parents – Page 5 – Nick Grant

Nick Grant

Tag: parents

  • Work Will Set You Free

    This is a story about ingratitude…

    Big gates

    Give me liberty, or give me death!

    How do you like living in the free world? Freedom of speech, not that anybody’s even listening and you’ll never get into print. Freedom to work, if you can get a job, and you’ll have to pay exorbitant taxes. Freedom to do what you want, if you’re not dead and have any spare time and energy after working a job until you’re nearly 70 years old. Freedom to buy what you want, except you probably can’t afford it.

    There: that’s the ingratitude part out of the way. Do I actually think like that? Some people think I do. You’ll have to read between the lines to see where I am being self-mocking, humorous, sarcastic and even a little farsical in the interests of courting controversy.

    This talk of death and suicide sounds a little flippant, a little melodramatic, but in actual fact, it’s shaped my mindset.

    I was always impossible to manage, and fearless talking to people of all ranks and status. I refuse to be cowed by credentials and hierarchy. I refuse to know my place.

    If you were to just dip into part of my story, and try to make a knee-jerk assumption about me, you might assume that I think I’m better than other people. You might think I’m an entitled snob, a spoiled little brat. You would have misjudged me, and instead you’ve failed to understand that I’m coming at things from a totally different end of the spectrum.

    I’m not claiming that I’m hard done by and that I’ve made my own luck and worked my way up from the bottom. On closer examination, these claims always prove to be horse-shit. When we look at people who claim to be self-made success stories, the tale is always ridiculous. For starters, many of the ones I’ve encountered came from loving homes in middle-class families, with parents who had a profession, a job for life. There has been financial security and a good education, even if they paint themselves as some sort of working class hero.

    My tale is slightly different. I’m judging things based on the experiences I had when I had nothing. No roof over my head, and no money. I’m judging life based on how close I came to death. I literally made a life-or-death decision… actually on a couple of occasions.

    So, I write from a position of knowing how it feels to have nothing. I write from a position of knowing how it feels to have to choose to act to stay alive, or else inaction would lead to death.

    Based on this standpoint, I judge things very differently. You might think I’m ungrateful to have a “good” job. You might think I’m ungrateful for my opportunities. In actual fact though, I’m just judging things relatively. I think to myself “am I more or less happy than when I had nothing” and “am I more or less inclined to die, than the time that I nearly died before“.

    There’s a cold hard rational core within me, that could quite easily slice my veins open, in a sudden brutally decisive act, if I decided that the effort of maintaining myself in a state of perpetual unhappiness and struggle would be ridiculous.

    British Commerce

    As a subject of Her Majesty the Queen of England, I was indoctrinated in the state schools of the United Kingdom, to become a loyal wage-slave, contributing to stability, increase and ornament of British commerce. Does it give me any pleasure or pride to say that? No, not really.

    My very first job was for a Ministry of Defence subcontractor, and I actively contributed to Great Britain’s military capability, as a naval power, to further their imperialist ambitions. Should that give me a lump in my throat when I see the Union Jack and hear the national anthem? Actually, no, it makes me think about the high price that is paid by the nations we have subjugated, in order to pay for the lifestyle I enjoyed.

    Do people enjoy their lifestyle? Huge numbers of ordinary working age people can’t afford a house, a family, a wedding. Most ordinary working folks hate their shitty jobs and their long commutes. Most ordinary working folks fret about getting ahead in the work rat race, or getting their kids good exam grades so that they can die an early death due to stress-related illness. But the good news is that you’re not going to have to die in poverty if you drop dead at your desk, given that the pensions are in a meltdown.

    It looks so hypocritical. The Westeners sit there in their sedentary jobs, comfort-eating themselves to death through obesity-related illness and giving themselves repetitive strain injury from their mouse and keyboard, cataracts from their computer screen and a bad back from slouching in a chair all day. Our short life expectancy is a function of stress, depression and poor lifestyle ‘choices‘. Meanwhile, the developing world slaves away, with the dream of attaining a western-style lifestyle. Supposedly, the West is the model the world should follow.

    However, maybe we got it wrong. In other cultures, the smartest member of the family gets sent away to study and work, so that they can send money back to their family to support them. Isn’t that something to get out of bed in the morning? Being the breadwinner for your family.

    Instead of the young, fit and active people being the economic providers, we have instead tipped our society on its head, where we worship the ‘grey pound‘. Since the pension funds became the biggest investors in all our companies, and all the wealth pooled in the accounts and property portfolios of the baby boomers, we now have an impoverished youth, who have a much lower quality of life than their mothers and fathers, and far fewer opportunities to provide for even themselves and their own offspring, let alone feathering the nest still further of their elderly relatives.

    I went to the Southampton Boat Show last year, and instead of successful young businessmen treating themself to a toy, as a reward for their hard work, ambition and ingenuity, it was baby-boomers who were spending their kids and grandkids inheritance, as a reward for having created an asset bubble that has meant crashes in both the stock market and the housing market.

    I know that all the pounds of economic output that I generate will simply disappear into a pensions black hole, to pay out final-salary schemes for a generation who have nothing but contempt for their kids and grandkids.

    Would you toil and toil, if you had no prospect of ever being self sufficient? If you were simply working for ungrateful masters who called you lazy and stupid? If the wealth that you generated simply inflated asset prices further out of reach, concentrated in the hands of the idle coffin-dodgers who didn’t work to create the very assets that they own?

    Tie Die

    Since when did it become a bad thing to be motivated to work? Why should we be so fearful of immigrants, who are young, fit and economically active? The very language smacks of greedy hoarders who are like a dog in a manger.

    Every year we have more students than ever before achieving the top exam grades, yet we print headlines and stories asking if exams are getting easier. Homework and the pressure to succeed is driving ever increasing numbers of young people to suicide, but yet it isn’t good enough.

    The prospects for young people are awful. The minimum wage is lower, and they’ll never be able to get married, have kids and buy a house like their parents did. Why do we label them as ‘gangs‘, ‘hoodlums‘ and ‘thugs‘ and mock them for their materialistic attachments to modestly priced bling, like gold cellphones and other trinkets that cost a fraction of the homes and cars that their parents had as their status-symbols?

    Why do we not see the link between demanding endless dividends on our shares and ever-increasing capital gains, and the need for corporations to suppress wage inflation, which impoverishes our working-age people?

    There are many people who would say that I’m not entitled to ask these questions, given my six-figure income. There are many people who think I should just shut up and take the money, because it’s there.

    In actual fact, I’m going further than just asking difficult questions. I’m actually putting my job on the line.

    I lost two big money contracts because I refuse to be bought. I refuse to stay my tongue, just because I’m being paid a lot of money. Is it unprofessional, arrogant, reckless, stupid? Actually, it’s none of those things.

    I struggled a lot with middle-class guilt, but predictably, I did very little about it. I used to wring my hands and say “but what can I do?” while reading the Observer and The Guardian newspapers, and having passionate discussions about putting the world to rights, while quaffing expensive wine in fine restaurants in North London. This was hypocrisy. The final straw would have been going on a sponsored run and doing some kind of gift-aid contribution out of my salary every month, to salve my conscience and give me some kind of sense of smug satisfaction that I’d played my part.

    Instead, I went on a journey. I’ve been to the bottom and back again. You might think that my risk was underwritten by my middle-class family, but they actually turned their back on me, when I had apparently left my social rank and become ‘untouchable‘. I was disowned, disinherited.

    I can never claim to know what it was like growing up in abject poverty. My parents might claim that they never had any money, what with my mum being a student and my dad working behind a bar in a caravan site, when I was born. However, my granddads were both professional men with good pension provisions, who were able to bail out my drug-addled hopeless parents whenever they really hit hard times. The same privilege was never extended to me. Perhaps I should have recklessly sowed my wild oats, and then pled poverty when there were extra mouths to feed, like they did.

    Me in the office

    A parent’s relief that their child is alive and physically healthy has no bearing on whether a person feels grateful to be alive. I didn’t choose to be born and I don’t want to go on living, if life is just endless misery and suffering. If you expect your kids to love you unconditionally, you’re just plain wrong. It totally depends on how you treat them, and there’s a real generational problem.

    Handing over a planet and an economy that’s absolutely fucked, and then retiring, is pretty ridiculous if the generation who are going to have to clean up the mess, accept austerity measures and live a lifestyle that is unimaginably frugal, in order to allow pollution to return to safe levels. It’s a bad deal, by anybody’s reckoning.

    It’s in my nature to question everything and anything. There are no taboos for me. There is no ‘respect your elders‘ bullshit, because the first question is “why?“. Why should I respect the generation that proliferated nuclear armaments, caused global warming, deforestation, pollution of the water table, an asset bubble that’s priced ordinary working people out of the market, an unprecedented increase in the rich:poor gap and widespread economic calamity and didn’t think about how they were going to afford their retirement, except by mortgaging the future of their children and grandchildren.

    Why do I work? I can’t tell you, but I can tell you what damage working does to humanity.

    The wealth that I generate goes to corporations, who pay it out in the form of dividends or use it to inflate asset prices, to generate growth for their majority shareholders, who are institutional investors – asset managers – whose job it is to generate yet more wealth for an idle elite who expect to receive final salary pensions and an amazing lifestyle, in return for having wrecked the world.

    And you wonder why I struggle to get out of bed in the morning and get excited about going to work?

    People that I’ve worked with throughout my career have read what I’ve written, and I’m slowly making myself unemployable. How could you employ me, knowing that I don’t subscribe to the groupthink? How could you employ me, knowing that I speak my mind, and have no respect for the instruments of power? How could you employ me, knowing that I’m not cowed by fear and insecurity?

    I’m impossible to control, using the millstone of debt and the threat of destitution. For me, destitution is freedom. Freedom from the oppression of working a job that only serves to line the pockets of an ungrateful elite who have no respect for the workers of the world, and are only interested in a comfortable retirement at the expense of over 50% of the world’s people.

    Obviously, I think to myself “I must take this down” or “I must cover this up” or “I must keep my mouth shut“. There’s a part of me that just wants to take the king’s shilling and let him call the tune, no matter how maddened I am by degrading myself as the court jester.

    There is so much false promise. Work today and be happy tomorrow. Fritter away my cash on good times to forget about the soul-less day-to-day existence and futility of it all, is what I could so easily do. I’ve done it before.

    I sometimes laugh at myself, so full of middle-class angst, but there’s a deep seriousness here. It’s just bullying groupthink to call somebody a hypocrite or a champagne socialist. The fact of the matter is, somebody has to do something, because we’re sleepwalking towards disaster. The middle classes are just about comfortable enough to write letters and furrow their brows with concern, but not enough to actually risk their jobs or their reputations and good social standing.

    Every day I sit at my desk, unable to not think about the bigger picture, unable to put the futility of it all out of my mind. I think “what the hell am I doing here?” and even though I’m good at my job and I am perfectly capable of toeing the line and keeping my bosses happy, I inevitably start to rock the boat, just because I have so much barely concealed contempt for a system that so obviously fails to serve the bulk of humanity.

    I’ve let a genie out of the bottle, by considering the wider questions that we face as a species. I’ve gone down a rabbit-hole of thought, and I can’t stop chasing that rabbit, even though I’m throwing away golden opportunities that people would love to have themselves.

    Please try not to get caught in the trap of thinking this is a simple case of ingratitude.

    Office worker bee

    My values and my work are really not at all aligned, and it grates with me, to the point where I really don’t give a shit if I lose my job, but I’m not stupid… I know that I only have to play by the rules for a short amount of time, and then I can let the world know what I really think and who I really am, before my horrified bosses get rid of me. Please just kill me.

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  • Counter Cyclical

    This is a story about being a contrarian…

    Chart

    I remember sitting down with a mortgage broker in 2007, and he said “just focus on the teaser rate, don’t worry about the interest rate after the initial 2 year discount. When your 2 years is up, we’ll get you another great deal!“. I said to this guy “you do realise I work with Credit Default Swaps, don’t you?“. Naturally, I ignored his advice and went for a deal that I could afford if there was a credit crunch.

    I didn’t even want to buy a house anyway. I wanted to put all my money into gold, in 2005/6, and I had opened an account at a bullion vault and bought a small amount… at $550 a troy ounce. The dollar was also really weak so it was a cheap buy.

    I thought the housing market looked massively dodgy and the amount of money I saw flying around at JPMorgan, in the credit markets, was ridiculous. Clearly, the bubble was about to burst and a store of wealth in a scarce commodity looked like the best bet. There were plenty of dumbasses around though.

    In Cambridge in 2011, I read the original paper on Bitcoin. I thought it looked a damnsight more interesting than my startup. By the end of that year, I had started buying Bitcoins. I bought hundreds.

    By the spring of 2012, I wanted to pump all of my wealth into Bitcoin. I was buying Bitcoins at $5 a pop. I was certain that there were big capital gains to be made in the emerging Cryptocurrency. Again, dumbassses didn’t see the potential, but even I frittered away those first Bitcoins that I bought, rather than keeping them as an investment. Unless I was going to make a sizeable bet I wasn’t interested.

    Come the summer of 2013 I was running out of money. My solution: invest in Bitcoin miners and buy bitcoins at $100. I borrowed every penny I could lay my hands on and sank it all into Bitcoin. I offered to cut friends and family in on the potential rewards. Two friends let me manage an investment for them. My family wouldn’t give me a cent, even to help me keep a roof over my head.

    An idiot – my father – called me “lucky” when I sold my Bitcoins for well over 1,000% return, later that year. I sold my bitcoin miners for a profit. I made money for my friends.

    At some point, you’ve been “lucky” so many times that it’s statistically improbable that it’s luck, and in actual fact, all the analysis and reading, and time spent thinking about the macroeconomic environment, somehow seems to beat “luck“.

    If I’d taken the advice of the idiots, I’d be working in a factory in the provinces for minimum wage, or I’d be dead, although the two things sounds pretty much the same to me. Is it “luck” that means I’m not? Well, I’m not arrogant enough to believe that it was smart choices or hard work that mean I am where I am. I know that I’m “lucky” to be alive, to have functioning kidneys, to have enough brain cells left to not be left as a vegetable.

    How do you unpick luck from your story?

    There’s a snobbery that’s coming across, and perhaps you even think I imagine myself as some kind of smarty pants. Well, it’s pretty clear from this tale that I’ve taken some pretty dumb risks and done some staggeringly dumb stuff, lately.

    I like to think of it as some kind of karma. If your family treat you like a worthless piece of shit and a know-nothing waste of space, then why shouldn’t the wider world be a little kinder to you, and gift you the occasional lucky break when you really need one?

    These are my fundamental rules for life:

    • Be nice to your kids
    • Invest in scarce commodities

    That is all.

     

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  • Violent Communication

    This is a story about channelling energy into something positive…

    The Globe

    Buckminster Fuller was going to commit suicide, so that his family could benefit from his life insurance policy. After an epiphany, he found his purpose in life and went on to publish over 30 books.

    In a month or two, I will have written the equivalent of 5 novels. Obviously, most of it is garbage, but I hope it serves as a warm-up. The point is to see if I have the discipline to sit down and write every day. Writing gives my life structure, routine.

    I normally have 3 or 4 things I want to write about each day, and I struggle to keep under 1,000 words. Browsing statistics tell me that people read for between 3 and 4 minutes per day, on average… even when I’ve broken my rules and have written 6,000 words, which means that they’re probably skim reading or getting bored and stopping reading before the end.

    There has been real violence & venom in my words, as I’ve struggled with a sense of abandonment and real anger and frustration at being let down on promises at a really critical time, and when my life really hung in the balance.

    My writing did nothing to sway the people who I targeted, to act with any decency, but now that I know they’re no longer reading, I do feel satisfied that I have at least put my side of the story across.

    In actual fact, I feel like I made myself look like quite a bitter and angry person, quite immature and unconstructive, negative. It might be well overdue, and the damage is already done to my image, my reputation, but now it’s time to stop grinding the axe and start writing in a more positive way.

    Behind every rant, every acerbic scalding word, was a lot of emotion, but it was all focussed & fixated on a few individuals. Not very healthy or productive. Unlikely to lead to pieces of writing that are interesting for people to read.

    I’ve read a couple of posthumously published satires where the author’s frustrations with the world are barely concealed. They are repetitive and almost cringeworthy to read, but the passion makes the books hard to put down. However, they are good works of literature, unlike me just slagging off my drug addict, alcoholic, loser parents and abusive ex-wife.

    It’s difficult to know how to act. My school days were dominated by bullying. My working years have been dominated by age discrimination and people who’ve been promoted to a position of incompetence, where they are completely useless and concentrate exclusively on stopping anybody else from getting ahead. My longest relationship was with an abusive bully. I’ve had relatively few good role models.

    I’ve picked a few people who I like and respect, from around the world, and I’ve tried to learn what I can from them, and to emulate their life philosophies, some of their thoughts and teachings, to be interested in things they’re interested in, to try and understand what is important in their lives, and how that makes them tick.

    I’m a long way from where I’d like to be. I’ve made a poor account of myself, blathering on like a fool while in a messed up state. I’ve exposed my darker side: the rage and frustration has bubbled over and I’ve revealed human characteristics that are less than desirable.

    It’s good to connect with people but I’ve been very exposed. I fear that I’ve lost the respect of some people I really idolise, and others that I could learn a lot from. I fear that I have taken something that had a lot of potential to reach a broad spectrum of people I wanted to connect with, and I have corrupted it into a nasty weapon to try and beat up on just a few people, and that’s kinda shameful.

    Slings n arrows

    You know what though? I don’t have a healthy outlet, other than writing this, and nor did I learn any ways to deal with frustration and anger as a child and young adult. I was the one on the receiving end of other people’s shit. I took the blame for my parents’ shortcomings. I was the recipient of my ex-wife’s viciousness. I was the victim of daily bullying and abuse.

    I’ve soaked up all this shitty abuse for years and years and years and now it’s all got to come out somehow. I’m fed up of being the punchbag. I’m fed up of being the scapegoat. I’m fed up of taking the blame for everything. I’m fed up of being the quiet keeper of secrets.

    Yes, I’ve got to find a more positive way to channel this negative energy. Hitting back at the people who hurt me, in particular my parents and ex-wife, will never lead anywhere. The bullies and abusers never feel any remorse. They’ll never back down. They’ll never say sorry.

    Retaliation & tit-for-tat… I know that it’s a dark path to go down. I know that the secret is to rise above it all. It’s hard to be the bigger person. It’s hard to just let things go when you’ve been wronged, even if the hatred is destroying you from the inside.

    Some of my friends’ parents taught me to believe that two wrongs don’t make a right. They’re probably right, but the main problem is that retaliation is punished more harshly than bullying and abuse. We reward the bullies and the abusers and the bigger stronger people, and hand out trite platitudes to their victims.

    But, it’s true, I am the bigger person. I know the chain of violence and abuse has to be broken. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

    I always thought that society would cleave itself in two, with the sensitive and intelligent beings creating a super-race that would have all the best technology, while the thick-skulled idiots would just slowly devolve into some more basic animal creature, which is quite well physically endowed but only uses its muscles to fight over food scraps and compete for other similarly dumb animal mates. These creatures would obviously very easy to herd and to keep separate from the elite.

    When life was going well, I lost all the bitterness about my shitty childhood. At last, I was tasting the rewards for that abuse… I had risen above the herd of idiots. Sadly, as a horribly ironic twist, I ended up dating and then later marrying a bully, and she dragged me down to her level. It’s taken me a long time to realise that I need to distance myself from such people as soon as I can, and to get myself back into safe space, away from the herd of idiots.

    It’s really hard to not be bitter & twisted, when you know you’ve got to rebuild so much. It’s really hard not to be angry and resentful at people who have profited from your labour, your industriousness, your ingenuity, your trust, your kindness.

    I’m remarkably close to either a breakthrough or capitulation, suicide. Things are on a knife-edge. I have the opportunity to earn 3 or even 4 times what I could have done, weighed down by the abusive numbskulls. With money comes opportunity. With opportunity comes the benefit of all those tough experiences.

    Now, I’m so passionately against bullying and abuse. I’m so passionately against living miserably. I’m so passionately against brutality and cruelty.

    It would be easy for me to become cruel and bullying, as a result of having suffered so much shit myself, however my future hasn’t been written off by a few horrible and small-minded people. There’s a glimmer of an opportunity, and every chance I might rise above the herd of idiots once again.

    I’ve got 6 months ahead of me before any kind of sense of security will return to my life. 6 months living under threat. 6 months where one thing going wrong could screw everything up. That’s a lot of pressure to live with every day. Everything has to go right, during the next 6 months, or else it takes me beyond the limit of what I can handle. There is no contingency. There is no safety margin. There is no excess fat.

    As you can imagine, that makes me very tense, very highly strung, very anxious. That pressure comes out in a negative way sometimes, directed at those who dumped me in the shit, but I know that’s no use. That pressure comes out as hopelessness sometimes: a sense that I can never overcome the obstacles, and luck will never be in my favour for long enough to break free again. The hopelessness leads to suicidal thoughts.

    So, tomorrow I start something that has real tangible value, to rebuild my life. However, don’t be surprised if the pressure is unbearable, and I fly off the handle at seemingly minor setbacks. Don’t be surprised if I’m still not quite able to bury the hatchet and stop being so aggressive, so violent in my communication towards my persecutors.

    I’m a long way from breaking free again.

    Gunmakers

    The geeks will inherit the earth

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  • Childish & Immature

    This is a story about arrested development…

    Whacky Fella

    It’s fairly clear that I have too much time on my hands to think about stuff. Too much time alone thinking about stuff leads to dredging up old memories, getting worked up about stuff in the past, and strange thoughts and ideas, without any checks & balances.

    However, I’m reasonably self-aware, so I thought I’d share my own impressions of myself. In particular, my attempts to be rational and objective about everything that grinds my gears.

    I’m aware that the more and more I wail in distress, bitch and whine, the more I seem like a spoiled teenager, full of angst and feelings of being ‘hard done by‘. Perhaps there’s the impression that I’m owed something. Perhaps a sense of entitlement is coming across.

    Actually, there’s no entitlement… driving all of these feelings are suicidal thoughts, which mean that if life is too awful, too unbearable, I’ll just remove myself from the game altogether.

    It’s easy to dismiss a suicidal or depressed person, saying “other people have it so much harder than you” but it’s that attitude that is the truly immature one. With maturity, you’ll realise that life doesn’t work like that. As a friend once said, there isn’t one single person on the planet who’s entitled to feel depressed and suicidal because they have it worst of all, and everybody else shouldn’t feel depressed because they have it better than this one individual.

    We judge things relatively, this is natural, it’s permitted and it’s an acceptable fact of life. Why shouldn’t I judge my lot relative to my peers, relative to the opportunities and luck that we’ve all enjoyed in life, as well as the unlucky things that have happened?

    Luck? Luck? What the hell am I talking about luck for? Isn’t destiny decided by choices? Well, no, not really.

    I didn’t decide to get born to a couple of drug addict dropout losers, who were too intoxicated on drugs and alcohol to adjust their lifestyle and grow the fuck up when kids started to arrive. Did I decide that these losers would be such a waste of space that they’d need bailouts from the bank of Mum & Dad just to put a roof over the family’s head? Did I decide that these losers would spend my entire upbringing teaching me not to be entitled, and to expect a lower standard of living than they enjoyed? Did I decide to pick parents who both enjoyed University educations, but dropped out, and decided not to afford me and my sister the same privilege? I think, if you’re looking for the entitled people who believed that the world owes them a living, you’ll find them in my parents.

    I’ve always looked to the future, and tried to act in a positive way. I forged my own path, and decided to have a career and follow the path of responsibility, hard work and reject the lifestyle of my parents: being lazy drug addicts as they were.

    However, when I found myself back in the situation of my teens – no money and control taken out of my hands – naturally, I feel pretty bitter about everything, pretty resentful to have nothing to show for years of hard graft. Yes it’s immature, to bitch and whine about it. Yes it seems like I’m not taking responsibility for the shit that went wrong, undoing all that hard work. Do you want to know why I watched everything burn down, and why I don’t feel that responsible?

    Happy Moi

    Does that look like a happy child to you, or a clotheshorse? Does it even look like a child, or perhaps a status symbol? Perhaps it’s an object, to be wheeled around, a badge, a token?

    The bulk of my upbringing was spent receiving abuse for not having been born with perfect maturity, naturally instilled Victorian values. I never had a childhood.

    This is what makes me tick: I feel like I’m entitled to a childhood, now, today, as payback for a horrible upbringing.

    I feel like I can act the fool, the jester, the clown. I feel like I can have a massive tantrum, call everyone names, throw a hissy fit. I feel I can have chocolate and jelly for dinner. I feel like I can play with toys. I feel like I can neglect my responsibilities and not do my homework.

    This is payback time. I’m taking the time that I didn’t have as a kid to make people laugh, or cringe. I actually don’t care that I look childish and immature, it’s too much fun and I don’t give a fuck what people think.

    Is it spoiled, and is it bratty? Well, that depends… who spoiled me? I paid for this. I paid for me to have a massive meltdown, a massive tantrum. It’s all my wages, my life savings, that has funded what had become a long-overdue childhood.

    What did you think it was all about? Riding my bike recklessly around London, getting mixed up with the “wrong” crowd and being the popular kid who doesn’t play by the rules, doesn’t respect authority and their elders, doesn’t say and do the “right” things.

    Oh boy, let me tell you that it feels good. It’s such a relief to throw off the shackles of savings accounts, mortgages and pension funds. It’s such a relief to be free from the oppression of a work schedule, allotted holiday allowances and kissing arses. It’s such a relief to speak my mind, rather than falling in line with the rabble.

    What’s the lesson we learn from all this? Well, if you’re overly disciplinary with your kids, and take them away from all their friends and give them a sparse, boring, shit little life, filled with angry abuse for them being nothing more than a fucking child… expect them to grow up feeling like they missed out, like they never really knew childhood innocence, the joy of just laughing and giggling.

    Now, when I start to go a bit hypomanic, I chuckle to myself, I grin manically. There is a lightness in my chest, pure glee. People see it, and it’s infectious. They can’t believe an adult would have such childlike qualities.

    When will this end, this somewhat embarrassing and disgraceful immaturity? When will I stop being bitter and resentful about a horrible childhood? When will I move on, and stop verbally attacking my lazy drug addict dropout loser parents?

    The answer: when I feel like I’ve had enough.

    Bus Stop Club

    I look pretty happy on top of this bus stop, don’t I. I’m ‘owed’ 18 years of childhood innocence, aren’t I?

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  • I Need To Write

    This is a story about everything trapped inside my head…

    Tick Tock

    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.

     

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  • A 2.5 Minute Read

    This is a story about human connection…

    Yo yo

    I try to use photos that are a metaphor for what I’m going to write about. I was thinking that the yo-yo could represent mood fluctuations, but I actually think of it more as an autonomous puppet on the end of a string.

    I’ve been feeling like I’ve lost my way. I’ve certainly felt like I’ve pushed just about everybody away that I possibly can. After the ‘big confession‘ around Christmas time, I’ve felt like I’ve been fighting to clear my name, to explain and justify myself, my actions, my thoughts.

    Obviously paranoia is sometimes a product of drug abuse, and I can certainly see that my brain was getting more and more destroyed as January became February, and then March, and the self destruction was still continuing unabated.

    Actually, last night when I went back and reviewed the 214,000 words that I have written to date, I could really see a frightening degradation of my capability to think and express myself, progressing over those 3 months. What shocked me most was how coherent I was in January, and how incoherent I was in March. For some reason, I had imagined that I had been ‘on the mend‘ for a lot longer that just 7 weeks.

    I’m acutely aware that the gibberish that I was spouting, plus the repetitive angry rants and axe grinding, made my writing virtually unreadable. I’m still coming to terms with the fact that I’ve got this bitterness that’s still coming out in a very unhealthy and unpleasant way. I’m not sure why I’m still so raw, tender and full of anger and pent-up aggression about things that happened a long time ago.

    I think there’s a massive amount of insecurity I’m experiencing at the moment, having ‘confessed‘ my darkest secrets, and I now feel very exposed. I feel unlovable. I feel like a failure. I feel like all the things I’ve been trying very hard to convince people I’m not. I notice that the harder I attack those who I pin blame onto, the more unpleasant I become myself, which shames me.

    If you imagine what my life is right now: trying to fight a drug addiction that has nearly claimed my life on a couple of occasions, trying to get a job and get back into a sustainable routine, anxious about servicing my debts and paying my rent & bills, with no income. I’m doing this with a supportive flatmate and another friend, but that’s pretty much it… for months, this is the only human face-to-face contact I’ve had.

    I had about 20 voicemails I hadn’t listened to. When you get into a financially distressed situation you don’t really listen to voicemails or answer the phone. It’s too much stress.

    My mum had left me about 6 messages that were all berating me for not being emotionally available to her, for support and to dump on. Sure, the family is going through some turbulent times, but my own name might easily be added to the list of casualties. Death is closer than you think.

    I think about committing suicide every day.

     

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  • Repetition ad Nauseam

    This is a story about being bored to death…

    Thank your wicked parents

    I’ve had enough of alienating people. I even bore myself with my repetitive themes, labouring the same points over & over again. I know I wrote once before about changing the scratched record, but I’ve struggled to do it yet.

    If you’ve stuck with me this far, I’m amazed, and I’m grateful. I will try my hardest to make it worthwhile, as the narrative hopefully turns in a positive direction. I decided that I was going to blog for at least a year, every day if possible, and I’ve stuck pretty true to my original objective. I’m about 8 months into this whacky project.

    When I think back to some of the weird and (not very) wonderful stuff that has spewed out, during some rather strung out periods, it’s a bit cringeworthy. Having all this brain dump out there for all to see is quite embarrassing, shameful, but who cares? The genie is out of the bottle.

    I’m far more self aware than you probably think I am. I’m aware how bitter & twisted I come across. I’m aware how much I’m grinding my axe, and refusing to bury the hatchet. I’m aware how stuck in the past I am. I’m aware how absolutely bat shit insane I’ve been at times.

    It’s going to take months before I have most of the pieces that build a stable life. I currently have a place to live and a couple of friends that I see regularly, so that’s more than I had in July 2014, homeless on Hampstead Heath, but it’s still a pretty incomplete picture. I don’t have a lot of control over how long it’s going to take to get another job, and rebuilding a social network is going to take ages. Who knows if I’ll ever patch things up with my family?

    I wrote before about compassion fatigue, and besides, don’t my problems look self made anyway? Doesn’t it look, to all intents and purposes, that I’m a spoiled little rich brat, wailing about first world problems, or things that I shouldn’t have to fix up anyway? How can I talk about being fortunate at one time, and then talk about being down on luck another time?

    When I’m starting a sentence, I notice how often I’m using a personal pronoun. It’s all “I” and “me“. This hasn’t escaped my notice. As a proportion of the world that I inhabit, I’m alone with my thoughts far more than most. No job, no work colleagues, only one friend that I see regularly, apart from my one flatmate.

    If you think I’ve become self absorbed… or maybe that I’m always self absorbed… that’s perhaps a function of isolation, loneliness, being an only child up to the age of 10, being bullied & ostracised, being moved around the country away from friends, switching schools 6 times, isolated in a tiny village in France every school holiday.

    I try and fight the self-absorption, but it’s a fact of where I am right now. I’m broke, unemployed and I don’t see anybody face-to-face on any kind of regular basis. I have no passion at the moment, nothing to live for, nor the money to pursue a passion.

    Free as a bird

    There’s a bird I photographed, when I was living up on Hampstead Heath. Perhaps I seem free as a bird to you, seeing as I don’t have any kids to feed & clothe, seeing as I don’t have a partner to buy handbags and shoes for, seeing as I don’t have a mortgage to pay anymore.

    Certainly, I felt free when I didn’t have rent to pay, debts to service. It was exciting, an adventure, sleeping rough in London. But, I’m not stupid. Sleeping rough is no fun when the weather is bad. Sleeping rough is no fun when your luck turns, and you get robbed or in trouble with the police or park wardens.

    Rejecting the rat race can only be done for so long, before you are unemployable and so far outside the system that you can never re-enter it. People and their neat little pigeon holes can’t cope with a gap in a CV where you were a no-fixed-abode hobo. When you have no address to fill in your last 5 years of address history, the forms just aren’t set up for that. Computer says no.

    There’s a very real lack of excitement and adventure in my life at the moment. The more that you play chicken with the grim reaper, the more the humdrum daily existence becomes anathema. My whole childhood and career was mostly boredom, so the chaos of even traumatic and stressful events holds more interest than yet more rat race game playing.

    In a way, I want to fix up things in my life, only so that I can burn them down again. To chuck things away at the moment would be an insult to two people who’ve helped me not lose everything that we consider vitally important in the world of the rat race. It’s a shame to admit how depressed I am at the moment though.

    Am I supposed to be happy about the prospect of brown-nosing bosses and dressing up in a fancy suit every day, trying to make a good first impression with new work colleagues? Am I supposed to be excited about having the money to wipe out my debts, and to feather the nest of my landlord? Am I supposed to be pleased that while death rushes headlong towards me, I’m saving up towards some imagined future time when hopefully I have enough health & wealth left to fuck the whole thing off?

    During periods of exhaustion and particularly poor mental health due to extreme stress and pressure, I’ve talked about wanting to teach deprived kids physics, write a book, solve the riddles of the Universe, set up a hostel for refugees… basically jack in the rat race and do something worthwhile. There’s a social conscience and a curious mind that are completely unfulfilled, and 36 years of trying to keep it at bay is just as damaging as anything you can do to yourself with drink & drugs.

    But, when I’m well, I’m a realist. I will choose the path of least resistance. I won’t burn every bridge.

    However, I do worry that the day has finally come when I’ve burnt every bridge. This website, where my entire psyche and darkest secrets are out on display for all to see… it could be the end of my professional reputation. It could derail my gravy train. If it does, I’ll feel guilty for those who tried to protect me from myself, but I’ll probably be happy, deep down. The rat race is a miserable existence.

    Lego Train

    There’s a Lego gravy train. Adults like playing with kids toys. What does that tell you about how pointless and boring most jobs are?

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  • Bitterness and Regret

    This is a story about things that can’t be changed…

    Where it all restarted

    London represents opportunity to me. People talk about the streets being paved with gold, and this city has always provided for me, when I’ve been going through hard times or thought I had reached a dead end.

    Obviously, it’s people not the place, that has meant that I’ve had a roof over my head, and the chance to work again, when I would otherwise have sunk, stagnated, rotted and died.

    I’ve been very bitter about my ex-wife and parents, who haven’t helped, and have even been obstructive. The bitterness is partly because I’ve not yet been able to have a sustained period of recovery, to show to those who have helped me that it was worthwhile.

    I’ve considered going back and deleting or editing some of my bitter, angry rants at people who’ve let me down, obstructed my recovery, even injured me and taken me away from friends, work, my life. It’s obvious to me how stuck in a rut I am, how boring and repetitive I’ve become, how obsessive and negative I sound.

    There are several challenges I’ve set for myself at the moment:

    • Get back to work
    • Fight depression
    • Tidy up a load of administrative loose ends
    • Stay ‘clean‘

    It probably seems like I’m making mountains out of molehills, having a storm in a teacup, but there are few words to truly convey just how dysfunctional my life was. Post was shoved out of sight, bills piled up, finances got in a terrible mess, out of contact with all my friends, conflict with my family. The threat of bankruptcy and homelessness was imminent, around the clock.

    I know that you have probably had times when you’ve worried about making ends meet, how you’re going to pay the bills, how you’re going to pay the rent or the mortgage. I’m sure you’ve felt like you’re not going to do it, that you’re going to fall on hard times and be evicted from your home. Try living like that for a few years, and see what your stress levels are like.

    A lot of my bitteness stems from the fact that the depths I sank to, the problems I’ve had to overcome… a lot of it was so easily avoidable. A very small handful of people just had to honour their commitments, their word, their duty and their obligation as supposedly decent human beings, and my situation could have been very different.

    However, I need to move forward. I don’t feel in a particularly forgiving mood, so instead I’m going to blame myself. I’m going to blame myself for trusting people. I’m going to blame myself for taking people at their word. I’m going to blame myself for thinking that other people were dependable, reliable, trustworthy, pleasant, decent human beings.

    I can improve on that. I can actually say that I learned some important life lessons. “In sickness and in health” are just empty words to some people, and some parents are just terrible, terrible people. My faith in humanity is damaged, but I will probably benefit from becoming cynical, untrusting, negative, selfish and unreliable… just like them.

    London Tyre

    I need to make it clear here that I’m not talking about all those many people in London, who have been my friends, my support network, my saviours in my hour of need. London has provided me with clothes in hospital, where my parents have left me for dead. London has provided me with a dry roof over my head, where my ex-wife would see me go homeless. London has provided non-judgemental friends, where others have recoiled in prejudiced horror at the propaganda pedalled by my ex and my Dad.

    One of my great sadnesses is that where these worlds have collided, and the chaos and trauma that I have been through has overspilled into all areas of my life, long-standing friendships have been damaged. I can not and will not criticise my friend, who made me a guest in his home, for the fact that he believed things said behind my back, which his naïvety led him to believe, but it’s hard to know how to fix things up between us.

    There’s a saying amongst people dealing with mental health issues:

    Nothing about us without us

    It’s quite simple really. You have no idea what a person is going through, when they’re suffering the chaos and trauma associated with mental health issues (including substance abuse) and 2nd or 3rd hand information is just tittle-tattle, and will not help anybody.

    It sounds like I’m ticking my friends off, and I’m really not. Where people have tried to help, I have nothing but gratitude. I don’t expect people to understand, to make allowances, to go out of their way to educate themselves. I have no entitlement, beyond the basic human decency of not making assumptions based on stuff that’s been discussed behind my back, but I can understand that there might be honest good intentions.

    This is all starting to sound rather paranoid, confused. Yes, that’s the psychological damage that’s done when you overhear hushed whispers about yourself, and news spreads via gossip and contact behind your back that you aren’t party to.

    As a sick person, I felt like a failure. I blamed myself for being defective, and later for ‘choices‘ I made. I viciously attacked myself, criticised my inability to cure my ailments and restore my former stability, reliability, order in my life. When you feel terrible about yourself, you carry a huge burden of shame. You try and hide yourself away, minimise your footprint on the world, withdraw from human contact and the public gaze.

    It’s very strange, pretending you don’t exist, because you’re ashamed, embarrassed. You live in fear of anybody discovering that you’re not well. You live in fear of anybody finding out how much of a failure you think you are. Of course, this breeds paranoia. Of course, you are hypersensitive to people talking about you behind your back.

    Of my friends, there’s no blame here. They tried to help. They wanted to help. Their motives were good. They aided. They helped, they didn’t hinder. I have only regret that I haven’t yet been able to use the patchwork quilt of support that I’ve received to put it all together into something more positive… yet.

    Primrose Hill

    Certain beginnings haven’t reached the end yet. This story’s not over

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  • Car Wreck

    This is a story about an inevitable crash…

    Wipeout

    If you’re under too much pressure for too long, eventually you’ll crack, you’ll crash & burn. Making hay while the sun shines is all well and good, but when you enter a cycle of boom & bust, it’s very hard to restabilise things.

    My school year was one of the first to do the dreaded SATs exams. These exams turned out to be incredibly important for the next set of exams that followed hot on their heels: my GCSEs. My SAT results pretty much decided which stream I would be in for Maths, English & Science. Being in the ‘top set‘ was important, to not get dragged down by those who didn’t want to learn.

    Education and a corporate career is just unrelenting. The mindset of continually challenging people with arbitrary measurements never goes away. Whether it’s A-level exams, University or your performance reviews at work, life is one continuous game of sorting and sifting, presided over by little hitlers who want to confine everybody into neat little boxes.

    I never felt particularly stressed about exams and getting good grades, at the time, but there was a heavy culture I was being indoctrinated into, which I didn’t realise until it was too late, and I hit a brick wall and could no longer continue on the same bullshit path.

    We tell our kids that they need to work hard at school and get good exam results so that they can continue into further education, get a better job, have a better lifestyle. It turns out that’s simply wrong. Society certainly benefits if we are all unthinking slaves, simply parroting the same identical bullcrap, and unquestioningly following our allotted route: KNOW YOUR PLACE is what’s drummed into us, for 40 or 50 hours a week.

    Playing the game, playing by the rules, believing in the value of pieces of paper above talent and experience, believing that there’s a place for everybody, and that if you try your best, you can do better than your peers, and it’ll give you and your family a better life. At some point, the bubble bursts, you become disillusioned, you see that it’s all a lie.

    I felt cheated out of my childhood, with such an unhealthy fixation on academic achievement placed ahead of playtime and social activities. Nobody would ever tell me off for reading too many books, completely isolated in my room, but playing games with my friends was not a good use of time, apparently.

    My parents pulled me away from my peers at every opportunity. Whether that was visiting their friends all over the country, or spending weeks at a time in a dilapidated house in a tiny French village. I did make a friend in this village eventually, but he was younger than me, and I was criticised for being “immature” and the effect this friend had on me.

    Some of my parents friends had children too, and I tried to be friends with them, and indeed I felt closer to these children than I did with a lot of my schoolfriends. I was kept away from schoolfriends so often during weekends and holidays, when there was less emphasis on homework, but I could never get close to any group of friends before I was dragged away.

    VR Racer

    I started to value material possessions above social bonds, because I had been taught that social bonds were not something I would ever be allowed to cultivate. I changed schools 6 times, instead of just once, because of my parents’ lack of care about how my social development was being affected. In the end, I gave up, and saw friendships as totally transient, meaningless.

    It’s a real tragedy, when somebody is taught not to get attached to anybody, not to make meaningful bonds, not to value friendships. I fixated on career achievements and money, believing that there was no value in staying with my peer group, having a group of friends, being socially bonded.

    It was quite by accident that I ended up with a group of kitesurfer friends. For me, the appeal of kitesurfing was that it was a loner sport. Most people who have been socially normalised enjoy team sports. It’s the camaraderie of the sport that is most of the fun, rather than the sport itself. That brotherhood (or sisterhood) between team members is something I never experienced growing up.

    Given that I was socially under-developed, and even cynical about friendship and human relationships, it was easier to develop relationships through technology, the internet. I started to read and contribute to an online discussion forum, about kitesurfing, and from this I got to know the online nicknames of a lot of people, as if they were people who I knew intimately.

    As my confidence with kitesurfing grew, I started to get more outspoken on the online discussion forums, and this developed into arranging to meet up with people at the weekends, to go kitesurfing where the wind and the tides were best. There was a social meet up every Tuesday night, at a pub in central London, which was popular, and cemented a lot of real friendships.

    Having access to a group of friends, a peer group that I felt bonded to, was something that was very new and alien to me at first, but it completed me: I felt secure and happy for the first time in my life. For the first time in my life, I was living for more than just exam grades and good feedback from my bosses at work. It was healthy, it was stable, it was sustainable and it was happy.

    Sadly, my underlying mindset was still one that placed ambitious career goals and risk-taking ahead of valuing the social group that I loved and who gave me great joy and security, a deep-seated sense of wellbeing, of connection to the world. I didn’t miss it until it was gone.

    I was driven to find a girl, to fall in love… having been so socially insecure, awkward, such a late starter, I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet that special lady, and I felt like that was the most important thing I had to do, since I had become happy in the rest of my life. I put all my energies and efforts into trying to make it work with every girl who I thought I was madly in love with.

    There are few words to describe just how immature I was, in some very vital and ‘normal‘ areas of life. You can’t bully and pressure and cajole your kid into being an academic bookworm without damaging them as a rounded person. Who gives a shit if they’re grade 8 on the violin if they had a miserable childhood and can’t relate to their peers or find any happiness in the world? Who gives a shit if they’ve got a first-class degree from Oxbridge, if they’re shy and awkward and depressed?

    It seems inevitable that I would go astray, with no peer group, no group of friends to compare notes with, to keep each other safe.

    I cannot possibly express to you just how isolated and alone I am.

    High Wire

    I walked the tightrope for a long time, believing that good qualifications and work experience would lead to a stable life, but as soon as I looked down I realised that there was no safety net

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  • Addiction and Libido

    This is a story about an unholy trinity…

    Foe Pawn

    At a hotel I was given a voucher to connect to the internet. As you can see, it was foe pawn. I’m not sure if I used it foe pawn, but I possibly used it for porn, amongst my other general internet browsing.

    Let me tell you about something that’s a fairly irresistible combination: drugs, pornography and masturbation. Drugs and sex – i.e. chemsex – are bad enough, but there’s a limitless supply of pornography out there on the internet, and given a limitless supply of drugs, you can get seriously messed up.

    People who are dealing with the chemsex crisis talk about an unholy trinity of drugs: GBL/GHB, Crystal Meth and Meow Meow (M-CAT). These drugs are endemic amongst a group of promiscuous homosexual men, seeking to reach unimaginable highs from drug-fuelled sexual congress.

    What happens when the secret is out? What happens when the wider, mostly heterosexual community finds out that having sex on drugs is many, many times more enjoyable than sex or drugs on their own?

    Let me tell you, from bittersweet experience, that once you have tried chemsex, your ideas about pleasure and sexual ecstasy will be irreversibly corrupted. You can’t un-experience things like that. You can’t forget what you know. You can’t un-feel what you felt.

    Of course, 99% of people know that drugs are bad, and dangerous and will kill you just from looking at them, right? Well, unfortunately, people are discovering that the hard-line propaganda just isn’t true, and the warning message is somewhat lost in the prohibitionist bullshit. So every cautionary tale is regarded with suspicion, or completely disregarded altogether.

    In actual fact, there is so much taboo around drugs, sex, homosexuality, masturbation, fetishes… even just feeling horny is something we don’t talk about openly. We are almost stuck in the Dark Ages when it comes to feeling guilty about our sexual desires, and the fact that we are inescapably driven to satisfy them.

    At the end of the day, you can’t fight hunger, you can’t fight thirst, and you can’t fight your libido. Those are the 3 things that ensure the survival of humanity as a species of animals. I know a small handful of us try to rise above the level of beasts, and act a little less like animals by using our higher brain functions, but we’ll still die if we don’t eat and drink, and we will actually devolve if the intelligent members of humanity don’t reproduce.

    Masturbation and drugs are the ultimate ways to thwart nature though. Once an animal has found something it prefers to eating, drinking and fucking, it’s pretty screwed in terms of its survival prospects, and the likelihood of it passing on its genes. You could see this as a good thing: eventually addicts and wankers will die out. However, evolution is ridiculously slow, and chemistry is ridiculously fast. Checkmate, humans.

    Meth TV Advert

    The above picture is an advertising campaign, suggesting that people don’t try Crystal Meth “even once“. The advice is quite reasonable. Meth is highly addictive, and the best way to not become addicted to drugs is to never take them in the first place.

    By the same token, beating addiction sounds fairly simple. Just don’t take drugs “even once” and hey presto, your addiction is cured. But things aren’t that simple, unfortunately.

    The brain is amazing at making connections between things. I would hope that everybody is familiar with Pavlov’s dog, that started to salivate whenever a bell was rung, because it knew it was going to get fed. The brain had connected the sound of a bell ringing with getting food, and something that is normally completely unconnected with food and eating, became linked in the brain of this dog.

    I would hardly consider eating food to be an orgasmic experience, but small amounts of dopamine – the pleasure chemical – are released in the brain every time we eat. It’s natural that we should have evolved a brain that teaches us to eat… eating is what keeps us alive. Eating food is a kind of addiction, if you like. We eat because we get a pleasurable reward from doing it. We are satisfying a craving.

    Sex and masturbation are a bit easier to understand. We get a much bigger dopamine hit every time we are sexually stimulated in a state of arousal, and another big hit of dopamine if we achieve an orgasm. It’s much easier to see that sexual behaviour is the same as any other addictive behaviour. We feel a craving for pleasure: we get horny, we want to fuck or masturbate. We then satisfy this craving, with sexual acts, and then we are rewarded with pleasure.

    However, the brain has natural systems to curb our enthusiasm for round-the-clock eating, masturbation and sex. After food or orgasm, a protein called prolactin is released from the pituitary gland, which signals to the brain that it’s time to take a break from those pleasure-seeking activities. The amount of dopamine that’s released if you continue to eat or fuck, is virtually nothing… you get no pleasure out of it, until the prolactin levels drop again.

    The problem with drugs is, that they’re almost always rewarding, provided you take enough of them. Sure, a tolerance builds up in your brain, but you can usually take bigger and bigger doses, and still get high.

    If you combine drugs with sex/masturbation, you’ve got a problem… just like Aaron on his injected Crystal Meth, you might want to fuck or masturbate until the drugs wear off.

    Now, if we imagine that Aaron is like that dog that salivates whenever the bell is rung… poor Aaron is going to want drugs whenever he gets horny, or he’s going to get horny whenever he gets high on drugs. It’s a vicious circle.

    The only way that you’re not going to feel horny is if you have your sexual functions interfered with, by medication or surgery. Castration for a man, removal of ovaries for a woman… the elimination of the sex hormones: testosterone, oestrogen and progesterone. That goes some way to eliminating your libido, but then, what are you if you’re no longer a sexual being? You’re certainly no longer human.

    Drugs produce a temporary and mostly reversible effect, but the longer that you abuse drugs for, and the more of a link that is made in the brain between drug-induced pleasure and other actions, the harder it will be to undo those drug cravings, given the same stimuli.

    When the stimuli is your own libido, you probably don’t fancy becoming a eunuch. The only option is to de-link sex and drugs. That means having a lot of mediocre sex and joyless masturbation.

    Creamy Coffee

    Once you start to realise how the brain works, you can start to disentangle why you do the things that you do. Why do you drink coffee? Because it contains the bitter plant alkaloid called caffeine, which causes dopamine to be released in your brain, which is pleasurable, rewarding. Why do you smoke cigarettes? Same reason. Why did you copulate for 30 seconds and produce a screaming shitting incontinent midget that can’t even feed itself? Same reason.

    If you truly want to elevate yourself above the level of the beasts, you would have to make yourself asexual and release yourself from the tiresome bother of having to eat and drink. However, you’d probably get so engrossed in some interesting area of research that you’d forget to eat and die of starvation. Plus, you wouldn’t have any kids, so you’d just die in obscurity as some kind of eccentric hermit.

    Of course you don’t have to take things to the other extreme, and test the very limits of human ecstasy, pleasure… to get as high as it’s possible to get. I really don’t recommend it. It’s bad for your health and probably pretty deadly. Everything else in life will be compared to that gold standard forever afterwards, and it’s hard to get over the disappointment that nothing in your life is ever going to be as enjoyable.

    This is a cautionary tale, but it’s more an honest conversation that people are running screaming away from, because they’re prudish, repressed, uptight, shamed by taboos and social norms into a culture of silent guilt about normal, natural human things that every person feels.

    But there’s another reason why some people go down the path of hedonism, while others go down the path of quiet family life: oxytocin. The bonding hormone is released when you stroke your dog or your cat. The hormone is released when you see your kids, and give them a cuddle.

    Oxytocin is responsible for curbing our urge to seek pleasure, by giving us a warmer, longer-lasting kind of pleasure. If the dopamine hit you get from an orgasm is like injecting Crystal Meth, then the opioids that are released due to oxytocin are like injecting Heroin. You’re happy to sit around, monged out in your pyjamas all day with your kids, because you’re wrapped up in the cotton-wool opiate hit of a Heroin-esque oxytocin ride.

    Nature wants you to change modes once you’ve reproduced, from the pleasure seeking fuck machine, into an obedient servant to your helpless infant(s). As a parent, your life is over. It’s time to concentrate on stuffing calories into the greedy mouths of your offspring until you finally expire from exhaustion. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, so having your brain calmed down and full of satisfying all-day pleasure chemicals while you’re fulfilling your parenting duties works perfectly.

    The most tragic thing is when these world collide. When children are conceived in the middle of a period of drug abuse fuelled sexual activity, it’s going to be nearly impossible for your brain to switch modes. The amount of pleasure you get from your shitting, vomiting, snot-covered offspring is not going to be able to compete with powders and pills.

    It might sound unpalatable, but if you’re going to be a drug addict, you should be gay or be a wanker. Becoming a parent might provide an incentive to get clean and sober, but you’re going to have a tough job kicking a habit and bonding with your child. That tiny bit of chest-swelling warm fuzzy feeling you get when you put your tiny baby on your chest… yeah, you’re not really going to notice that if you’re on a massive comedown.

    Pregnancy Test

    It might seem like I’m a reckless risk-taker, and that I’ve come dangerously close to ruining my life, but that’s the whole point: I’ve got no dependents. I’ve actually been really careful. The main thing to be careful about is to not spawn any offspring you’re in no position to look after, because you’re struggling with addiction.

    But this isn’t a lecture. This isn’t me being holier-than-thou. Actually, it’s me saying that I understand why families fall apart, why parents don’t love their kids enough, why babies get born to junkies and hopeless drug-addled fathers.

    One of the main reasons I have such a high metabolism, I believe, is because my Mum wasn’t expecting to get pregnant with me, and when she found out she was pregnant, she then decided to lay off the booze and the fags. The withdrawal from nicotine and alcohol while I was in the womb would have meant that highly elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, would have passed into my developing body, through the placental blood.

    As an organism, whatever advantage we can get in our environment would have been crucial to our survival in a world that was out to kill us, 10,000 years ago. A baby that is going to be born into a world with little food and many predators should have a completely different metabolism from a baby that’s going to be born into a land of plenty. You can’t run away from the wolves very fast with a big fat blubbery baby, and there’s no point in having a baby that’s really good at storing energy in fat reserves if there aren’t any excess calories around.

    Addiction is just the same as hunger or thirst, and so, babies that are born to mothers who are recovering addicts will be affected as if they were starving: low birth weight, and the epigenetic expression of genes that cause features to create a skinny scavenger, constantly in a state of nervous tension, high alertness.

    While it’s easy to look upon me with ignorant, stupid eyes, and assume that my life has been directed by my choices, in actual fact, so much of what we think and say and do, and how our body and brain responds to circumstances which are very much out of our hands, is a result of a chain of causation that is far more impenetrable than a trite oversimplification.

    What does it tell you that I’ve been able to take drugs like Cocaine, Heroin and Crystal Meth and not become addicted? What do your simplistic ideas about drug abuse tell you about that particular fact?

    Drug addiction is a more complex relationship than simply a person and a chemical. Drugs are social. Drugs are sexual. Drugs are societal. Drugs are cultural.

    Yes, it’s true that the right combination of a drugs and activities associated with drug taking can form a nearly unbreakable bond in your habits, behaviour and actual brain programming, to the point that escaping addiction will be virtually impossible.

    However, only a fool would write people off and say that somebody can never change. One thing is for certain about the brain: it’s a plastic organ, that can adapt itself in amazing ways. One thing is for certain about humans: they’re adept at handling almost anything the world can throw at them.

    To stigmatise a huge group of people, to ask them to hang their heads in shame, to ask them to shoulder other people’s guilt, to pay for crimes they’re not responsible for, to be the black sheep, to be the scapegoats… it’s a horrible thing to do, to sit in judgement over somebody who is 99.5% identical to you.

    Ok, so you bought a dog, and a house, and copulated and made some kids and now you feel all smug and fulfilled, and you’d like to tell other people how they made bad choices and you’re morally superior. Well, guess what? You’re made of the same stuff. You’d respond just the same as the people you’re judging, if you were put in their situation. Your brain works in exactly the same way.

    You should really learn about how to lead people back to the right path, rather than trapping them onto the path they’re on, which can only lead to their early death… a death that you share collective responsibility for.

    Blue Light

    I had to complain to the manager of this coffee shop that I couldn’t see my veins in the toilet. Caffeine good, Heroin bad, right?

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