depression – Page 12 – Nick Grant

Nick Grant

Tag: depression

  • My Other Girlfriend

    This is a story about infidelity…

    Medication

    Yo ho ho and a bottle of Xanax. We’re off to take a sailing trip across the Atlantic to New York. I’m nervous, but she’s with me – she’s also an experienced sailor – so I’m excited and I’m sure that between us we can manage the voyage. At first we are heading towards Dover. Why are we travelling East when we need to be sailing West? Then, we are becalmed and a fog descends. The water is glassy and flat and the sails flap uselessly. A road sign appears and it becomes apparent that we are in London, on a road. We are towing the yacht on a trailer. I rack my brains, trying to think of the best marina with a hoist to lift our yacht into the sea. I can’t think straight.

    This is a dream, obviously.

    Next, I’m approaching a nightclub, skipping the queue outside and heading straight for the entrance. I present my left hand to the bouncer, who shines a torch on it. I brush past him so confidently, and he’s not really paying attention, so he doesn’t notice that I don’t have an ink stamp that says I’m allowed in. Nobody challenges me. I go past the dance-floor and into another room. I notice somebody sucking on a glass tube with what looks like shards of gold, or maybe honeycomb, being ignited with a lighter. Then, an old schoolfriend wants to show me something he’s making. He’s pouring chemicals into a large jam jar. He’s making shake-and-bake methamphetamine. The crystals aren’t perfect shards of ice, but instead they’re a milky mess. I know the drug will be potent, but the solvents and other chemicals used are deadly. I’m afraid, but also drawn to it, like a moth to a flame. Somebody has prepared some lines of a white powder; it’s being passed around. I wake up.

    My doctor warned me that my new depression treatment – California rocket fuel – would lead to vivid dreams, but I’ve always had a lot of dreams.

    In a way, my new dreams are better than the old ones. When I used to dream before, they were basically all the same: I have some supercrack and I’m trying to find a private place to take it, but every time I think I’m safe from intrusion, and I’m about to snort a line, somebody interrupts me. Then begins a stressful game of hide-and-seek where I’m trying to escape the voyeurs who wish to intrude on my private drug use. I never actually manage to get any drugs up my nose before I wake up.

    Of course, drugs are still my mistress. I’ve got a virtually unlimited supply of opiates, in the form of tramadol and codeine. I’ve got stacks of benzodiazepines, in the form of diazepam and Xanax. I’ve got loads of Z-drugs in the form of zopiclone and zolpidem. I’ve got pregablin, venlafaxine and mirtazepine. I’ve got Viagra and Cialis. None of these chemicals seem to make the blindest bit of difference to my depression, and they’re certainly not my drug of choice: supercrack.

    I go to the chemist, and I have to give two signatures, because they’re giving me medications that are controlled substances – they’re illegal to possess without a prescription. I’m handed a carrier bag that’s bulging with boxes packed full of blister strips containing capsules full of chemicals, or pills that have been pressed into certain shapes and sizes, with numbers and letters imprinted on them. Everything is so colourful. If I lose a pill on the floor by accident, I can identify exactly what it is.

    I get confused at night, as I swallow 6 pregablin capsules (white with black lettering), 2 venlafaxine tablets (round and dark orange), 2 mirtazepine tablets (small lozenge shaped, light orange), 2 zolpidem tablets (tiny white lozenges) and a Xanax (an oblong with “XANAX” imprinted on one side). Sometimes I also take a zopiclone if I can’t sleep (round white tablet). When my leg was in pain, I would also take 2 co-codamol with 30mg of codeine in each tablet (large white lozenges) and 2 tramadol capsules (green and yellow). Trying to remember if I took everything, and make sure I don’t take anything twice, is quite difficult. I’m almost at the point where I should prepare all my tablets and check I’ve got everything before I greedily gulp them down. I can now swallow 6 tablets at once, easily.

    My real mistress, and the beast that’s out to kill me – supercrack – is tamed at the moment. I know that a lapse would be disastrous in my financially precarious situation, but I’m also so doped up that my libido and craving for supercrack is under control… for now. I’m not a superstitious person, but I feel like I’m tempting fate just writing these words.

    I don’t bother keeping a tally of how long I’ve been ‘clean’. It’s a ridiculous idea. If a person quits one thing, they start doing something else. A former gambling addict might become obsessed with fitness and go to the gym 7 days a week. A smoker who quits will probably start eating more, to compensate for the loss.

    It might seem logical that the longer you’re addicted to something, the harder it will be to quit and stay ‘clean’ but nobody seems to realise that the more times you quit and have periods of abstinence, the better you get at quitting and resisting temptation. Medically, the binge & quit cycle of drug taking is the most damaging, because the binges are so extreme: days and days without sleep or food, and huge doses of really harmful drugs, when your poor body has just about recovered and was starting to get back to normality.

    Of course, the really harmful stuff is to relationships. She doesn’t mention it very often, but she’s worried about the next time I just disappear off the face of the Earth, and reappear skinny, sleep-deprived and suffering from all the nasty side effects of supercrack: paranoia, obsessive-compulsive behaviour and panic attacks; not to mention tachycardia, malignant hyperthermia and rhabdomyolysis. I’m no stranger to hospitals and psych wards.

    If you meet me in person, I seem polite, well presented, somewhat smart and certainly confident and self-assured. I can make smalltalk and feign interest in other people’s lives. I remember the tiny details that people tell me, which I can see are important to them, so that I can bring them up if ever there’s a lull in conversation; an uncomfortable silence. There’s no chance you’d peg me as a ‘druggie’ or a ‘stoner’ or a ‘junkie’. I take perverse pleasure in contradicting and confounding the stereotypes.

    Despite my ability to confidently bullshit my way through life, I do wonder if I’m as seriously sick as my doctors tell me I am. They can’t make their mind up whether I have treatment-resistant major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder or some dual or triple diagnosis of all of them, plus the substance abuse, of course.

    On top of the chemical cocktails, there’s a bottle of wine every night, just like every other middle-class professional. Lots of people would say that alcohol is part of the problem, but the last time I quit I quickly went hypomanic and lost my contract. Seems to be the story of my life: losing my contracts through ill-health. All the evidence points to chronic illness that makes me unfit to work, but my confident and upbeat attitude – plus my employability – has got me stuck in a groundhog day loop, where I work enough to pay the bills for a year, but then implode spectacularly and find myself without gainful employment, yet again.

    Undoubtedly, my affair with supercrack wreaks havoc across every area of my life, but what about the depression? What about the hypomania? What about the fact I see everything in black and white, and I either love you or hate you? Even when I’m ‘well’ and functioning, I’ve still gotta be right: intellectual pride and arrogance.

    I’ve committed to a new regimen of antidepressants, for the first time in years, so maybe my mood will improve if I can keep taking the pills regularly for 4 to 6 weeks… then we’ll see if these blunt instruments of brain manipulation actually fucking work for once.

    Meanwhile, money pours out of my bank account and the end of the runway gets ever closer, but the wheels of the aeroplane are still on the tarmac. If I can’t psych myself up to overcome the depression, stress and anxiety enough to hide my problems and tackle the arduous task of getting another contract, I’m fucked. The house of cards will collapse quicker than you can say “fuck my life”.

    It’s remarkable how much time I spend thinking about setting my affairs in order: making sure my life insurance pays out to my sister, making sure I’ve left instructions so that friends who’ve helped me out get repaid, making sure I’ve thrown away everything that’s of no value, making sure that I’ve listed the details of all my bank accounts and creditors, making sure I’ve left enough money in my company so that my accountant can wind up the business and he gets paid, and also making sure that at least a teeny bit of my legacy is preserved: I’ve written a novel and this blog has about 600,000 words, plus photos. I always said I wanted to leave a smoking gun, in case anybody wanted to investigate how stress – mainly financial worries – can destroy a person and drive them to suicide. My biggest fear is being written off with a simple throwaway label: “mentally ill” or “substance abuse” or whatever… things are never as simple as that.

    While most people are planning summer holidays and extended weekend breaks over the bank holiday weekend, I’m paralysed by the ever-approaching end of the runway, combined with debilitating stress and depression. Things look straightforward, because I’ve made life look like a walk in the park so far, but in fact I’m just very good at hiding the deteriorating situation, when my back’s against the wall. Just because I can rescue myself in the nick of time, doesn’t mean I can always do it, forever. I feel physically sick at the thought of the effort involved in doing what I do, all over again, even though it’s a well-practiced tried-and-trusted formula.

    Time just gets frittered away, which is fine when you’re getting your regular salary and you spend most of your time at your desk just counting down to the weekend or your next holiday, but when you’re in my situation, in a way, I’m dying. How do you think you’d feel if you were left penniless, homeless and with a bunch of vultures trying to take the clothes off your back? How do you think you’d feel if you know you can make everything alright again, if only you were well enough to work, but you feel sick and the thought of going back to the office caused you severe stress, anxiety and paralysed you; unable to cope or deal with the situation?

    Tick tock goes the clock, and it doesn’t stop. You have to run just to stand still. This is why it’s so attractive to run away with my mistress and pretend my problems don’t exist: escapism.

    I want to escape this invisible prison.

     

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  • Do you want me to be more ‘normal’?

    This is a story about being locked in…

    White Tiger

    Let me quote from a poem called The Panther by Rainer Maria Rilke:

    His weary glance, from passing by the bars,

    Has grown into a dazed and vacant stare;

    It seems to him there are a thousand bars

    And out beyond those bars the empty air.

     

    The pad of his strong feet, that ceaseless sound

    Of supple tread behind the iron bands,

    Is like a dance of strength circling around,

    While in the circle, stunned, a great will stands.

     

    But there are times the pupils of his eyes

    Dilate, the strong limbs stand alert, apart,

    Tense with the flood of visions that arise

    Only to sink and die within his heart. 

    Some of us do not seem to suffer in captivity. Some of us even thrive. “This is great: it’s so comfortable, warm and dry in this big building” one pig says to another. “Yeah, I know and they keep bringing us all the food we can eat”. Have these hogs found hog’s heaven?

    Perhaps this analogy serves well to explain why I bite the hand that feeds me. Perhaps it explains why any short-term comfort does not outweigh my long-term unhappiness.

    “Stop complaining and take the free food and be grateful to work in a nice warm office” you might admonish me. “There are other people in the world who’d dream of having what you have”.

    How low do you need me to go? I’ve been homeless, penniless. I’ve cleaned hotel kitchens and done the washing up. I’ve done shitty jobs for shitty money. I’ve lived on the streets, in parks, crisis houses, and hostels. I’ve accepted food handouts. You want me to sink even lower? How’s about being locked up in police cells, or on secure hospital wards? Is that low enough for you?

    I tasted freedom once, when I was briefly released from my lifelong cage, and it was such a sweet feeling. No exams, no holiday projects, no homework, no bullying, no kissing ass to teachers. No interviews, no performance evaluations, no targets, no made-up work, no kissing ass to bosses. Nobody ever said “you’re screwing up your academic prospects” or “you’re screwing up your career” if I didn’t conform and consent to live in a cage.

    Obviously it it would be lovely to be a painter, a writer, a musician, a poet, and to be able to cope in captivity. Captivity demands zero creativity. Captivity can’t cope with creativity.

    Personally, I think the two worlds have been designed to be mutually exclusive. If I tell people at my day job that I wrote a novel they look visibly uncomfortable. The two groups just don’t know how to mix, mingle, let alone relate to one another, or ask non clichéd awkward questions.

    Am I medically broken for not being able to happily live in my cage, being fattened up for slaughter? Am I medically broken for wanting to be free of mortgages, ISAs, savings accounts, watching my digital bank balance slowly increment upwards. along with the days, weeks and years counting down until the day I die? Am I sick, if I reject a life of stress and anxiety, which benefits my paymasters, not me?

    I’m sure there’s a medically sanctioned happy pill out there to shut up the part of my brain that says “why are you enslaving yourself?” and turns me into a good well-behaved consumer, dragging a ball-and-chain of debt around with me.

    Should I run clamouring for my doctor to anaesthetise me from reality? Should I ask for a chemical lobotomy that would allow me to be well-adjusted to a fucked up world?

     

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  • Depressive Realism

    This is a story about bias…

    Nick in blue

    When you go hypomanic, you overestimate your capacity to work without sleep and food; you overestimate your ability to take on difficult tasks without negative consequences; you believe you can achieve superhuman feats. Often, hypomania can mean hypersexuality and the belief that you’re irresistible to the opposite sex. Hypomania brings extreme risk taking, for me, and I’m a big risk taker anyway!

    There must be an element of underestimation too. When hypomanic, you underestimate the difficulty of what you’re trying to achieve. You underestimate the risks and the consequences of failure. “How hard can it be?” you find yourself thinking, as you get stuck into the quantum mechanics books. I rejected a highly paid career, in favour of building my own business, mostly because it seemed like it would be quick and easy at the time.

    Depression has flipped all that on its head. I had an interview with a well known high-street bank earlier in the week. I thought it went dreadfully and I sank into an even deeper depression, because I gave such an appalling performance. I was beating myself about things I said and cringing about holes in my knowledge and experience that the interviewer had exposed. Then my agent phoned me:

    “They loved you. They want to meet you again”

    I spent the rest of the week dreading this second interview. I imagined all the things that they were going to ask, that would be difficult for me to answer. They were going to haul me over the coals and my incompetence would be laid bare for all to see. It would be embarrassing; shameful. I was losing sleep over it and waking up each day with a feeling of dread.

    At the second interview, they cooed enthusiastically at everything I said, and laughed encouragingly at my anecdotes. It was almost as if we were friends and work colleagues, gossiping conspiratorially about the good and bad things that happen in the world of grey suits and office blocks. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

    Afterwards, I thought “oh no!” What if my intuition is wrong again? What if there’s an inverse correlation between how I feel like things went, and how impressed my interviewers were?

    Depression is almost like a defence mechanism: a reaction to a hostile world where bad shit happens. When the UK voted to leave the EU, and when the USA voted for Donald Trump, I had placed bets correctly on both outcomes, at substantially long odds. I knew I was sad that those things had happened and I didn’t make enough money to be happy, but I still didn’t really feel anything even though they were awful events. I was prepared for the worst. In fact, I expected the worst.

    There are psychological experiments that prove that depressed people are able to perceive the world more accurately, in certain circumstances. This depressive realism is the antidote to illusory superiority. This depressive realism is the antidote to the madness of crowds and a misplaced sense of optimism.

    Humans are notoriously bad at perceiving the risk of very real and likely events: stock market crashes, earthquakes and hurricanes. If we were risk-averse according to probable catastrophes, we would steer clear of the Pacific Rim of Fire and the San Andreas Fault, but yet we see insane real estate prices and a concentration of our best technologists, in Silicon Valley and Japan.

    London is currently rated by MI5 as at severe threat of international terrorism: an attack is highly likely. When I see huge crowds of people at Canary Wharf underground station, I see a swarm of sitting ducks. There are two vans full of armed police parked nearby, but it doesn’t make me feel any safer… it just makes me glad that I don’t have brown skin.

    On a day-to-day basis, I generally assume I’m going to be blown up by a terrorist, fail to get a job, run out of money, be evicted, be declared bankrupt, never be able to work again, society is going to collapse, there will be riots and looting and the human race is going to retreat into the dark ages of barbarism, religious dogma, superstition and ignorance. It just seems likely, given the evidence.

    I might be wrong, but I tend to put my money where my mouth is, and I’ve sadly been right more than I’ve been wrong.

    I just placed a bet on Marine Le Pen. I hope I lose.

     

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  • Stop and Smell the Roses

    This is a story about the rat race…

    Queens flowers

    I was working out how much time I’ve had away from the coal face and I figured out that kind of thinking just ain’t allowed. If you start figuring out that you don’t have to work every hour God sends, then you’re an enemy of [status quo] society. What happens when people start rocking the boat? What happens when people start asking if there’s a better way?

    Obviously, I’m immensely fortunate that I didn’t get some childhood sweetheart pregnant and I don’t have to run around doing shitty jobs in order to feed and clothe my squawking infant offspring. I’m very lucky that I’m not enslaved to the system, in order to be just about managing.

    I came really close to suicide and drug addiction relapse – which are one and the same thing – during the last week or so. I’m not out of the woods at all, but I had a slightly better day today. Some good luck went in my favour.

    You know, having a few years of living hell isn’t something I would rather not have experienced. Whether it’s homelessness, hospitalisation, being locked up in a cell or whatever… my life has been enriched by everything that’s happened to me.

    Being desperately depressed, stressed and anxious ain’t no picnic, but I still live a pretty charmed existence.

    If and when I get back into the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday routine, the blinkers will go up and I won’t be able to see the wood for the trees. Who has time to stop and smell the roses when it’s rush, rush, rush, to get across town and get to your desk? Last summer I sat by the River Thames eating my lunch, looking at HMS Belfast, Tower Bridge and The Shard, but I didn’t really appreciate the view: I was glum that I had to go back to my desk within the hour.

    I’ve been doing my full-time career for 20 years, and I’ve been bitter, jaded and resentful for the working world taking the prime years of my life, the whole fucking time.

    “Get over it. We all have to do it” I hear you say.

    Yeah, but why? Why the fuck are we stuck in dead-end bullshit jobs when we’re young, with no money? When we’re old and tired and our health is fucked up and we’re about to die, that’s when we finally get to supposedly enjoy the fruits of our labour. Isn’t there something back-to-front about that?

    The biggest crime against humanity, is that when we’re innocent, optimistic, sensitive, passionate, full of energy and joy… that’s when we’re squeezed into little boxes and forced onto the treadmill. For sure, when I’m old and infirm, I’ll be grateful to be sat at a desk in a nice warm office, but why the fuck do we chain our young people to their books and to bullshit menial jobs?

    I’ve been over this again & again, but the more that I zig when everybody else zags, the more I feel like a madness is lifting and I can see rationally.

    As I travelled through Bank underground station at 9am this morning – making my way home just as 400,000 City workers descended on the Square Mile – I thought: “this is insane”.

    Of course, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em… but I need to remember to fight the system from within, and to try to protect my mind when all around me people are losing theirs.

    Who, honestly, has the time to stop and take in the beauty of their surroundings and marvel at nature? Aren’t we all so swept up in the school run and the daily commute? What the fuck point is there in that? To pass the baton of misery to the next generation?

    “We can’t all be artists and dreamers, skipping barefoot across the grass and daisies” I hear you say, gnashing your teeth.

    True, but if there’s no time to be carefree and unburdened from the pressures of this modern world we’ve created, are we building any kind of world you want to be part of? What’s the fucking point, if it’s all stomach ulcers and stress and exhaustion?

    The relentless depression I experience is awful and I live forever with Damocles’ sword hanging over me, in the form of endless suicidal thoughts, but at least it forces me to consider an important question: what’s the fucking point of being alive?

    There’s probably no opportunity for me to be an artist, a writer, a poet or anything else authentic, without robbing a bank or making myself penniless and destitute, but the closer I get to death, the more I gravitate towards authentic experiences, rather than the soul destroying life of wage slavery.

    Give me liberty or give me death.

     

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  • Selected Short Stories of 2016

    This is a story about a year in review…

    Woz Ere

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

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

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

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

    I wrote a letter to myself.

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

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

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

    Everything you never wanted to know about addiction.

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

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

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

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

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

    Happy New Year’s Eve.

     

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  • Will to Live

    This is a story about insecurity…

    Sussex river

    The self preservation instinct varies by individual. In theory, we should all be equally risk-averse, because all genetically heritable traits must surely code for self-preservation, by definition. Any genes that would make an individual less likely to want to live, would literally die out. However, we know that people willingly jump out of perfectly good aeroplanes, while others are afraid to leave the house.

    When life becomes one long unrewarding fruitless struggle – endless anxiety – then it seems logical that you’d give up hope of things ever getting better. “This will pass” people say. It doesn’t. They’re wrong.

    I’ve done most of the stressful things in life: moved house, made new friends, asked a girl out on a date, got a job, paid bills, started businesses, balanced the books, paid my taxes, fixed a broken down car, fixed a water leak, fixed a gas leak, been punched in the face, got divorced, been arrested, been locked in a cell, been hospitalised, ran out of money, been homeless.

    So, I’ve been through a lot of shit and survived. I’ve dealt with a heap of very stressful situations and I managed to get through them without having a nervous breakdown. However, I’m not exactly thrilled about having to start over.

    I had become careless with my life, because I’d been suicidally depressed for so long that existence offered nothing but unrelenting pain.

    My life attitude has generally been this: start today with whatever I’ve got, and make the best of it.

    It’s heartbreaking when you try your best for years and years, but you’re thwarted at every turn. Imagine you’ve patiently observed, practiced and developed your skills. You’re doing all the right things, but it’s not working because somebody is working against you. I try to win people over. I try to get people onside. I try to convert the bad apples into good apples, rather than chuck them in the bin.

    I’m named after a heroin addict: Mr Grant. I don’t know his first name. If I took my mum’s name, I’d be Nick Newton. If I took my dad’s name, I’d be Nick Edmonds.

    I had a blazing row with my mum when I was a child, over whether it was ever ethical to write somebody off as a lost cause. Unsurprisingly, my unshakeable belief – for as long as I can remember – has been that nobody is born bad, and nobody should be abandoned. Even the idea of casual dating is unpalatable to me: pick a partner and stick with them; be loyal.

    My core beliefs have been tested to breaking point. I’ve lain myself wide open to be taken advantage of, and people have come and filled their pockets at my expense.

    “Where are your friends when you need them?” my flatmate asked me a few times. “They’re not there when you need them” he said.

    In fact, I never phoned my friends for help. Ironically, the one time I phoned my friends for a favour, was to get rid of my flatmate – who owes me thousands of pounds in unpaid rent and bills – when he refused to leave.

    Of course, my friends have been there when I’ve needed them, but I have a strong instinct to take my problems away from the people who I care about. I don’t suck people into the turmoil of my decaying life. If I’m in trouble, I don’t want that trouble to spill over onto my friends. If I’m going to kill myself, I’m going to throw up barriers – defences – to stop people getting too close to ground zero.

    I haven’t been ready to have anybody in my life, because I started to believe the bullshit: I started to think that I was a good-for-nothing write-off lost cause.

    Now, a couple of people have stuck by me and been physically present through some of the horrors, and we’ve come out the other side. With every bit of loyalty, love and care that I’ve received, it’s helped me to heal and repair a little more. It’s hard to be objective, but it feels like things are getting better for once.

    Everybody needs at least one person who believes in them. One person who’ll be there when you really need somebody. One person who’s trying to help, not thwart.

    I find myself writing with consideration for their feelings and how they might perceive things. I’m starting to think about a positive future, rather than just brain-dumping before I die.

    This blog was supposed to be a time-capsule; a smoking gun; a suicide note. This blog was supposed to contain all the things that hold some horrible people to account. It’s so much easier if the target of your malice goes down without a fight and quietly dies.

    She said to me “awwww, you wrote me a love letter” and it’s true. In amongst the bitchy sniping at a bunch of arseholes who’ve screwed me over, there’s a new theme developing: I care about hurting somebody’s feelings and damaging a burgeoning relationship. There’s something precious to me that I want to protect.

    It’s fairly hard to think “I hope we don’t break up” and “I want to die” at the same time. Obviously, it’d be a logical fallacy to hold both thoughts simultaneously. Reason is a very poor way to tackle emotion, but it seems to be quite hard to be suicidal when you’re cuddling on the couch… although not impossible.

    When you care about somebody, you can feel insecure: “what if I lose her?”

    It’s progress, of a kind. I wouldn’t say that dating is ever a reason to live, but having a significant other who you’re crazy about is an improvement on a situation where your own emotional pain fills your world, to the point where you have no capacity to think or care about the people who would be sad if you were dead.

    “Suicide is so selfish.”

    No, you simply haven’t understood. It’s you who is selfish, if you expect somebody to endure intolerable agony for your benefit. Believe me: people don’t want to die because they’re selfish; they want to die because they can’t stand the pain and suffering anymore.

    Guilt-tripping never works, but kindness, care, compassion and loyalty seem to be a winning combo.

     

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  • Endurance

    This is a story about waiting…

    Boats on the Thames

    There are many things in life that have to be endured. Life’s like a really shit amusement park, where you queue up for days, weeks, months or even years, so that you can have a thrill ride that lasts all of 90 seconds.

     

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  • Alter Ego

    This is a story about insecurity…

    Self portrait

    Where does your sense of self worth come from? Are you good at your job? Are you a good parent? Do you do good deeds? Do you consider yourself virtuous, or at least not a bad person? Does the fact that you’re loved by friends and family somehow make you see yourself as valuable?

    What happens when you lose faith in yourself?

    I lied as a kid. I lied about having a Game Boy. It was a strange thing to lie about, but I lied. I lied about having Sky TV and having videotaped a music video off MTV. How curious.

    I didn’t lie about being a doctor, causing deaths as I bungled patients’ healthcare. I didn’t lie about being a pilot, killing every passenger and crew member on board my plane. I didn’t lie about being a financial whizz, building an elaborate ponzi scheme and lining my own pockets.

    Why would I lie about such mundane stuff?

    I stopped lying. I was happy with who I was. I was good at my job. I was good at some sports. I had girlfriends. I was getting paid what I was ‘worth’ and people valued my opinion… they sought it out. I was just me.

    Then, shit happened.

    Bizarrely – to me at least – I managed to pick up where I left off. It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, but the things that I was good at – before shit happened – I was still good at. The job that I’d been doing capably before shit happened… it turned out I could still do it.

    Then, even more shit happened.

    Digging myself out of that hole looked like such a long shot that I didn’t even think it was possible to stay alive, to preserve hope, to go on. I didn’t lie to dodge another bullet. I was a little economical with the truth, but I didn’t lie. When my situation started improving, it was impossible to reconcile with where I’d come from. I went insane with the ridiculousness of the situation.

    Then, yet more absolutely terrible shit happened.

    This was starting to become routine. There was a magic formula that seemed to work time and again. This time I played to my strengths, kept my mouth shut when needed, kissed the right asses. Depressingly, it worked. Is that who I am now? The guy who’s just stuck in a never-ending cycle of near-disaster and recovery? Bust and boom. Over and over and over again, ad nauseam.

    Stop the world. I want to get off.

    Who am I? I had a plan, coming back to London, and it’s worked… in a way. As a friend said though, I can never quite get my head above water. I can get my nose just high enough to inhale enough oxygen to stay alive, but I’ll never get my chin out of the depths beneath, let alone start to rise even higher.

    I know who I was at times. There are identities that I can successfully emulate from the past. There are identities that don’t seem to be me anymore. Perhaps I was never the person I thought I was at times. Perhaps I believed my own bullshit at certain times.

    I know I should just let go of the past, forget about former achievements, status, comforts. Does it seem easy to just let your entire identity go and re-invent yourself… from nothing? Worse than nothing, in fact. If you let go of your advantages, nobody’s going to let you off your disadvantages. My advantages are only just cancelling out my disadvantages, so I’d be screwed if I had to start over from ‘nothing’. There’s no such thing as nothing. Everybody wants a piece of me. So long as I have an address, somebody will be trying to track me down and suck the life right out of me.

    Run to stand still.

    It’s amazing how hard you gotta work just to break even. Just to go nowhere. Fuck it’s exhausting because it’s not going anywhere. Hard work doesn’t pay. Period.

    Yes, I can look back on this or that achievement in the past. Yes, I can extrapolate from my potential. But neither thing is meaningful. Look around. Do you see anyone getting ahead?

    I wrote a book. A whole novel. I don’t even think it’s terrible. Does that make me a writer, a novelist? In theory, yes, but if I was to commit to it, it would also make me a tramp, a vagrant, a bum, a loser. Is that what I am anyway? Is my true destiny catching me up?

    No. Art is for the rich and spoiled.

     

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  • Ups and Downs

    This is a story about data collection…

    Step Count

    Here’s a graph of my daily step count for the last 18 months, as recorded by my iPhone. I practically always have my iPhone in my pocket, so it should be fairly accurate.

    As you can see, there are big gaps.

    I’ve added a 14-day moving average to the graph too, which is the dotted line.

    How do I interpret this?

    The optimistic interpretation is that I was overdoing it last year and had a big crash. There’s a little gap in the graph that you can hardly see at the end of October. I was in hospital then. This year got off to a shit start and then improved and stabilised, but I still had a hiccup at the start of October. The graph is much flatter on the right hand side – on average – than it is on the left hand side. Perhaps the volatility in my life has been reduced.

    The pessimistic interpretation is that there’s a strongly downward trend. There are also signs of repeated periods of inactivity: shit times. Perhaps there’s a cycle that would be clearer to see with more years of data.

    I could bring in my Android phone data which covers the period before this, and maybe some other data sources too, but it was a pain just to produce this. 

    Interestingly, if you own a smartphone, you should be aware just how much it’s tracking you all the time you carry it around!

     

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  • Only Smarties Have the Answer

    This is a story about a pill for every ill…

    My pills

    There was a young man who swallowed a lie, about how hard work and loyalty to his company would make him successful. It left him exhausted and with depression, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. I don’t know why he swallowed the lie. Perhaps he’ll die.

    There was a young man who swallowed 150mg of Bupropion – a fast acting antidepressant – to cancel out the depression and exhaustion, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. Perhaps he’ll die.

    There was a young man who swallowed 5mg of Olanzapine – a mood stabiliser – to cancel out the hypomanic highs that were created by the Bupropion, that was supposed to fix the depression and exhaustion, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. Perhaps he’ll die.

    There was a young man who swallowed 15mg of Mirtazapine – another antidepressant – because the Bupropion wasn’t working so well any more on its own, to fix the depression and exhaustion, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. Perhaps he’ll die.

    There was a young man who swallowed 25mg of Lamotrigine, to raise his seizure threshold so he could take more Bupropion, stabilise his mood more and as a third antidepressant, to fix the depression and exhaustion, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. Perhaps he’ll die.

    There was a young man who swallowed 10mg of Diazepam – an anti-anxiety drug – because by now he was pretty jittery from all the damn drugs, that were supposed to fix his depression and exhaustion, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. Perhaps he’ll die.

    There was a young man who was going to swallow 2,000mg of potassium cyanide, to end the depression and exhaustion, that wiggled and jiggled inside his brain. Of course he would die.

     

    Top picture, from left to right: Mirtazepine, Olanzapine, Bupropion, Diazepam, Lamotrigine.

     

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