Tag: publishing

The Journey

This is a story about three years of my life…

I was living in an ultra-modern hotel in Canary Wharf and working for HSBC at their head office. I was a member of the team working on the bank’s number one IT project. Shortly beforehand I had been living in a 14-bed hostel dorm and I’d narrowly escaped bankruptcy and destitution. I was working 12 hours a day, 6 or sometimes 7 days a week. I was exhausted and the tiredness, stress and unsettled life was driving me literally insane. I was suffering with delusions of grandeur, paranoia and my behaviour was erratic and unpredictable; I was extremely tense and irritable. I was on the brink of having a breakdown.

I rented an apartment on the River Thames near the office. The rent was obscene – £500/week – but I was earning great money working for HSBC and I was working very hard, so it seemed affordable at the time; it seemed like a nice reward for all the hard work. It felt like justice that I’d been able to get myself off the streets and into such a lovely place to live; to have gone from homeless and sleeping rough in a park, to having a luxury Thameside apartment with panoramic views over London.

I was dating a BBC journalist. I was rapidly gaining a Twitter following. I felt like everything was happening for a reason. I felt like it was my destiny to do something important. I was consumed with mania; I was obsessed with the idea of a grand gesture. I had been deeply affected by my homelessness and near-bankruptcy and destabilised by the exhaustion of sleeping rough and in hostel dorms. The IT project was very stressful and I was under a great deal of pressure from HSBC management. My mind was a mess. I was very severely mentally ill.

I woke up one morning and I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t face the office. I wanted to kill myself. I went to my doctor who sent me to hospital. 13 hours later I was admitted to a secure psych ward. I explained that I was financially distressed and very stressed at work. The psychiatric team recommended I stay in hospital for at least 2 weeks, but I needed to be back in the office if I was going to keep my job, to be able to afford the rent.

I discharged myself from hospital after a week and flew to San Francisco. I figured that if I was going to kill myself I might as well do it somewhere iconic. A friend picked me up from the airport and I borrowed a bike. I cycled straight to the Golden Gate Bridge. Seeing old friends, however, made me change my mind about committing suicide.

I lost my job with HSBC and I “slept rough” in the shadow of the head office skyscraper in Canary Wharf. I thought that this would be the pinnacle of my journey. I thought that having been used and abused by HSBC then unceremoniously dumped out onto the streets to suffer bankruptcy and homelessness – having managed to get myself a job at the bank while of no fixed abode and living in a hostel – would be deliciously poetic. It was, but my journey had barely begun.

I quit drinking for 121 consecutive days. I starved myself. I thought that I would go on hunger strike. I thought that I would sleep rough on Christmas Day. I was really angry and upset with the world. Self harm and substance abuse dominated my life for several months. I got into heaps of debt just staying alive.

I survived the winter. I got another job. My life was OK except for persistent suicidal thoughts. I hated the project I was working on but I persevered because I was in a lot of debt. I loved where I was living – every day in my apartment was like Christmas Day because the view was so awesome. Living by the river was an incredible privilege. I took a holiday and went kitesurfing. My quality of life was improving slowly.

I met somebody very special and fell totally in love. She accepted me for who I was, including the all the bad bits, such as my prior issues with substance abuse. She was the first person I’d been in a relationship with who’d been able to read everything about me on my blog and to understand my flaws. We had a good relationship. The project I had been working on came to an end and I was jobless again. I wrote and published my first novel – she proofread it and helped me with the ending and other ideas. She was very supportive and I was confident I’d find work again easily.

New Year’s Eve watching the fireworks over London, sipping champagne on my balcony with the woman I loved – it seemed like the New Year was full of promise, but I was worried about getting another job and I was still in a lot of debt. There was a lot of pressure.

Disaster struck. I got deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in my left leg, which swelled up to twice the size of my right leg. My kidneys failed and I ended up in hospital on a high dependency ward having many hours of dialysis every day. The potassium in my blood spiked to a life-threatening level and I was constantly at risk of cardiac arrest. I was very sick.

My stay in hospital caused me to lose my job. Losing my job caused me to collapse psychologically and become very depressed and despondent. The DVT had caused terrible nerve damage and I had a lot of neuropathic pain, as well as a numb left foot. I started to become dependent on painkillers. I sought powerful antidepressants for my low mood. Pictured on the table are: codeine, dihydrocodeine, tramadol, diazepam, alprazolam, mirtazapine, venlafaxine, dextroamphetamine, zolpidem, zopiclone and pregabalin, which are all highly addictive. Because of this cocktail of prescription drugs I suffered an episode of medication-induced mania – temporary insanity – and broke up with the love of my life.

I ran out of money. I had to pay a huge tax bill and I had to go even deeper into debt. I was virtually bankrupt. Out of desperation I was forced to put all my worldly possessions into storage and leave London to take a job in Manchester. The job in Manchester included an apartment as part of the package, which was lucky because I didn’t have enough money to pay rent or a deposit – I was totally broke. Moving house and leaving London was incredibly upsetting and traumatic. The new job was extremely demanding and exhausting. I was very lonely and isolated in an unfamiliar city with no friends or family; no local connections.

I tried to commit suicide. I took a massive overdose: I’d been stockpiling my prescription painkillers and I knew that 8+ grams of tramadol was likely to be fatal. I sent a tweet when I believed I was beyond the point of no return. I thought nobody knew where I lived. I thought there was no chance anybody would get to me in time. I was wrong. I regained consciousness a few days later in a hospital’s critical care ward on life support. I was later sectioned for 28 days and admitted to a Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU).

A doctor from Wales discovered my blog and invited me to live on their farm in a converted garage. I had no money, no car, no job. I had nothing.

I almost went bankrupt but a friend got me some work in Warsaw and in London. I was living in AirBnBs and working in the Square Mile from Monday to Friday and living in Wales at the weekends.

I bought a car, I got a local job, a local girlfriend and I rented an apartment. Briefly, I had everything I wanted and needed, although I went even deeper into debt. The pressure, stress and turmoil which I’d endured to get to this point was unimaginable; just to get to a position which most people would take for granted as the minimum acceptable things for a normal ordinary liveable life.

The local project ended and I was jobless again. The relationship ended. I papered over my bedroom windows and withdrew from the world. The journey had destroyed me. I was spent.

An obscene amount of money flows through my hands, but it all ends up in the pockets of those who I owe money to. I’m desperately trying to keep my head above water. The financial pressure is immense; unbearable. The journey has been incredibly long and arduous. There’s still a very long way to go before I reach security and stability; before I’m comfortable, happy and content.

In the last year alone, I’ve managed to move house 3 times, work 4 different jobs, travel to 4 different countries, date 2 girls, survive a suicide attempt, be admitted to 3 different hospitals, quit addictive painkillers, sedatives, tranquillisers and sleeping pills, be arrested and locked in a cell, buy a car, rent a place to live, stay in 17 different hotels and AirBnBs, and somehow stay on top of my mountainous debts, not go bankrupt and even pay some of that crippling amount of money back. My only remaining vice is wine. I’m completely unmedicated and I don’t abuse any substance other than alcohol. It’s a remarkable journey for just 12 months, but the journey has been much, much longer than that.

In the last three years, I’ve written and published a million words and connected with thousands of people all over the globe.

To be precise, to date I’ve written exactly 1,001,020 words and counting, on this blog.

It’s the world’s longest suicide note.

If you want to understand why I’m suicidal you just have to read it all – it’s all written down in exquisite detail. To save you the trouble of reading all 1 million words I’ve summarised the last 3 years for you right here.

The pressure; the stress; the exhaustion. Where is my reward?

I’ve travelled so far and I’ve achieved so much but yet I feel like it’s gotten me nowhere. I should be rich but in fact I’m up to my eyeballs in debt. If you want to know where that debt came from, I just explained it to you. I didn’t get into debt buying frivolous things and being profligate. I didn’t make particularly bad choices. I’m not stupid. Where’s the payoff for working so hard? Why did I bother?

My name’s Nick Grant and I drink too much but otherwise I’m an ordinary regular guy. I do my job to a high standard and I’m liked and respected by my colleagues. I pay my taxes. I pay my rent and bills. I contribute to society as a productive member. I do ordinary stuff and have ordinary needs.

I’m 39 years old and I have nothing but debt. I have nothing much to show for my 39 years on the planet.

I’m lonely. I live a double life. The person I am in the office is different from the person I am in the comfort of my own home. Nobody at work would ever suspect that I’ve slept rough, been in trouble with the police, been hospitalised many times, been sectioned and had horrific problems with addiction. Nobody would suspect that my mental health has caused me horrendous difficulties when exacerbated by stressful life events, like divorce, moving house, losing jobs and everything else that’s happened to me in the past 5 or so years.

My solution to the instability in my life was to create a backbone that has run consistently through my ups and downs: my daily writing. To have been able to write a million words has been immensely stabilising and has brought me into contact with so many wonderful kind and caring people. I quite literally owe my life to those who’ve followed me and my blog, especially via Twitter. Without this connection to the world I would be dead.

Today, I’ve crossed a seemingly arbitrary imaginary finishing line, in having written and published a million words in less than 3 years. It might seem ludicrous and pointless, but if you consider it in the context of the journey I’ve been on, you can see why I’ve wanted to document it.

If you’ve followed me on some part of this journey, I’m really grateful to have had your support. Thank you.

Tags: #writing #career #friends #socialmedia #publishing #homeless #mentalhealth #bipolar #london #suicide #depression #debt #addiction #drugs #nhs #hospital

25 August 2018
9,500 Words To Go

This is a story about summit fever…

I’m writing an average of 1,900 words per day at the moment, which rather pleasingly works out to be exactly 5 days to reach my 1-million word target on August 25th. I’ll be finished about 12 days ahead of schedule.

The finishing is important. So many projects get started but never finished. There are so many abandoned blogs where the author just got bored after the initial excitement. There are so many uncompleted novel manuscripts. If you never finish, you’ll never publish. Publish or perish.

If you’re a bird, there’s no point only having one wing, or tiny little wings. Even bad wings are better than wings which don’t allow you to fly at all. At least if you’ve got something that’s a bit rough, you can improve on it.

Creating software forces you to finish stuff. Your software won’t work at all unless there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. An unfinished manuscript can fool you into thinking that it’s going to be perfect, but it’ll never be perfect unless you write all the way to the end. Striving for perfection can stop you ever completing a project. Done is better than perfect.

I thought it would be funny to write more words than there are in the Bible. The King James Bible has 783,000 words in it and it’s not exactly a page-turner, so I don’t feel like what I’ve written is complete crap, because my creation is organised into lots of little sections. Somewhere buried in the 990,500 words I’ve published during the last 3 years, there’s some good stuff. Sure, there’s a lot of repetition and rubbish, but that’s what you’d expect from a single author churning stuff out at high-speed. Producing a large volume and having the discipline to write every day is an OK place to start if you’re an aspiring author – the blank page and the daunting prospect of completing an entire work of literature is otherwise too daunting if you’ve never successfully managed to finish anything more than crappy poems and short stories.

“Why do people climb mountains?” is a question oft-responded with “because they’re there” but that’s not everything you need to know about climbing mountains. One reason to climb them is because it’s amazing that simply putting one foot in front of the other, slowly, slowly inching your way up the steep incline, eventually leads to the summit. Reaching a mountain summit is an incredible experience of achievement and wonder that a comparatively tiny human could get to the top of such towering peaks. From the summit of a mountain, you can look down at the path you took to get up there and marvel at how far and how high you’ve travelled.

One reason to keep a journal is because of the pleasure of seeing all the pages full of your handwriting, and building up your collection of journals over the years. The more completed diaries and journals you amass, the greater the sense of achievement. There’s a great deal of pride about having created someting – made your mark – when you see that stack of bound pages.

The blog is the modern equivalent of the journal, except of course that it’s usually public from the start. The huge advantage of writing on a computer is that your creative output has already been digitised – nobody’s going to have to type it up. I imagine that many journal-writers dream of one day turning their journals into a memoir or otherwise doing something with the vast amount of words they’ve produced, but they never will because of the enormity of the task. Nobody’s going to sit down and struggle with your handwriting unless you become very very famous, and even then it’ll probably only be some poor archivist who has to catalogue your stuff before it’s stored and never looked at again. At least a public blog is a living document that’s available for anybody to stumble upon and dip into. Blogs are Google’able and sometimes a blog can be the top hit when doing a Google search.

During my 3-year writing project I’ve averaged 900 words per day, but I’ve been writing more than twice that amount during the last 20 days. I’ve seen the finish line and I’m sprinting towards it. I’ve got summit fever and I’m desperate to reach the top of the mountain after over 1,000 days slogging away.

I’ve tackled my goal with a siege mentality. I’ve avoided being drawn into discussion. I’ve avoided approval seeking. I’ve tried not to worry too much about quality and to get too fussy. To say that I’ll do some editing later is ludicrous. Most of what I’ve written is fairly throwaway, but that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. It shouldn’t be underestimated, the difficulty of one single author writing and publishing 1-million words, which need to be at least of the minimum quality deemed acceptable for public consumption. If I was writing total garbage, that wouldn’t be anything to be proud of. There’d be no sense of achievement if I’d written total crap.

Somewhere – around the middle – of my 3-year odyssey, I wrote a novel which I think is reasonably good. That novel is 54,000 words long. I should probably subtract those 54,000 words from the cumulative total, because I plan to remove the draft manuscript from this blog at some point. I wrote 42,000 of a second novel, which I could finish at some point but I’m not pleased with a lot of what I wrote, so I might just bin it and start again.

I’ve deleted A LOT of blog posts. When I first started I wanted to write really good stuff, so I would delete thousands of words which were a bit rambling and meandering. When I started to get unwell I wrote vast amounts with manic intensity. When I was feeling threatened and insecure I wrote a huge number of things driven by those unhappy feelings. When I got angry, frustrated and upset with people, I wrote passive-aggressive attacks. Some of the regrettable stuff I’ve written has been deleted, and some of it I’ve preserved because the whole point of my project was to capture every bit of the entire spectrum of mood swings, mental health problems, addiction problems, relationship problems, work problems, money problems, housing problems and every other thing that’s been going on in my chaotic life. I decided to write my stream-of-consciousness with candid honesty and emotional rawness, and not particularly worry about whether I was making a fool of myself.

I was wondering whether to pop a champagne cork to celebrate the achievement of reaching 1-million words, or whether that’s a little ridiculous considering how much of a rough diamond my artwork is. There’s so much I could be upset about – that my blog contains things which are very unflattering; that there are many tens of thousands of words which were written when I was seriously unwell, and barely able to string a sentence together. I could get quite depressed about how far from perfection my creation is – it’s not as if I’ve managed to produce 20 high-quality fully edited and fully proofread novels which are ready for publication; I’ve produced just ONE novel that I’m happy with in the whole 3 years, and it needs a good edit.

Thinking about how unwell I’ve been and some pretty catastrophic things which have happened, it’s remarkable that I have managed to write 900 words. Every. Single. Day.

If you dip into what I’ve written at random, it’s surprising how much of it reads OK. I find it very hard to read, because I’m reminded of the difficulties I was going through at the time. My life isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly a lot better than it has been during awful periods over the last 3 years. I cringe with embarrassment that I continued to write without a filter when I was extremely unwell, which of course exposes me and makes me vulnerable – it’s plain for all to see that I was suffering from very strange thoughts and ideas; my sickness is quite apparent and I’m a little appalled that it was me who wrote some of the things I’ve written. I could have hidden the bad side of myself. I could have attempted to continue to pretend like everything was fine and present a fake image, but I’m glad I’ve been consistent in the way I write. I think people need to see what’s really going on beneath the surface. People have been sympathetic and kind.

Making myself so vulnerable by documenting all my struggles was a huge gamble. It’s hard to know what would have happened if I didn’t, but I feel like writing every day has given me structure and purpose. I feel like having this project and this goal has given me something I can work on even when I’ve been unable to work. Being able to produce and create is important for self esteem and a sense of achievement. I think I’d be much more depressed if I didn’t have this huge volume of work I’ve produced, as a testament to my own industriousness and ingenuity. Perhaps it’s not an original idea, and perhaps it’s not a great contribution to the vast mountain of words which are published every day, but it shouldn’t be underestimated. That I’ve done it through the highs and lows of a very challenging 3 years of life is a huge achievement.

It’s unlikely that my vast repository of words could ever directly be turned into a useful resource for people who are struggling with mental health problems, addiction, and general difficulties with debts and suchlike, but the process of writing so much has creating a writing habit and given me a written voice which flows very easily from my brain onto the page. If I take some time to rest and recuperate, I imagine that I will be able to use my toned writing muscles and stamina to be able to produce whatever I want with relative ease; certainly a lot easier than it would be if I hadn’t had so much practice.

Perhaps I’ve gotten into bad habits. Perhaps I should’ve gone on a creative writing course. Perhaps I should’ve produced vast quantities of bad poetry and short stories to cut my teeth. Certainly, my two attempts at novel writing have taught me that I’m a bit of a one-trick pony. Perhaps you think it’s easy to write about your thoughts and opinions and express them clearly. If you read my stuff and you think what I do is easy, then I’m really pleased, because I set out from the beginning to develop a writing style that would appear effortless. I’ve attempted to write using simplified language, which was a style I had to learn. It’s easy to write dense impenetrable text which is off-putting to the reader, but appears as if the author is very intelligent and the writing was very difficult. To make things look effortless is a sign that a person is mastering their art. Of course, I’m aware that I could also just look like a pretentious idiot, spouting complete rubbish.

Well, I’m getting close to my daily word count target. I really didn’t want to do diary-style daily journal entries and just write until some arbitrary point where I decided to stop. The bulk of what I’ve written are little bite-size self-contained nuggets. The bulk of what I’ve written is coherent, at least on a given day for a given title and topic. These past 20 days I’ve just pounded out as many words as I can, because I’m so desperate to reach 1-million words.

I’m sorry, dear reader, that I’ll have spent the best part of 3 weeks bombarding you with 46,000 words which were written with the sole objective of reaching my goal as quickly as possible. If you’ve stuck with me this far, that’s super kind and awesome of you, and I hope to reward you with some more well-considered and higher quality efforts, which I’ll be aiming to keep below 700 words per day, as opposed to my 2,000+ word rambling meandering waffle.

Can’t wait for this final phase to be over.

Tags: #writing #novel #author #publishing #blog

20 August 2018