This is a story about golden handcuffs...

You would think that riding the Wall of Death would not be an attractive prospect, but once you've started, you can't back off the throttle and slow down, or else you will crash. Round and round you go, and people say "why did he even start?" and "why doesn't he stop?" but they're fundamentally not understanding what drives a person to take risks in the first place.

Adrenalin 'extreme' sports give some kind of thrill, but in a controlled environment. There are brakes on your mountain bike, ropes for rock climbing, and reserve parachutes for skydiving. We try and mitigate the risks, and stay within a 'comfort zone' where we don't end up out of our depths.

I ended up out of my depth, but the thrill of surviving can't be denied. Why do you think so many movies get made about drugs and crime? I think it's because we want to experience a more exciting life, vicariously. We would never dare to take the risks that these screen antiheroes take, but there's a little part of us that wants to be the gangster, the hustler, or to know what it feels like to take powerful narcotics.

There's a lot of romanticism, glorification, of risk takers. Increasingly, there's an amorality in Hollywood, where bad guys get away with stuff and the drug takers don't always get locked up behind bars, just to teach us - the audience - some trite moral lesson. There is even the occasional movie where the antihero is fighting the system. Modern day Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich and corrupt, with us cheering them on in their lawbreaking activities.

I should say, upfront, that I don't believe I'm above the law. I don't think I'm special, and deserve any special treatment. I don't think rules don't apply to me.

However, it's undeniable that I have received special treatment and rules have been bent. The full force of the law has not been brought to bear on me. I've been in a police cell a few times, but yet I've retained my liberty and a clean criminal record. Other people in similar circumstances have not been so lucky.

The fact is, that I've been trying for a while to get back on the straight and narrow, but circumstances have not exactly been favourable. When things start going wrong, it tends to cause other things to start going wrong too. You might lose your job, and because of that you get into rent arrears or default on your mortgage payments, which impacts your credit score, so you can no longer cheaply refinance your debts or borrow in order to pay your bills while you look for a new job. Now, you start getting fines and paying punitive interest rates, and before you know it you're in a death spiral.

Is it right that the punishment for not having any money, is penalty charges and higher interest rates? Maybe you sell your car and your laptop in order to raise money to cover the shortfall, but now you can't look for work or travel to a job that's inaccessible by public transport.

It's a modern-day Merchant of Venice, where we extract our pound of flesh, but the cost is the entire society.

The cost to me of the last couple of years should have been my right to work. Had a criminal record and a bankruptcy been forced upon me, I would be virtually unemployable in the field I'm highly qualified and experienced to work in. As an added ironic twist, it only took a couple of months of employment to rectify my deficit and satisfy my creditors. If they'd been allowed to get what they thought they wanted, they would have had to write off a big chunk of debt.

When we come to criminal justice, would justice have been served if I now found my employment options curtailed, because I had a black mark against my name? The UK system at least has some safeguards, where convictions become 'spent' and are therefore not supposed to affect your employment prospects after a few years, but what are you supposed to do during those years where you're a leper, shunned by mainstream society?

We say "if you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime" but what if you're trapped by circumstances? Do you think somebody wakes up in the morning and decides to become a drug addict, with full consideration of the consequences? Do you think it was a rational decision made with completely free will?

About drug addicts, Dr Gabor Maté writes "a person driven largely by unconscious forces and automatic brain mechanisms is only poorly able to exercise any meaningful freedom of choice". Do these people sound like they should be treated as criminals, or as patients?

But what about pleasure, what about the 'thrill' of scraping together the money for drugs, scoring and then taking them? Yes, it's true... drug addiction is an alternative lifestyle.

The problem is, the man who has nothing has nothing to lose. I found it immensely liberating being suddenly bottom of the pile, not caring about keeping up appearances, no longer harbouring unrealistic aspirations and living with the daily threat of redundancy, eviction and destitution. When you're already destitute, there's no way you can fall any further... for the first time, you are free from relentless crushing fear and anxiety.

My family decided that cutting me off, showing me 'tough love' and me hitting 'rock bottom' would be some kind of 'cure'. They were wrong.

Frankly, there is no rock bottom. Rock bottom is something somebody else thinks they'd find intolerable, but no matter how bad things get, when it's you who's going through that shit, you find a way to adjust to it... you find a way to cope. I can laugh about some of the shit that happened to me now... that's not supposed to happen.

The fact is, that stick doesn't work. You can't beat someone into submission. You can't truly break a man's spirit, their soul, crush them completely... if they're actually not doing anything wrong. Is it wrong to want to survive? Is it wrong to want some dignity? Is it wrong to expect to live without debilitating stress, to expect more than a miserable depressing existence?

Yes, it looks like I have choices, opportunities, but I've also tasted freedom. Freedom from boredom, freedom from oppression, freedom from stress, freedom from relentless exhausting pressure. Is it any wonder that I consider my forays back into the rat race and so-called 'civilised' society to be the real prison? A prison for my soul.

I'm not the first to rattle the bars of the cage and rage about being trapped into mechanisms of societal control. I'm not special, I'm not different. I just know what I've experienced

Tags: #career #drugs #addiction #police #politics #capitalism

This is a story about being an open book...

I'm having a crisis of confidence. I've written the best part of a quarter of a million words, but now I'm starting to feel like it's all garbage. I'm losing my audience, and I'm losing my way... where am I going with this?

I've got experience of writing every day. I used to do it on a forum, and it brought very positive things to my life. Having that connection with a group of people formed the basis for friendships that later developed in to proper face-to-face relationships. It was also really confidence inspiring, finding out that people had read my stuff and found it interesting.

So, this could be seen as something immature. I've gone back to the things that I was doing in my early twenties, in an attempt to recapture some long-lost happiness and security. I've moved back to London, I'm working back in banking IT, I aspire to get back into kitesurfing and I'm writing every day... albeit in isolation.

When I started writing on the British KiteSurfing Association (BKSA) forum, the internet was a very different place. There was no Facebook. There was no Twitter. The internet had not yet been colonised by an army of bloggers, churning out a banal wall of white noise, as they attempted to fill the void in their boring isolated lives.

It was interesting that a friend said he had to take down his forum website because it was simply killed by spammers, trying to generate links to their crappy sites, in an attempt to push up their Google ranking. In an article he shared yesterday, a woman wrote about most of the comments in her blog being other bloggers trying to do the same: to generate traffic on their sites.

Fundamentally, the message is clear: nobody reads your boring shit. Stop writing. Don't bother.

However, I'm not writing because I want the advertising revenue or product sponsorship deals. I'm writing because some crazy shit happened to me in recent years, and I want people to empathise. I can no longer carry the burden of having all these secrets. I can no longer handle having a load of experiences that I've never told to my friends and family.

A year ago, I was paranoid about being 'found out' as somebody who came off the rails and had a tough time. I felt that my professional reputation would be ruined. I felt that people would recoil in horror, and that I would lose friendships, respect. The jury is still out, and I've pushed pretty hard into territory that makes me look really really bad, but I'm still here... pushing through it.

There is a kind of catharsis in sharing some stuff that's eating you up inside. I guess it doesn't have to be done so publicly, but my attempts to discuss this stuff over email fell on deaf ears. My attempts to discuss this stuff with my parents ended with them just wanting to avoid the topics. I don't really see any friends on a regular basis, so I've been trapped all alone with my thoughts.

What I know about stuff online is that there are a lot more 'lurkers' than you're aware of. Far more people are reading than writing. People struggle to find the words of their own, and instead they try and find voices that echo their own sentiments. We find it much less scary to share something that was written by somebody else, that matches our own opinion, than to write down our own opinion. We almost feel as if our own opinion isn't worthy, isn't valid.

I guess I don't really have that problem. I'm outspoken in any area that takes my interest. If I don't have an opinion on something, I'll think about it and then develop an opinion of my own. I like to think that my opinions have not been easily swayed, but are instead the rational conclusions drawn from the available evidence.

When I write some pieces which are pure opinion - like my rants about the pensions crisis, or how shitty young people's prospects are - then I do kind of feel like I'm writing garbage. I don't treat it as an academic exercise, and put in loads of references and quotes. I simply set out my opinion in strongly emotive language, because I obviously care deeply enough to write about it.

However, when I think about why I wrote something, it's often because I'm bitter and angry about something else. It's been quite clear from my writing that I'm pretty pissed off with my parents, and so these strong emotions start to express themselves in thinly veiled attacks on their politics and lifestyle choices. The fact that they sit in wealthy comfort while my sister and I struggle turns into an attack on rich Cotswold-dwelling upper middle class Conservative twits, like David Cameron... completely ignorant of the struggles of inner city and suburban ordinary people.

Why I have chosen to shame myself, and write about deeply embarrassing personal stuff and mistakes that I have made, is somewhat more complicated.

There's a huge risk that I'm going to slip backwards into the traps that threatened to destroy my life, during the last few years. I'm scared about how chaotic my life was, how close I came to death, life-changing injury and permanent madness. I want to have some kind of record of my ups and downs, to put things into my own words and demystify what's been going on.

My perception is that I'm currently fairly healthy. I'm struggling with depression and anxiety, but all my feelings of paranoia, my jumbled up disordered thoughts and the really strange ideas and terrible plans or schemes... they've all subsided. Now, I feel quite practical, quite realistic, quite sane. I feel mostly normal.

It's not healthy to regard yourself with suspicion, to think of yourself as unwell. I'm pretty sure I'm not unwell, but it's taking time to get back on my feet. Repairing the damage caused by traumatic events in your life is not quick and it's not easy. If you've read any of my story, you'll know that I've had a remarkable turnaround from where I was, at my lowest ebb.

I've got no idea who's still reading this, and what their perception is of me, but my objective now is to try and demonstrate that I'm stabilising, that I'm getting back to normal. I want to try and reassure people that I'm not a lost cause, and that I'm on top of the scary things that threatened to consume me. I want people to see me as somebody worthwhile, somebody worth being friends with, somebody interesting, not just as a gruesome jester, not just as a fizzing, bubbling, seething mass of self-destructive insanity.

It would be nice if I can write a new, happier, more normal chapter in my story. It would be nice if that chapter included some supporters, but I appreciate that my story has been very hard to follow. I've been hard work, but I hope I'm worth it in the end.

Fundamentally, I'm humbled, even if it doesn't come across very well.

I'm starting to get a bit paranoid about my employers finding this blog, but if I keep writing, all the madness is going to get buried under far too much text for them to bother reading

Tags: #writing #mentalhealth #career

This is a story about worthy causes...

How do you decide who is worth helping, and who has made their own problems? It's easy, right? People who drink and take drugs are the architects of their own misery, or so we think. Homeless people have to be clean & sober before they're worthy of our help and support. Alcoholism and addiction aren't symptoms, they're the root cause of problems, we believe.

But what if we got it wrong? What if people drink and take drugs to escape problems? What if people's lives are so miserable and hopeless that they need something to anaesthetise the pain, the discomfort and the fact they're treated like dirt, shunned by society and even their own friends and family.

Once somebody has the label attached to them as a waste of space, a lost cause, it's hard to shake it off. We don't like to see our own shortcomings, our own demons, reflected back to us in the eyes of the suffering addict, alcoholic. We'd sooner that the person just disappears into obscurity or dies, so that we can repaint them in some kind of idealistic light. We want to remember them as an innocent child, and having them hanging around as a living adult is rather inconvenient. The living embodiment tarnishes this false image we want to remember.

Some homeless people have poked fun at the ridiculous notion that giving them money will only 'enable' them to continue with their habits. We see images splashed all over the internet of signs begging for money to spend on drink & drugs "but at least I'm not bullshitting you" the signs say. This is confirmation bias. We have preconceived notions about a homeless person, a bum, a junkie... we find it hilarious, and pleasing, to see a sign that confirms our prejudices.

When I met Frank, he was keen to tell me that he wasn't an opiate addict. Because almost all of us have an innate fear of needles, the heroin addict is very bottom of the pile. Almost every non injecting drug addict will tell you "at least I'm not a junkie" as if it somehow makes them a better person. Every stoner will tell you "at least I don't take hard drugs". Every alkie will tell you "at least I don't take drugs". Every person on antidepressants or anxiety medication will tell you "at least I don't drink". There is a clear hierarchy here, but it's no different than a bullied person finding somebody weaker than themselves in order to bully, in order to make themself feel better.

This infighting amongst humans is uncivilised, inhumane. Where did the empathy go? Where did the sympathy go? Where did all this ignorance come from?

You really think you could make things any worse by helping? In actual fact, charitable giving is far more likely to make you feel smug about yourself, and feel like you've done your bit for society, so you don't need to feel guilty about your comfortable existence. The fact of the matter is though that going on a sponsored fun run was something you wanted to do anyway. The fact is, that the coins in your pocket aren't amounting to even 1% of your wealth. You're buying a clean conscience very cheaply.

To actually sit down with people, hear their story, get involved in their lives, take a risk... that's a big deal. We all have busy lives, so who has the time to do that, and aren't charities so much better, more qualified? Well, no, not really. Charities have salaries to pay. Charities have offices and need to pay bills. The amount of money that actually reaches the front line, through charitable giving, is clearly not making any difference. The levels of poverty and deprivation are bigger than ever. The rich:poor gap is the widest it's ever been.

Economists trumpet the fact that a large number of people who were living on $1 a day are now living on $2 a day. An increase of 100% in somebody's wealth sounds like a lot in percentage terms, but would you honestly feel happy if your pay rise for the last 10 years was just $365?

Perhaps we should just be happy and content to even have a job. But why? Why should we be content to live with insecurity? Why should we "count ourselves lucky" to have a job where we're exploited, and we don't even have enough money to comfortably pay our rent and bills and have anything left over in case the car breaks down?

Don't you think that living with Damocles Sword dangling over us is unhealthy? Worrying about unemployment, and the ensuing rent arrears or mortgage defaults is not a healthy way to live. The stress and anxiety of working all hours, commuting for long distances, being away from our families, the uncertainty over our finances and the security of our homes and livelihoods... surely it's this constant stress that's destroying countless numbers of people's mental health.

We can't shy away from the fact that there's a mental health epidemic. 5 million Prozac prescriptions get written in London alone, every year. A quarter of Londoners feel like crying on public transport at least once a week.

City living can be isolating and lonely, but it doesn't get any better outside of London. There are less jobs and wages are lower outside the capital. Rents are a bit lower, but bills are just as high, and public transport isn't as good so you probably need to own a car to get to work. Food costs much the same wherever you are in the country. Many towns and suburbs can be just as isolating, and there's always the fear that you don't want your friends and neighbours finding out how unhappy you are, how stressed and anxious, how depressed.

If you live in some poxy little town with only a few major employers in the area, you can't risk burning your bridges. If you get sacked because your mental health got unmanageable, you can potentially make yourself unemployable in the place where you live. You can potentially end up labelled amongst people. If it gets really bad, you can be known to friends and neighbours as a "troubled" individual. You'll be a joke, a laughing stock.

London offers some anonymity at least, and a much bigger pool of jobs, to compensate for the fact that you can feel totally overwhelmed by the impersonal and seemingly uncaring nature of the dog-eat-dog rat race. People do stop and listen, and can be very kind and compassionate. Sometimes, it feels like we're all clinging onto the pieces of our wrecked ship in a storm. There is gratitude when you connect with another person who understands the sheer terror of facing a hostile world, out to label you, to shun you, to try and trample you.

In a way, London has led the way for the country to adopt a kind of blinkered attitude, where we're all working too hard, and our communities have been destroyed, families pulled apart by the need to spend hours at work, commute long distances and live with unbearable stress. However, London has passed the point where it was completely unable to continue any more, and I actually find it far friendlier and caring than anywhere else I've been.

London has provided, where even my own family has failed me.

Many homeless and addicts are fleeing a life of blah

Tags: #homeless #frank #addiction #alcohol #drugs #london #mentalhealth

This is a story about pounding the mean streets...

Here's a map of the fun run route that I followed. I wasn't actually following a route or a map, as you will see from the tale I'm about to tell.

Picking up again, where we left part two of this story, yesterday. I had just left my hotel bedroom, in pursuit of the woman and her family, who had been antagonising me all day. In my mind, this had become a game of hide & seek.

I dashed down the back staircase of the hotel, and found myself in the kitchen. Everything was dark and deserted. I went to the front windows and looked out. The police helicopter was still there, shining its light onto the front of the hotel. I decided to try and get out the back of the hotel.

At the back of the hotel was a room full of building materials, as well as the fuseboard controlling all the electrical circuits in the building. Everything was falling to pieces, with plaster hanging off the walls, doors hardly on their hinges, and some kind of makeshift extension on the back of the building. The back door wasn't locked.

Going out of the back door led me into a kind of car park, that was also a bit of wasteland. I started heading away from the hotel, but then noticed that there was a security guard at the gates. I pretended not to have seen him and to be looking for my car. Then, the lights from the police helicopter shone over the top of the hotel, and I rushed towards the back wall so as not to be seen. I explored the other end of the car park, where it was just overgrown and derelict, but there wasn't anything there of interest.

I spotted another entrance into the hotel, but that seemed to be serving a function room and I didn't want to freak any other guests out, so I headed back to the back door where I had originally come out from, turning my jacket inside out as I went, as some kind of 'disguise' as I planned to try and come out of the front entrance and I didn't want to be recognised by the police.

I was scared that I might have been spotted by the security guard, going in and out of the back entrance, so I hid myself behind a big stack of rolled up insulation and other building materials and waited for 20 or so minutes to see if I would hear anybody coming looking for me. I heard nothing.

I made my way out of the hotel, where there was a man on a scooter, talking incessantly on the radio and watching me. I walked down a side street, changed my jacket again, and went back into the hotel. This time, I went to the other side of the building, down a ground-floor corridor.

I descended a staircase into the basement and found a stack of plasterboards which I hid behind. I wanted to know if the hotel staff had been spooked out by me acting all weirdly, and if I was being followed. I tried to hide myself in the gap between the plasterboard sheets and the wall, but it wasn't easy. I was making a lot of noise and generally acting extremely strange, and felt sure that I was going to get in trouble with the hotel or the police. Surely I was disturbing other guests? It had been about 45 minutes of running around already.

I came out of hiding and found another corridor, this one had guest bedrooms on it. I heard somebody talking in what sounded like a bad German accent, and followed the sound. I decided that I was sure to be confronted by hotel staff though, and near the sound of the voice I decided to hide in a maintenance cupboard. Strangely, none of the maintenance cupboards were locked.

This particular cupboard I hid in didn't have a proper floor: it was just the floor beams. There were also two water tanks for 2 bedrooms' ensuite bathrooms, plus various pipes. It was also really dusty and cobwebby in there. I struggled to hold the door shut and regulate my breathing. I must surely have been overheard by guests, hiding in this cupboard.

I bumped into the girl who had been speaking in the German accent. She didn't seem shocked to see a dust-covered man, hiding in a cupboard right outside her room. She appeared to be beckoning me inside her bedroom, but I couldn't be sure exactly what her body language was saying. She certainly wasn't freaked out. I had no idea what to do. I was receiving no clear communication, and my thoughts were jumbled, confused.

I decided to go back to my room, but on the way there, I freaked out about somebody seeing me and decided to hide in another cupboard. This one was much the same. However, it sounded as if my noises had upset a guest. I could hear them phoning somebody. I imagined that they were freaked out by the sounds emanating from the flimsy walls, which were probably very clearly audible in the ensuite bathroom of their room. It certainly would have freaked me out.

I marched up to reception, and explained that I might have disturbed a guest, and that I was very sorry. I must have been quite a sight, covered in dust and cobwebs. There was a man sat in the lounge near reception, and he muttered something about "what a disgusting state" when he saw and overheard me, and wandered off when I made eye contact with him, and agreed with his sentiments.

I returned to my bedroom, and wasn't sure what to do. I was sure that the police would surely arrive at any minute. I didn't want the police to think that I had tampered with any evidence or anything, so I went to the window, and sat on the sill with my hands behind my back, so they could be clearly seen from the helicopter, if it was still there. I waited there a long time.

The night passed with much confusion. There was no sign of the police and I even rang the non-emergency number to see if there was anything they could tell me: was I in trouble? Things seemed to quieten down.

As it got light, I got changed and made my way outside. There were some young lads hanging around. They offered me drugs, which I declined "I don't do that anymore" I told them. I'd never encountered open drug dealing in a suburban residential area. Perhaps it was because I looked a wreck, or perhaps it was a setup, I mused.

I went back inside the hotel, to my room. The noise of other guests moving around was starting to rise. I heard a big group leaving, and looked out of my window to see a large family party getting on board a coach. A girl saw me looking out of the window and she waved and beckoned me. I was very confused about what to do.

Then, there was a voice. "Are you coming down?" it said. There then ensued a kind of argument, between me and a couple of voices, where I basically said I'd had enough... I'd been running around playing this silly game all night, and I still didn't know what I was supposed to be doing or why. I started to say "do your worst, you can't hurt me anymore, I've been bullied loads and some more won't matter" but these people, these voices, threatened to 'tell' everybody I knew what a disaster area I was.

It seemed I was being ransomed in some way. The footage from the spy camera, and perhaps other things, was going to be used against me in some way.

I sat down on the bed and decided that I wasn't going to play anymore. I was sulking. I was fed up of being bullied. I'd had enough.

Then, I thought, sod it, I'll go and see what they want me to do. I grabbed all my bags and went down to reception, where I put them into left luggage, except for my backpack which had my laptop and my mobile phone which was plugged into an external battery pack, for extra charge. I then left the hotel.

I heard somebody shout "wanker!" and I made my way down the street towards where I thought I had heard the voice from. As I walked down the street, I heard other catcalls of abuse. "Tosser" I heard, as I went past another house. I noticed that some windows were open on the top floors, but there wasn't anybody to be seen.

I walked up and down the road, noticing that the yelled abuse would come from a few of the same places, but nobody was showing their face. I was very confused about what I was supposed to be doing.

I started walking further and further along the road. There was lots of building and decorating work going on at various houses, and I would hear clanging that was much more like somebody trying to get my attention rather than somebody doing some work. I went to investigate these noises.

Eventually, I started to feel like I was being directed by these clangs and bangs. Somebody clanging, hammering or shutting a car door seemed to be my cue to cross the road, or to turn 90 degrees right. Two slams would see me do a U-turn.

As I made my way up and down the road, I noticed that as I passed somebody, they would run off down the street or get on a bike and ride past me. As I came and went, making several trips, it seemed like I was being made to walk a circuit so that I would see a bunch of people face to face. I started to say "thank you" to the people who I saw, who were all looking for my eye contact for some reason.

I started to jog along, and the vehicles got larger and larger. Starting first with a stream of bicycles, then cars, then vans, then lorries... I seemed to have to greet a larger and larger number of people with a "thank you" while I was running in circles, directed by people slamming doors and banging on scaffolding.

I realised that a huge number of people were involved in this dance, and I could be holding up their day. I wanted to show that I cared that they'd all got involved in 'helping' me and that I was going to put in as much effort as I could. I tried to run as much as I could, with my heavy backpack.

There appeared to be co-ordinators. People would jump on their mobile phones as soon as I passed them and they'd say "yeah, he's just gone past" and other things to suggest that I was running late, behing schedule. I tried to pick up my pace.

I had been hoping to get the ordeal over with quickly, and had assumed that it was only the road that the hotel was on that was involved, but it soon became clear that I was then starting a much bigger circuit. I started being directed through roads taking me away from the hotel. How big was this route and how long was it going to take me?

I kept kind of hoping that I would run into the usual crowds of commuters and normal London life, and this strange experience would be over... I'd just be mingling with everyday Londoners and there would no longer be this sense that I was being guided on a pre-planned journey around Islington, choreographed by people banging on building sites and slamming doors.

I ran, and I ran, and I ran, hoping that I would soon be done, hoping that I would have seen and been seen and said "thank you" to everybody I needed to, and the route would turn back towards the hotel, and I could collapse in a heap with exhaustion. However, the route seemed to be taking me nowhere near the hotel. I had no idea where I was going or how far I had to run for.

I started to feel really dehydrated and that I was getting dangerously tired. The backpack with the expensive and heavy electronics was a real burden, and the shoes that I was wearing, although they were waterproof, were really heavy - designed for walking, not running. There was a bottle of isotonic fluid in my backpack, but I felt bad stopping to drink it.

Eventually, after many miles, I decided I needed to stop and drink the half-bottle that remained. I heard jeering as I paused to get it out of my bag, but I couldn't go on without something. I was drenched in sweat, and I put away the fleece I had been wearing and carried on running.

As I ran down a big wide open road, with a park in the middle, and large grand Georgian terraced houses either side, I noticed that I was being followed by an ambulance. Whatever I was part of, it was certainly well organised. I started to get the idea that I was being tracked by GPS, so that I wouldn't be lost, and there was a little restraint being shown by the organisers. I wasn't going to be hounded to my death. I had to trust these people, I told myself.

I ran down one road, and a girl and her boyfriend stopped me. "My boyfriend did this too, and it helped him get better" the girl told me. They were a sweet looking young couple and were linked arm-in-arm, and looked very happy and in love. I was touched that they told me this, and it spurred me on to continue.

I ran down another road, past a school playground, and all the kids yelled "Nick! Nick!" I thought I really had lost my mind, so I went back and ran past again. "Nick! Nick!" all the kids yelled in unison, once again as I ran past. This was getting pretty surreal.

I then ran into a less residential area. There were people there that were clearly minding their own business. I was starting to get into ordinary London, and it was clear that nobody was paying a blind bit of notice to me. I started to think that perhaps it was over. Then I realised where I was... I ran right past my bike, where it was locked up on the road, where I had gotten into a bit of trouble, and really upset somebody, about 4 or 5 days before this whole weird fiasco.

I looked around, as I ran past my bike, to see if I could see the injured party, who had perhaps been the trigger for this entire event, but I could see no sign. I kept running. At times I assumed that I had perhaps reached the limit of the 'zone' where I was supposed to be, and I was outside the influence of the people who were directing me, but then surprising things happened...

Whenever I needed to cross the road, there was always a gap on both carriageways, opened up by the cars, vans, lorries and busses. This was uncanny. Also, the ambulance was always there, somewhere nearby, presumably on hand in case I collapsed. The traffic thing was really spooky though. London traffic rarely parts like the waves to make way for you.

I kept running and running, but I was getting tired and dehydrated. It had started to drizzle with rain, but it wasn't doing much to keep me cool. I tried to scoop up the water as it settled on railings and benches, to put on my face, to cool down. I really needed some more water as I had run a long way and quite fast with a heavy backpack.

I started to get dizzy and my balance was getting dubious. I started to wonder where the 'finish' line was likely to be for this crazy event. I imagined that it would probably be right at the top of Finsbury Park, where I knew there were some large function halls. I imagined that there was probably going to be an 'intervention'-like event up there, with me having to face the people I'd somehow upset.

I decided to get my phone out and look at a map to see where I was. I could hear groaning and jeering. People in cars started to toot their horns at me and yell at me. I knew I was quitting something too soon, but I didn't know how far I had left to go. I didn't feel like I could carry on any longer, without water, without a break.

Using my phone, I made my way to the top of Finsbury Park. There were lots of hostile yells now, mainly coming from people in cars. The drizzling rain got more persistent and there was a real air of disappointment in the air. I felt like I'd let people down, but at the same time, I felt in my heart-of-hearts that I'd given it my best shot, and to continue would mean passing out from exhaustion and dehydration.

I reached the buildings at the top of Finsbury Park, and there were lots of people milling around. I looked to see if there was any acknowledgement of me, but there was only hostility. It looked like whatever was happening there was being packed up. I heard things being yelled at me.

There was a water fountain in the park, and I greedily guzzled water down, and splashed my face and neck. My feet were in agony and my muscles ached. I was also soaked through with drizzle now.

I set off in the direction of the hotel, or so I thought, but I emerged onto the Holloway Road by accident. I had taken a wrong turn. I decided that I couldn't carry on by foot and tried to hail an Über using the app on my phone. It said the wait time was 35 minutes. I went into a local cab office and waited there for ages, but there didn't seem to be any cabs.

Lots of people were hanging around, sheltering under shop awnings and under the eaves of buildings from the rain. Holloway Road seemed to have reached gridlock. The traffic was bumper to bumper. People still seemed to be yelling abuse at me from cars and vans though. There were occasionally people who passed me on the pavement, and gave me a withering stare, as if I'd personally failed them somehow.

As I stood, sheltering momentarily from the rain, I heard the familiar voices of the woman and the main man I had been talking to. I looked around. Where the hell were they? How the hell did they get here? "We're in your phone" they cackled with laughter. I felt like such a fool... how obvious it suddenly seemed, that these voices had been coming from my phone, which had done the entire journey with me, in my backpack with a 12,000 mAh battery backup pack attached.

The GPS data from my phone confirms the precise route I followed, on this crazy caper. I plotted the GPS data onto Google Maps, which is shown in the image above.

I phoned my friend Cameron, who lived nearby, and left a message saying I really needed his help. I realised that I had left my wallet back at the hotel, and besides, I was exhausted.

I started to wander up the road aimlessly. I was sure that I was still a long way away from the hotel. Then, miraculously, I bumped into Cameron. He hadn't got my message, we just happened to be crossing paths. Anyone who knows London will tell you that this is a very unlikely occurrence.

I begged Cameron to get me something to eat and drink, and help me get a cab back to the hotel. Cameron got me fed & watered, and then into a black cab, to collect my bags and get me back to the hostel in Camden, where I collapsed and went straight to sleep for 24 hours.

I tried explaining to Cameron what had happened, and had imagined that he might have even been involved, as it seemed so co-incidental that I'd bumped into him at that moment. I also knew that he was very interested in street theatre and had organised a kind of zombie apocalypse 'run away from the undead' type event, as well as attending a couple of these events put on by professional outfits in London and Bristol. I thought that his sister, an actress, could perhaps have provided the 'voices' for this personalised event that I had just experienced. He listened to my wild theories, but didn't seem to be doing anything other than humouring me.

The next day, in Camden, I went on a similar long run, where I tried to respond to the slamming of doors and clangs from building sites. I think I was just insane though... completely freaked out by what had happened, and exhausted.

My feet were screwed: two bloody stumps, covered in blisters and with my toenails black and hanging off. I'd completely soaked two sets of clothes with sweat. I'd been through a physical ordeal, to match the mentally horrific things I'd been putting my brain and mind through with powerful stimulant drugs.

It's hard to know what the hell happened. I've looked back at emails and messages I sent from around this time, and it's clear that my brain was barely functioning, and what it was spewing out was total gibberish. I had been through some fairly stressful stuff and I was definitely losing my grip on reality.

However, I know what I saw. I know that I interacted with people. I know that it's pretty hard to go absolutely bat-shit insane and not attract some attention to yourself. The fact I didn't end up in trouble with the police or in hospital is either a miracle, or there's something fishy about the whole mad caper.

In a way, I came back to London so I could let an episode of insanity work its way out of my system. The anonymity of the place, and the fact that most people turn a blind eye to even the most alarming behaviour, means that you can go stark-raving bonkers without causing a scene. Perhaps this was just the ultimate realisation of that urban solitude, and me pushing that envelope of insanity to the very limit.

I often think that in all the parallel Universes where I have died or gone insane, I'm obviously not able to tell the story. Therefore, at that moment when I should have died of a drug overdose, or my mind should have finally splintered and collapsed from all the abuse, chaos and trauma... at that point, the only possible outcome was for something incredible to happen to stop me in my tracks.

I've got to say I'm incredibly grateful to this fantastic city - London - for being everything I have ever seemed to need. I have no idea how I've managed to scrap through such ordeals as I've been through, but I seem to be pretty much unscathed, which is not the case for the crappy things that have happened to me outside London.

I guess it's fairly clear to me, in retrospect, that my sanity is hanging by a very slender thread. Another bout of addiction would be sure to finish me off, either physically or mentally, I'm sure.

It bugs me, not knowing what was real and what was in my mind, but in practical terms, it's given me a sense that I owe it to those who helped me on that day, to see that lots of people want to see me stay clean from the powerful stimulants that I was hopelessly addicted to. I have no idea who they are, or what brought them together, but there was kindness and compassion there. That girl and her boyfriend will always stick in my mind.

I wish somebody would reach out and tell me that they were there, they know what happened, but I know it's unlikely to happen for whatever reason.

Anyway, sorry it's so long and there aren't any pictures. I hope you've managed to read the whole story and been able to follow it, even though it does sound every bit as crazy as it was.

Hopefully, I'm well and I'm sane at the moment. I certainly feel fit and healthy and in OK mental health, apart from a bit of anxiety and depression. Anxiety and depression are nothing compared with a talking mobile phone.

By the way, I don't recommend you getting a Google Android phone or using the Google Gear watch... I've been very suspicious of these devices, and a lot of the apps on the Google Play app store... I suspect that one of the many many free apps that I had installed had some kind of ransomware software in it, but that's just a hunch.

I'm just praying I'm not mad.

Tags: #mentalhealth #addiction #drugs #london

This is a story about becoming self obsessed...

Things have gotten pretty weird, haven't they? I've shared some stuff that would surely be better off buried, deep deep down in a pit of shame. Writing has become central in my life in a way that has even outrivalled my relationship with my collapsed trashed bed.

I've kept up the story, through living out of a suitcase in a hotel, working 7 days a week, suffering the trials and tribulations of the London housing market, falling out with an ineffectual scrounger friend, ending up in a secure psychiatric ward of a hospital, flying round the world while warding off suicidal thoughts, seeing long-lost friends, visiting every geek's Mecca (Silicon Valley), losing my job, financial armageddon, replapse into drug addiction and then starting the whole motherfucking cycle again, job hunting and fixing up stuff that got broken, like my life.

So, I'm back on the park bench again. Only this time it's in the garden that belongs to the apartment complex in a gated community where I live. However, I'm technically homeless as I have no means to pay the rent or bills, no job, no income.

Yes, it's true that I have good employment prospects, provided my prospective employers don't Google me and read the truth about how chaotic and traumatic my life has been. We can't be giving people chances to redeem themselves now, can we? One strike and you're out. Put a black mark against my name for having lived, for having tried... forget it... I'm used & dirty, tainted. We only employ shiny perfect plastic corporate dolls, who've had their brains removed.

I did start to feel that I'd overstepped the mark. I did start to feel like a bit of jackass for having poured my heart out onto the public internet. I did start to get fearful that I really had made myself unemployable, and had alienated friends and family.

I'm reading a book by Dr Gabor Maté at the moment, and his son wrote a letter to him, describing his addiction to blogging. His son said he initially loved the frisson of excitement, when sharing more and more intimate personal details, until finally Dr Maté had to point out that his son had gone too far. He'd overstepped the mark.

I considered this very carefully, in the light of my own obsession with writing down my story in all its gory truth. However, I've come to a different conclusion. I feel worthless, and isolated from the world. This website is an invitation for people to connect with me, and it's worked: people have reached out and gotten in contact. On balance, people have shown that they care about me, unlike my family who have only got in contact to try and gag me, to try and protect a fake image.

But the point is, it's not all about me, me, ME, is it? The point is that all this is so self-centred, and apparently doesn't consider the feelings of other people. Apparently, this is purely egotistical, narcissistic, self-obsessed. Wrong. You need to consider it in the context of my life at the moment: I have nothing, nobody. I'm all alone. I'm trapped with my thoughts, isolated... what else would I write about? How else should I conduct myself, when I'm so ostracised?

Think about the regular, healthy, face-to-face contact that you have with your family, friends, girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband, co-workers and even the people you buy your coffee from, shop assistants. Contrast this instead with a housebound depressed guy, unemployed, unable to pay rent & bills, paralysed by anxiety and stress... just waiting for the day I hit the limit of my credit and I'm evicted onto the street.

What would you do? Well, to say that you would never have let things get so bad is churlish. To say that you'd just fix the broken things in your life is ignorant. I am fixing things up, but there's only so much you can fix up at any one time. The bulk of my effort is currently being expended on job-hunting, which will bring structure, routine, human connection as well as easing my cashflow crisis. To say I should be out socialising, making new friends, pursuing a hobby... well, that just doesn't consider how dysfunctional my life has been, how destructive things like depression can be. Besides, how would I pay for those leisure pursuits?

It's certainly true that I squandered a few months, falling back into drug addiction. What you need to understand about addiction is this: it's slow suicide. I obviously didn't have the guts to actually push slightly harder on that razor blade, when I was slicing my forearms open. I was covered with blood and making quite a mess of them but I was still holding back slightly, stopping short of actually making a deep incision into my veins.

You need to understand though, that this isn't attention seeking, and it's not emotional blackmail. The time to save a suicidal person's life is when they're alive, not some pretty words in commemoration of their life, at their funeral.

Yes, I use very emotive language and imagery. Yes, I even took some pretty clear actions: travelling to San Francisco and going straight to the Golden Gate Bridge, and cutting my arms to ribbons with a razor blade. If you think it's just alarmist, I wonder what's wrong with you? How did you become so desensitised to human suffering? How can you ignore somebody in distress?

My Mum told me that I was "better than" the alcoholics and addicts at Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. In actual fact, it's my peers who are the most kind and compassionate. Yes, it's true that a lot of addicts are liars, cheats, fraudsters, hustlers... but they're also open & honest about shortcomings that are present in every human being, as well as being very empathetic. There's a refreshing lack of hypocrisy amongst my peers.

There's a clear hierarchy in society. Those who are keeping a lid on their mental health problems look down on those who have become unwell. People who are taking psychiatric medication look down on those who are self medicating with alcohol and drugs. People who are using alcohol and 'soft' drugs look down on those who are self medicating with 'hard' drugs. Only the hard drug user says "mea culpa" but the truth is that these people are the most bullied, abused and scapegoated.

It would be easy up to try and sum me up as reckless and irresponsible, but what about the 30+ years of getting good exam grades, not getting in trouble, being a good little worker bee and dressing up in my grey suit and going to work, Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, paying my mortgage, bills & taxes and being a regular guy, just like you?

I'm telling my story because there's a dichotomy here, and I don't trust my family to tell it truthfully.

I meant to try and keep to 500 words a day, but there's too much to say at the moment. Instead, here are some pretty pictures to hold your attention while you read for a whole 5 minutes.

Tags: #homeless #career #depression #london #suicide #mentalhealth

This is a story about everything trapped inside my head...

I'm lying awake and my mind is going at a million miles an hour, thinking about all the things that I want to write about, need to write about. There's a lot of my story that still needs to be told before the 13th/14th of May. I'm not sure why anniversaries are important to us humans, but we seem to attach significance to the passage of 365 days and nights.

I want to write an open letter to my Mum, for her birthday on the 13th, but I don't want that to overshadow something more significant that happened at around the same time: The Finsbury Park Fun Run. My parents have become quite irrelevant really, and I'd like to keep it that way. The further they are from my life, the more I feel within touching distance of restabilising, recovering, moving forwards.

My parents will tell you that I shouldn't be thinking about myself at the moment, when there's been a death in the family and another family member is seriously unwell. However, as I've alluded to before, I'm not exactly off the critical list myself. I took a kitchen knife to my forearm only last night, daring myself to open my veins, to end it.

When I came to listen to all my old voicemails at the beginning of this week, there were heaps of messages from my Mum, berating me for not being emotionally available to her. I couldn't believe how I'm supposed to be the responsible, reliable, dependable member of the family, there as emotional support and as a punching bag, for my flakey drop-out loser parents. Ok, so I've thrown off the shackles of wearing a grey suit and being the career-minded sensible and conservative member of the family, after the best part of 20 years in financial services technology and 9 to 5 office humdrum. However, I reject both roles: punchbag & outcast.

I can't be both left out in the cold when I'm having a hard time, but yet supposed to be there for my family when they're having a hard time. Fuck them. Fuck them to heck.

Anyway, I've kept my safety barriers up. There's too much at stake at the moment. I'm under too much pressure and stress as it is, and things are too fragile, the green shoots have only just appeared. I'm not going to have it all go down the shitter because of my damn parents again, rearing their ugly heads at precisely the wrong moment, because they want something.

I already occupy a convenient space for my parents: a talking point. They are friendless, isolated, unhealthy and unhappy. Their abusive relationship is toxic, and the only way that they know how to function is by picking holes in other people, sitting in smug judgement over the world.

Anyway, enough about my damn family already. The sooner I'm disinherited the better. I may revisit the topic of my Mother, in an open letter, but otherwise it should be case closed. The open wound that was my horrible childhood will never heal while I'm still dragged back into that sick, unhealthy family.

END OF RANT

So, what else is going on inside my damaged little noggin? Well, I feel like I haven't really bridged the gap for my readers, between the happy me who had my shit together, and the drug addict homeless guy. There's a period of time that warrants further examination.

I appreciate that what I'm doing - picking at the scab, committing public reputational suicide - is rather strange, hard to deal with, almost impossible to comprehend. If you think about the damage that I'm trying to undo though, and how close I've come to death or permanent insanity (perhaps already there, ha ha!) then you might be able to see why I have to take such a bold step.

Somebody who has been through what I've been through should be suffering much more permanent and irreversible brain damage. I should be attempting to swat invisible insects, perhaps picking off my own skin to get to invisible bugs underneath. I should be shouting at unseen people, hearing voices. I should be consumed by paranoia... convinced that something or somebody is out to get me.

I've certainly unseated my mental health, which has always had dubious stability. I was clearly suffering from a mood disorder before I started putting copious amounts of powerful narcotics into my body. The two things really don't mix well and play nice.

It's hard to be self-aware, and it was certainly surprising when I was told that I was slurring my words and talking really slowly, back earlier this year, when I was swallowing loads of legal benzodiazepines and suffering the cognitive impairment of drug withdrawal from long binges on powerful stimulants.

I'm quite familiar with the brain-killing sluggishness of stimulant withdrawal. Normally it means I'm really sleepy and struggle to hold a coherent conversation or thread of thought. When writing, I might drift in and out of consciousness, and it'll take me ages to finish what I'm writing, which ends up flitting from topic to topic. You can see it in my writing, but it's masked by the fact that you have no idea how long it took me to write.

The benzos leave big gaps in my memory. Rohypnol, the famous 'date rape' drug is a benzo, and the amnesia-inducing effects are presumably what the would-be rapists are looking for, when they're spiking drinks. So, I guess I was spiking my own drinks. Who would do such a thing, and why? Well, another effect of stimulant comedowns is horrible panic attacks and anxiety, as well as disturbed sleep and appetite. Benzos help to calm everything down after a big stimulant binge.

But anyway, I'm getting waaaay ahead of myself. How did it even come to this? How did I even get off the rails in such a bad way?

In actual fact, you don't realise this, but things have improved massively. Things were much, MUCH worse. That's the thing about your journey downwards... you don't even know where you're headed yet. People talk about rock bottom, and I think that's a lot of nonsense. I never reached a rock bottom, but I can tell you that things started out slow, crept up on me and then got the better of me. No rock bottom, but I had to learn some pretty brutal lessons before I got the upper hand.

So, let me give you a little insight into how I became a drug addict. It starts with sex.

SEX ADDICTION

I've written before about experimenting with drugs to enhance bedroom antics, but what I haven't had a chance to write about yet is just how much of an addiction sex was. Perhaps it wasn't an addiction, but it was the yardstick by which I measured happiness and security. If I wasn't getting sex, my life felt pretty meaningless.

A few of my relationships were built on an almost purely sexual basis. One girlfriend, I really didn't find at all attractive, but at least I was getting regular sex. It was somehow important to me in my late teens and early twenties to get a lot of sex. I felt like I was making up for lost time, that I had missed out on a lot of those great experiences of first girlfriends, childhood sweethearts, school crushes etc. etc. I felt like I was 'owed' a debt of sexual gratification.

One of my close friends talks about notches on the bedpost as a way of warding off the relentless bullying endured at school, and it was this exact thing that I was trying to do myself, except I was just doing it with the one girl, rather than being the heartbreaking rogue that he is. Fact of the matter was, my self confidence was probably damaged, not enhanced, by being with somebody I really didn't fancy, and actually felt ashamed that I had 'sold out' and decided to date.

The truth is, I'm actually pretty vulnerable. Very vulnerable in fact. I'm so desperate to be loved, liked even, that I'll accept all kinds of mistreatment and being pushed into things that are really not in my favour. There are desperately needy things, like being friends with people who are just taking advantage of me. Then there is the sexually fucked up thing of having sex with girls I don't fancy, just because I don't want to be alone.

My ex wife was different. I did actually fancy her. I mean, I do kind of corrupt and twist myself though. I found her attractive, but in truth, I also tried to dump her when I realised she wasn't a nice person. I also realised that I wasn't even that compatible with her, the more I got to know her. However, there was one thing that we stuck together for: the sex.

I'm not sure what your relationship with sex is, but mine used to be like this: I felt I had to have it. If I thought I wasn't going to have it, I used to get stressed, upset, anxious. I had more of it than I really wanted, just because I was fulfilling some kind of ritual, reassuring myself that I could have it whenever I wanted. When I couldn't have it, I'd react badly, getting upset or threatening to go off to find it elsewhere.

Basically, I'm pretty sure I had all the hallmarks of a psychological addiction. When my ex mentioned she'd have to be away for a period of time, the pit of my stomach would feel sick. What about sex? Where am I going to get sex? When can I have sex? Will I be able to have enough sex? What if I want to have sex and I can't? This was a major issue for me.

I must be clear: I used seduction rather that coercion to ensure I had a steady supply of sex. I worked my arse off in the bedroom to ensure my ex wanted it as much as me. In a way, I addicted her to sex. I was a sex pusher. I gave her a great time in the bedroom, but my motives were not pure. I wanted her to be available to me, whenever I wanted. It took time, it took effort, but slowly I was building a co-dependent relationship based around sex. It's all we had.

There were other reasons why sex became such an unhealthy fixation in our co-dependent relationship. Namely, she was a really mean person to me. She isolated me from friends and activities I loved, criticised everything about me and generally dragged down my self esteem to the point where I was trapped by a sense of worthlessness and loneliness. All alone in a flat in the middle of nowhere that she insisted we move into. I was miserable as sin.

I'm covering old ground here a little, but it's important to go over this, as this was the groundwork for the really destructive stuff that was to follow.

CO-DEPENDENT RELATIONSHIP

It was always clear that the relationship was unhealthy as hell, and really needed to end, but it was virtually impossible for me to back out of it, because I had so little in my life except for the sex. So many friendships had been damaged and fallen into disrepair. Even my work was suffering because of this all-consuming fuck up of a relationship.

Eventually though, I found a reserve of strength and finally managed to break up with her. This was the catalyst for me forging a more entrepreneurial path. Mingled in with the breakup was some career changes, some business ventures... basically a lot of my pent-up creativity and strength came out in much more positive directions, around the time that we broke up, the first time.

Then, when things were going really well in my life, I decided to try and get back with her. Things were different. The relationship was less destructive, but the way that things quickly developed was deepening co-dependency, with the introduction of sex-enhancing drugs.

Yes, the introduction of drugs into our relationship brought a kind of stability. I've written before about swathes of time at weekends being taken up by the drug-fuelled pursuit of sexual ecstasy. I felt like drugs would bring us closer, and they certainly reduced the arguments, the agression and abusive nature of the relationship. However, it wasn't healthy. It was co-dependency taken to the next level.

With drugs, it's sometimes only a matter of time before you take things up a gear, if you're chasing a high. What started out with some MDMA (Ecstasy, Molly) and GBL/GHB then turned into rampant experimentation across the spectrum of available legal highs, before fatefully arriving at a compound nicknamed NRG-3.

MY FIRST DRUG ADDICTION

This is where the slowly-slowly creeping up thing happens. You feel like you're in control, with your accurate measuring scales and strict rules about dosages and keeping things limited to weekends, but you're playing with drugs that erode your self-control, willpower. I was the sensible one, but I was also a lot of the driving force too... this new level of co-dependency felt a little bit like we were in love and had a stable happy relationship, with me as the architect.

It would be me who carefully researched each chemical, measured doses and made sure we stayed safe. The problem was, I hadn't yet found my nemesis: my drug of choice.

NRG-3 was deemed by me to be too dangerous for us to try, and it remained an unopened packet, a closed Pandora's Box. I was right to treat it with respect... it turned out to be every bit as dangerous as my research had led me to believe.

But, addiction needs a catalyst. Me leaving Cambridge and facing the stress of how to grow my little company to be big enough to employ at least 2 people full time, plus resolve the intractable issue of where to locate the office, reached crisis point. A busy summer of relentless weddings taking up whole weekends was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Me and my ex were absolutely paralytically drunk at her brother's wedding. We had an absolutely almighty row in front of her whole family, and I ended up back home, alone, suicidally depressed. It seemed like the perfect time to try NRG-3.

People talk about drugs being near-instantaneously addictive, and I don't think that's correct. However, the circumstances under which I tried NRG-3 certainly conspired to create brain conditions that were almost perfect for addiction to flourish. I disappeared into the depths of my first ever drug binge. All the rules about dosage and measurement went right out of the window.

So, the rest is history right? Wrong.

Chronic drug addiction still doesn't happen overnight. At the end of my binge, I had an almighty panic attack, got really scared by it, and then life kind of got back to normal... except it didn't. There was now a little devil inside of me that wanted to repeat the experience, and was just waiting for an appropriate moment.

Enter the era of the 'secret drug habit'. My ex talked about my 'drug habit' during our divorce. What utter nonsense. By the time we separated, 2 years later, I was a raging drug addict. There was no hiding a 'habit'... I was actively turning parts of our home into a crack den. However, there was a period of 18 months where I tried my very best to keep the devil at bay, and hide my habit.

I'm actually putting myself in an excessively bad light here. I had no idea that addiction had taken hold so firmly. Yes, sure, it was me who played with fire and got burned. It was me who made bad decisions that led to an ever-worsening situation. However, as I've tried to explain above, one thing leads to another. It's impossible to separate my decision making from my state of mind and the circumstances surrounding it.

So, I started to try to use NRG-3 in secret, which wasn't a problem at first as my company was going down the shitter, so I could use drugs at home when I was supposed to be working, and my ex was at her job. Whether the drugs were the reason why my startup failed, quite possibly, but actually you could say that a terrible relationship was the reason why I did a startup in the first place, which later led to unmanageable stress that was the catalyst for my drug habit... one thing leads to another!

Within a month or so, I thought I was going to die. I was carrying a letter around with me at all times, that basically confessed that I was addicted to powerful stimulants. This letter was going to be given to the doctors at Accident and Emergency, in the event that my heart started giving out, or I went insane or something.

I was a little more proactive than this, and did reach out to community mental health services as well as addiction support specialists, but when I met other 'service users' I felt that my case was unworthy of their time. Meeting child prostitutes who'd had their children taken into care, and had poly-substance abuse issues as well as alcoholism, and grinding poverty... versus me, with my health intact plus a big pile of savings still in the bank. I felt like I was taking the piss by taking up the time of those treatment centres.

This is what I mean by saying that there were lessons I had to learn. I sensed the danger, but I still felt in control. The main problem was a recurrent lie that a lot of addicts tell themselves though: I thought I could use in moderation, and I thought I was better off hiding my problems and trying to fix things on my own, which actually turn out to be contradictory things.

There's a lot of times when drugs are talked about, not as something inanimate, but actually as if they have a life of their own. It's the drugs that are to blame we say, as if they have legs and walked right into your bloodstream all on their own. It's certainly hard to unpick the strange behavioural changes that addiction has on you, from the supposed free will that we all apparently exercise.

What happened to me, during my descent into chronic addiction, was the re-programming of my brain. Whenever my ex would say she was going away or she would be doing something, my brain would instantly say "great, more time to use drugs". When I wasn't using drugs, I was planning the next time I would be able to, anticipating it, aching for it, willing the time to pass more quickly so I could get to my next fix. This didn't happen overnight.

I used to be able to go for a week between getting a fix. Then it shortened to about every 3 days. Then of course, it started to be a daily habit. Then it came to the point where I would pretend to be staying up late to watch TV or something, but just stay awake all night taking drugs. Then it progressed to 'secretly' dipping into a bag of drugs when we were actually in bed together. By the time it gets this bad, you're not exactly hiding your 'habit'... you're practically a chronic drug addict.

Two things happened to significantly worsten the addiction: firstly, I started getting signed off sick for periods by the doctor, which in my mind were to be used 80% for drug taking, and 20% for recovery. I remember when I got signed off for 5 weeks, my very first thought was "great, that's 4 weeks drug taking and 1 week to recover". It had become automatic by then... I didn't choose to think like that... that's what addiction does to you. It changes your subconscious, your priorities, the way you think and act.

Secondly, conflict erupted between me and my ex, and my response was to corner myself. I would go into the spare bedroom, and she would kick and punch the door and scream at the top of her lungs. I was always afraid of her aggressive, violent, abusive side, and this was particularly harrowing when under the influence of powerful drugs or on a comedown, so I tried to barricade myself from these attacks.

THE PRISONER

Being barricaded into a corner, with somebody raging and snarling and raining blows on the only physical barrier that prevents you from being the object receiving the beating, is not conducive to good mental health. Siege tactics were employed, but hunger and thirst don't have the intended affect on somebody so psychologically traumatised, and under the influence of anoretic drugs.

Eventually it got so bad, that my ex could finally see that she was killing me. You can't leave somebody backed into a corner with no food, no drink, no toilet, and not see that your aggression is the reason why somebody is so physically wrecked. It was being cornered that destroyed me, as much as the drugs. It was being cornered that affected my mental health, as much as anything.

By the time we separated, we had entered a dangerous dance, where it was almost routine for her to spend entire weeks keeping me entombed in my sarcophagus. It was unrelenting, the screaming, the shouting, the hammering of fists and feet on the door. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that I felt shellshocked. I was hypervigilent: I could never relax for a second. I was in a state of constant fear, agitation.

If you'd like to blame the drugs in isolation for this, you're wrong. It's quite possible that the addiction would have developed in a different direction, without this mistreatment, but it's certainly true that what I went through was inhumane. I was a prisoner in my own home. Drugs just facilitated this, made me an easier target for abuse. I can barely convey to you the awfulness of being subjected to around-the-clock abuse like that, when so weak and so vulnerable.

Finally, our parents stepped in and enforced a separation to spare my life. I was fucked, and had made a desperate appeal for my release from captivity, to both her parents as well as mine. Mercifully, they arrived and stopped the relentless vigil at my flimsy barrier.

Am I being melodramatic? Well, find yourself a tiny room in your house and lock yourself in there with no food, water or toilet for days on end, with people coming to hammer on the door and scream abuse at you around the clock. See how long you last for. See how your mental health holds up, without even the amplifying effects of a drugs.

Why didn't I run away, go somewhere else? Well, this is where the illogical bullshit that addiction spews into your brain comes in. In my mind, my drug use was still a 'habit' that could be hidden, and it was only when a weekend or holiday arrived that this folly was exposed for what it was. The arrival of a weekend can even come as a surprise to somebody completely in the depths of chronic addiction... it was only the screaming and the yelling and the kicking and the punching that I had any means to mark the passage of time at all.

You have to remember that I was the weakened one here, I was the one in trouble, in distress, cornered and traumatised. You don't fight abuse with more abuse. Nobody's psychological problems were ever cured by screaming at them and cornering them. I had enough on my plate with drug addiction to deal with, let alone an abusive partner.

I did need to quit drugs, get cleaned up... addiction was consuming me and fucking up my life... but, abusing me only prolonged the agony. I learned nothing from being cornered and abused. All it did was to leave me with deep psychological scars.

Separation only opened the door to these psychological issues being resolved, over time. When some friends in London invited me to live with them, I was paralysed by fear of somebody hammering on the door, shouting at me. When I went to stay with my parents, they actually did hammer on the door and shout at me, which is what I had spent days anxiously anticipating... deepening my sense of threat, confirming my worst fears. Obviously, these feelings were irrational, however I had been traumatised to the point where serious psychological damage had been done.

London was chaotic and traumatic in whole new ways, but at least I was eventually released from the prison cell of being trapped in a room with no food, water or toilet. My life imploded to the point where I was actually in full public view, either in hostels or sleeping rough. All privacy, dignity was stripped away from me. I was laid bare for the world to see.

But London led me to social reconnection. Having interactions with people that weren't screaming, shouting, punching and kicking... it started to bring me back to the real world. As I built a network of friends at one hostel, my life started to stabilise. The more human contact, the more friends, the more ordinary conversations and interactions I had, the more normal I felt again, the more my dignity and self-esteem were restored, the more my chances of recovery increased.

RECOVERY

Johann Hari, writes that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but human connection. Addiction is about forming a bond with a drug, when healthy human relationships are not available. I had fallen back into the clutches of an abusive co-dependent relationship, miles away from my fellow startup founders, investors, mentors, family and in a part of the country where most of my friendships had fallen into disrepair due to the all-consuming and destructive nature of the relationship I had with my ex.

Of course I was going to get sucked into drug addiction. It replaced my ex perfectly. It was actually a superior relationship. I had everything that a co-dependent sex addiction gave me, in a convenient powder form. It was this drug - NRG-3 - that allowed me to finally break the habit that was my ex. We finally broke up once and for all, and I knew that it would be easier to quit drugs than to break up with her, so I felt relieved even though I was deep in the hole.

When me and my ex wife separated, I was using heroin, crack, crystal meth, cocaine, speed, diazepam, alprazolam, zopiclone as well as my drug of choice... NRG-3. Within a few weeks, I had cut it down to just some pure Dexidrene, which I was using to get over the worst of the depression and fatigue that would be inevitable after a lengthy period of addiction.

I was using 5mg of Dexidrene per day, to combat fatigue, cravings and poor concentration that would have ruined my recovery. It was a remarkable turnaround, but unfortunately it all got ruined by a complete lack of care for my wellbeing and future survival prospects, in favour of my ex's unreasonable demands to have the divorce processed her way or the highway. I wanted her to just take everything and leave me alone. My life and my health were the most important things. She continued to make my life hell.

Not that it matters, but today I've been abstinent for 7 and a half weeks, but not only that, I'm not drinking any caffeinated drinks or taking anything to help me sleep. I'm 100% drug free, and I'm not suffering unmanageable fatigue or cognitive impairment. I have no motor tics, and I don't have any psychosis or paranoia. This is quite remarkable. Considering how long and how deep this gash in my life has run, it's quite remarkable that I should be as close to normal as I am.

Anxiety and depression are unspeakably horrible forces in my life at the moment. I guess when I think about it, it's to be expected: withdrawal from benzos gives horrible rebound anxiety, and withdrawal from stimulants can trigger deep depressive episodes. The fact that I'm chugging along through a very stressful period of financial problems and job hunting, with very little support from friends & family, while going completely abstintent from all drugs... this is a big deal. It's not every day that people pull through things like this.

I'm sorry that last paragraph ended up a bit back-slapping, self-congratulatory. Certainly, any kind of complacency will lead to relapses. I've fallen foul of thinking "I can quit anytime I want" before, but the next challenge is to try and sustain recovery and put in place all the pieces that make a proper life. Everything was so temporary and fragile before.

Anybody who says "oh yeah, heard it all before" doesn't have a fucking clue what they're talking about. Every relapse has been due to either excess stress, or a collapse of the things I worked so hard to build. Losing all my hostel friends due to the pressures and stresses associated with the life change of moving from an unemployed homeless bum to being a guy working 9 to 5 in an office, plus a breakup with a girlfriend, plus the loss of a contract. Then, facing financial armageddon with a rent to pay and no means to do it, deep in a hole of debts, ridiculous pressure on the project I was working on, and bad mental health problems due to the sustained anxiety and stress I had been under relentlessly for so long, losing friends as well as colleagues when my work contract was no longer sustainable and I had to leave a job quite abruptly and inelegantly.

We've all faced bumps in the road, and these hiccups, these hurdles are inevitable. Part of sustainable recovery is once again being able to cope when things aren't going great. However, expecting somebody who's been through hell to be able to cope with an absolute clusterfuck as the challenge to their fragile, delicate, green shoots of recovery... I've got to say... what sort of cruel fucked up world would wish that upon somebody who's trying so hard.

That's fundamentally the driving force behind so many of my bitter, angry rants. I'm just incredulous that I'd be left to flounder by so many of my nearest and dearest, when the distress flares have been going up and the opportunity to rescue an entire ship before it sinks below the waves has been there for the taking. Raising a wreck is hard, when it's at the bottom of the ocean. Better to step in when it's just a little leak in the hull, rather than after the captain and crew have drowned and the boat's sunk.

It's not anybody else's responsibility other than my own, but you can fuck off if you're going to ring me up and leave me shitty voicemails saying I'm letting friends and family down. You want something from me now? Well, where were you when I needed support?

I know that a lot of friends have been there with support at the most unlikely of times, and in the most dire circumstances. I know it's seemed a little thankless, and that friends have even felt a little used or that trust has been abused. It's really not like that.

Yup, I've made some mistakes along the way. I'm still making mistakes. However, the tip of the iceberg conceals the great mass of the shit that I've been through, and yet, I still maintain some ethics, some sense of a debt of gratitude. I have a functioning moral compass, and I'm honest and acting purposefully towards repaying my friends for their help and support, showing them it was worthwhile, aiming to restore some semblance of a will to live to my shattered life.

That's what you're doing if you help me: you're saving a life. Don't believe any bullshit about 'enabling'... it's true that's possible if I'm wrapped up in active addiction, but I have the ethics, the sense of right and wrong to not ask for anything of my friends that would be squandered on addiction. The truth of the matter is that there are plenty of times, like now, where I'm not an addict. I'm just somebody who's struggling to rebuild their shattered life. I'm less of an addict than you, given that I don't drink tea or coffee, or even take headache tablets.

Yes, you could say I was reckless, I was irresponsible. Not really. I always paid my own way. I always covered my bets. I've kept track of where any debts or favours need to be repaid.

It's true, I felt a little entitled to have a complete breakdown. I felt entitled to lift the burden of responsibility from my shoulders for a time. For a time, I didn't feel guilty for being a risk taker and for the consequences that followed. Most of the consequences were suffered by me anyway.

CONSEQUENCES

Consequences, consequences. I've felt perhaps less than I should have done, but perhaps I have paid in other ways. I certainly feel like I don't want to rack up any more consequences. In fact, I'm back to the position of wanting to end my life quickly and cleanly if it looks like everything's going to go down the shitter again, rather than prolonging the agony and creating more problems for the world to mop up after I'm gone.

I feel a little bad that I would be depriving my sister of a brother, to be there to support her and my niece after my parents are gone, but at the same time I'm aware that I need to keep my distance from my niece, in case I don't make it. An uncle she hardly knew who's now gone is no big deal in the grand scheme of things, and certainly better than a drawn-out endgame that's just continuous "will he make it? won't he make it?" heartache, until the inevitable day that luck runs out.

Maybe you think I'm being melodramatic again, or using emotional blackmail. You think I talk about my suicidal thoughts lightly? You'd seriously call my bluff on this? I really think you'll regret it when I'm dead. I'm obviously not going to feel anything when I'm dead, except sweet sweet relief from a world that's been indifferent to my suffering and pain.

It'd be so easy for me to just decide, and act. I'm a very decisive person. I'm determined, stubborn, brave... everything that could quickly snuf my life out, if the scales tip just that bit too far. I'm keeping score, and if things get too unfair I'll just tip the whole boardgame onto the floor, along with all the playing pieces, dice and cards. You might think it's childish, flippant, knee-jerk, but it's actually cold hard rational, logical.

I feel like the writing I did when I slipped back into addiction doesn't make a fine account of me. I feel like the bitterness and anger towards unresolved issues with my parents made me come across as very unpleasant, as well as obsessively stuck in the past, and even launching tirades against people who only share some of the responsibility. I can't lay everything at the door of my horrible childhood and irresponsible and unpleasant parents. At some point, I have to draw a line that indicates where the division of responsibility lies.

The fact of the matter is though, that you've got to live with yourselves after I've gone. Coulda, woulda, shoudla... that's not going to mean jack squat when I'm gone. There's a smoking gun here. It's going to be hard to say that it was inevitable that I'd meet my untimely demise, when there's a record of periods of opportunity to step in and help, before things got too unmanageable for any human being to endure.

We should be fucking celebrating somebody coming back from the fucking dead. This is a fucking big deal, where I'm at right now. I shouldn't be here. The way I've been treated thus far in my life, I've been left for dead so many times. Aren't you going to fucking learn?

BACK FROM THE DEAD

It's not right to write people off, and leave them for dead. It's not right to nickel and dime people. It's not right to let the bystander effect be your excuse for not stepping in: let somebody else make the first move, surely it's somebody else's responsibility, not mine?

What the fuck happened to collective responsibility? What the fuck happened to a sense of community? What the fuck happened to helping each other out?

Where the fuck did this every man for himself bullshit come from? Are we Darwinian beasts, duking it out in the jungle, or are we a supposedly advanced race living in a modern civilisation?

I watched the film Se7en (Seven) again the other night, and I was taken by the similarity between me and the psychopathic killer. He had filled books and books with his thoughts, and then wanted to make a grand gesture to the world, culminating in his death. He thought that his actions would be studied, that they would make a difference in an indifferent world.

In a way, I'm drinking poison, hoping to kill somebody else. Everything I've done and written since I reached breaking point has in some way hurt me more than it's hurt anybody else. I threw away a very lucrative contract, I destroyed my professional reputation with a large number of individuals, I have spread word about my personal and private problems all over the internet and throughout my network of contact. If you search for my name and any company that I've worked for on Google, there's me.... right there on the first page, for all to see.

Here I am, with my guts hanging out. All my internal organs are on display. All my gory detail is right here, on these pages, for anybody to see.

What's worse, to die with some kind of false reputation? Your friends and family could always hold some mistaken belief about what your life was really all about, in the end. The more lurid details could be discreetly swept under the carpet, to save the blushes of your family, and to preserve your memory in some slightly more wholesome light. Seems like bullshit to me. I want people to know what drove me to the brink and beyond. I want people to have the facts, and decide for themselves. I want a world where we see that the only difference between people are the circumstances that conspire around them.

To say that this writing, this journal, this log, is a gift, that it serves some useful purpose... is grossly arrogant, deluded. However, it's all I've fucking got at the moment. Perhaps I am fighting to clear my name a little. Perhaps I'm not going down without a fight, and I'm taking hostages, taking some people down with me.

It's up to you, dear reader, to decide. I present you with my side of the story. It's up to you whether you dismiss me easily, as a madman and an addict, with no worth to my words. It's up to you whether you remember me as having the potential to be good, or the destiny to be bad.

Personally, I think it's immoral to make bets on living people's lives.

Tags: #parents #childhood #drugs #addiction #depression #suicide #career

This is a story about unlocking potential...

I have been unproductive for 6 months. In fact, I was counterproductive for 3 months: self sabotaging. That might be a turn-off for some people. They might assume that my actions are nonsensical, and point to irrational behaviour, madness.

I would argue instead, that my ability to fight my way back from being abandoned by my own friends & family, and society as a whole, but getting back onto my feet without assistance, is proof that I can do things that would send most people insane with stress and anxiety.

If you hit Christmas, when everybody is thinking festive thoughts and taking loads of holiday, and you haven't got a job, you haven't got a lot of hope of finding a new role until well into the new year.

With no means of paying my rent & bills, and no cashflow, what hope did I have? Seeing as I'm out of contact with so many friends, and my relationship with my family is beyond broken, what was I really living for?

Society is literally better off with me dead. I'm a risk. Although I'm a net contributor, through taxation and productive output, there only looks like one outcome, according to conventional wisdom: that I should live out the rest of my life heavily medicated, on benefits, or that I will fully relapse onto drugs before being caught up in the criminal justice system.

Surely, given this bleak outlook, you should reach the same conclusion as my parents and leave me for dead. When I'm dead, at least I have a life insurance policy that can be cashed in. When I'm dead, at least the expensive assets in my estate can be sold off and the proceeds distributed. Only my life stands in the way of unlocking all that cold hard cash.

And what quality, this life? With hardly any human connection, it's a miserable existence. I don't see my children every day (I have none), I don't see my girlfriend or wife (I haven't got one), I don't see my friends (I'm out of contact with those far-flung people), I don't see my family (the relationship has broken down). Without human connection, what do I exist for, except to pay rent, to service debts and to consume, consume, consume?

I know that it is only the bullshit of the system that keeps me down. The millstone of paying rent can be replaced by living rough on the streets. The misery of working a pointless job can be replaced by just doing random acts of kindness, making human contact instead of trying to thrust more crap down people's throats, trying to squeeze a drop more blood out of the stone.

I'm wrung dry. I've been playing the silly games for so long that it seems patently ridiculous to be asked to continue doing the same stupid shit that doesn't go anywhere. "Make poverty history" charities exclaim, and have exclaimed for many lifetimes... but yet the rich:poor divide is wider than ever. I can't switch my brain off. I can't turn a blind eye, in the self-centred interests of child-rearing, like you can.

The more I write, the more I see a thinly veiled jealousy. Of course, I would love to feel fulfilled by the unconditional love of my children, knowing that I have passed on my genes, and that I have a reason to get up in the morning and go to work: to put food on the table, and keep a dry roof over the heads of my family.

I've been trapped up a dead-end alleyway. I'm now somewhat forced to take the highest paid work that I can, in order to service debts that I incurred as a result of being let down by people who believe in abandoning their own family members and reneging on promises. I'm angry that I trusted them, instead of making commercial lending agreements to bridge the gap during my divorce.

Again, I can point to evidence to show who the real fools are. I made shrewd investments when my back was really hard against the wall, and made 1,200% return in just a few months. I had few options, because my time had been wasted on false promises, and so I had to bet big. I outsmarted some dumb, nasty people, and survived. My credentials gained even more credibility, whilst some other people proved to be an unreliable waste of the hot air expelled from their mouths.

But for some reason, I don't feel credible. I feel broken. I feel like a fraud. In fact, I'm far less of a fraud than many, because I'm so self-critical, even in the face of great evidence that I can create value wherever I go, no matter how shitty the circumstances.

There's a picture that my parents have painted of me: a drug addict who has wasted thousands on drugs and time wasting. In actual fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The total amount of money I've spent on drugs in my lifetime is less than a week's wages. Admittedly, I'm paid quite a lot of money, but it's still less than a week of my wages, in my entire life.

The other fact is that despite crippling mental health issues, I have still managed steady gainful employment. I've still been incredibly productive. Even in the very darkest days of problems with mental health and substance abuse, I was still valued by colleagues and bosses, well paid and contributing big sums of tax to the state.

What is the measure of a man? As I'm currently not in a contract, I feel worthless. I feel like I've 'gone soft' while I've been off work and that my skils and employability have been very badly damaged. I feel less of a person. I feel a great pressure to sell myself short, to undervalue myself, in the same way that other people undervalue me.

It's only because a select handful of people have gone above & beyond that I don't chuck the towel in and fuck the whole thing off.

The sun only shines in my life for short periods at the moment

Tags: #career #depression #bipolar #mentalhealth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cut the thread, and I'll fly

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

This is a story about feeling bad...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's to all the haters

Tags: #depression #mentalhealth #parents

This is a story about engaging your mouth before your brain...

Most of what I write is not stuff that is ordinarily shared by people. We bottle a lot of stuff up, and perhaps with good reason, but what happens if your general demeanour means you're a fairly open book?

Sure, it's true that some of my life experiences - mental health problems, drug abuse, homelessness, being arrested by the police - are not things that your ordinary middle-class professional will hopefully ever experience. It is therefore logical that I should keep all these things hush-hush. Pretend they never happened.

I don't think that privacy and anonymity is necessarily helpful, judging by the direction that life is headed for many people who I speak to. We know there is a mental health epidemic, with millions of people laid low with depression, anxiety and a huge spectrum of illnesses affecting the mind. If we don't talk about this, and share our experiences, we suffer in silence.

It seems to me as if Psychiatry has failed. Pills, powders and potions have failed to cure the ailments of our very souls. Something is wrong, broken, with society, and medicine hasn't yet come up with the cures... probably because we are treating symptoms, not root causes.

It's been a theory of mine that we were never evolved as a species to live in such close quarters with one another. Open plan offices and tiny cramped apartments in overcrowded cities certainly make me feel like a lemming: compelled to throw myself off a cliff. It really doesn't help that so many service sector jobs are so soul destroying. Moving paper or electronic money around for the mega wealthy is most of what we do in the rich nations. It's not growing carrots or building houses.

Sure, some of us are tortured artists and entertainers. Some of us create organic artisan jam, or dog's milk yoghurt, or run a creative digital agency where we wear unfashionable clothes and stupid facial hair and ride fixed-speed bicycles to work. These, most surely, are the last days of a dying civilisation.

They say you should never get too close to an iceberg, because they can flip over unexpectedly. You might be rather pleased to be part of the top 1% or even 5%, but while you're sticking up at the top, there's a huge mass under the water beneath. Sooner or later, the massive body of ice that's been held underwater rises up, and the top of the iceberg is plunged into the freezing sea.

The motto of Über is "everyone's private driver" but how can we all have a jet-set A-list celebrity lifestyle? There simply isn't enough landmass to create enough helipads for everybody to be flying around by private helicopter, chauffeur driven around the place, pampered and flattered at every turn. Technology can't make us all rich, famous and able to have an impossibly high standard of living, despite its promises.

With our MacBook Pro and our high-quality digital camera etc. we all feel like a writer, a photographer, an artist. Facebook gives us the impression that people love looking at photos of us, so we must be glamour models. Twitter turns us all into bloggers, preachers, with our followers... our congregation.

There was a time when you could quit your job and probably make a good living selling cup cakes, setting up a trendy delicatessen or being a life coach. I'm not sure if those people who followed their dreams and quit the rat race are happy, but there's certainly not any opportunity to do it today. Things are so competitive. How many cup cakes have you got to sell, in order to have a salary comparable with somebody who shuffles paper around their desk and tries to look busy and important in the office, but is just a tiny cog in a big wasteful machine that doesn't actually produce anything of tangible value.

I'm mortgaging my privacy. I'm selling my soul. By making public every little tiny detail about my private life, including my massive f**kups, I'm potentially headed up a one-way street. If I achieve any kind of infamy, then I'm basically screwed, in terms of re-entering the world of the wage-slave drones.

So, I've got the best part of 6,000 Twitter followers in the space of 6 months. Do you think that translates to pounds in my pocket? Do you think that taking the unprecedented step of writing nearly 200,000 words about a fairly spectacular life implosion, would change my life significantly? Well, the ship has sailed for anybody hoping to get an easy ride, I'm afraid.

I like what I've written. I would defend it, to some extent. It serves as a permanent public record of not only what I've been through in the past, but more importantly, there is a subtle recording of what I was going through during the whole time I've been blogging. You can read my emotions, my moods, the challenges, the stresses... in-between the lines of what's written down.

I'm starting to be accused of being self-indulgent, self-absorbed, but why shouldn't I have this? Why shouldn't I be allowed to scream and wail and tantrum a bit, if I had to be the sensible grey-suited career guy, with the good job and an impressive CV, who had the mortgage and saved money for a rainy day and got married and did everything by the f**king book like I was supposed to. I deferred gratification like a son of a bitch, and there was no f**king pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The cake is a lie.

How many people are discontented? How many people are struggling? Not only struggling with stress and poverty and unpleasant things happening in their lives, but also struggling with the injustice of things, the pointlessness of some make-work wanky job that's completely useless to humanity. Or perhaps the work they can get is just so completely degrading and poorly paid it's not even worth working at all. You might as well just get off your head on drugs and alcohol and dribble while you play computer games or watch terrible trashy TV.

How many kids are getting smashed out of their skulls on cannabis, skunk and legal high smoking blends? How many kids are consuming dangerous amounts of cheap alcohol, simply to become highly intoxicated? What is it about life that these kids want to escape? Why aren't they sharing the anguish, the inner turmoil? Why do they retreat inwards, under the heavy sedation of intoxicating drugs and alcohol?

Now Microsoft and Facebook are hitting headlines, saying they're working on chat bots. The iPhone has Siri, which is supposed to be a kind of artificially intelligent digital assistant, that can understand what you ask it to do, and try and help you. People are delighted when it turns out that you can ask Siri to beatbox, and it will kinda do it, in a weird kind of way.

Why would we be wasting our time talking to computers, when we could be talking to each other? I wrote before about us sharing 21% less on Facebook, in the space of a year. Do we not keenly feel the loss of that connection with real people, who can get in contact and try to make us feel less alone with our problems and our existential crises?

No person is an island, and the isolating existence of interacting more with apps and websites and software in general, instead of with each other is a worrying trend. Ok, so I'm bucking that by providing a veritable brain dump of sharing, which is much akin to verbal diarrhoea, but at least it's putting stuff out there, where there's a chance I can get some help from my friends.

There's obviously a bystander effect, where nobody knows quite what to do when somebody starts having a public meltdown. People just aren't supposed to act like this. Where is my stoicism? Where is my stiff upper lip? Where is my shame? Where is my embarrassment and my intense desire for total privacy?

Nobody wants to be first, and people also worry that they're going to end up feeling responsible. Everybody feels they're already struggling so much to keep their own shit together, that anybody else bleating on about their own struggles should shut the hell up. Look after number one and keep yourself to yourself. Don't you think that could be the root cause of this horrible isolated existence that causes so much damage to our happiness, our sense of wellbeing, our mental health... leading to depression, stress, anxiety, breakdowns, self harm and suicides?

We're in such a hurry to label, to judge, to jump to conclusions. We like to bracket people and problems as quickly as we can. Somebody becomes known as a drama queen, or we tire of their depressed demeanour, the dark clouds that follow them around. We start to stop inviting the killjoy out, or generally interacting with them. Let them wallow in self-pity, right? I'm sure social services or somebody from a government service will step in before they do something stupid. It's somebody else's job. Not my problem. I've got enough going on with my own stressful, meaningless, empty, unfulfilling life that I hate and I'm depressed about.

I'm just typing now. The taps are open and the words are flooding out. I have relaxed my anal sphincter and a torrent of liquid brown verbal diarrhoea is jetting out of my arse and into the toilet bowl of the internet, and nobody gives a shit, because we are all sinking with shit up to our necks. There is a whole World Wide Web of shit out there, and we're all just pumping out this useless effluent into the cesspool of human emotional pain.

Do you think I'm going to look back on this frantic period of writing and recoil with horror when I read it back? I certainly expect that I will be cupping my face in my hands, saying to myself "what the fuck was I thinking?" but it must be about as close as it's possible to get to knowing what somebody's thinking, reading this shite.

I thought to myself that I won't hold back, I won't censor, edit or filter, because I can always tear this down with a click of the mouse. A stroke of the keyboard, and all this is gone and I can deny all knowledge that it ever existed. It's the digital photo that you deleted off your camera or smartphone... those shameful ones and zeros are gone forever.

But you know what? I've not felt the urge to take anything down. I've not felt the pangs of regret at sharing stuff that makes me look really bad. I've given the world everything it needs to pigeon-hole me, to categorise me, to bracket me, to judge me, to dismiss me with a label or an over-simplification of my entire existence.

That's what we want, isn't it? Computer credit scores, and computerised personality profiling, and a computer simulation of a real person, that responds in a predictable and easy to understand way. We don't want real lives, with all their messiness and unfathomable complexity. We don't want to get to know each other, but have to live with the fact that we still don't really know each other. We don't even know ourselves, even if you're an irritatingly self-absorbed little prick like I am, who self indulgently wallows in a world of introspection and deep self-examination.

Show me some more videos of funny cats. Distract me from the banality of my existence. Please don't remind me of the humanity that my fellow Earth residents possess or incite any kind of sympathetic or empathetic response in me. I'm quite wrapped up in my own world of pain and disappointment, boredom and stress. I want to pretend like technology and the advancement of civilisation is going to wave its magic wand and even though I'm fornicating with a person I'm nearly totally revulsed by the more I get to know them, in a filthy home in an overcrowded town, on a hopelessly poisoned planet, everything will be fucking rosy for the screaming brats that end up getting spawned.

What the hell is this anyway? This is what happens when the filter gets switched off. This is my life, with no filter.

I think I was born with no filter.

Look: I bought new socks. I'm sharing the private details of my socks life. Every time I have socks, I'm going to post it up on social media. Socks is supposed to be a taboo subject. Always practice safe socks.

Tags: #privacy #depression #mentalhealth #suicide #career #socialmedia