This is a story about putting down roots...

It looks like the smartest short-term decision for me right now is to go back to London. Third time lucky, maybe.

London was amazing the first time, so I guess third time lucky is not really accurate.

London was pretty amazing when I went back, but my damn acrimonious divorce and evil ex-wife conspired to disrupt and destroy my chances of re-establishing myself back in the capital. I'd reconnected with lots of old friends, incorporated a company and had started doing business. The last thing I needed was the distraction of the divorce, so I went and sold my house to a cash buyer - I had the sale organised within a few hours, and should have completed with cash in the bank in about 6 weeks.... except my evil ex-wife sabotaged the whole thing and put it back on the market with the worst estate agent she could find, and accepted an offer - for the same amount as I'd already agreed with the cash buyer - from some clueless idiots who were part of some horrible chain.

Said same evil ex-wife then tried to screw me over with the division of the house sale proceeds, which was a more than fair and reasonable 50:50 split. The contracts had been exchanged and the deposit had been paid. I was quite happy to have us both get sued if she wanted to drag things on any longer... she'd already delayed everything by 3 or 4 months. My final signature was needed for completion and if I didn't give it, we'd have breached our contract. So, I didn't give it until I had it in writing that she'd take her 50% and let me get the hell on with my life. She's an idiot, because I'd have gladly paid more if she'd just let me get on with rebuilding my life in London.

So, that changed the complexion of my second jaunt back to the capital completely. Gone was the momentum of my new business. Gone was my new girlfriend. Gone was a holiday I'd been planning on treating myself to. Gone was every bit of optimism and energy, wasted on worrying about cashflow and legal wranglings with one of the most thoroughly unpleasant individuals I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with.

I never quite caught up. You need a lot of money behind you if you're going to get ahead in London. If you haven't got the working capital - the comfortable financial cushion - you'll never be able to handle the challenges of the city AND fret about money.

Out of pride and stubbornness, I tried and failed and tried and failed again. I kept almost but not quite reaching the point where I was financially comfortable, only for the stress and effort of it all to finally scupper me, plus some bad luck too. I lost a contract simply because I refused to kiss the arse of one guy who thought he was indispensable. They terminated my contract, and then the guy who did it got the sack for getting rid of me. Another time, I was just too exhausted from living in a hostel while working on one of the most demanding projects - and indeed important projects - I've ever worked on in my life. I got myself out of the hostel and into my own apartment, but the stress and exhaustion of it made me very unwell. I tried to get myself sacked while I was on holiday in San Francisco, so I could stay for longer, but they didn't take the bait - I got sacked as soon as I walked back into the office, which I knew I would.

I took a shitty contract in a shitty part of Greater London. That was awful, but I did it out of necessity.

Finally, I got a great contract, great team, great project, great company... then my kidneys failed and I was on emergency dialysis on a high dependency ward for weeks. DVT in my leg. Nerve damage. Unbelievable pain.

That was me done for. Broke. Game over. I was lucky to escape bankruptcy.

Now, I've had a little taste of small town provincial life, and it's OK. I liked it when I could drive to work and walk to my girlfriend's house. I liked it when my income was 20 times as much as my rent, and I was living like a king... or at least I'd have been able to if the gravy train had continued to run on it's scheduled timetable.

There's no opportunities here. It's a small place. I was lucky to have a few months when I had it all, but I always knew that when it came to an end, there wouldn't be anything else here for me that's comparable.

No girlfriend. No job.

Gone off the place a bit.

I had a look at what London has to offer and I'll be increasing my already obscene income by 50% if I go back there. Make hay while the sun shines. Get rich quick, or die trying. The number of jobs I'd be a perfect match for was quite staggering... so reassuring to know that I've got the right skills that still command such high remuneration.

There's nothing round here. At least, nothing for somebody who's trying to get ahead. I'm sick of being behind. I'm sick of playing catch-up.

If I go back to London and keep this Welsh seaside town as my primary residence, I can live on expenses - my rent, meals, travel... all that will be reducing my tax bill as well as giving me a lovely lifestyle. No more shitty AirBnBs and pot noodles. I can have my own little central London apartment and eat takeaway every night. I can take black cabs everywhere and even reclaim the expenses of having my suits dry cleaned, shirts laundered and shoes shone. What the hell am I doing, having to cook, clean and do laundry, in this sleepy seaside town where I don't know anybody except for my ex-girlfriend and some of her friends, who all hate me.

I can go on Tinder and there will be gazillions of drop-dead gorgeous highly educated well travelled professional career women, who are pretty up-front about what they want. Tinder in this Welsh seaside town has 15 identical looking Snapchat filter photos of women who look like they've put make up on with a trowel and can't string a sentence together, and then that's it - you've swiped them all left, and there's no more to swipe.

I shouldn't do the place down, because it makes sense if you've got your wife & kids sorted and mortgage paid off, plus a big fat wedge of cash in the bank, but it makes no sense at all for me to be here, single and still struggling to get back to a position of financial security.

So, at some point I'm going to push the button and the calls will come flooding in and the contract negotiations will start, and before I know it I'll be on the train back to London, except I'm not slumming it this time.

When I sign on the dotted line for my third attempt at making things work in London, I'll be going to live in a serviced apartment, and I'll be living there for the duration of the contract. I've got my little seaside retreat - my second home - where I can leave most of my stuff, but I'll also have a permanent base in the capital, where I can leave my suits and shirts and smart shoes and everything else I need midweek.

If I hesitate, I'll just burn through all the cash I've managed to tuck away during the last 6 months of nonstop hard work. If I hesitate, I'll lose all the ground I've gained. If I hesitate, I'll lose momentum. If I hesitate, self-doubt will creep in and I'll dither and dawdle.

I might be sick of moving, but as long as I'm able to keep on sending my invoices every month, and every month my net worth moves rapidly from the negative to the positive, there's a tiny glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. I might be sick of proving myself over and over and over again, and having the stress of yet more reference checks, security vetting, credit checks and criminal records checks, but in London if one contract doesn't work out, there are literally hundreds of others. If one relationship doesn't work out, the London is literally jam-packed with mind-blowingly beautiful intelligent women who have dedicated themselves to their careers, and are making themselves known to be single via the Tinder app.

I have friends in London. I know my way around. There's a drinking/socialising culture, instead of the "going home to the wife and kids" culture of the provinces. What am I doing here in this place where I suddenly feel so out of place?

In the blink of an eye, I'll be available again - back on the market.

In 2 or 3 weeks, I'll be meeting my new team and learning about my new project; my next opportunity.

It's actually quite exciting. It's a fresh start in a place I already know and love. It's another opportunity to stick two fingers up at my ex-wife for ruining my chance to have a clean break and rebuild my life back in London. It's another roll of the dice - maybe I'll be lucky this time and I'll prove I can make it work. I've certainly tipped the odds massively in my favour.

I'm sick at the moment, of course. My mania must be plain as day to anybody who has any dealings with me. My colleagues kindly and patiently indulge my endless stream of ideas and words, delivered so fast they can't keep up, but it's good timing: things are late and everybody's stressed. To the uneducated eye, it just looks like I care a lot about the end of the project, as opposed to being in a fully-blown manic episode in the middle of an office full of mild-mannered civil servants, who normally move at glacial speed, as is the way of the public sector.

I'm sick, but I haven't pissed anybody off or burnt any bridges yet. I'm sick, but I do remember to shut up and try to act normal once in a while. I'm sick, but I obviously made enough of a good impression that I'm being given the benefit of the doubt.

I'm sick and I'm sick of moving, but move I must. I must move and I must maintain momentum.

Tags: #london #career #divorce #relationships #sex #money #debt #wales #bipolar

This is a story about precious objects...

I gave my sister the second Macbook I ever bought, which was the first model with the aluminium case. However, it was also the one where the batteries always expanded and busted the trackpad when it got old. I got it fixed, but never got round to giving it back to my sister.

I had a Macbook Air, which was wonderful, but then I went through a phase of breaking it. One time it cost me virtually the price of a [working] second hand one to fix. Once it broke, so I left it gathering dust for a year or so, and then it came back to life.

I can't wait a year to see if my main mac comes back to life. Annoyingly, I only back up SUPER important stuff, so I'll be hunting through email inboxes or just damn well having to live without some of the data, until it can be recovered.

I'm back on the Mac Pro my friend brought me back from New York, saving me hundreds of pounds. It has an "enter" key rather than a "return" key, and no sign of the UK Sterling or Euro currency marks. I like that I can type a # (what Americans call pound) without having to use a weird keystroke.

Having this old mac has saved me from being laptopless while I get mine fixed, which could really have badly screwed up my week (more than it is already) and delay me applying for contracts in London, of which there are loads and they're really good ones too, so I'd better get my CV updated... see if I can secure something before my last day at the current place.

Tonight and tomorrow are going to be awful; this week is going to be awful. I've made things harder for myself than I needed to, I've seen how much work there is in London, and how much extra they'll pay now I've added a few skills to my repertoire, and it's great news: it makes me really hopeful that I can go to London, live comfortably and be able to continue to replenish the war chest. It'll be so much better to not have the constant strass and anxiety about cashflow.

If I get this old laptop out at an interview, it might raise a few eyebrows, but it does the job and it's got retro chic.

Am gutted about my Macbook, but I do have home insurance which will hopefully pay for the repair.

All in all, I've managed to make a right mess of the weekend, after a relatively uneventful Friday night, and I've really made a lot of work and suffering for myself,  as well as the risk of going into the office when in a state. Should've brought the work laptops home on Friday, but I was feeling a helluva lot better than I was on Wednesday... I'm a fucking liability.

Maybe the insurance gods will be kind and I can get a shiny new toy.

Tags: #computing #career

This is a story about being unhinged...

A highly paid civil servant decided to doodle this cock onto a poster which was affixed to the toilet door, at a government agency which is responsible for the collection of £6bn in taxes per annum. You'd have thought that the kind of people who clear the stringent security vetting wouldn't be the types to do graffiti in toilets, especially the toilets at the highly secure office.

There's nothing in writing yet, but I'm getting the shove... services no longer required. Project delivered, happy client, but there isn't another project at the moment, and I'm quite expensive to have sitting around doing nothing, although the banks I've worked for have never seemed to care much about that.

It's the worst-case scenario. Contract has finished early and no extension. Nothing that's very appealing in the local area; not a lot of choice... in fact, pretty much just one contract I could apply for, which I'm pretty sure I'd hate.

If I go on my holiday instead of working, I'll lose £3,000 of potential income. That's a helluva expensive holiday, when I could just write off the £600 it cost me for the flights and accommodation. Should I work that week, and use the extra money to go on a holiday which'd be much more suitable for me now I'm single? Should I work that week and simply go on a better holiday, to cheer myself up? Should I work that week and be sensible, and save the money, given that I'm about to lose my income?

What have I got now? No girlfriend. My car is about to be declared unroadworthy. No job. I've only got 2 friends in the local area, and one of them I haven't seen for 6 months and the other I've only met twice. All my money is earmarked for debts, rent and bills. I have no surplus which I can use to have an unplanned break from work - I need another contract.

Wind back to September 9th 2017 when I tried to kill myself. Why did I go through that hospital treatment to save my life and restore me to physical health? Why did I go through that psychiatric treatment, to make me safe to release from hospital? Why did I go though the stress of moving to yet another city where I don't know anybody? Why did I work my arse off and have the misery of living out of a suitcase, staying in a different AirBnB every week? Why did I work my arse off getting security vetted and landing a cushy public sector contract? Why did I spend every spare penny I had getting a car and an apartment? Why did I wine and dine and generally woo and wow a girlfriend? Why did I bother? Why did I think that I'd get anywhere; that I'd make any progress; that I'd ever be able to get ahead in life? Why did I think I'd ever be happy; content?

I'm not sure if I'm a danger to myself, others or both. I'm unhinged. I'm mad. I'm deranged, demented and disturbed. What the hell am I going to do? How the hell am I going to react? Who or what am I going to blame?

Desperate people who believe they have nothing to live for - that their lives are not worth living - are dangerous, aren't they? Can you think of anything more dangerous than somebody who's got nothing to lose?

Fear of consequences is the thing that keeps our behaviour 'in check'. What possible consequence could be used to threaten me or control my behaviour? Why on earth should I behave myself? What reason have I got to give a damn about consequences? I've got nothing to lose.

I've played by society's rules and it's gotten me nowhere because the game is rigged. I've conformed and complied and it's been to my detriment, because there are so many who lie and cheat and break the rules. I had hope and I had things that I didn't want to lose, but now I don't. That's a dangerous situation. That makes me a dangerous person.

I'm liberated. Too liberated. Too liberated for society to tolerate... depending on my completely unpredictable behaviour.

Should I be locked up?

Tags: #suicide #career

This is a story about premonitions...

All I needed was a run of good luck... a couple of contract extensions, or maybe two long contracts. My client in London loved me and wanted to keep me, but I hated working on my own in that office, with the rest of my team in Warsaw. Something local came up... 2 years of project work supposedly. It was a gift from the gods. It only had to last until November and I'd have been home free: debts cleared and with a healthy financial cushion again, living a very comfortable lifestyle and able to reduce my hours to part-time or take a lower-paid but more rewarding job; a more secure and stable job; a more sustainable job.

I was getting nervous. Taking a holiday before you've secured a long contract extension is always risky and I was reluctant to lose the income too. I was getting the ever-growing feeling that my luck was running out. One project was getting close to completion and there didn't seem to be another one in the pipeline.

"Would I consider staying, but getting paid less than half?" came a question, which was actually more flattering than it sounds: there would be job security and other perks. The sums just don't add up though. I can't afford to take that kind of income hit until I've cleared my debts and built up a decent pot of savings.

Anything could happen. Theoretically, I've got two more months before I need ink dry on a contract extension or a new contract, but in practice I'm only ever two weeks away from being shown the door. Two weeks to find something new. Two weeks to answer the question: "what next?".

What is next?

Do I go back to London, where there's heaps of opportunities? Do I find another coastal town or city where I can reproduce my enviable lifestyle of living close to the beach? Do I go back to the Bournemouth/Poole area, where I have many old friends who I could reconnect with? Do I cast my net wider? Why not try somewhere I've never been before? What about Nottingham? What about Cambridge? What about Bristol?

I could do nothing. I could sit and wait. I've got the skills and somebody local is going to need them sooner rather than later.

I might be worrying about nothing. I've impressed the right people. I've proven my worth. Perhaps I'll be the lucky one. Perhaps I'll be kept around, because I'm a handy guy to have around. Certainly my client in London was quite happy to pay me to sit and do nothing, just in case something came up: services retained, if you like.

Nothing makes sense to me. Why am I here? What am I doing? What do I want? Where should I go? What should I look for? What makes me happy? What do I need?

Local girlfriend, local job, nice apartment, drive to work, walk to the beach, yacht in the marina, amazing place to kitesurf just down the road... then a breakup and the job's under threat. It's not a big place where I live. There aren't a lot of different organisations to work for. It's not like the Square Mile and Canary Wharf where you just keep moving from bank to bank, going round and round, going back to where you've been in the past: a never-ending stream of projects that keep the cash flowing.

Play it cool. Don't catastrophise. I haven't actually had any bad news yet. It's all rumours.

Sit tight. Be cool.

But, what the hell? Why am I here? What the hell am I doing? What the hell would I do in the worst case scenario?

I didn't know this was going to happen, but it was my biggest worry. Everything can fall to bits in the blink of an eye. Dream shattered. Plans demolished. Hope destroyed.

Let's just say I had a premonition.

Tags: #career

This is a story about warning signs...

One of the reasons why I write every day - and publish publicly - is because it's a healthy habit: I do it when I'm well, or at least not dreadfully unwell. One of the reasons I publish every day is because it gives a lot of clues about my state of mind, and therefore informs the reader about the risks to my life.

For example, I published every single day - without fail - while I was working in London, because I was on the brink of suicide nearly every day. More often than not, if I stop blogging, I'm either dead or dying. If you look at the previous blog posts leading up to the days I stopped blogging, then you'll see plain as day all the warning signs.

The problem is, people get used to hearing a struggling person casually saying "I wish I was dead" and they think it's part of their personality; they think that they're "crying wolf". Trouble is, many of those people will eventually kill themselves, or at least attempt to. There's a lot of bullshit about "attention seeking" and not having to worry about the ones who are talking about it: "it's the quiet ones you've got to worry about". Bullshit bullshit bullshit. There's a lot of bullshit - especially in the medical community - which equates to "I don't think you're really going to do it. Go on! Do it! Prove it! I call your bluff!".

The net result is dead people. Lots and lots of dead people. A man kills himself every 2 hours in the UK. When you visit a doctor and the number one thing that's going to kill you is suicide, and the doctor has the opinion that you're "probably not" going to kill yourself, they're arrogantly gambling with your life.

I get it. It's boring hearing about how awful people's lives are. I get it... it gets REALLY BORING waiting for a suicidal person to finally do it. DO IT ALREADY. I'M BORED OF WAITING. I'VE HEARD YOU SAY YOU WANT TO KILL YOURSELF SO OFTEN, SO I WANT YOU TO DIE SO I DON'T HAVE TO HEAR IT ANYMORE.

Thus, we arrive at the world's longest suicide note. 900,000 words and counting.

Nobody can say "I didn't know" or "we'd have done something if we knew" or "we don't understand".

I've documented in exquisite and unflinching detail, every single aspect of what makes me suicidal.

The photo above is taken using the night-vision mode of my smartphone. The photo is taken through the crack at the bottom of my door. You can see my bike in the hallway, but other than that the image is pretty hard to discern. This is a snapshot of psychosis - I was using the night-vision mode on my smartphone to 'peek' outside my bedroom and look into the rest of my empty apartment, but the psychosis was telling my that my apartment wasn't empty. I was looking for intruders: the shadow people.

My mental illness started as common-or-garden variety depression, meaning that I was planning to kill myself by sellotaping a bag full of pure nitrogen over my head, and asphyxiating. I bought the canisters of nitrogen gas. I bought the duct tape. I found an airtight bag big enough to envelope my head, and leave enough space so I could breathe in the nitrogen. Nitrogen is not a poisonous gas, but it's inert... if you breathe pure nitrogen, you're not breathing any oxygen, and you'll quickly pass out and die.

I bought potassium cyanide. I even put a picture of the potassium cyanide that I'd bought on Facebook and told people what it was and what I planned to do with it. The most notable reply I got was from a 'friend' who was angry that I had it in my house when he brought his kid over to visit... which I did not. It was triple sealed in airtight vacuum packaging, then placed in a hazardous chemical containment jar, then finally it was placed in a locked steel strongbox in my summerhouse - nearly 100m away from the house. His kid must be pretty special to be able to pick two locks, locate the container and open the packaging in order to ingest the deadly chemical. That was the most notable reply. THAT WAS THE MOST NOTABLE REPLY - anger that somebody's child might have died if they had the ability to time-travel and pick locks.

So... nobody gives much of a fuck.

I was immediately discharged as soon as I came out of my coma and my kidneys started working again, following my attempted suicide in Manchester, when I'd ingested enough tramadol to kill an elephant. They didn't transfer me to a psych ward. They didn't put me in a crisis house. They didn't do anything - they just discharged me, whereupon I had to go back to the apartment where I'd tried to kill myself, with its door hanging off its hinges because the emergency services had to kick it down to save me. The first thing I said to the ITU doctor when I came round was "I'm upset that I'm alive. I wanted to die. I told you not to treat me; not resuscitate me. I still want to die". What the actual fuck? Do the capitalists want to exploit me so badly that they'll keep me alive against my will?

There's an 'unsound mind' argument, but my mind is free from drink, drugs, medication and other mind-altering substances. My brain is working the way nature intended through millions of years of evolution. MY BRAIN IS FUCKING WORKING. If I'm depressed, it's because of depressing bullshit jobs, war, famine, climate change, inequality, brutality, bullying, people who don't give a fuck whether you live or die, and people who want you to stay alive so they can exploit you until the day you die of old age and exhaustion. My mind is perfectly sound. I'm having a sane reaction to an insane world.

If I'm not blogging, you should worry.

If I stop blogging, worry.

In a perfect world, I'd tell this fucked up world to fuck off and I'd become an artist. I'd quit my god-awful boring unchallenging piss-easy pointless bullshit job, and I'd go do something creative. I'd be a 'bum'. I'd be a 'loser'. I'd reject 'civilised' society and go have some damn fun. 21+ years in the rat-race full time, and 13+ years in full-time 'education' which was just bullying and absolute bullshit box-ticking for the sake of school league tables. I don't give two fucks about pieces of paper to wave around - they prove nothing - and I don't give two fucks about inflated job titles for work that is ABSOLUTELY USELESS. Take a long hard look at yourself - you're all talk and no action; you produce nothing; your job is completely and utterly useless; you're very busy doing NOTHING.

However I kill myself - quickly by jumping off a tall building, or slowly with drugs and alcohol - it's the same end result. We all die in the end anyway, so I really don't see the point in prolonging the suffering. Cut to the chase. Jump to the end. Skip the awful bit, with the commuting and the BORING BORING BORING bullshit made-up pointless jobs.

Yes, at one point I had lots of lovely holidays and lots of friends, plus lots of material trimmings like sports cars, yachts, speedboats, hot tubs, summer houses, a house, a garden, a cat... then I said to myself "but I'm still depressed that my job is utter bullshit which doesn't do anything of any use for anybody". So I became an electrician. I can proudly say that lots and lots of families have lights, and power sockets, and electric ovens, and electric hobs, and electric showers, and power to their hot tubs, and power to their sheds and outbuildings, and power to their electric gates and power to a million and one other things. Work that I did is responsible for improving the lives of all the tons and tons of families for whom I installed the electrics in their homes. Trouble is 1) people begrudge paying tradesmen, expecting them to work for minimum wage, 2) the work destroys your health, because there's so much brick dust, asbestos etc, and 3) the responsibility for doing a safe installation to safeguard the lives of everybody who will ever be in those houses, is not reflected in the wage or the health damage aspect.

Pushing paper around my desk and pretending to look busy carries zero risk that a mistake of mine might kill somebody, but yet I get paid 5 or 6 times more money... but I'm intolerably bored.

I might as well be an artist. At least with the creative arts, you're paid fuck all but it's lots of fun, intellectually stimulating, free from responsibility, and nobody gets electrocuted to death if you make a tiny mistake... in fact, can you even make a mistake as an artist?

This blog is an artwork; it's a piece of evolving art - it's durational to use the wanky arty term.

But, when the art stops my heart stops.

If I stop blogging, you should worry about me.

Tags: #writing #art #suicide #psychosis #depression #career

This is a story about disguise...

Far sooner than I expected, I've reached a point where at least one work colleague has found my blog and I'm also facing the possibility that I might have to undergo further security vetting, which may reveal the double-life that I lead.

I don't really lead a double-life, because my name is plastered all over the pages of the internet and I make no attempt to hide my identity. Nobody asked me about my mental health. Nobody asked me any questions about my rather turbulent ride that brought me to this point. I haven't told any lies, or even been economical with the truth. The truth is that nobody's really cared about what's gone on in my personal life, because I always do a good job and deliver high quality work on time.

I am facing a bit of a difficult decision. I might have to go through a whole load more gatekeepers and submit myself to a load of horrible scrutiny, in order to keep progressing with my career, and to get a bit of security and stability in my life.

I'm loath to delete my Twitter and Facebook accounts and take down my blog, because then I lose one of the most important parts of my life - my digital identity and my personal brand, which I've cultivated for the purpose of what, I don't know... but it's extremely good for staying afloat when my mood has been unstable and my life has been smashed to bits; I've been through some very rough times. Who would I be without all the people who I can stay in contact with via my blog and social media? Who would I be if I just had my job and nothing else? I'd have nothing to fall back on if my day job wasn't going well, for whatever reason.

I work a full day in the office, and then I come home and write. I suppose you'd say that writing is my second job, but in fact I put far more effort and energy into my writing than I do in my day job. I'm not lazy or idle in the office, you have to understand, but it requires so little brain power and creativity. I think it'd drive me nuts to not have a creative outlet which I can plough all my excess effort into.

Things are going well at work. I've been well received by my colleagues and the bosses are pleased; the client is happy. The projects I'm working on are going well and I'm making a useful contribution - I'm an asset to the team.

It seems dumb to take a chance. Surely it's insanity to risk getting sacked, by writing candidly about my mental health problems, and about the difficulties I've had during the last few years. To risk my livelihood; my income - that's nuts, right?

It was too exhausting to live a lie. I tried to cover up the fact that my mood fluctuates up and down. To try to pretend like I'm a perfect corporate drone who can plod along and be a steady eddie was making me sick. Far too much effort was expended by me, trying to shoehorn myself into a job that was made for an unambitious mediocre plodder, who can get up early and go sit at a desk achieving precisely nothing for 45+ years, until they retire. Yes, it's arrogant and primadonna-esque to presume that I'm capable of doing and achieving anything noteworthy, but it doesn't suit my personality at all to get some dog-shit job and then cling onto it with my fingernails for over 4 decades, doing very little. It makes me sick, being held back and thwarted by the plodders. I'm not made for plodding.

Of course, boredom is profitable and it's healthy for me to pace myself. I've found a happy medium at the moment where I work hard in the office, but I leave early every day and I don't take things too seriously - I'm not getting too absorbed in my work. I work to live, not live to work, and that's healthier.

So, I could tear down my digital identity, because it's soon going to become career limiting. Sooner or later somebody's going to take me to one side and say "errr... about your blog...". I'm not going to back down though, because I'm not doing anything wrong - I'm not breaching my code of conduct, acting unprofessionally, talking about anything confidential, risking security, privacy or anything else. All I'm doing is writing truthfully, openly, honestly, transparently and candidly about who I really am about what makes me tick.

It'd be a shame if who I am became career limiting, because I really can do my job, and I can do it really well. I hate that we're asked to pretend to be somebody that we're not, just to conform and earn money and get ahead in our careers. I hate that organisations have that power over us.

Tags: #career #privacy #socialmedia #writing

This is a story about neuroplasticity...

Who even am I any more? Am I the same person my friends knew 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago? Have I changed beyond all recognition?

I suppose change is not important if you're happy with who you are in the present day. I wonder about who I've become. I'm very isolated and I'm so fixated on earning enough money to dig myself out of the hole I got in, that I'm not really making a lot of time for socialising or reconnecting with old friends. I don't speak to anybody on the phone. I don't speak to anybody via email. I only speak to a tiny handful of people via text message. I've got no local social network. There's hardly anybody I'm in regular contact with.

I had a very clear plan for a long time - get out of an abusive relationship, move to London and resume my career in The City. Moving, selling the house and divorce were horribly sabotaged by my ex and made unbearably awful, which derailed me. I ended up stuck in a never-ending nightmare cycle of getting sick, ending up in hospital, recovering, starting to get my life together, and then it all falling to pieces over and over again. I had one good shot at escaping from her, but she ruined it; she ruined me; she ruined my chance.

I woke up in hospital all on my own far more times than I care to remember. I was cut adrift. Nobody came to see me.

Then, a little over a year ago, one of my lovely ex-girlfriends organised a load of support for me when I was in hospital. I had LOTS of visitors and brilliant messages of support. That was amazing. That made such a big difference. That was a turning point.

Recovery is non-linear, and getting my life back on track back in London was impossibly hard. I needed to leave London, which meant a breakup with the aforementioned lovely ex-girlfriend. Nothing about that breakup was done right by me. Nothing about the situation was good. It was a big fat mess. Things got worse before they got better. Things got A LOT worse.

Between the seizures and the coma, I think that my latest suicide attempt reset my brain. I think all those seizures were like a kind of intensive Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT) for me. My life certainly started to improve versus the destructive cycle I had been caught in while living in London. When I tried to kill myself, I was hopelessly trapped. My suicide attempt broke me free from something I could never have escaped otherwise.

It's strange: two breakups and a suicide attempt led me to a better life, inadvertently. Through that destruction has come new life and more prosperity; hope.

I'm completing my 21st consecutive month without a proper holiday, and I'm exhausted and stressed, but I get up every morning and I go to work. Whatever's going on with my mental health, I'm very functional. I'm in a healthy happy relationship. I'm getting on well with my colleagues. I'm staying on top of my adult responsibilities - paying my rent & bills, keeping my car road legal, washing, cleaning, laundry, shopping, cooking and all the other stuff that caused me unbearable anxiety and difficulties last year.

I might be somebody completely different, but I'm still somebody. My personality might have completely changed, but I'm still me... just not the me I was in the past. If my work colleagues like me and my girlfriend likes me, and I'm a functional member of society, then what's the problem with me?

I'm paranoid that mental health problems are going to rear their ugly head, but it's been almost 8 months without incident. I don't want to get complacent, but that's a long time to be unmedicated as well as dealing with the horrendous stress of losing your home, losing your job, almost going bankrupt, moving house, moving city, starting two new jobs and everything else to boot. Looking at the evidence, I'd say that I'm one of the most mentally strong and stable people you're ever likely to meet, as opposed to an emotionally unstable lunatic, which you might wrongly presume from some of the stuff that happened before.

I think the lesson is that the brain is a homeostatic organ that's evolved to rapidly adapt to the ever-changing environment. If you trap me in to dreadful circumstances, I'm going to have a dreadful reaction - that's logical and reasonable; that's rational... a sane reaction to an insane world.

I do have my PTSD flashbacks - described as "Tourette's-like" by a close friend - and I do have to be extremely careful with my sleep, diet, stress levels and myriad other things, but my mental health problems are a risk not my destiny.

If I can just keep plodding through life, things will improve. Time is the biggest healer, giving my brain time to adapt.

Tags: #mentalhealth #ptsd #suicide #homeless #career

This is a story about tedium...

I left work at 4:15pm. I got home at 4:30pm. I'm lying on the sofa writing my blog at 4:45pm, having gotten changed out of my work clothes, fixed myself a drink and a snack and opened my post. This is the life, surely?

Night owls would hate my job. I aim to be at my desk at 7:45am.

Anyone who's a people person would hate my job. I can spend days, weeks and even months without having any human interaction - if the specification is clear, I can just sit down and churn out software without speaking to a single soul.

There is absolutely no room for creativity in my job. If you're a creative person, you'd hate my job. There's no room for artistic expression or artsy-fartsy waffling in what I do - it's binary. Right answer; wrong answer - nothing in-between. No shades of grey.

If you like being busy and you like variety; stimulation, then you'd hate my job. I've been solving the same few problems over and over and over again for the whole of my 21-year career. I already mastered all the skills I needed to do my job well before I started my career. In fact, I already mastered most of the skills I needed to do my job before I learned them in formal education.

If you want to work doing something you're passionate about, you'd hate my job. The kinds of things I'm asked to do will achieve nothing. Mostly, my clients want me to write systems that are just like their other systems, which have already demonstrably failed to effect any meaningful improvement to the human condition.

I like* money though. Money is good*. Money is useful*.

If you want money and you want it fast, you should definitely get the most boring job imaginable. Banking is boring. Accountancy is boring. IT is boring. Get a boring job and money will quickly follow. Where there's boredom there's money.

So, I've spent most of the day trying not to fall asleep at my desk, and I've been bored, but it's been a profitable day. There aren't many jobs where you can earn so much doing nothing.

I don't love my job but I don't hate it. It's a good job. I'm lucky to be able to earn money being bored.

Boredom sucks, but it's profitable. I'm paid very well to be bored.

Tags: #career

* - money is actually evil and completely useless. We should return to barter.

This is a story about working...

I want to be busy. I want to have the distraction of being engrossed in a project. I want to feel like I have a purpose and I'm working towards a goal. I want to feel like hard work will get me to the end result quicker. I want to feel like there's a relationship between the effort I put in during my waking hours and the net result. The rewards should feel commensurate with the energy expended.

I'm writing less and that's because I'm making some progress. In the absence of another outlet for my creativity, all my pent-up energy gets poured into writing. In the absence of another more productive distraction, I write a lot.

I've still got a lot to say but I don't feel the pressing need to write about anything at the moment. I have a huge list of blog post titles that I could use to get me started, but I'm actually feeling fairly content to have a period of lower output. I expect that if something upsets me I'll be pouring my heart and soul out, but I'm feeling alright at the moment.

Work is going alright. I'm in the process of renting an apartment. My cashflow is OK at the moment. Things are going OK with my girlfriend. I'm seeing friends and doing activities. My life's generally a lot healthier and happier than it was a few weeks ago.

Writing doesn't feel like it's very energy-consuming, but it's exhausting living with a lot of anxiety and in fairly dreadful and toxic circumstances. It's awful living without much hope of life getting better. I feel like things are improving and I've got some hope for the future, so I don't need to write so much. Things are not so desperate.

I need to learn how to take it easy and plod along at a steady pace. I need to stop working as hard as I possibly can and travelling as fast as I can. I've been rushing everything because I've been under so much pressure. I've been so close to disaster for so long that when there's a window of opportunity to fix my life I have to be quick. Things are going alright, so I need to back off the gas pedal and engage the cruise control for a while.

My life has become quite sensible all of a sudden. I go to bed early. I get up early. I'm in the office on time and I work less than 8 hours a day. I take my time and I don't rush my work. I'm working at a sustainable pace, rather than burning myself out.

It's been incredibly draining to get to this point, but hopefully I can limp along and I'll slowly recover from the ordeal that led me up to this point. To all intents and purposes my life appears to be getting fixed up very rapidly, so you might find it offensive that I talk about the struggles I've been through, but it's true - it wasn't very long ago that I was absolutely screwed and had no hope of fixing my life.

It's going to take months and months before I'm well and truly in a good position with an apartment of my own and a pile of money in the bank. It's going to take a long while before I prove that my stability hasn't been just a fluke. I can't really believe that I've managed the best part of 4 months at work without a major incident, despite it being the crappiest time of year and there being a heap of stress in my life. I need to keep going and get into a really good routine. I need to get back to position of financial and housing security and regular social contact, and maintain that for a good long while. I'm slightly nervous that I might be experiencing the calm before the storm, but I've managed 6 months without a destructive mood episode or any self-sabotaging behaviour, so it's a good omen.

The next challenge is to get the keys to the apartment I'm renting and move in without having some kind of breakdown. When I rented the place in London on the river it nearly killed me. I don't want to repeat past mistakes, but everybody needs somewhere to call home. No more sponging parasites trying to ride my coat tails and ripping me off for thousands of pounds of unpaid rent and bills this time. No more Klingons.

I'm optimistic. I'm enjoying my new job. My finances are in reasonable shape, although cashflow's going to be a little tight what with buying a car and renting an apartment in the space of a few weeks, plus buying some clothes I need for work and other unavoidable expenses. You have to speculate to accumulate.

I thought I was going to write just a few hundred words but I seem to have written much more than I was expecting to. Oh well. Better out than in.

It's Friday and I feel like I've worked hard to get to this point and I'm seeing some rewards. I know that I don't really 'earn' my money per se, because my job is very easy and I'm overpaid, but there are lots of ways that I DO work really hard, so I'm going to go ahead and pat myself on the back for what I've achieved. I know there's lots more hard work ahead, but I'm going to celebrate a little bit - another working week completed and more money on the way, hopefully. I'm digging my way out of the hole little by little.

It's frustrating that hard work often doesn't pay off, but I feel like I've always been rewarded for my efforts.

Tags: #career #homeless

This is a story about spying...

I'm not doing very well in terms of burying my blog. I've not been very successful at writing a load of non-contentious stuff that would bore any person who stumbled upon my website and decided to go digging in the archives. I've not done a very good job of being sensible and writing stuff that wouldn't be controversial if it was discovered by somebody connected with my work.

Where I live is a fairly small place. In theory I should be more careful, but I haven't been. It's been too difficult to change my habits. I've written candidly with authenticity and honesty for so long that it's become a habit. I'm unguarded. I'm vulnerable. It's been so long since I kept up the corporate mask and pretended like everything was A-OK for the sake of my job.

This Monday has been completely different from last Monday. I'm starting to become hopeful that life might become sustainable and pleasant. Happier times might be ahead - I'm really close to making a breakthrough. My life is more good than bad at the moment.

It makes me a little paranoid knowing that I've got some things that I want to keep. I'd be upset if I lost my local job and my imagined future crumbled into dust. Without money how am I going to get a place of my own? How am I going to be able to go out on dates and on mini-breaks with my girlfriend? How will I continue to escape from the circumstances that made my life so awful, without some means of bankrolling it? There's a temptation to hide my real personality; to hide my inner monologue; to bury my true feelings; to present a fake corporate-friendly mask instead of my honest self. I'm economically incentivised to become Mr Boring.

Obviously I'm not going to ditch my blog. I need my daily writing outlet. I need the stability; the security; the comfort blanket.

I'm very worried that mania is going to rear its ugly head and ruin everything. I'm really worried that I'm going to self-sabotage as soon as I get myself into a better position. It's been so long since I had all the pieces of the puzzle. It's really dangerous when I get everything, because I'm busting my balls and on the brink of a breakdown the whole time. I can imagine that I'll be hit with an emotional tsunami when I finally get the keys to a place of my own, for example.

I can detect a lot of unpleasant aggressiveness in my demeanour at times, due to the fact I'm so stressed about crossing the finish line. I'm super defensive and super protective over the progress I've made. I have so little tolerance for anybody who might stand in the way. I have no time for anybody who thinks they've got any ideas of how I should be living my life, because I've got such a clear idea in my mind of what I'm doing and where I'm going. It's so stressful to be so close, but yet so far.

I'm under so much pressure to make my struggles secret. I can't imagine that my work colleagues would understand the journey I've been on to get to this point. It's too mind-blowing for a corporate drone to think about an atypical path through live. It's too much of a taboo to talk about any off-piste moments that aren't CV-friendly, in the world of business and large organisations.

I'm going to keep the details of my working day secret, as is my professional duty, but it's too much to ask of me to bury my blog; to hide my identity. Yes, it's risky, but I need the stability; I need the consistency; I need the continuity.

By writing, hopefully I'm making myself more normal in the flesh. I think that without this outlet I struggle to deal with people face-to-face. Without this outlet, there's no way of getting rid of the bad thoughts and feelings and harmlessly de-fusing things that threaten to blow up in my face. Without this outlet, there's a greater chance of me losing my mind and screwing everything up. I just did 6 months incident-free. 6 months of stability is an amazing achievement, especially considering the toxic circumstances I've had to deal with. By writing, I hope that I can maintain the steady stable changes that have helped me to improve my life, working towards happier times.

I don't even particularly feel like writing today, but I'm doing it because it's part of my routine. Some days we don't feel like going to work, but we do anyway because we need the money. The routine is necessary. The routine is healthy even. It can be easy to give up and stop... to refuse to carry on.

Keeping secrets is a burden. I can't handle any extra burdens right now. I'll do my professional duty and avoid any situations that would infringe my code of conduct, but I can't afford to go stealth; to bury my identity.

Perhaps I seem reckless. Perhaps I seem like I want to have my cake and eat it. I certainly seem to be getting everything I want. I guess I should be humble. I guess I shouldn't take any risks. I guess I shouldn't take any chances. I should grovel and kiss arses, declaring my undying gratitude for a few crumbs from the cake, shouldn't I?

I've been put through the wringer to get to this point, but that doesn't make me want to hide my personality; it doesn't make me want to put the corporate-friendly mask back on. I think it was the fake corporate mask that made me unwell. It was so exhausting pretenting like I'm the perfect employee... a perfect CV; a blemish-free record - no black marks against my name.

So, the open secret is staying here. Fuck it. If you want to buy 100% of me - my brain, my body, my past, my future - then it's going to cost you a lot more than I'm being paid at the moment.

Tags: #career #writing