This is a story about friendship...

I had a truly awesome week - the best in a very long time - thanks to my friends. People have been scattered to all four corners of the globe, but through social media and the pull of the capital, we managed to reconnect. I can't stress enough how grateful I am to those people who've made the effort to stay in touch, and not to judge and disown me.

The week kicked off with a couple of friends making a last minute dash up to London. Doing touristy things with them really made me appreciate where I live. I can jump on the tube whenever I want and travel all over London very easily, but sometimes you don't appreciate your home town until you're seeing it through the eyes of visitors, and playing host.

The really cool thing about seeing my friends was having face-to-face conversations. We sat out on the bench in my garden, and we had a conversation that was way easier to have in person, having spent the day together. Chatting online is nice, but it's rarely more than checking in to make sure each other is OK, and just renewing that bond. I'm not complaining, but it was great to see some old friends, and for them to challenge me on some of the bitterness, regret and resentment that's been very unhealthy, as well as just having a really nice chat.

Chatting with my friend's wife, who is a social worker, she shared some really interesting stuff about the importance of a sibling relationship in the life of a child. The big hole in my life is my sister. I spent the first 10 years of my life as an only child, and they say the first 7 years of a child's life are the most formative. Obviously, I've tried hard to re-adjust, and I'm genuinely overjoyed to have a sister, but it's never good enough for my parents. They wanted me to tread a hard line: being both a mature parent figure to my sister, but at the same time I was still a kid and a sibling, not actually an unpaid babysitter. I wanted to play with my sister, not raise her.

If you think I'm a bit cold and brutal with people, a loner, unafraid to cut people off if they're taking the piss... you're right in a way. I was always taught not to bother forming close bonds with people. Being pulled out of so many schools and kept away from my friends, taught me that I would never be allowed to retain my friendships, my relationships. I learned to develop shallow friendships and remain emotionally detached. I learned to protect myself from the inevitable time when my parents would drag me off somewhere else, away from my friends.

In adult life, I've bonded with a new set of friends and found great happiness and comfort in having those friendships last more than a couple of years. Things slowly fell into disrepair with one set of friends, as I moved away from London and got sucked into an abusive relationship. Friendships were neglected during my descent into mental illness and addiction, which kinda poured cold water on another set of friends, and meant further declines in the quality of my older friendships.

However, quite a lot of people are still tentatively connected to me, and by co-incidence another friend was coming up to London for a visit. We met up in a pub on my last day as a free man, and played a card game, just like we used to do on a random midweek evening in the good old days. We then sat in his friend's back garden playing cards and drinking beer, under the watchful gaze of a zombie garden gnome, with the light fading to the point where we could no longer tell which cards were which.

I started a new job, and the guy who showed me the ropes turned out to know a guy who I met at my very first full-time job. He's a friendly fella and it certainly took away a lot of those first day nerves, plus the feeling of trepidation that builds and builds, the longer you have off work. Having taken 6 months out of the game, I was filled with self-doubt, so it was a big relief to meet somebody friendly.

Some friends from my homeless days came over to visit. It was nice to show them my flat, and a real point of pride for somebody who was really down on their luck only a year before. Entertaining and hosting are so good for my self-esteem. I know it's probably not healthy to pin my sense of wellbeing on wowing people with something so materialistic as a nice place to live, but it does make me feel good to say "look how far I've come". It was nice to chat to a couple of people who also keenly felt the sense of loss, as our little social group crumbled, when we all started to get jobs and places to live, and move on with our lives.

I went out for dinner with another friend. It was nice to feel like there was some reward for working. Social bonding over food & drink is the reason for living, for going to work, to me. I always valued the social time with people rather than the excuse, the 'sport' or 'hobby' or whatever it was that supposedly tied us all together.

It was a totally unexpected twist, that when I got into kitesurfing - which is not a team sport - that I would actually end up with one of the largest groups of friends I've ever had the fortune of having in my life. I felt truly cherished and blessed, during those golden years of the London Kitesurfers, when we jetted around the globe together and threw wild parties.

Friday, I scheduled a 'date' with my 'bro'. It was nice to arrange a phonecall with a very supportive friend, and have good news to report. He's a sensitive guy and has been particularly concerned about my wellbeing, especially during my very suicidal moments. It was nice to have a somewhat more positive phone conversation.

Technology and social media is priceless in my life, and I rounded off the week with a video-chat call with a friend in New Zealand. At one point, I was struck by just how amazing technology is. I was having a face-to-face conversation with a friend who I haven't seen for 5 months, and there we were having a chat... midnight in the UK on a Saturday night, and 11am on Sunday morning in Auckland. Truly a globe-shrinking experience, to think that I'd have to be on a plane for 24+ hours if I actually wanted to shake my friend's hand, but yet we were able to speak as if we were almost in the same room together.

I completed the week, 10 weeks clean from the drugs, 3 days of my new job without being sacked, having seen 8 or more friends and made an ally at work. Given that recovery is a function of a healthy life, not sobriety, this bodes well.

I expect that things will get harder before they get easier, and the last week was probably a blip. I'm slightly scared to say "I'm feeling a bit better" because I fear that friends who are looking out for me might back off, believing I'm fine. You know, every little message in chat apps, every like on facebook, every text, every email... they all add up to a cushion of support that keeps me afloat. This is not emotional blackmail. Please think of it as a Thank You.

I still need to put regular social contact, exercise and some kind of hobby or passion into the mix. I'd like to get my kites repaired and buy a new wetsuit so I can go kitesurfing at the weekends again, just like I used to.

Don't move, improve!

Look: I even got a new bed, thanks to my guardian angel driving me across London in a small car, overburdened with a massive piece of furniture. This reparation is a good metaphor for the damage repairs that my friends have enabled.

Tags: #friends #career #suicide #addiction

This is a story about the descent into darkness...

The first time I couldn't work due to depression, it came out of the blue. I had started a new job, and it was actually really interesting. I was quite enthusiastic about what I was doing, and empowered to grow into a new role. Spring was turning into summer, and so I had the seasons in my favour. What happened next was a surprise to everybody, including me.

One morning, I couldn't get out of bed. I'd had problems getting up early for work, but this was different... I couldn't face the day. As soon as I'd admitted defeat - that I definitely wasn't going to make it into the office that day - I was somehow a changed person. It was like a dam burst. This problem that I had been barely coping with was suddenly unleashed, after 11 years of steady 9 to 5 grind and reliable service in the name of the corporations I worked for.

People talk about nervous breakdowns, and I guess that's what had happened. All of a sudden, and with little warning, I was sick... but this was an invisible sickness. I felt it, and I couldn't overcome it, but I didn't believe it was real. I thought that it was fake. I felt like a fraud.

In the UK you can take up to 3 days off work without a doctor's note. After 3 days, I knew deep down that there was no way that I could possibly go back to work, but what was wrong with me? This was highly unusual for the dependable grey-suited regular 9 to 5, Monday to Friday office Joe Bloggs, that I was. 11 years of full time work and 13 years of full time education. All I knew was getting up and going to a dictated place, on the treadmill, in the rat race, following orders.

To summon the effort to go and see my doctor took the whole of those 3 days. I knew the problem was more severe than just not feeling very well. I knew it was more severe than a day off work was going to cure. I knew that something was seriously wrong, but I couldn't express it... I had no language to explain the brick wall that I'd hit.

It was so unlike me to be lacking in energy, in purpose, in motivation and to neglect my duties, my responsibilities. It was so unlike me to not do the work. I'd had a nearly 100% attendance record at work and at school and college. Bunking off wasn't in my vocabulary. Not doing things I didn't like wasn't something I ever considered as an alternative.

I went to the doctor. I sat down and explained that I was tired. I was more tired than I'd ever been in my life. I couldn't cope. I couldn't turn the pedals of the cycle anymore. I couldn't do what I'd always managed to do, which was to drag myself out of bed, and go to school, college or work, no matter what. It hadn't mattered whether the bullying was unbearable, or the stress was intolerable, the pressure relentless... I had been that guy, that perfect student or dream employee, who always turned up and did their work, like a good little boy.

Within a couple of minutes of me explaining my unexpected interruption in my perfect attendance record, and inexplicable fatigue, my doctor said "have you heard of Fluoxetine?". I had heard of Fluoxetine: it's the generic name for Prozac, which is an anti-depressant. Fluoxetine is a Specific Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) which was supposed to increase levels of Serotonin in the brain, or so Eli Lilly - the manufacturer - thought, and told the world that depressed people had unnaturally low serotonin levels in their brain. They were wrong.

The theory that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, is ubiquitous. We are comforted to know that there is a medical problem with us, that can be corrected with medication. It's a neat little theory: depressed people don't have enough serotonin in their brain, and with medicine it can be topped up to 'normal' levels. Sadly, it's just not correct.

Measurements of the amount of serotonin metabolites in spinal fluid of depressed people who take Fluoxetine or other SSRIs are actually lower than supposedly healthy people. The theory was proven to be bunkum, but doctors and mental health professionals still share research that's 30+ years old and has been disproven. The theory was just too popular, as well as the SSRI medication, which millions of people had flocked to as their salvation.

I had read extensively in the field of psychopharmacology and had received unconditional offers of a University place at several prestigious institutions, to study psychology, pharmacology and psychiatry. I was probably better informed than my doctor.

I knew that SSRIs were associated with emotional blunting, anorgasmia (not being able to cum) and increased suicidal ideation (thinking about killing yourself). I knew that the long-term outcomes were actually worse than placebo, in several studies. I knew that an SSRI would take 6 weeks to take effect anyway, and that was no use to me. I needed to get back to work!

So, I declined the medication that was offered to me, within just a few minutes of talking to my doctor. I was shocked by how quickly I had been offered psychiatric medication from a general physician, which would take at least 6 weeks to take effect, and I could end up taking for a long time. I felt a little failed by the health services.

My doctor signed me off for a week, and I felt a little relieved to have some time to allow my body to hopefully revert to homeostasis, and I could hopefully get back to work. I felt like a real failure, and I started to feel anxious about the impression that my bosses and colleagues would have of me. Would I be seen as unreliable? Would my name be tainted?

The fatigue and lack of motivation, purpose, persisted and I spent a week in bed, sleeping for 16+ hours. I hardly ate. I didn't open the curtains. I turned my phone off and just curled up under the duvet. Where had this tiredness come from? I had always been in good physical shape and my body had never failed me like this before. I had always had plenty of energy.

I went back to the doctor after a week, and I was getting pretty desperate for an answer. I was looking for a diagnosis, a cure. I wanted the trusted men in white coats to make everything better again.

We did tests: blood tests, urine tests, thyroid function, kidney and liver function. We even did an AIDS test, as my doctor was at a loss to explain why I was so fatigued all the time. One week turned into three weeks. There was seemingly no end to my exhaustion and inability to cope with the thought of going back to work. There was no way I could face the day, for some reason. I had been housebound with the curtains closed, except for trips around the corner to the doctor's surgery.

My doctors remained convinced that I was suffering with Clinical Depression, and urged me to try an SSRI, but I still refused on the grounds that I didn't want another 6 weeks off work, while I waited for the medication to kick in. 9 weeks off work seemed ridiculous to me, and the side effects sounded unacceptable.

So I stopped going to the doctors. I stopped getting sick notes. I switched my phone off and went to bed, and I just tried to ignore the fact that I was going to lose my job. I didn't care because I couldn't care. There was no way I could go back to work, feeling so exhausted, so drained, so fatigued and unable to cope with even preparing food, getting dressed, having a shower. I just lay in my bed and slept two thirds of every day, and lay half-asleep, anxious about a knock at the door, with the curtains closed, for the rest of the time.

Everything seemed impossible, insurmountable. The idea of going to the shop seemed as insane as the idea of going on an expedition to the South Pole without any warm clothes or supplies. Clearly there was something wrong with me if I was misjudging the effort involved in things, but I also knew that I couldn't keep just doing the same shit, the same crappy 9 to 5 routine, and the same formula of working a job.

As the summer wore on, I started to get interested in the idea of doing some iPhone development work, and slowly I ventured outside into the sunshine in the afternoons, to learn how to develop software on the Apple platform. It seemed like a nice confidence-building exercise, as I had started to doubt that I'd ever be able to work again. I had started to feel like I'd be invalided out of the workforce for the rest of my days.

The more I worked, the more obsessed I became. My energy came back. Slowly at first. I would work for an afternoon, then an afternoon and an evening, and then soon I was doing full days of work again. But it didn't stop there.

By the time July had given way to August, I was working an 18 hour day. I was irritable and single-minded. Eating was a chore that would slow me down and get in the way of me working. I didn't want to waste time with my partner, my friends, my family. Nobody understood what I was working on and how important it was. Explaining anything to anybody was painfully slow and angered me to have to take time out from my work to even answer the simplest of questions.

I started to speak faster, in a rush to get the words out and not waste precious time speaking to people. I viewed other people as obstacles, standing in the way of my single goal, and as dimwitted fools who were sent to irritate and frustrate me. My thoughts raced, but I could follow them, but speaking was never fast enough to verbalise what was going on in my brain, so my speech was pressured... trying to will my tongue to be fast enough to keep pace with my thread of thought.

My work rang me up and insisted that we meet up. I saw my boss, and we agreed that I should give my notice. There was no way I was going back to that job. They were cool about things, but I didn't really have any explanation about what was going on with me.

I was free from the confines of the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday office routine. I was free from dimwitted bosses who had been promoted into positions of incompetence. I was free from bureaucracy and red tape and corporate bullshit. I just worked, and worked, and worked. I worked 7 days a week. I worked until I was falling asleep, and then I would start again as soon as I woke up.

At some point during this flurry of activity, I managed to get a couple of iPhone Apps to number one in the charts. Naturally, this brought in a lot of cash. I had done it. I had proven my point. I had unwittingly become a successful entrepreneur, off the back of becoming unwell and losing my job.

However, I failed to see it like that. What I saw instead was that office work wasn't good for me. I felt like office work had made me sick, and that I needed to find a new profession... well, a trade actually.

I decided to quit IT and software - the thing that I was really good at - and retrain as an electrician. I decided that the most important things to me were being self employed and working in a non-office environment. It took a couple of years before I finally realised I was wrong.

The same thing happened to me, except this time it was much, much faster.

The pressure on a small businessman, and a tradesman is immense. An electrician is responsible for the safety of everybody in the homes that you have installed an electrical system into. If anybody is electrocuted because of your shoddy workmanship, it's your fault. That's a lot of responsibility. Also, the public expect you to work for peanuts.

The sense of exhaustion and inability to cope with the pressure anymore, had hit me really hard in my cushy desk job. Now I had angry customers ringing me up because I had gotten sick. This was much, much worse, because they were ordinary people who I'd met and built a relationship with. Ordinary people were counting on me to wire up their homes, and I was personally failing them.

This depression was much deeper and darker, because I'd really run out of ideas. I felt completely useless, and that as a well known local tradesman, I'd ruined my reputation in my community. This was awful. I was actually afraid to leave the house, in case I bumped into somebody I knew, somebody who I'd let down.

I felt like I couldn't go backwards, and I couldn't go forwards. I was really trapped. How would people take me seriously as an IT professional if I'd previously been a lowly electrician? How would I ever work again as an independent businessman, when I had actually crashed a business due to my ill health? How could I ever be trusted again?

I started to think about suicide very seriously. I saw no way out of this cycle of depressions and failure. I couldn't see a way to earn money anymore, to work again. I couldn't imagine going back to my profession, or starting another business. Everything looked doomed to fail again and again and again.

I tried the medical route again, and finally got referred to a psychiatrist. It took a very long time before I actually met with the consultant, and the options were the same: SSRIs, SNRIs and NaSSAs. All serotonergic drugs. All with horrible side effects. All taking 6+ weeks to kick in.

I begged my psychiatrist to let me try Bupropion (sold as Zyban and Wellbutrin) which is very popular in France and is fast acting. He refused on the grounds that it was an off-label prescription in the UK and he'd have to get special permission from the NHS trust. It was more than his job was worth.

So, I resorted to self-medication.

Self medication worked... in the short term. I felt better, I could function. However, it took me down a path that led to the Dark Web, which led to drug window-shopping, and later to experimentation with just about every highly addictive hard drug known to man, including Heroin, Crack Cocaine and Crystal Methamphetamine.

Drugs don't work. The brain gets used to them, and then you have to increase the dose or switch to a more powerful drug. You can't artificially induce an organ that's designed to be balanced - homeostatically self-regulating - to be forced into an unnatural state.

What's the reason why those people who were taking SSRIs had lower serotonin levels in their spinal fluid? Well, it's because the brain realises that something is artificially out of kilter, and so it releases less serotonin to compensate, and puts you right back where you started.

In the words of The Verve: "the drugs don't work, they just make it worse".

Why do you think drugs from your doctor are good, and drugs from a drug dealer or the Dark Web are bad? Do you think your brain knows the difference? Of course it doesn't. Most of the drugs that are abused were developed by pharmaceutical companies originally, and used to be prescribed before newer 'safer' medications were developed. By 'safer' we tend to mean weaker and with such horrible side effects that taking bigger doses becomes unpleasant. In actual fact, the so-called 'drugs of abuse' have far less side effects than their 'safe' counterparts, at therapeutic doses. Anything becomes poisonous at high enough doses.

Does that mean I'm pro-drugs then? Am I soft on drugs, and one of these decriminalisation nuts?

Well, no, not really. Drugs are bad. They put your brain into an unnatural state and it's hard for your brain to achieve homeostasis when you are poking and prodding at it with the blunt instruments that are the chemicals that cross the blood-brain barrier.

Drugs can 'reset' your brain, in a similar way to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) which is also known as 'shock' therapy.

Medicine of the brain is very early in its development. Psychiatry has only really been a medical field since the 1950's and the true mechanism of action of medications is only very poorly understood, especially as the true nature of mental illness has not yet been revealed.

My personal view is that the destruction of families, clans and villages in favour of ridiculously long working hours in an isolated urban setting, has destroyed everything we need as humans in terms of our relationships with other human beings. Mental illness is a perfectly sane response to modern life. It's a sane response to an insane world.

The thing that's been most beneficial to my mental health has been connecting with a group of friends, while being homeless. Being relieved of the isolated silence of the commuter train, and the pressure of horrible work and job insecurity, coupled with the financial pressures of paying ridiculous rent and unattainable material goals... it was sweet, sweet relief. Living in a kind of commune, with other people who were living in close quarters with each other, sounds unbearable, but it was actually nice. It was humanising. It felt natural, and a sense of calm, relaxation and connection with the world, flooded back into me. I felt a warmth within me that I'd never felt, except maybe with Heroin.

The question now on my lips is: how do I get that again? How do I recreate the sense of community I had, either with tons of kitesurfing friends, or with tons of similarly dispossessed and dislocated homeless people, all thrust together out of necessity to stick together?

The need to belong to a tribe, a group, a commune... it's undeniable, now that I've experienced it. I place an importance on it above financial security, because without it I just feel suicidal, so it's actually essential for life in a way that money just isn't.

Human connection is the answer to the riddle of depression, suicide and addiction.

I'm halfway betwixt and between. Half in the dark, and half in the light. My brain doesn't know whether to be suicidally depressed or hypomanically fixated on a single goal.

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

This is a story about the hardest part of the journey...

People often give up when they're closer than they think they are to making a breakthrough. The first 80% of a task is always the bit that seems quite easy, like you're making really good progress. The final 20% is tough. Progress seems to slow to a snail's pace, and self-doubt creeps in. It's easy to quit in the final leg, believing you're never going to achieve your goal.

I'm racked with nervousness about whether I'm following the right path. There are lots of things that I feel somewhat full of regret about. There's lots of stuff that I feel a bit stupid and embarrassed about. There are plenty of things that, on reflection, look pretty dumb, arrogant, crazy.

In particular, I'm following a cyclical pattern. I keep repeating the same formula, because I know it sort of works. It's easy for me to stay living where I live, getting more work in the field I know best and pretty much acting the way I've always acted. The pressure to stay in this loop is undeniable.

I need to get my head above water. I'm not in any position to just sack off the western lifestyle and leave a smoking crater in my reputation, creditworthiness and ability to continue to function in the mainstream.

Believe me, I'm so tempted right now to just disappear. I would love to grab my tent, sleeping bag and a few other essentials, and just go off-grid. Suicidal thoughts have reached a crescendo in my head... they stalk me every waking hour of the day. It's clear what's driving this sinking feeling in my heart: the fact that life for the next 6 months is going to be very much a paint-by-numbers exercise.

I've done the commuting thing for 20 years. I've done the IT thing for 20 years. I've done the city living thing for 20 years. I've done the urban solitude thing for 20 years. There is no novelty, no joy, no challenge, no surprises... it's just a case of turning the pedals, and plodding along. The monotony, the drudgery, the formula, the routine... it's worse than a prison sentence.

Do I have a reason for living? Not really. What would it be? Is it a reason for living, to pay rent and service debts? Is work a reason for living, if you're just selling your brain and body to the highest bidder to work on bullshit projects? How can you take pride in your work when you've done the same thing, over and over and over again, for 20 miserable boring years.

I used to work to live. I had a nice lifestyle and I always took my full holiday allowance, travelling to exotic destinations and pursuing exciting activities, adventures. That was less than 10% of the time. The rest of the time was spent watching the clock. Two clocks actually: one that counted down until the end of the working week, and one that counted down until the day that I no longer had to do a job that I had nothing but contempt for.

In truth, I hadn't really reckoned on living this long. Certainly in recent years I decided that things would be wrapped up neatly if I just shuffled off my mortal coil, and my life insurance would at least leave a small legacy for my sister and my niece. I don't really fancy growing old and infirm, and facing yet more of the same bullshit that's been such a chore.

I remember being in hospital, and I really wasn't at all scared that I was going to die, even though my prognosis was that I had about a 30% chance of surviving, such was the damage to my internal organs.

Things haven't really moved on much. I have no dependents. My family ditched me, so I've ditched them. I've not been able to rebuild my social life. I take no pleasure or satisfaction from doing the same job I've been doing for 20 years. I'm too trapped by the mechanisms of capitalism to be able to pursue travel and adventure. I'm too paralysed by fear of dropping out of the rat race and becoming unemployable, to do something gutsy, which would be a one-way ticket.

You see, I'm acutely aware that my perception of the world is coloured by my mood disorder. When I'm depressed, I see everything as pointless, relentlessly horrible and never going to improve. However, I'm able to be rational, and I know that it's foolish to make a permanent change for a temporary problem.

If I throw away the ability to be able to earn huge amounts of money very quickly, then I'm very much limiting my future options. As it stands, at the moment, I can potentially dig myself out of a financial hole and feather the nest very quickly. It seems churlish to not even be prepared to toe the line for 6 short months. However, if you've followed my story at all, you'll know that 6 months is a long time for me... a lot can happen in my life in that period.

My timescales are heavily compressed. Gains need to be shored up quickly or else the hard work will be undone. Things need to happen faster, not slower than normal. Asking somebody whose life is extremely fragile to work harder, longer and suffer more than their peers is likely to lead to the "fuck it" button being pushed. Whatever happened to supporting those who are weaker?

I can see now, where the cracks are. I can see why people slip through the nets and sink to the bottom. I understand where we are hindering, not helping. Life is pretty vicious and unforgiving.

It's true that I'm pretty resilient. It's true that it's remarkable that I've made it this far, and that I still apparently have the opportunity to fight my way back, to recover... and then to perhaps thrive and prosper.

Hopefully, this feeling will pass, but from experience, I think it's going to get harder before it gets easier.

It's like this blog. There are less people reading than ever before, and I'm getting less feedback and encouragement than ever before. I'm not sure why I'm even writing anymore. I've failed to shame my parents into acting with any common decency (although perhaps that was always doomed to fail) and I've as yet failed to feel better, using writing as some kind of shrink, a silent counsellor... to deal with my fucked up head.

But, my experience tells me that doubt always creeps in. I've written 240,000 words and I plan to write 300,000. I plan to write every day for at least a year. Who knows what it will achieve? Sometimes, you don't know until you do it.

When I wrote on a forum every day, it brought me friends, a sense of identity, self-respect and even a sense of achievement when I wrote something that a lot of people found useful. This is kind of like a repetition of that, except that this time I'm publicly dissecting my own psyche.

Is it useful to externalise my internal monologue? Is it useful to psychologically expose myself like this? I've found introspection and self-examination useful in the past, and there's no reason why 'open sourcing' the contents of my brain shouldn't be interesting to somebody somewhere sometime.

They say the most interesting writing is when people are raw & authentic. I'm not really trying to emulate any writers or follow any formula to gain an audience. I just need to get stuff out of my brain and onto paper. I need to pick things to bits and figure out what makes me tick, so I can hopefully begin to open a new, happier chapter in my life.

Watch this space.

Travel doesn't have to mean jetting around the globe to me. I'd be happy in my tent in a muddy field, I think. I'm so sick of the global rat race.

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

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 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 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 doing more faster...

Startup accelerators are a good thing, don't get me wrong. But what's to be done with the wayward founders, the ones who burn out? How does somebody decompress, decelerate from the high demands of an intensive program like an accelerator?

Here's something I wrote on day 28 of the 13-week Springboard program, which is part of the global TechStars network: https://springboardcambridge.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/day-28-guest-post-validated-madness/

My company was shortlisted for TechStars, Boulder, CO, USA. I got the news at 6pm on a Wednesday evening. I needed to be in Boulder for about 10am the next morning. Solution? Get on a plane to Denver that night and drive straight to Boulder in the morning. No problem.

When I arrived at London Heathrow airport and went to check in for my flight, it turned out that the visa waiver program had changed since the last time I was in the USA. I needed an ESTA. This was a problem... the embassy was now closed. However, I managed to apply for my ESTA and get the all-important number in about 15 minutes, standing at the checkin desk, via a US government website.

On the plane, I read a book from cover to cover: Do More Faster by Dave Cohen and Brad Feld, founders of TechStars. It seemed apt, and I had finished the book by the time we landed in Colorado. I then met Dave Cohen later that day, along with Nicole Glaros who was heavily pregnant at the time, but still running the Boulder program.

I guess I shouldn't really associate myself with the TechStars network, given my precarious professional position, and the nature of this blog, but it's impossible to tell my story without somehow including the post-accelerator implosion that I went through. Certainly it's important to state that I always had the support of the network and fellow founders at all times though. Things would probably have ended up a lot worse without that safety net.

Anyway, I didn't really love my startup. I didn't have a lot of passion for the industry sector it was in and the software challenge had already been overcome. We started the program with a cashflow positive business, working software and an established customer and reseller base. I definitely took the wrong startup through the Springboard program. We should have pivoted more aggressively, but you live you learn.

I should have ceded control to my co-founder, David, a lot earlier. The acting coach that Jon got - Annette - to help us with our pitches, suggested that we give David a shot as the CEO. It was good advice. However, ego got in the way. I liked having those three little letters as my job title, even if I wasn't any good at the job and hated all the roles and responsibilities of it.

The problem is, I'm an engineer, and engineers just want to solve problems. In sales meetings, I would be far more concerned about the customer getting the solution that met their needs, than trying to extract a commercially sensible amount of cash from them. It was more important to me that my software was being used, rather than it bringing in sustainable revenues.

Looking back now, it makes much more sense that David and I should have switched roles. He's really good at the whole business administration and driving a hard sales bargain thing. He's really good at making sure that the whole business runs smoothly and is well administered. I only care about the software.

Jon did an interesting thing to try and save us from ourselves (or rather, from me). He got in a bunch of psychologists to come and tell us that we should be consultants, not running a startup. He had tired of nursing us through the growing pains of founder conflict, and joking about our "mutually assured destruction (MAD)" pact, which he wrote on the whiteboard above our heads.

Between Jon, Jess and the other founders we somehow managed to muddle through to the end of the program. There was only one time that I was so offensive that I nearly got my head kicked in. I would have deserved it. I was wrong, David was right, and my beef was with the browser, not him. I was upset that some technical detail wasn't quite measuring up to my preconceived notions, and refusing to try David's suggestion, which wasn't to specification. Of course, it did work, but being a stubborn engineer, I just didn't want it to work like that.

The weird thing is that David and me didn't have a very startup-y lifestyle. After I had finished with TechStars in Boulder, I jumped in my hire car, drove to Vail and went snowboarding. David used to be a ski instructor and sometimes do programming work in Arinsal, Andorra, inbetween forays onto the piste. We both had a pretty nice life. We didn't really need startup stress, hassle and belt tightening.

Apart from living away from our girlfriends in Cambridge for 3 months, there wasn't a lot of hardship that we really suffered, apart from the sheer workload of Mentor Madness and having to try and run a business at the same time as participate in a startup accelerator. I'm glad we did it though. Those experiences and contacts are very precious to me, even if I've not exactly made the most of them, yet.

Our intake must have been a record one for babies. There were two founders - including my co-founder, David - who had girlfriends who were pregnant. The first Springboard babies were born only months after the program ended. How those guys did it, I have no idea. Hero dads.

Obviously, David wanted to maintain a stable family home near Bristol for his first-born child. The end of the program marked the culmination of the intractable problem of where to locate the business. My ex-wife certainly wasn't giving any ground or prepared to compromise even an inch. I was rather caught inbetween a rock and a hard place. Naturally, I just had a meltdown rather than dealing with things in any sensible way.

The sensible thing to do would have been to ditch the girl who never supported me in any of my endeavours and was simply an ungrateful drain on my time, money and resources. She expected zero impact in our lifestyle, from me choosing an entrepreneurial lifestyle. Funding lavish holidays for her on a startup salary is quite hard to budget for.

But an unstoppable change had been started within me. I found Cambridge life to be exciting, exhilarating, even if it was only by some tenuous association with the University of Cambridge. I loved being around smart people. Startup founders are great to hang out with because they say "yes, and" rather than "no, but".

I really needed to go through a breakup, but I don't really handle failure very well. I knew my startup was going to fail with me at the helm. I had failed as CEO. I had failed to make my relationship work. I wanted to change my entire life, but I felt trapped.

My word is my bond, and I take commitment very seriously. I'm also a completer-finisher. I would rather finish something to a terrible shoddy standard, than leave a job uncompleted. I have lots of finished projects, but most of them are not to a very high standard. I'd prefer something was done, rather than perfect.

So it was, that I came to be trying to meet the screamed selfish demands of a spoiled partner, whilst also unable to bite the bullet and step down from my position as CEO, and also accept that I needed to chuck away and change most pieces of my life. They were challenging times, in the couple of months following Springboard.

During one trip back to Cambridge, in an attempt to secure a seed round of funding, I pretty much told all our potential investors that there was no interesting intellectual property in our business and it was a completely copyable business model. Not a smart move. I could almost see my co-founder facepalm when I told the panel this. Engineer's problem. I cannot speak a lie on technical matters.

Anyway, perhaps I wanted the thing to die, because my life was pretty miserable post-Springboard. Back in my spare-bedroom office, over a hundred miles away from my co-founder, and over a hundred miles away from London, and the wrong side of town to get to Cambridge. It felt like I was in the middle of nowhere, which I was.

Just about the only thing I've done too slowly in my life is to ditch a dead relationship. I tend to pick the wrong partners and allow klingons and coat-tail riders to try and hang on for a free ride. I tolerate fools too gladly. David is certainly no fool, and I feel very privileged to have gotten to work with him. However, he quite rightly stood his ground and didn't compromise on matters that were my responsibility to resolve.

The pressure to provide a luxury lifestyle for an ungrateful and unsupportive partner, and give up on my hopes & dreams was too much to ask of me. I was sinking fast into a depression, as my all-too-brief foray into the liberating world of running a business and being an entrepreneur, plus my time in the company of startup founders, mentors and academics, was looking like it was over forever.

I tried to prop things up, getting a job back in corporate bankerland. Shovelling other people's s**t for a living. It broke my heart. You can have the most lavish lifestyle in the world, but if what you do for 50+ hours a week is basically total bulls**t that you hate, then it won't be any compensation at all.

My ex-wife and my Dad really worked very hard to pull the rug from under my feet, and I'm really upset about it. However, I know it's my fault for not pushing those toxic people out of my life and following my dreams. They've been wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again, but they still can't see that their small-mindedness and lack of vision has caused so many golden opportunities to be wasted. I actually have hard numbers showing that investment ideas of mine that they vetoed have now turned out to be ridiculously profitable. Never mind.

I actually feel as though I've never been allowed to dream. I've always been expected to just shovel shit for everybody else to prop up their dreams. I didn't go to University when all my friends were going, because my Dad made such a big deal about what a waste of money it was. I didn't follow my startup dreams, because I was pretty much forced to provide a luxury lifestyle, and chain myself to a remote seaside town for an ungrateful partner who didn't appreciate a single cent of it.

Anyway, moan moan moan. That kind of negative attitude is not going to get me anywhere. I've watched it all burn down, while my Dad and ex have stuffed their pockets and then distanced themselves from me. It should have been vice-versa. I should have shut those toxic people out of my life a lot sooner.

Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda. That's not going to be my epitaph. There's no sense in living in the past, and I apologise that this blog has been firmly rooted back in time, as I struggle to move forwards with my life.

You probably can't understand why I've left highly paid jobs and contracts, and put myself through all the stress of founding a business. I know I complain about the overhead of business administration sometimes, but I really have few complaints about the entrepreneurial lifestyle. I know that Jon's psychologists told me that I'm not cut out to be an entrepreneur, but it's something that keeps coming back to me... that desire to found and shape businesses, to lead, to create.

You don't see the sacrifice that has enabled me to enter the corporate world on a decent wage. You don't know how much of an isolated lonely existance that a geek had at school, programming their calculator and designing sprites in the back of their exercise books, when they should be having schoolday antics with the group of friends that they didn't have.

The loners, the eccentric introverts, the odd-ones-out are thrust together out of a necessity for safety in numbers, and sure those people become friends, but you're all still prisoners in your own mind to some extent. You might be able to see your friends get bullied too, but when it's your turn, you have to endure it all on your own.

Suddenly, being a techie geek startup guy becomes cool, and you are hot property. You can earn big cash selling your soul to the corporate sector, or you can sell lies to investors and have a super cool office of your own. Fake it until you make it, but you never faked it. You just woke up one day, and you're one of the highest paid people, because of stuff you did because you had a lonely childhood, with your head buried in books, or hunched over a keyboard.

Look, there are those sprites I designed in the back of my school exercise book, now on the wall of a global bank's office. You can't see how hard I've worked. You have no idea how much suffering there has been behind the bored looking exterior of the guy asking awkward questions on a conference call, slouched in his chair at his desk.

I can't hark back to 3 or 4 years of my life when I had very little to do except read books and write essays about things I found interesting. I never got to spend my investor's money on cool mosaic decorations on the wall, and bean bags and a table tennis table for my team. My startup life spans pretty much 3 months in a startup accelerator. That was the only time in my life when I really believed in what I was doing. When I was surrounded by smart people who I liked and respected. I was forging my own path through life.

So, what's to be done? Well, I'm running low on cash again, so I guess I will have to do another stint at the coal face. I will have to go on a raiding mission into corporate crazy-land and shovel s**t for some more dollars. I don't really have enough capital to risk chasing my dreams, as usual. As usual, I have been nickel and dimed by the klingons, coat-tail riders and the toxic people in my life, and I'm the one who feels bullied and alone.

I'm kinda used to it. I guess you could call this regression therapy. I've gone back to my childhood, where I had my head in the clouds and I was just writing programs and designing sprites, to distract myself from the crushing loneliness and brutality of the daily bullying.

It looks like there are a lot of open doors to me, but you've got to believe me when I tell you that it's virtually torture to go back into the corporate world, having had a taste of freedom.

I'll do what has to be done, and I'm sure you hate me for acting all spoiled and privileged, but you have to understand just how heartbreaking it is to sell your soul so cheaply.

Tags: #career #startup

This is a story about self-imposed constraints...

I was hoping my depression would go away if I gave my brain a chance to achieve homeostasis, but there's always something that's pulling your mood this way or that. Whether it's a new friend, girlfriend, going shopping (even just for food), exercise or being a slave to the highs and lows of social media. Work is also obviously something that affects my mood in a huge way.

Apologies for this stupid Advent Calendar thing I wanted to do. It's just because I had an idea for a blog post on December 26th. I've padded things out, laboured points, repeated myself.

I'm looking forward to letting things flow naturally again.

Merry Christmas, by the way. I'm sorry my stuff has been so self-pitying and not at all festive. In fact, I've been quite the boring misery-guts. I appreciate that over 100,000 words on oneself is either conceited as hell or it's just me trying to brain dump and order my jumbled up thoughts.

Nearly 6,000 words on subjects as diverse as climate change and subatomic physics was really not written with the idea that anybody might read it. I'm embarrassed if you did, but maybe you got a little glimpse into the world I'm trying to navigate.

I don't know where I stand on social media. In some ways it's addictive and anti-social. In other ways it's a lifeline and a means of maintaining some social contact, when you haven't figured out how to get a social life back again, yet.

Anyway, I appreciate all the lovely messages of support, and people looking out for me.

Tags: #friends #socialmedia #computing

This is a story about running out of ideas...

That's a light box. It's supposed to be a way of treating Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). It's the final thing I thought I could try, as a natural remedy for depression. The regimen that I have followed for 6 months is:

• Varied diet, including plenty of fruit & veg
• Sleep hygiene: strict bedtime and getting up after 7 or 8 hours, even on weekends
• No caffeine
• No alcohol (actually only 3 months)
• No medication
• No drugs
• No legal highs
• Amino acids
• Vitamins
• Minerals
• Exercise
• Making new friends
• Trying to have a stable place to live
• Trying to have a job
• Reconnecting with old friends
• Getting some professional help (only had a whole week in hospital)
• Being disciplined and self controlled
• Wearing blue-light filtering glasses after 4pm (for the last few months)
• Using the light box for at least an hour every morning (for the last month)

Guess what happened? My mood was able to react to things, and I reacted to my mood. There was no stability. In fact there was no coping mechanism. Everything I used to do to regulate my mood was removed, so I did other things that were detrimental to my overall wellbeing.

Being hung over or drunk at work is quite good if you hate your job and think that the management are idiots. Because I was sober, I told the HSBC management team that their project didn't stand a chance in hell of being delivered, because it was being run by people who are terrible at Agile Project Management, and seem to be completely lacking any relevant software development experience. I said I didn't want to be any part of it unless some big changes were made. I said I wasn't comfortable doing the wrong thing.

Being hopped up on coffee is good if you want to rescue a project. I recoded Barclays entire Corporate Pingit system, in 30 hours, with no sleep. I kept the existing public API, but everything else was thrown away. Instead of spaghetti code, full of copy & paste, and buggy as hell, poor error handling, poor logging - unsupportable - I just rewrote nice clean code. Lots of coffee, 30 hour hackathon, all the bugs solved, code reduced by 80%, production grade error handling and logging. The team leader felt important because the old system barely worked, so he spent a lot of time understanding the spaghetti. There wasn't really anything for either me or him to do after I wrote a decent system. My boss was happy, the team leader wasn't, I got my contract terminated, Barclays customers were happy, I was happy that I'd delivered the software that meant I no longer had any work to do.

Corporate software is boring. The projects I'm asked to do are child's play. 48 million customer's metadata? That's only 48 terabytes, if we store a megabyte per customer. A low res scan of their passport and maybe a utility bill, plus a few thousand characters for their name, address, phone number etc. etc. At JPMorgan we stored about 3 petabytes of document scans. That's about the same amount of data in the entire Library of Congress.

AI, games, simulation, data analysis, physics & cosmology modelling, codebreaking... those are the hard problems. I remember I wrote a program that calculated every single possible checkmate. Then I wrote a program that found all the moves that led to those positions. It ran out of memory before it got back to the early moves. Then I wrote a program that could take the position of the pieces on the board, and find the moves to checkmate, where there is no opportunity for your opponent to win. Most of the time the program couldn't find a path where the opponent had no chance. In theory, with enough processing power and storage space, chess could be solved by a program. However there are 10 to the power 80 (10 + 80 zeros) atoms in the universe, and there are 10 to the power 123 (10 + 123 zeros) moves in the chess game tree. We should probably concentrate on modelling the cosmos at subatomic scale before wasting our time on a silly game.

So, that's my quandary. I'm not very challenged or interested by anything in the corporate world, and my solution of just being drunk all the time can't have been doing my liver much good. However, without alcohol/benzodiazepines I think too much, and without caffeine/bupropion/stimulants, I can't get motivated to keep solving the same easy problems that don't even need solving.

In fact, when I think about it, I must have made a lot of people redundant. I've automated a lot of stuff that people used to be employed to do. I've made corporations very rich, by allowing them to lay off loads of their workforce, but increase their productivity and profitability. My main specialism is Straight Through Processing (STP). I know how to get $1.16qn processed with just a few programmers, database administrators, infrastructure engineers, network specialists and system administrators. You don't need project managers, because they just put the lies you tell them into a spreadsheet and tell everybody that everything is going really well. You don't need testers, because good programmers write good automation tests, and they don't write bugs. There's no difficult logic or calculations in a corporate system. I do get spooked out when my code works first time, but it's quicker to do it that way.

Human workflow and user experience. Here's a better use of your time and money. Fill out paper forms and then set fire to them. Nobody gives a shit about having to go through your life story just to become a customer or get a government service. If I want broadband, just send somebody to install it and set up a direct debit. If I want to rent a flat, I'm going to pay you 6 weeks deposit plus a month's rent in advance, plus letting agent fees. Just give me the keys as soon as I've put the money in your account. Don't even bother with the contract. Burn it. The contract is simple: I pay you rent, I live in the flat.

You send a person to read the electricity meter. They can take my card payment for whatever I owe when they are in my home. You send a person to read the gas meter. They can work out my bill and I'll pay it on the spot. You send armies of traffic wardens. They can spend less time hiding in bushes and more time knocking on doors taking card payments for the rubbish collection, street lighting, police, fire service, libraries, schools and other things that I quite like rather than hovering near cars whose meter payment is about to expire.

My bank sends me a letter saying that they've paid a bill for me, but I didn't have quite enough money, so they're going to charge me even more money. My bank's only function, so far as I can see, is to make my problems worse. Rather than ringing me up and saying "Hello, Mr. Grant. We can see your income has suddenly stopped. We're not going to charge you any interest until you start earning again, because otherwise we are going to stress you out and make you bankrupt, and then we won't get our money back". 

You see, everything trundles along fine when you play along with the game. Keep working doing that job you hate, at a company run by imbeciles, on a project that just needs 5 decent full stack developers to get on with what they do best, for 2 weeks, with no project managers who couldn't organise a piss up in a bar, and no 'architects' who just draw on whiteboards and produce documents that nobody reads, because they were rubbish at actually producing real working software.

The worst code I ever wrote was my first iPhone game. Games are awful as a single indie dev. You have to do all the graphics, sound effects, music, plus design the user interface, and then there's the game itself which has to run at at least 30 frames per second. The calculations are hard. Doing it in Objective-C was a nightmare. I've never know a language with such whacky syntax. I can probably write code in about 20 languages (BASIC, Pascal, Assembler, C, ADA, C++, Java, Javascript, C-shell, Korn-shell, Bash, Perl, PHP, C#, SQL, AWK, Batch, Google Apps Script, Logo, VBA, XSLT) and there's a bunch more I know enough of the syntax of to read and edit.

I can glance at some data and tell you if it's XML, JSON, Base-64, HEX, key-value pairs, fixed position, CSV. I can probably guess how the programmers of your favourite game store the high score table, and insert myself as the number one player with an unassailable score.

Yes, playing the games that everybody else does, competing... it seems a bit pointless when you know the game is rigged, and if I really wanted to, I could tweak my bank balance. Fraud is not hard, and banks make so much money they don't even go after the small fraudsters. It's easier to charge honest hard working people exorbitant rates of interest and fees rather than doing their actual legal & moral duty to Know Your Customer (KYC). I could buy a digital identity for about $100, open a bank account, get some loans, use the money to buy a real passport from a European country that's a bit more relaxed about staff members making identity documents in return for a cash bonus.

Once you're in Europe you can just keep heading east until you find a country where people don't read too many newspapers and watch too much TV. You can find somewhere you can afford to eat and sleep for a couple of years, while you wait out the storm. You can take some time out from the rat race, because you deserve it.

My iPhone app business was a hit, my first IT contracting company made loads of money, my electrician business was profitable, but the building trade is hard, my enterprise mobile apps business was too ahead of its time and never made much money, my Bitcoin trading and mining was hugely profitable, my second IT contracting company made loads of money. I don't really want to sell out and get another contract just yet. I've got some cool software ideas.  Instead of doing what I normally do and start with a profitable business model, I want to do something I'm passionate about.

I don't work at MIT or Stanford. I don't work at CERN or the UK Atomic Energy Authority, but I can tell you that the strong nuclear force is the energy that's released when a heavy element is split into two lighter elements. But what does "heavy" even mean when we haven't managed to get the Standard Model of Particle Physics to be unified with Special and General Relativity. Special Relativity tells us that energy and mass are two sides of the same coin, and General Relativity tells us how mass stretches the fabric of spacetime. Gravitational lensing has proven the theories predictions. The Standard Model had it's wartime and industrial applications. The transistor radio and faster computers. Every experiment discovers new weirdness though, rather than proving the model is complete. The particle zoo grows and grows, every time we smash protons together at higher and higher energies.

What does Quanta mean? It means "how much". A photon - a packet of light - comes in a specific frequency, which tells you how much energy it has. Let's imagine that a red photon is 2, green is 4 and blue is 6. We can also imagine that an X-ray might be 20 and a gamma ray 50. Do you notice that all the numbers are even? That's because you can't see anything odd numbered. A photon with the wrong energy won't interact with an atom that needs a higher energy to absorb it, and then emit a new photon. The only way you know anything exists is because of the photons that are emitted from atoms.

So we can only work with things we can see, and those things will only tell us about the photons that have the right energy. We can build a machine that measures microwaves, but what material should we use to listen to the frequencies that no known material interacts with. How would we even find elements that our eyes and our radios and our photographic chemicals can't detect?

Well, cosmologists reckon there's loads of it, whatever it is. They call it Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Nobody can see it, but they've done the math, and there just isn't enough visible matter to glue the galaxies together. Imagine if Dark Photons came in frequency 1, 3, 5, 7 etc. but our visible universe is governed by the Planck Constant, which means multiples of 2, in this  simplified example. If you can only see 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 etc. then you can't see the Dark Photons and the Dark Matter that can only be seen with the materials that we only hypothesise to exist.

General Relativity is normally right, and GR isn't fussy about the matter that it accelerates. It doesn't deal in packets of energy. GR doesn't do probabilities. Quantum Mechanics says that if we stop observing something it loses certainty and spreads out into a probability cloud. If you know the location of something, you can't know it's momentum. If you know something's momentum, you don't know where it's located. It's like saying that if everybody stops looking at the moon, it won't be where you predicted it to be when you look back. But GR doesn't care about that. GR has predicted the moon's orbit with incredible accuracy, and the moon always obeys the law of gravity.

If you ignore gravity in your subatomic world, you permit matter to behave unpredictably. If you ignore special relativity, you permit massive particles to fly around faster than the speed of light, in order to uphold the uncertainty principle.

If we think about the duality of light. Both a particle and a wave. We think of photons as massless, but they have energy and finite speed so General Relativity applies. The speed of light is too fast to get caught in orbit but light will bend around massive objects. Let's use the Pilot Wave Theory instead of all that Quantum weirdness. Imagine our photon being carried along by the gravitational waves that it's making. Gravity waves can travel as fast as they like and can even escape black holes. You can't detect them, because your ruler will stretch and compress as a wave passes. You can't take a timing of how long it takes for something to travel from A to B because time and space are different for different observers. Just by carrying my atomic clock to my fellow experimenter, to compare the time I measured and the time they measured, my clock will run slower because I'm moving in space. Time is not distance divided by speed.

Time measures how much slower you're moving than the speed of light. If you could travel at the speed of light, and tried to shine a torch forwards, no light would come out and your watch would be stopped. You wouldn't even be conscious, because you'd be frozen in time. If you slowed down to 99% of the speed of light and shone your torch, you'd see it beaming off just as fast as normal. That's because time is passing more slowly, so you don't notice that your light is moving at 1% of its normal speed. When you get back home, you'll probably find that everybody is dead, because time didn't slow down for them. Your clock is right, but so is theirs.

So what's going on at the subatomic scale then? Well, you can't really detect a single particle. When a photon hits the Charged Couple Device in your digital camera, it's absorbed. Enough photons have to be absorbed to trigger the discharge of a capacitor. Only the amplified signal is strong enough to be measured. The thing about amplification is that you get noise. You're trying to measure a signal, but a percentage of what you measure is noise. That's the signal to noise ratio. It gets worse. Because instruments are digital, they have limited precision. If you measure colour with 8 bits, you can only pick the closest of 256 colours. A CD can only store 16 bits of air pressure: 65,535 possible values. It does this 44,100 times a second. Pretty good, but only an approximation.

Because all digital equipment depends on an effect called Quantum Tunnelling, it's hard to know if the Quantum phenomena are being observed, or whether it's the instrument's noise that is being amplified. Early computers sent signals in parallel, but sometimes the data got 'skewed', with some bits arriving later than others. Now data is sent in serial, with very fast modulators and demodulators, but that means that a lot of buffering has to occur. If you imagine the time it takes for a detected signal to be amplified, that amplified value to be measured, the value stored in a buffer, a modulator to turn the value into electrical pulses, the time to travel down the wire, a demodulator to measure the pulses and store a value in another buffer, a memory controller to load that value into the computer processor's register, the processing instruction has to be loaded from the cache, and then the calculation is performed, the result is copied from the result register to memory, the I/O controller sends the result to the storage device.

Then, ages and ages and ages later, a scientist comes and looks at the values. According to Quantum Physics, every piece of measuring equipment, power source, data transmission cable, the computer and it's storage device, are all part of a quantum superposition, and the value is not determined until the scientist observes it, at which point the wavefunction collapses. Computers are great at doing calculations and for sharing research, but by their very nature as machines that exploit strange subatomic behaviour - semiconductors - they are also not very reliable when measuring the very properties of physics that they themself are built on.

It's useful to think of the Pilot Wave theory, because it explains observations like the double-slit experiment, in a nice deterministic way. Photons don't travel through both slits, but the wave does, and then the two waves interfere. Interference disappears as soon as you polarise the particle, because the peaks and troughs are no longer in phase. We really don't need to mess around with probability waves.

Yes I really hate probabilistic theories. Because subatomic things are smaller than the wavelength of light, we can only make statistical measurements. The size of the atomic nucleus was estimated by hammering a sheet of gold really thin and then firing electrons at it. Based on the number of electrons that bounced back and got detected, an estimate was made of how much empty space there is in an atom. However, you might know the weight of the gold, and the surface area, but you don't know how thick it is. It might be 5 atoms thick, it might be 50. Where did you get your measurement for the weight of a gold atom? How you know its density? How do you know how tightly packed the atoms are together?

At some point you're going to have to rely on some old science. The periodic table gives us the atomic weight, based on a presumed number of protons, neutrons and electrons. But what about the strong nuclear force that's holding the nucleus together? What about the energy of the electrons in the biggest orbits? Does a 1g diamond have as many atoms as 1g of Carbon dust? Prove it.

So we know that heavier elements are unstable, radioactive, and decay into lighter elements. We know what amount of what element, in a certain isotope, will give a self-sustaining fission reaction. We guess that fusion in stars creates all the elements up to iron, and all the elements after that we guess are created in supernovae. We haven't done much apart from a bunch of chemical reactions and some atom smashing yet though. We've done pretty well with electromagnetism and radio waves. Semiconductors and transistors are completely ubiquitous. It's all useless junk if the Van Allen belt blows away in a coronal mass ejection and we're all bombarded by cosmic rays and the radio waves are filled with static noise.

I can tell you something that's fairly easy to observe. Hotter air takes up more volume than colder air. Also, there's an altitude where Earth's gravity can no longer hang onto its Nitrogen, Oxygen, CO2 and noble gasses. Also, if you suck up dense polycarbons from deep underground, where they have been heavily compressed, and then set fire to them, the result is less Oxygen, more heat, and the expansion of liquid into a big volume of gas that's heavy, so it lies close to the ground, while the useful Oxygen is pushed into the upper atmosphere, where it thins out and drifts off into space.

If you have more CO2, you should plant more trees. However, we're doing the opposite. Deserts are spreading, rainforest is being cut down and fire sweeps through vegetation in California, Australia and Borneo.

So many people work in banking, insurance, accountancy, financial services, paper pushing jobs of such woeful uselessness that probably the bulk of humanity's job description is: sit at desk in front of computer, wear telephone headset, read the script on the screen to people on the phone and type their answers on the keyboard, drink tea & coffee, go home.

Why can't I do something to help feed some people, spread the wealth, speed up the conversion to clean energy, get more computers doing more useful calculations and modelling, rather than just massaging sales figures and marketing crap that nobody needs?

I'm going to risk running out of money for another few weeks at least, and that means I definitely will run out of money, because it's usually 60 days until I get paid. For the amount of money I'd get selling my depreciating electronics, and the time and hassle involved, I might as well get a job stacking shelves in a supermarket.

I'm just going to do the type of work that I'm passionate about and good at for a few weeks. I know HSBC are going to need a Customer Due Diligence system before February. I like my ex-colleagues, but my god nobody had the balls to just bin the junk and start again. It doesn't scale, it's not maintainable, it's so hard to roll out in-country, the pilot was a disaster, all the good people are leaving, and 85% of the work still has to be done.

I remember getting really angry at an all-day meeting with about 40 people. I didn't know at the time, but the CIO was there, and head honchos from Retail Bank & Wealth Management and Corporate Banking, plus the best in the software business trying to save Europe's biggest bank, on their number one project, money no object. It maddened me that we spent 2 and a half days estimating how much work there was to do in 3 weeks, but nobody knew what our productivity was. Nobody knew what the backlog was. Nobody knew what Minimum Viable Product was. Nobody was bothered about Continuous Deployment. Nobody had thought about the godforsaken task of pumping thousands of questions and rules and logic into a spreadsheet that you needed to know 3 programming languages to even make a stab in the dark.

I said I'd do half the questions on my own. I then had to spend an absolute age reprogramming the core system so that it would spit out meaningful syntax errors. There were about 500 things wrong before I even started. Then the architect admitted that he hadn't even thought about some fairly fundamental things and his solution took days to get right, while my suggestion was roundly ignored. Then the data architect started changing everything, even though it was tightly coupled throughout the entire system. I had to give loads of people lessons on Git and Maven artefact versioning. It was madness, and I had to call time out: I asked for a code freeze while we got everything stable. To everyone's credit, they listened to me, trusted me and supported me. I think it was only 5 straight days of midnight finishes. The work wasn't hard, but there were major bugs in every single component of the system. The pressure of knowing that hundreds of people are effectively twiddling their thumbs, and if you don't get it all working, you've damaged a huge amount of productivity.

A little cheer went up when everything integrated and the screens went green for the first time in weeks. It was also just in time for the CIO to announce that we'd achieved a significant milestone at the Town Hall. It was false optimism though. I had unearthed an absolute mountain of buggy code and dodgy config. My worst fears about performance were confirmed too. It took 5 minutes for the homepage to load.

I found a Scrum Master I liked and gave him a list of names that I wanted to work on a new version of the application. We picked good tech, designed a simple system and had something to demo in a week. They sacked my scrum master, me, and the longest serving member of the development team. People were getting jumpy and we were making management look pretty incompetent. I was also leaving a paper trail that was inconvenient. I was quite explicit about the urgency of the situation and what the simple remedies were. I didn't sugar coat it, because I'd been giving the same advice for 5 months.

I had plenty of warnings to keep my head down, and toe the line. I knew my days were numbered, and when I found out my old scrum master wanted me back because everything was tanking, I fired my parting shot. I knew I'd get terminated. Quicker than having to work a notice period. No need to lie about your reasons for leaving. No 4 weeks of hell working for a micromanaging idiot.

There's no challenge for me in corporate software. I ran the IT for a nice medium sized company. The board asked me for a data warehouse and a new phone system. Instead I gave them a new card payments processing system and an accurate set of accounts, with the correct ledger for all their customers. It's the only reason why the Office of Fair Trading didn't shut them down when they sent their forensic accountants to see why the books didn't really balance. Oh, and they were in breach of card data protection and were going to have a data theft until I tokenised all the card numbers. I had such a hard time in convincing the CEO of the right technology strategy that when he said "fit in or fuck off" I was more than happy to leave that rudderless captain.

When JPMorgan needed somebody to figure out why their FX system was running like a dog and they were going to cause a market liquidity disaster on International Money Markets Day, they'd had 10 Oracle consultants and none of them could find anything wrong. I found a DBA I liked in London, who didn't even work in my department, and we went through everything with a fine tooth comb. I also harassed the sysadmins until they got my disk I/O up to scratch and tweaked every kernel configuration value, applied every patch and generally wrung every bit of speed we could muster out of the hardware. I then had to take the vendor's code to bits and tell them where they had multithreading issues. They didn't believe me, but I kept sending them the measurements I'd made and pretty graphs, until they put a dev on the phone to me, and we talked through the code, and found a bug. Then the marvellous DBA found the setting that was causing the latency. With the new code and the much faster database, I could hardly believe the timings from the performance tests. When IMM day came, we blitzed it. We absolutely wiped the floor. Fastest FX platform in the world. There wasn't much appetite for developing our own in-house system anymore, I really didn't want to sit around looking busy. I liked my friends and the culture, but I still need interesting work.

And that's how it goes. Hire me to fix your technology problems, and I will, but then I'll want to leave if new challenges don't come along. I hate just keeping a seat warm. I guess that's Bipolar. I work like a son of a bitch for 3 or 4 months, then I'm really struggling to stay motivated for another month or two, and then I'll just stop coming to work.

I could try and pace myself, but invariably I find myself drawn to the impossible challenges. Normally you hire somebody who turns out to be rubbish, but refuses to leave. They literally stick to their chair like glue, because their main motivation is job security, not being good at their job. When you hire somebody who's really good, you can't let them know what a hideous stinking mess everything is in, and that they're going to be under relentless pressure to do horrible work. People who are really good will just go and find somewhere better to work.

I'm an idiot. I want to finish the job I've started and leave feeling proud of delivering stuff. I never ask for the poor performers to be fired. Most of the time I'm able to calmly filter out the new guy I'm training, when they're trying to impress me, but they don't know what they're talking about, and I've got an absolute bitch of a schedule to keep. I had to keep just saying "no" when 3 people were shadowing me, and they were all saying you forgot this or that, or you did that wrong... then I press a button and it all works first time and I can start to be more amenable again.

I'm absolutely not perfect. The first implementation is normally a dog. An ugly dog. But it works, and then the pressure is off so I can refactor for elegance. It's a bit of a thankless task though. When you start refactoring you then start looking at other code, and you end up having to change more and more and more and all the tests break because everything is so fragile, and then people start complaining that they can't find their bit of code anymore, and they have to merge their bit of work into an unrecognisable new world, because people don't pull, commit and push often enough.

I don't even write much code. Ask me for a bit of code that does something, and I'll give you a little bundle that you can plug in wherever you want it. When everybody is developing features but the application doesn't work, I'll concentrate on bug fixing and stabilising the build. When everybody is trampling on each other's toes, I'll concentrate on release management and versioning. When an important demo is coming up but people are committing code that doesn't work, I'll roll it back and tell them to put it on a branch until it integrates. When code starts getting promoted from DEV, to UAT, QA and PROD, somebody has to make sure the database is created with the latest schema, test data is loaded, Business Process Management tasks are cleared down, and all the little microservices are up to the right versions. That can take 3 hours on a bad day.

Software is not hard. Managing a huge team is hard. I haven't had a management role since 2013. However, I know that every untalented email forwarder who thinks they can manage a big project says "features, features, features, we're late, features, features, oh my god we are so late, let's just get it working, get it working, oh my god so many bugs, performance is terrible, let's try and go live anyway, oh my god it's hard doing a production rollout, and the users hate it even more than the testers, what do we do? what do we do? everybody panic, work 25 hours a day 8 days a week, 366 days a year, what do you mean we don't have any metrics? what do you mean we don't have any reporting? what do you mean it's not multilingual? why are all the good people leaving? why do things seem to get done a lot slower now we're supporting 3 or 4 more environments, instead of just one? who could have predicted such a thing? why didn't any highly paid consultants tell me? oh, they did? get me the mail server administrator immediately, there's some junk mail I don't seem to be able to delete permanently. Just get it done before the regulators come asking why we've failed to meet our timetable commitment".

And that's why I hate corporate bullshit.

It's the engineer's curse: we want to just solve problems, to make stuff that works, to make things better. I don't care that it hurts your feelings when I say your idea's rubbish. Your job is to listen to the experts, motivate people and sign the paychecks. My job is to come up with the ideas and make them a reality for you.

I don't really think I'm cut out for having a boss. I don't really think I'm employable anymore. I just completely ignore all the management, then they love me, then I tell them I'm not doing it again unless things change, then they hate me, then I get fired, then they get fired.

I probably need to figure out a way to get paid for more than 5 or 6 months of shouting and swearing at everybody and just doing whatever the hell I want. But it's so soul destroying to go to work and think that you made absolutely no difference. In fact you were complicit. Your day rate bought your silence. You were more worried about losing the stream of big invoices than your ethics. You put financial benefit ahead of professional, moral and legal obligations.

A bunch of white collars have got to get prosecuted soon.

Bankers have had their hand in the till for far too long.

Tags: #banking #bipolar #physics #career