and make the correct judgements based on the evidence and rational investigation of the facts. Yes, it’s nice and easy to jump on any one particular thing that seems to be the ‘smoking gun’ pointing to the fact that I must be an evil little shit sent from Hell to terrorise the world, but there comes a time when that story really doesn’t stack up.

    I’ve been wondering why I do a lot of looking back. I have very little control over the future. My future is bound up in the hands of decision makers, who will either give me a role that I’m qualified and experienced to do, in order to get the cash that’s needed in this bullshit capitalist society. Otherwise, my life will be ripped to pieces by the vultures that prey on anybody who doesn’t fit the mould.

    Life’s definitely a lot easier when you’re not penniless, sick, homeless and addicted to drugs, but it’s not as simple as that. What’s your purpose? Who are you? What’s your identity?

    Being a vagrant is actually a fairly strong identity. There is something cool about being half-dead. There’s something attractive about the hollow eyes, pale skin and skinny body of heroin chic isn’t there? If you don’t belong to a sports team; you weren’t one of the popular ones at school; you aren’t trying to get as many letters after your name as possible; you haven’t conflated your professional and private identities… then who the fuck are you and what the fuck are you doing?

    Drugs neatly encapsulate both identity and reward. Instead of getting small dopamine hits by bragging about your promotion at a dinner party, you can get a big dopamine hit by staying at home and taking drugs. Also, you feel that you ‘belong’ to a special club: you learn to identify other addicts and you feel a connection to them… a sense of belonging.

    If you can roll a joint and you have weed, you’ll have ‘friends’. If you have enough money to buy cocaine, you’ll have ‘friends’ and you’ll want to share it because you’re not an addict, right? Except you are.

    I found – by accident – that drugs gave me the self-confidence that had been stolen from me by my parents. I was able to chat to girls. Pretty much most of the time that I had sex, it was on speed (amphetamine), mushrooms (psilocybin) or Ecstasy (MDMA).

    Eventually, I discovered – through dangerous experimentation – a drug that was so powerful that it was a far superior substitute for my abusive ex. She was no longer needed. She was abusive, mean, selfish and unpleasant and I was very glad that the spell was broken, even though it cost me a period of addiction and a lot of money. I wasn’t strong enough to leave her, without the drugs.

    Now, I’m all cleaned up. I’m a good boy.

    But, I’m left wondering about that whole purpose & identity thing.

     

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  • The Doors of Self-Perception

    This is a story about being objective…

    Yardsticks

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Defining “happy” has started to get really hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A friend made the following amusing observation:

    “People who are dying of dehydration can’t just mime drinking water to quench their thirst”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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  • The Dark Web

     This is a story about drug dealers…

    Dark Web

    The top image shows an official UK prescription. A doctor registered with the GMC prescribed me the medication and a pharmacist registered with the GPHC filled my prescription. The bottom image shows black market prescription drugs for sale on the Dark Web. When you buy from the Dark Web an anonymous vendor will sell you whatever you want, no questions asked.

    In order to receive my official prescription, I had to answer 14 yes/no questions. One of the questions was “do you have high blood pressure?”. How the hell should I know? The last time I had my blood pressure checked was 11 months ago, and I’ve gained loads of weight and have been drinking far too much since then.

    According to my order tracking, a doctor spent 7 minutes deliberating my 14 answers – 30 seconds per answer – before writing my prescription. I never met this doctor, we never spoke and they never saw my medical records.

    Some years ago, with a great deal of arm-twisting from my private psychiatrist, my GP agreed to prescribe me Bupropion for the depressive episodes of my bipolar disorder. In the UK, Bupropion is not licensed for the treatment of depression or bipolar disorder. NICE guidelines do not recommend the use of Bupropion for anything other than as a smoking cessation treatment. Basically, my GP faced being struck off the GMC register if I suffered some horrible medical complications because of an adverse drug reaction.

    I’ve been back in London for 3 years and I’ve had 2 different GPs since then: one in Camden and one just across the road from where I live. Neither of them has prescribed me a single medication, but the Camden GP took it upon himself to phone me on my mobile in his personal time to see if I was still alive. My GP went out of his way to try and help me.

    The average face-to-face GP consultation time in the UK is just under 9 minutes. Imagine having just 9 minutes to establish that somebody is suicidally depressed and then select a psychiatric medication for your patient. The medication could either save them or reduce their quality of life even more. It’s not much time, is it?

    And so, I became an educated well-informed patient. A doctor I spoke to some years ago said that I would be better off finding a “prescription pad psychiatrist” who would write me a prescription for whatever I wanted. These doctors exist. They’re available online, without even having to meet them or speak to them on the telephone, it would seem.

    I have no criticism of the ethics of what the doctor and the pharmacist who I obtained my official UK prescription from are doing. It doesn’t seem unethical to me.

    Interestingly, it cost me £90 for 60x 150mg Bupropion tablets. I could easily buy the exact same medication for less than half that price on the Dark Web. If I was to buy the medication from India, it would cost me less than £6 (plus postage).

    On the NHS, a prescription costs £8.40 if you’re working and not entitled to welfare benefits.

    Basically, you pay for convenience. With the online pharmacy I had a short form to fill in and I got my medication delivered next day. With the Dark Web, I would have had to faff around with Bitcoins, but my medication would also have been delivered next day. With my doctor, I would have had to make an appointment, and there’s every chance that they wouldn’t have been prepared to take the risk of writing an off-label prescription. With the Indian medication, their postal service is appalling and it takes weeks for a delivery to arrive.

    One reason not to order from the Dark Web though, is that you can get anything you want. It’s easy to start window shopping. Once you’ve loaded up your account with some Bitcoins, it’s easy to fill up your ‘shopping basket’ with all kinds of things that you’re curious about, or things that you know you really shouldn’t be buying because they’re bad for you. It’s a slippery slope.

    One of the reasons why I don’t have any drug dealers phone numbers and I’ve never bought drugs from a drug dealer, is because it’s so convenient. I don’t believe in the idea of a ‘pusher’. People want drugs, plain and simple. The drugs push themselves.

    One of the reasons I’m not using internet banking at the moment, is because it makes it too easy for me to buy some Bitcoins, transfer them to a Dark Web marketplace, and have a little jiffy bag containing deadly white powder, hitting my doormat the very next day.

    I don’t believe prohibition works, but certainly making things a little more inconvenient does offer some protection from temptation. I wouldn’t even know where to begin, trying to find a drug dealer, unless I wanted to buy low quality cannabis or terrible quality imitation cocaine from one of the many dealers who hang around by Camden Lock.

    Prohibition created legal highs. Prohibition created the Dark Web. Because I’m an IT expert and a sensation seeker, when I read about legal highs in the news I was tempted to give them a go. The rest is history. All of that “moral panic” crap in the media had precisely the opposite effect than intended. A naïve middle-class IT professional working for an investment bank, suddenly became exposed to a world that I would never have become part of, if it wasn’t for the fact that prohibition lowered the barrier to entry.

    As the legal highs started to get banned, I then took to Internet forums to find out where people who had stockpiled – like me – were supposed to go after we ran out of drugs. That was how I found out about the Dark Web. Yet again, prohibition moved me from a world that was legal, taxed and regulated, towards the dark and murky world of illegal drugs.

    One day, in a pit of despair at my spiralling addiction, I decided to order all the drugs. I bought crack, heroin and crystal meth. I didn’t even know what to do with them. You can snort heroin and meth, but not crack, as it turns out. How does a middle class homeowner even smoke crack? I didn’t even own a cigarette lighter.

    A couple weeks later, I had nailed my door shut and put newspaper all over the windows. It’s remarkable how quickly a respectable middle-class rich person can turn the house they own into a crack den.

    What’s also remarkable is how quickly you figure out that you’ve bought a one way express ticket to an early death, if you have vast sums of money and a reasonable intellect.

    One day, I smoked a pipe – I had bought a meth pipe off the Dark Web by this point – that had been filled with heroin, crack and meth. I thought “is this as good as it gets?”. The room was bathed with a yellow light, even though it was barely lit. There was a calm serenity. I thought “this ain’t even that great” and decided that I’d better stop before I decided that it was great.

    It’s the strangest thing, flushing rocks of crack and a big bag of heroin down the loo, not because you’re addicted and you want to quit, but because you can see how easily you could become addicted.

    People think that drug addiction is all about wanting drugs and taking drugs, but it’s not that at all. Drug addiction is about identity, routine, habituation, ceremony, lifestyle… things that I even struggle to explain. If you’re just locked in a room with a virtually limitless supply of drugs, because the postman keeps bringing your supply and you have lots of money in the bank… you’d think you’d just take drugs and more drugs until you died or ran out of money.

    In actual fact, addictions are self-limiting. Given a clean pure supply of drugs, eventually, addiction becomes kinda boring or the downsides start to outweigh the upsides.

    I’m lucky, because I’m wealthy and I’m not a total dumbass. I tried so many drugs, and eventually found one that was far better than crack, heroin or crystal methamphetamine, but cost less than £1 a day.

    I used to buy a packet of capsules off the Internet for £27. This was a legal high called “NRG-3”, which turned out to be MDPV: I’ve nicknamed it supercrack. The packet contained 20 capsules, and each capsule had 100mg of MDPV in it. I would hide these capsules all over the house, so that I would never have to hunt for very long to get my fix, when the cravings became unbearable.

    I would divide the 100mg contents of a capsule into 3 equal piles. Then, I would divide one of the piles into 2 lines. I would snort one of the lines, which would weigh approximately 17mg.

    17mg of MDPV is a very strong dose. Basically, it’s enough to be bat-shit insane for 24 hours. I would pretty much always end up going back for the second line… so that’s 48 hours of insanity, with no sleep. I would go back to work for a rest.

    120 days of bat-shit insanity for £27.

    Cheap.

    Deadly.

    You spread 120 days over the weekends, and you’ve got 2 years worth of hiding a drug habit. If you do anything for 2 years, it becomes an integral part of your life. It’s hard to change the habits of a lifetime. Again, you’ve gotta be smart and spot the changes in your behaviour.

    I started cancelling plans, because a 1-day drug binge turned into a whole weekend drug binge.

    I started not making any plans, because I was planning on taking drugs all weekend.

    How the hell I held down a job during this time, I have no idea.

    My psychiatrist and my GP thought I was self-medicating for depression. They thought I was in control. They actually told me “don’t stop what you’re doing… just try to cut down gradually”. My GP signed me off work for 5 weeks, and I thought “great! I can take drugs for 4 weeks and then spend a week recovering”.

    It’s true that my clinical depression and abusive relationship had led me to self medication, but when it became drug experimentation, I lost control over the course of a year. I started with a legal drug called Methylone, which I took every day and it worked to alleviate my depression. Then, when I found NRG-3 during a messy breakup, I was completely hooked.

    Less than a month after becoming addicted to NRG-3, I started carrying a letter with me and a £20 note in an envelope. The letter said:

    “I am a drug addict. If you have found me with breathing difficulties or unconscious, please put me in a taxi to A&E”.

    In actual fact, the letter was far more detailed and contained some information that would have been useful for any medical professionals who had the misfortune of trying to look after me… but you get the idea. The penny had dropped. I knew I was in trouble. Self-medication had turned into experimentation, which had unleashed addiction.

    For others, there are 3 valuable lessons I learned:

    1. Depression, stress, relationship difficulties, money worries, housing worries: these are the things that create a festering swamp. Addiction will take hold, not because of the drugs, but because somebody’s life is already awful. If you want to prevent addiction, you need to improve people’s lives, not ban drugs.
    2. Even though it sounds disingenuous, it does make sense to shop around. Think about all those Oxycontin addicts who haven’t yet figured out that heroin is stronger and cheaper. They’re going to one day. How much money are they going to ‘waste’ in the meantime?
    3. Addictions are naturally self-limiting. People need to quit on their own terms. There’s an oft-quoted line about how addicts and alcoholics “can never get enough of their drug of choice”. In actual fact, very few people can actually afford to take as many drugs as they want. Look at the mega wealthy: aren’t you surprised that so few of them drop dead from drug abuse?

    Alcohol is a dumb choice of drug, because it’s so damaging to the liver. In a way, benzos are the smart alternative. GHB/GBL makes you ‘drunk’ but it doesn’t have the same hangover, and it’s not so damaging to the body. You can buy 10 litres of “alloy wheel cleaner” from BASF in Germany for about £500. That’s equivalent to 7,000 shots of vodka, and it won’t give you cirrhosis of the liver.

    Cocaine is a dumb drug of choice, because it’s so expensive and the adulterants are highly damaging to the mucous membrane in your sinuses, to the point where you might lose your nose. You can buy nitracaine from China in bulk for just a few dollars per gram, and it’ll be 99% pure.

    Heroin is damn cheap. It’s the injecting that causes the problems: collapsed veins, abscesses and dirty needles leading to blood-borne diseases. With an adequate supply of medical grade diamorphine, a heroin addict can live a long, healthy happy life, and will probably “grow out” of their habit in their 40s or 50s.

    Crystal meth is cheap anyway. Smoking meth is undoubtably incredibly destructive to teeth and lungs. It sounds crazy to say this, but given an adequate supply, at least crime will go down and the need for prostitution goes away. With higher self-esteem because people are not selling their body to get drugs, surely a large number of addicts are going to stop using eventually?

    I’m not saying “legalise all drugs and have your local supermarket stocking crystal meth”. Drugs are so widely available and so cheap, we’re at the point where prohibition is like a bad joke. Shutting the original Silk Road marketplace on the Dark Web just caused dozens more imitators to spring up and fill its place. You can’t legislate to control human nature. It doesn’t work. Supply and demand are the only forces that you need to understand.

    If you have a loved one who you think is at risk of addiction, or struggling with addiction, you can prevent that journey from even starting by making their life vastly better so that addiction never takes hold. Once an addiction has started, you’re not going to be able to cut it short by cutting off their supply of money or forcing them into some rehab program. An addict will simply go around any obstacle. An addict needs to quit on their own terms, when they’ve had enough.

    Perhaps I will never have had enough, because perhaps my life will never improve. Certainly, when you’re depressed, stressed, bored shitless by your job, worried about money, isolated and lonely… those things are perfect breeding conditions for addiction to take hold. Why the hell are you being clean & sober, if your clean & sober life is utter bullshit?

    This is how I’ve arrived at the decision to start using drugs again.

    Except, I’m being smart… I think. I think I’m smart. Correct me if I’m wrong. Am I smart?

    What am I doing differently? Well, nothing really. I’m combining my experience from far too many years of ups, downs and dangerous self-experimentation. However, I have meticulously gathered data. I have documented pages and pages of details on my drug and medication use, and cross-correlated that with my mood diary, earnings, movement data and every other data source that I could harvest.

    My conclusion: I need a fast-acting antidepressant that gives me a mood improvement.

    So, I decided to prescribe myself Bupropion.

    It arrived today.

    I took it.

    The experiment continues. It’s a big relief to finally change something, after 6 painful months of controlling the variables, even though it was causing me untold mental anguish.

    Actually, two things changed today, which is a shame, in terms of conducting a decent trial.

    Today, I’m unemployed.

    Anyway, I need to get another job, and it might just be a little easier, now that I have relented and I’m taking happy pills… let’s see, shall we?

     

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  • 6 Months “Clean”

    This is a story about milestones…

    Diazepam

    There are so many people who either “don’t smoke” or call themselves “social smokers”. People say “I only smoke when I drink”. There are so many people who claim that they are free from drink and drugs, but they’re actually popping Xanax, antidepressants, Oxycontin, Solpadeine, Co-codamol (codeine), Vicodin and tranquillisers. There are so many people who sneer at substance abusers, but they drink, smoke and consume lots of tea, coffee and energy drinks, without realising they’re dependent on alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, just to cope with normal everyday life.

    In 6 months, I got through those 59 tablets – a combination of diazepam and nitrazepam – in an attempt to avoid a nervous breakdown and to survive an extremely stressful situation, where my whole career, solvency, home and life as a respectable member of society, hung in the balance.

    If you take benzodiazepines continuously for over 3 months, you have probably become physically addicted. What that means is that you might have a seizure and die, if you were to abruptly stop taking the medication.

    I’ve run out of benzodiazepines today.

    I’m not worried about this.

    59 tablets, of 2mg to 5mg strength, spread over 180 days, is a piss in the ocean. There’s no way that I’m going to have withdrawal symptoms from stopping taking benzodiazepines. I might be a little anxious; I might have a little insomnia; I might feel a bit panicky. However, I’m not going to die.

    A couple of years ago I took myself off to rehab. For over 3 months I had been swallowing a little cocktail: 6x 10mg diazepam tablets, 4x 2mg Xanax, 2x 10mg Ambien, 2x 15mg Zopiclone. Maybe it wasn’t quite that much. I have no idea. Benzodiazepines cause amnesia. All I can remember is that I used to fill up the palm of my hand with various pills, and swallow them all in one go. Lights out. Wake up 2 days later.

    You’re in a hell of a mess when you’re mixing uppers and downers; stimulants and tranquillisers; but that’s what we do every day, when we have our morning coffee and a glass of wine when we get home from work. If you have a strong coffee after a boozy dinner, you’re basically having the middle-class equivalent of a speedball (cocaine & heroin, injected).

    Obviously, I’m irreverently mocking your self-delusion, when you tell yourself that you’re not “hooked” on anything.

    I’ve used alcohol and the occasional tranquilliser tablet, in order to limp through the last 6 months. I haven’t been having tea, coffee or other caffeinated drinks.

    I’ve actually tapered off the alcohol and the benzos, to the point where I only drank 2 days in the last 14. I didn’t take any benzos all weekend.

    The thing is, if you’re smart and you’re disciplined, addiction is something you can master. It is possible to give up anytime you want. It is possible to become really good at quitting drugs and booze. I’m a fucking expert in abstinence.

    Almost like an alarm clock going off, my subconscious revealed that I had simply been waiting for 6 months.

    School was absolute shit for me. Getting through the long school days of bullying was awful. Getting through the long terms of bullying was unbearable. Getting through year after year after year of bullying was absolutely dreadful. All I was doing was waiting for the end of school bell, the school holidays, and the day that I could finally leave school and get the fuck away from the bullies.

    Family life was absolutely shit for me. I couldn’t wait to move out of home, and get away from my arsehole parents. I’ve loved paying my own rent and bills. I’ve loved being independent. I do have all the fucking answers. I went out into the world, got a place to live, got a job, and never looked back. Up until then, I’d just been waiting for the day I could finally leave home, and it couldn’t come a moment too soon.

    So, I spent 17 years, just waiting. I was biding my time. I know how to suffer patiently. I’m an expert in suffering patiently.

    Then, I applied my expertise in deferred gratification to the working world. I took shitty entry-level jobs and worked my way up. I stuck with shitty projects, and shitty companies, so that my CV would look good. I stuck with shitty bosses and put up with glass ceilings. I stuck with idiots who couldn’t see my potential, and I just suffered because I had a game plan.

    I can patiently wait anything out. I’ve had to spend about 16 weeks with very limited liberty, being treated as an inpatient. That’s not including the time I’ve spent in hospital receiving emergency treatment. In theory, I could have discharged myself, but there would have been consequences. I spent 7 weeks with somebody who’d been in prison twice, and he acknowledges that I have a mindset that suggests I know how to do time.

    I mean, Christ, I spent the best part of 5 years working for one damn company, in one damn building, with the same damn people. Day after day, month after month, year after year. I’ve done 19 bloody years on the IT gravy train, solving the same damn problems again and again and again, and seeing the same damn mistakes time after time.

    And so, I wondered to myself, why didn’t I have a packet of drugs to tear open, in celebration of the fact that I have so easily completed a 6-month period of abstinence?

    What you’ll find with many addicts, is that they’re liars. When they say that they’re abstinent, they’re actually lying to themselves and others. I’ve done “6 months clean” before, but that hasn’t counted “the occasional weekend” and one or two “lapses” (note: a lapse is a ‘small’ relapse). In actual fact, you’re still addicted, but you’re limping yourself along by hiding your habit, from yourself and others. You start to believe your own lies.

    I’ve arrived at 6 months “clean” and it really is clean. As clean as anybody in the history of anything, ever.

    Most people who quit smoking will drink more, have more coffee, eat more. Most people who quit anything, will find some way of compensating. It might be exercise; it might be work. Basically, humans need shit. We’re not fucking robots. Humans have always had intoxicating substances. Wine was being made 6,000 years before Jesus Christ was even born… that’s over 8,000 years ago!

    Anyway, I started looking at websites of awful toxic Chinese “legal” highs. Then I had a look at the Dark Web. The amount of drugs that are available to order over the Internet is just staggering. Prohibition has spectacularly failed. The designer drug industry is enjoying such a boom time, thanks to ridiculous laws that force chemists to get creative. Technology’s answer to the eternally insatiable human demand for mind-altering substances has created a whole swathe of online marketplaces stocking every drug under the sun.

    There’s something for everybody in the cornucopia that has been created by the war on drugs.

    My finger hovered over the “Buy Now” button, because I’ve damn well proven my point. Pick some arbitrary milestone, and I’ll hit it, easily. But, what do I have? My life is miserable. All I have ahead of me is stress and loneliness; insecurity and pain; suicidal thoughts and a sense of abandonment. Fairly easy to justify a relapse, isn’t it, when you work so hard and you’re not getting anywhere.

    Then, I thought, what could I do that’s slightly more sensible?

    With a bit more searching around on the Internet, I found that you can consult a doctor online and have a prescription despatched next day. In the space of 7 minutes, a doctor agreed to prescribe me a fast-acting antidepressant called Wellbutrin. I needed something because I felt certain that I was either going to commit suicide quickly by cutting an artery, or commit suicide slowly by relapsing back into drug abuse.

    Wellbutrin is a wonderful medication, because it’s fast acting, it doesn’t make you drowsy, and it doesn’t ruin your sex life. Have you experienced the boredom of patiently fucking somebody who takes an SSRI antidepressant, waiting an absolute age before they possibly cum, but probably won’t be able to? Who wants a sex life like that? I don’t want my emotions blunted. I don’t want ‘brain zaps’ and uncontrollable crying when I try and stop the damn medication.

    Yeah, who knows what the fuck happens next. Tomorrow, I have a 2-month supply of a fast-acting antidepressant that you can’t get on the NHS being delivered. Maybe life will look a bit less hopeless when I’m drugged out of my mind, like virtually everybody else I know.

    It feels like selling out, but it’s nearly killed me having to fight tooth and nail just to have a roof over my head and a job, while also being nearly stone cold sober. I don’t have kids to remind me why I get up and go to work. I don’t have pets to look after. I literally have no reason for living, except to achieve some arbitrary goals.

    I thought, as an added bonus, that I would also be celebrating one year of blogging today, but it turns out that happened a couple of weeks ago. Today is my last day at work, and I’ve had a couple of leaving dos, which is nice, but I do of course have to go though all the stress and hassle of applying for new jobs, interviewing, making a good first impression etc. etc. How ironic that things seem to have conspired to happen today.

    As luck would have it, a colleague has recommended me for another job, which I might end up interviewing for tomorrow and could even be asked to start a new contract as early as Monday. If I do that, I’m damnwell going to need a few happy pills to carry me through, because I had been thinking that I was going to have a minor nervous breakdown.

    Anyway, a milestone of sorts. Nice to leave work with a few slaps on the back and “well done”s. Nice to know that I didn’t ‘cheat’ with my 6 months of abstinence from addictive stimulants. Where’s my fucking reward? Surely I should feel better than I do, but I’m depressed and anxious. I’m overwhelmed by the task of having to hustle again, to keep the momentum going.

    But really, is there momentum, or did I just wait for 6 months, in order to have a well-earned breakdown?

    Is that what life is? Just waiting to die, miserable as fuck?

     

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