This is a story about delicate senses...

My preference for sweet or salty, my thirst and my sense of smell are all altered by alcohol, but I'm not able to perceive those alterations to my senses in any given moment. It's only when I carefully analyse my behaviour that I can see I drink more water and eat more sweet things when I've been sober for a few days, and I begin to see food as something worth spending time and effort on, instead of eating as a chore.

If alcohol can alter those senses so profoundly, I wonder what other subtle effects it has on me. The sleep I get seems to be of much lower quality when I go to bed drunk, although I don't perceive that at the time because I find it much easier to fall asleep when I've had lots to drink. When I have a break from drinking I notice that I have very vivid dreams, bordering on nightmares, which reveal a lot of things going on in my subconscious. Having used alcohol as a crutch for so long, it's amazing how much trauma I've repressed and not dealt with.

I made a prediction earlier in the week that I'd have increasingly better days, not because we're getting closer to the weekend, but because I'm sobering up. It's hard to quantify, but I found it much easier to get up this morning and although there were periods when I was bored and miserable at work, I found myself far less inclined to give up and walk out.

There was a leaving do at work and my colleagues invited me out drinking tonight. There's an open bottle of wine in my cupboard and I bought 4 more because there was an offer at the supermarket. The temptation to drink and the social pressure to get drunk is hard to escape. Alcohol is a social lubricant and can be especially welcome when making smalltalk and getting to know people. This week has felt long and difficult and it's hard not to reach for the bottle as a reward for putting myself through the misery.

Which came first? The misery or the alcohol?

I find it easy enough to stop drinking when I want to, but I wonder if I've simply become habituated into experiencing and putting up with awful feelings. Alcoholics can begin to enjoy the sensation of neat liquor burning their throat as they glug it down, and junkies can get needle fixations and enjoy injecting themselves. I wonder if my brain has become confused by my cycle of highs and lows; boom and bust. I wonder if I'm simply unable to tell when I'm half-drunk, hungover, withdrawing, completely intoxicated or stone cold sober, because there's nothing extreme enough to register on my scale. The highs and lows which I've experienced have ranged by such an exceptional amount that I've become used to never feeling very good at all. Earlier this year I didn't even notice that I had a bad chest infection, except that my ribs were so tender I couldn't sleep and it was agonising to sit up in bed in the morning, or to cough. Depression and anxiety are just things I live with, without medication.

I know that my brain is a homeostatic organ which will attempt to return itself to equilibrium. If I put stimulants into my body, I will make myself more tired. If I put depressants into my body, I will bounce back the other way. Everything has an effect for a short while before my brain readjusts and it becomes normal. It shocks me how functional I can be when full of drink and drugs, or under an incredible amount of stress and in very bad circumstances.

I'm attempting to control the variables. I'm attempting to clear my brain of drink and drugs. I'm creating a pharmacologically unpolluted state, where I'm free from nicotine, caffeine, uppers, downers, medications, hard drugs, soft drugs, legal highs and every other thing we normally use in our daily lives to tweak our moods hither and thither.

I stay in an identical hotel room and eat in the same place every night, normally choosing one of only a handful of my favourite dishes. I'm doing the same work I've done my whole 21+ year full-time career for an organisation which is ostensibly similar to all the others I've worked for, solving exactly the same problems I've solved a million times before. It's an almost perfect experiment. I can't imagine that it would be possible for almost anybody else to experiment on themselves in the same way, because so few of us are capable of giving up things like tea and coffee, or of sticking with a job which makes us excruciatingly bored and thoroughly miserable.

So far, my conclusion is that alcohol does not make the time pass any quicker, reduce anxiety or aid sleep. My conclusion is that alcohol makes it harder to concentrate and cope with the boredom. My conclusion is that alcohol is not very helpful, but I'll tell you what is helpful: money. Despite being almost continuously drunk for the past 9 consecutive months, undoubtedly the biggest changing variable has been my ever-increasing wealth. I can't say whether it would have been easier and more pleasant to reach today without alcohol, and whether I'd have been more inclined to improve areas of my life which are completely absent, such as a social life, but I can say that alcohol was ever-present. Is it possible that I might not have made it so far without alcohol? I really don't think it's likely that I would've made it through the roughest patches without alcohol as a relatively inexpensive coping mechanism, even if it's a very poor medicine for reducing anxiety, fighting depression, stabilising my mood and helping me sleep.

If we consider that a year ago I was suicidally depressed, manically high, abusing drugs, addicted to medications and generally in a dreadful state with little or no hope of escaping that situation, I don't see how it would be possible to resolve everything without something to use to self-medicate.

It's impossibly unlikely that anybody's going to gift you £100,000 and a year off work to get your life sorted out, which is what it would take to rescue somebody whose entire world has imploded spectacularly, leaving them crippled with mountainous debts, homeless, jobless, single, estranged from their family, mentally ill, alcoholic, addicted to drugs and dependent on medications.

As my head clears, I realise I've pulled of an impossible feat. I've come back from a clusterfuck of issues which should have buried me a million times over.

It's hard to avoid the pitfall of marvelling at the miraculousness of my recovery, such that I start to believe I'm special, different and perhaps even immortal. It's hard to see the evidence and to not draw the conclusion that the clearly exceptional achievement must mean I'm destined for greatness. At least I have a clear enough head to see that I've fallen foul of that before, and that it's important to keep my brain intoxicated just the right amount to stop it from overheating. Going teetotal in 2015 caused me to swing into mania, so I'm not going to make that mistake again.

I'm also aware that I'm no longer a young man and that the past few years have been very hard on my brain and body. Ultimately I can't keep pushing myself as hard as I have been and taking extreme risks. Sooner or later my luck is going to run out, even though all the evidence seems to indicate that I'm immortal.

As my thoughts start to wander towards topics which have always been a little too hot to handle - such as quantum mechanics - I now start to realise that there's a lot to be said for being a bit of a drunk, at least until I'm filthy rich again.

I've managed to avoid drinking again tonight. I'm going to see how I feel tomorrow, but I must be careful to preserve the good progress I've made this year, even if that means continuing to drink because it's my tried-and-trusted means of keeping my mania at bay. Better the devil you know.

Physically, I have a runny nose, a sore throat and a headache. I feel terrible, which I imagine is because I'm at the 3 or 4 day sober mark and my body is seriously protesting about the lack of alcohol. If I continue my sober streak I'll feel physically better, but there's always the risk that mania will rear its ugly head and I'll screw up everything I've worked for 9 consecutive months without a holiday to rebuild.

September is coming. September is my nemesis. If I can get through September smoothly, that will be a huge milestone.

Tags: #bipolar #alcohol #anxiety #depression

This is a story about losing my temper...

I'm blessed with the ability to observe reality and analyse it using pure reason and logic; in fact it's a prerequisite of my chosen career - to be able to decompose the world into systems which can be modelled mathematically inside a computer. Computer science is good science, because in its very essence it's repeatable. If an experiment is not repeatable it's not science. So many experiments in psychology, biology and fringe pseudosciences are not repeatable at all - when those experiments are re-run, the supposedly statistically significant findings cannot be reproduced. Even many so-called scientists are prone to being led by their gut instincts and preconceived ideas - they draw completely incorrect conclusions from their data, and publish findings which are simply bad science because they're based on small sample sets and incorrect assumptions.

A lot of scientists invent a hypothesis and devise an experiment to prove or disprove the theory, then when they find that their experimental findings do not support their theory, they look at all the data and attempt to reverse-engineer a theory from the results. For example, let's say that it's my theory that people with red hair have anger issues, and so I go out onto the streets and ask anyone with red hair to complete a survey for me, as well as a number of control subjects. When I crunch the data, I find that there's no evidence that the redheads are more angry than the control group. Instead of abandoning the research as fruitless, I look again at the data and I find out that a lot of 18 to 24 year olds have scored highly on the "anger scale" based on the surveys they filled in. Thus, I conclude that this age group has anger issues, and publish my findings as if that was the original theory being tested. This is flawed science, because there was no underlying theory or hypothesis which existed before I did my experiment, and my experiment was not designed to prove or disprove the theory which I'm publishing. I'm pretending I've discovered something profound and important, when I haven't. If the experiment is repeated the results vary wildly - at prestigious universities, the 18 to 24 year olds are not angry at all, and in former industrial towns with high unemployment the 40 to 50 year olds are even more angry than the original group. Thus, the experiment is not at all repeatable and the published conclusions are worthless.

We are often so eager to reach a profound conclusion that we believe we have discovered a universal truth, when in fact we've discovered nothing. We are keen to talk in absolute terms and declare things to be fixed and immutable, when in fact the world around us is constantly shapeshifting, making it virtually impossible to tease out cause and effect - feedback loops obfuscate the fundamental laws which govern reality, so it's ludicrous to talk about macroscopic matters as if they can be examined in isolation and behaviour will be consistent no matter what the surrounding circumstances are.

Human mood, perceptions and behaviour are particularly fickle, and to believe that a person can be simplified to the point where they behave in a predictable manner according to a convenient model or label, is laughable. To say a person is "an angry man" or to damn somebody's character with a label like Borderline Personality Disorder, is not only useless but also leads to completely incorrect beliefs, in much the same way that the 12 signs of the zodiac tell you absolutely nothing about a person's character and temperament. Not only is each individual unique, but their character and behaviour will be different dependent on their ever-changing circumstances. It might be possible to corner a person and bludgeon them to death, but it really doesn't tell you very much if you limited their options and inflicted atrocities upon them. So desperate are a group of powerful elites to believe that their theories are correct, that they'll physically restrain and force vulnerable people to comply with their flawed belief system, learning only that the more artificial constraints a person suffers the more frustrated and dysfunctional they become.

Rage can be paradoxical, but so can positive reactions and behaviours. We might believe that if somebody draws a knife or a gun, our only response should be to draw a weapon of our own in defence, which will then neutralise the situation. It seems fairly obvious that in fact there are a range of available options, some of which will have much more positive outcomes than "comply or die" diktat. Of course, somebody can pull rank or badge and say that they are acting with authority in imposing their tyranny on another human being - claiming it to be in the best interests of an individual or society - but in fact we can surely see from the available evidence that this is not successful at all.

I've suffered bouts of paradoxical rage. I've become obsessively and disproportionately angry about things, and my anger has been completely misplaced. The crap on the side of my leather shoe - pictured above - was from a walk through a garden in winter time, so far as I could remember, but I suddenly became angry about it the following summer. I apportioned blame, becoming more and more entrenched in my belief that some compensation was owed to me. I got increasingly angry and frustrated about the issue, and I was soon completely consumed by an obsession that the matter had to be settled immediately. It felt at the time as if I'd suffered the most terrible injustice imaginable.

That the matter of the ruined shoe was resolved was somehow the very last thing I wanted. My rage was nonsensical and my demands were unreasonable; my blame was misplaced. I was completely in the wrong and I suppose I knew it all along, but my world had inverted and rational thought eluded me. I suppose I've lived most of my life with the burden of being the rational person who's been forced to suffer other people's illogical bulls**t, so very occasionally I flip out and cross over into the world which most people inhabit, where fuzzy-headed dunces perpetrate unspeakable acts of violence against anybody who doesn't do what they want.

I received a pair of replacement shoes, which immediately caused me to return to my senses. I was flooded with disbelief, shame, embarrassment, guilt and regret. Not only could I not believe that - for once - the world had bent to my nonsensical will, instead of vice-versa, but I was gobsmacked that I'd been so obsessed and insanely angry; my anger was completely ridiculous and misplaced. My logic and reasoning had evaporated and I'd behaved just like an average ordinary person; I perpetrated a terrible tyranny until the result complied with what I stubbornly believed; until I got what I wanted. As soon as I got the result I thought with horror "what have I done?". As soon as my point was seemingly proven, I knew with certainty that the very opposite was true - I had acted abominably and my thinking was plain wrong all along; my behaviour was outrageously unjustified.

If we step back and consider the bigger picture, we might consider that I was involved in an abusive relationship for many years, where rage and violence trumped logic and reason, and I was viciously tyrannised. I had never known known love, as my parents sought to impose their iron will over me and thought of me as an animal to be made obedient, compliant and robotic in its behaviour, through abuse. I spent about 8 years in a relationship with an aggressive psychopath who completely tormented, dominated and subdued me. Considering this, the shoe incident can be understood thusly: the most important relationships in my life had never contained any love or care for me or my feelings. The shoe incident caused me to completely reverse my stance when the reaction to my unreasonable behaviour was clearly an act of love and care; an act of kindness, the likes of which I had always hoped to receive but had never gotten from my parents or ex-wife. I had demanded proof that there are decent people in the world, and I had not been disappointed - at last - despite all the years when I had the very great misfortune of being tortured, trapped and tyrannised by abusive bullies.

My eternally optimistic hope that my strategy of being unguarded, open, trusting and loving, despite the very great risk of getting hurt, has been very successful since I cut my parents and ex-wife out of my life. I suppose I carry more baggage than I'm aware of, and it's certainly alarming that my behaviour has on a couple of occasions, mirrored that of the horrible tyrants who I suffered at the hands of. However, I on the other hand, respond immediately and positively to love and kindness, unlike my parents and ex-wife who's only objective was to subdue, control and abuse me... they never felt guilt or regret for dominating me and crushing me under their heel; they never saw their own behaviour as abhorrent, even though it was undoubtedly so.

My life's had maybe just three incredibly uncharacteristic fits of seemingly inexplicable rage, under the most extreme circumstances imaginable. Logic and reason eluded me and I fleetingly believed crazy things and acted in the most extreme and unreasonable way. My misbehaviour became quickly apparent to me - with sudden realisation - and has left me with nothing but sorrow, regret and guilt. I have no entrenched stubborn belief that my thoughts and actions could be explained or justified, unlike the total assholes who abused, traumatised, tyrannised, bullied and dominated me for far too many years of my life. If it sounds like I'm excusing my behaviour, I'm not. I live with my guilt, unlike those assholes.

I would say that alcohol and benzodiazepines play a very important role in disinhibiting thoughts, feelings and behaviours, which potentiates paradoxical rage. I don't think I would have meandered so far from the path of logic and reason, and been so stubbon and unreasonable - closed minded - if my brain chemistry hadn't been substantially destabilised by psychoactive substances.

I firmly believe that if you want to defend yourself you should lower your guard. If you want to de-escalate a situation you should be kind, not aggressive. If you want love, love.

Tags: #anger #relationships #divorce #abuse #trauma #childhood #parents

This is a story about having no home town...

"Where are you from?" people ask me. The answer, which is most unexpected to them, is that I was born in Aberystwyth in Wales, but only stayed there a matter of months, then moved, then moved again to some Cotswolds village, then moved again to Central Oxford, then moved again to France, then moved again to Devon and then moved again to Dorset, around the time I left home, and then I've lived all over, but mostly in London... does that answer the question?

A social worker, housing officer or other person tasked with helping me have a safe place to live and enough money to buy food, would ask "where are your local connections?". Again the answer, which is most unexpected, is that I have the most old friends in Bournemouth but they're from 5+ years ago, and the place with the most of my oldest friends who I've actually seen relatively recently is London.

The next question is "where do your parents live?". To which the answer is they moved back to one of the very many places we moved through, as I got dragged around the country, abroad, and got sent to 8 different schools. "Aha! That's your local connection then!" says the social worker, housing officer or other type person.

NO.

I have a friend in Abingdon, which is not local - it's the same county as my parents, but a long drive away. I have no relationship/connection with my parents, and there never will be a connection again - I haven't seen them in years, and I have documentary proof that my dad is actively working against my best interests. They're the very last people on Earth I would want to be within a million miles of.

"What about brothers and sisters?" comes the next question. My sister lives in Nottingham. I've been there 3 times. When I asked my sister about moving to Nottingham, she said no. My parents think I'm 'banned' from talking to her, but we do communicate and we're on OK terms. Nottingham is somewhere I know nothing about, having barely visited the place.

"What about where you've had your GP registered?" comes the next question. Well, in the space of a year that would be London, Manchester and Wales.

"How are you getting on in Wales?". One friend, who I've met once. Another friend who I've met two or three times. No job. I have to use the satnav to get to the supermarket. At least I'm in the right country, in terms of where I was born though.

"Hmmmm" they say. "No local connections here" they say. Then they roll a 12-sided dice to decide where to give me a one-way train ticket to. I go to the local services there and we start back with "where are you from?" and work through all the same answers, before the dice gets rolled and I'm moved somewhere else.

If I'm out of sight and a safe distance away, I'm out of mind. Local councils just want me moved out of their county, so I'm somebody else's problem. Friends who I've been chatting to about having a beer in their part of the country quite naturally don't remember to tell me when and where it's happening, because I'm out of sight and out of mind. 

Frankly, I've been busting my balls to stay afloat despite mental health problems which have nearly claimed my life on several occasions, and cause me a very great deal of problems. I look functional and productive, but - for example - for most of my last 3 month contract in London I was thinking about suicide every day, and more recently, breaking up with my girlfriend and my contract ending early have taken me to the point where I've had the knife at my throat in the bathtub, trying to line it up with my carotid artery so I can be absolutely certain that I'll be dead and completely unable to save - it only takes minutes to bleed out from such a major artery, and even if I got to a hospital in 10 minutes, they'd have to find enough units of blood to refill me, while performing open cardiac massage AND having a trauma surgeon on hand to suture up the damage while blood pissed out of it at high pressure... you can't just ligate that motherfucker - it's supplying oxygenated blood to your brain.

The thought of the stress and hassle of interviews, moving, impressing new boss & team, re-establishing a routine. It's all too much. I was already on the limit. I'm not well. I shouldn't be working.

Yes, my mental health is bad enough for me to be sectioned, which means it's bad enough that working a full time job (which I don't even have) is ridiculous, as is the idea that I've got any kind of support network around me. Nope. I'm alone. I'm not managing to stay afloat.

Any social worker, psychiatrist or GP would conclude I'm unfit for work and I'm vulnerable. I need things like income and housing to be supported by the welfare state, because I'm in bits and I'll just kill myself because I'm so exhausted by pretending to be healthy when I'm not at all. I'm very, very sick. I'm just very, very good at hiding it for long enough to scrape together enough cash to avoid becoming homeless again.

But, it's always going to come back to the same question: "where are your local connections?". There's a simple answer: NOWHERE. So, instead of getting help where I am, I get help nowhere. There's nowhere I can go. There's no home town I can go to. There's no family. There's no support network. Might as well just kill myself.

I'm exhausted. Might as well just kill myself.

I had a lovely time seeing an old friend a couple of weeks ago... he lives in Prague. I'd made plans to see a friend from California and a friend from Abingdon, but I'm out of sight and out of mind so they didn't reply to my messages - I never knew where and when they were meeting up. You cannot begin to imagine the social isolation which I suffer on a daily basis.

Time to die, I think.

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about re-living a nightmare...

Setting aside the when, how, who, what, why and any presumption of blame, guilt, morality, karma... I've been through a load of awful shit in the last few years. For longer than I care to remember, I've regularly had some very harrowing stuff happen to me. I don't care to recite the details because there are so many things - these things pop into my head randomly and they stab me like a knife in the guts. These flashbacks make me gasp aloud because the memories are so difficult to handle.

Periods of time that I've written about - like the Finsbury Park Fun Run - contain multiple distressing and traumatic events. For far too long, my life was a series of similar stressful and awful calamitous episodes, which contained everything from the mildly shameful, embarrassing and a bit surreal and ridiculous, to experiences that could pretty much destroy a person.

Of course, mental health problems and drug addiction have featured heavily, but my memory has functioned perfectly well and I've been fully conscious almost the whole time, experiencing the awful events and being affected by the trauma of it all.

Some of my experiences I've managed to integrate and cope with by telling the story, like I did with Finsbury Park Fun Run, and other experiences are bundled up into a great big ball of trauma, which I can sometimes laugh about, sometimes forget about, but memories are constantly surfacing and causing me to wince with pain, as if I was being physically stabbed with a sharp object. I screw up my face and I make an involuntary exclamation. I exhale and I mutter stuff under my breath to make it go away, which it usually does.

When I get an invasive thought, which is a memory of a traumatic moment that I'm struggling to cope with, I write down a little 1-line summary of what it is. If the thoughts keep popping up, then I write about them: I use my notes as a writing prompt, so that I can work through whatever trauma is bothering me the most. I'm writing as fast as I can, trying to stay on top of these negative memories that could easily drive me insane, or cause me to collapse under the sheer weight of them. I could easily kill myself, trying to escape the torment of these invasive awful flashbacks.

If you imagine a heroin addict who's having to resort to a life of crime to fund their drug habit, they'll be forced to commit a lot of acquisitive crime: thefts, robberies, burglaries, muggings, stealing off friends and family. That addict will have their morals completely corrupted by the need to avoid getting junk-sick, which means they'll probably have a lot of stains on their conscience. Shoplifting could be seen as a relatively victimless crime, because shops have insurance against theft, but burglaries have a lasting impact on the victim, because of the violation of their home. It's not that the heroin addict doesn't care, because they're evil and immoral, it's that the need for their fix is a primal urge that's far greater than hunger, fear, pain, or anything else you've ever experienced in your sheltered little life.

I've never been a heroin addict.

I've never committed any crime to get money for drugs.

I haven't even particularly had my morality corrupted by addiction, but I came close. I understand what it's like when you're in the grips of addiction. I can see that morality is relative, not absolute.

My own traumatic experiences come from being desperately sick and vulnerable. When you're sick and vulnerable, broke and sleeping rough, trapped into a life of addiction and health problems... you're constantly traumatised. My life had so many episodes of trauma, because I was trapped into such a destructive cycle.

You'd think that if things were really bad, you'd do something about it - surely the trauma I was experiencing was there to bump me back onto the right track; to get me back on the straight and narrow. Well, no not really. When you're trapped and vulnerable, you're pretty fucked. It's very hard to escape from such a vicious cycle.

Getting yourself off the drugs and off the streets is only the tiniest part of any meaningful change. What about the pre-existing mental health problems? What about the trauma?

The longer I spend in a safe and stable environment, the more trauma seems to bubble up to the surface. When I was in the vicious horrible cycle, there was no time to stop and think about all the awful things that had happened. When I was right in the thick of things, and barely surviving, I was far too busy staying alive to be bothered by the traumatic flashbacks.

Which came first? The trauma or the unhealthy coping mechanisms?

Definitely the trauma came first.

But the unhealthy coping mechanisms led to more trauma.

I got out of the frying pan, but I ended up in the fire. I got out of a horrible abusive relationship, but the destruction to my life - at a time when I was already really vulnerable and traumatised - was too much to handle. Things got a lot worse before they started to improve.

Today, my life looks much improved. Today, my life looks sorted and peachy. Today, you might be mistaken for thinking that I'm hunky-dory and A-OK, but it's not true... I'm not out of the woods yet.

I have no idea how I'm going to deal with everything and come to terms with what I've been through, but my healthy coping mechanism is to write. I write down the particularly traumatic things that I keep getting flashbacks about, and then I write down these little stories, which attempt to explore my feelings. I'm attempting to deal with all the horrible traumatic stuff in a way that lays it to bed; gets rid of it out of my brain and down onto paper.

I feel like I should tell you about some of the stuff that I'm dealing with, so you can see that I really have been through some horribly traumatic experiences that would cause anybody significant psychological damage. I feel like I want to list off a whole load of experiences that were off-the-charts in terms of how awful they were. However, I only want to do that because I feel unworthy somehow. There are people out there who've been through unimaginable trauma - is it a competition? Should I shut up, because there's one person out there who's had it worse than every other human being on the entire planet?

I'm not even going to tell you what it is, because this process can't be rushed. I've written about plenty of traumatic stuff, and it doesn't fix it or make it all ok suddenly. Even stuff I've written about still bothers me, but every time I write I feel like I'm making some progress towards a time when I feel I can cope; a time when these PTSD flashbacks won't be so aggressively invasive and hit me so hard.

If you think I'm being hyperbolic and complaining about nothing, you probably haven't spent any time in relaxed company with me. These flashbacks regularly assault me. At work, I can barely conceal the fact that I'm hit with these awful memories, which cause me to gasp, groan and wince. At home, I can't conceal it... my close friends and girlfriend hear me yell like I'm in physical pain, and worriedly ask "what's wrong?".

The brain is a plastic organ and it will heal itself. It takes time though.

Tags: #ptsd

This is a story about relentless monotony...

I fell asleep at my desk today. I haven't had any time off since November. I spent November writing a novel, so I guess I haven't had any time off since October. I was in hospital in October and I moved house, so I guess I haven't had any time off since September. I was in hospital in September and I tried to commit suicide and I lost my job and I was evicted, so I guess I haven't had any time off since July. I moved house and started a new job in July, so I guess I haven't had any time off since June. I was selling loads of my stuff, trying not to go bankrupt, while also trying to get a job in June, so I guess I haven't had any time off since May. I was quitting supercrack, having an episode of medication-induced mania from California rocket fuel and breaking up with my girlfriend in May, so I guess I haven't had any time off since April. I was a drug addict in April. This is what I was doing back in April.

Here I am looking at the dark web a little over a year ago. I'm probably not buying anything that would be illegal because I already had enough supercrack to last me 2 years. The fact I'm wearing clothes and sitting in my lounge, taking recognisably normal-ish photographs suggests that a little over a year ago, things were going OK.

Oh no I spoke to soon. This night-vision photograph indicates that I was going bat-shit insane while high on supercrack. I took this photograph only a couple of days after the one before, where I was sat in the lounge browsing the dark web. This photograph was taken about a year ago.

What the hell is THAT? Well, it's pretty obvious that I've barricaded myself in my bedroom. This photograph was taken one year and one day ago. This photograph perfectly illustrates my subconscious fears of privacy invasion - that people are going to burst in on me, shame me and violently attack me. I don't come across as very paranoid in day-to-day life, but I'm very traumatised, and this is my reaction that that trauma: I barricade myself in to protect myself from my parents and ex-wife. It's bat-shit insane, of course, but this is my underlying psychology.

Looks like I was eating some food. I'd probably barricaded myself in my bedroom for days. I'd probably not slept for days. My life was a horrific mess a year ago. I had a virtually unlimited supply of supercrack and my addiction was raging out of control. Clearly I was paranoid because of drugs and sleep deprivation, but what was the seed of that paranoia? I wonder if it could have anything to do with having the rug pulled out from under my feet - being muscled out of my own home; being horrifically injured in my own home; being punched in the face or suffering a horrific injury to my leg, at the hands of my ex-wife and parents. I wonder if it could have anything to do with them. I was trapped in a corner for so very long, with no means of escaping my tormentors, who were demonstrably vile, violent and abusive. Fuck them. That kind of trauma has a lasting effect.

My paranoia reached such ridiculous levels that I barricaded the door to my ensuite bathroom using my laundry bins and some clothes storage boxes. Clearly I just wanted to be left alone. Clearly I didn't feel safe. Yes, it's paranoia that's come about because of drug abuse and sleep deprivation, but there's got to be a seed too. Nobody gets this paranoid unless they have their ex-wife kicking doors in and screaming abuse at the top of her lungs. Nobody gets this paranoid unless they have their parents humiliating them and bursting in on them, and dragging them out of their own home. There's a seed for paranoia. There's always a seed.

Something to help me sleep (zopiclone) and something to help me cope and function (dexamfetamine). You can't end a horrific addiction instantly. There's no cold turkey when you're in as deep as I was. I was too dependent. To attempt to suddenly quit overnight would have caused me unbearable withdrawal symptoms and would have required me to be hospitalised. This is what I prescribed myself - two medications for harm reduction. Two medications that I used to wean myself off the dangerous and highly addictive supercrack.

I flushed that big bag of supercrack a year ago. There was enough to last me a couple of years, easily. I can't remember when exactly I flushed it, because my life was chaotic, but the evidence suggests that it was at this point I decided to get clean, using substitute prescribing.

Things didn't go smoothly, but it's very difficult to deal with a major addiction as well as mental health problems and all the practical problems that came about because my life had disintegrated. I needed to get money, get a job, get an apartment I could afford. I needed to move house, move city. I needed to get a new girlfriend and a new group of friends. I had a false start in Manchester, but I tried again in Wales... I'm trying again in Wales.

Maybe you think my life is easy and everything is sorted out, because I earned bit of money, which I spent renting an apartment and buying a car so that I can get to my new job. Maybe you think my life is easy because I get up and go to work every day, and I'm doing a good job and my bosses are impressed with me. Maybe you think my life is easy because I've 'bounced back' from losing two apartments, running out of money three times and being hospitalised twice. Maybe you think my life is easy, because I've made it look so easy, quitting supercrack, Valium, Xanax, tramadol, codeine, dihydrocodiene, pregabalin, zopiclone and zolpidem, which are all highly addictive. Maybe you think my life is easy, because I've gone 7 months unmedicated and I haven't had a single mental health episode that's caused me to commit suicide or do something else drastic to fuck up my life. Maybe you think my life is easy because my finances are improving and I've got a girlfriend. Maybe you think none of what I went through in the last year was very hard. Maybe you think none of what I've been through in the last year has caused any lasting damage.

I'm in my 5th consecutive month of full-time work without a holiday. I'm working my bollocks off. All I do is work work work, because I'm running as fast as I can to get myself into a position where my housing is secure - nobody can evict me - and I'm financially secure. I constantly have to ignore my physical and mental health, because I so desperately need to get myself into a position where I can collapse in a heap and have a minor nervous breakdown.

Yes, I can do stuff like this - I can save myself; I can come back to life; I can return from the brink of destitution and make it look very easy.

It's not easy.

Tags: #homeless #addiction #drugs #bipolar #mentalhealth #suicide

This is a story about crossing a line...

To say I'm not sorry, I'm unremorseful, I don't live with regrets and I've never made a mistake, would be completely untrue. My life is fairly simple - work, eat, sleep - so I have a lot of time to think about things. I'm always prepared to consider the possibility that I've overstepped the mark; that I've gone too far.

The level of isolation I live with is something that 99% of people would find intolerable. Humans are sociable creatures. I'm quite a sociable guy, but my life completely collapsed and I haven't rebuilt it yet. I started a new job a little over a month ago and I'm starting to build a good relationship with my colleagues, but it's early days and I have to tread carefully because I really need the job and I don't really want everyone to know that I've been really unwell. I only moved to the area a little over 6 months ago, and I've spent half that time working in London, so I've not had much opportunity to make new friends yet.

I wake up, I drive to work and I think about what I'm going to write. My job's pretty easy, so I spent lots of time at work thinking about what I'm going to write. I get home and I write. I then spend a lot of time thinking about what I've just written. I often think that what I've just written doesn't accurately reflect how I'm feeling because I feel differently after writing. On reflection, I often feel like I've gone too far - I've been too passive-aggressive and critical; I've been a little negative and cynical. However, if I let my frustrations build up I'd explode or be driven mad.

You probably don't realise just how much you use your support network every day, because you take those people for granted. If you're feeling upset about something, you can pick up the phone or talk to somebody face-to-face. I often don't have that. At work I put on my corporate mask and pretend like everything's perfect in my personal life. With people who I rely upon for my money and my accommodation, I have to present a fake front, because my life depends on it. I'm very rarely able to be myself, and when I am able to finally talk with people who I can be honest and open with, they tend to be my social media contacts, because of my isolated life.

I have a girlfriend and she's great, but I can't have a dependency on one single person - that's too much pressure. My girlfriend suggests seeing a therapist, but that's expensive and you can only talk to them for an hour a week... provided you even like and respect them, of course. Finding a good therapist is a hard enough challenge in and of itself.

If you imagine the amount of traumatic experiences I've had in the past few years - a horrendous leg injury, suicide attempt, kidney failure, police, sleeping rough, crisis house, hostel, police, lost job, evicted, hostel, police, psych ward, DVT, kidney failure, dialysis, homeless and virtually bankrupt, suicide attempt, police, psych ward - then I hope you realise that an hour of week of speaking to a therapist isn't really going to cut the mustard... hence the blog.

I arrive at the point I'm at today, heavily traumatised.

You can't see the trauma, but I know it's there because I keep getting invasive thoughts that stab me like a knife in the guts.

The shit I've been through doesn't give me an excuse to be shitty to people and not be sorry when I upset people. The shit I've been through doesn't give me an excuse to say and do whatever the fuck I want. But, I've only got a limited amount of patience for anybody who makes my life any harder than it needs to be. I've only got a limited amount of patience for anybody who thinks they've got quick fixes and easy solutions. I can only humour people for so long.

Dealing with this post-traumatic stress is taking a long time. There's a lot of shit to work through. There's a lot of stuff I'm getting over. I only just managed to get myself into secure housing and start a job that I can tolerate. My finances are still shitty and I'm only just getting to the point where I'm a couple of weeks away from a cash injection I desperately need. There's been a mountain of practical stuff to sort out, on top of the psychological damage; the trauma.

Frankly, I'm surprised that I'm not more vindictive and nasty, because I've been through a right load of shit and I'm still deeply traumatised. It's true that people have been hurt who don't deserve it, but it's not true that I'm not sorry... in 99% of the cases, I'm sorry when somebody got hurt by me lashing out.

I don't really have anybody who regularly provides some kind of checks & balance on my behaviour. Most of us talk to our friends and family and then our initial anger and indignation dissipates... we feel like we're being unreasonable, when we voice our frustrations to our trusted confidantes. My blog is my trusted confidante, because my life collapsed and I'm dealing with a clusterfuck of post-traumatic stress.

Yes, my blog is public, but I also avoid using names or other things that might identify people. Yes, my blog is public, but how else am I supposed to get the support that I need, when I'm in such a dangerously low and precarious situation? Yes you might feel personally attacked, but are you absolutely certain that it's you I'm talking about? If you think it's you, is that because you've got a guilty conscience?

So, sorry I'm not sorry. But I also am sorry too, in those cases where I overstepped the mark; where I was unnecessarily unkind.

Tags: #writing #ptsd

This is a story about having one foot in the past...

I don't want to go back to Bournemouth. I have lots of friends there and many happy memories, but there's too much trauma. Bournemouth's a beautiful place and it's possible to have a wonderful seaside lifestyle there, but my ex-wife lives there... it's hers now. Too much bad stuff happened in Bournemouth. That relationship was too abusive - it's caused me so much trauma.

I don't want to go back to the North Oxford village where I briefly lived as a little boy. It was traumatic when we left, because my parents were constantly moving - I went to 8 different schools. The drug addiction, the alcoholism, the general disregard for settled, secure, nice, normal family life... it was all too disruptive and traumatic. I don't want to be anywhere near those toxic abusive people - my parents. It's a massive insult that they eventually moved back to the village where I first went to primary school. It's a massive insult. Why did I have to go through the trauma of losing so many friends, moving around so much and having my childhood destroyed? I guess that's what drug addicts and alcoholics do to their children. F**king selfish c**ts.

I don't want to go back to London, because I've tried for too long to make it work and the capital city has chewed me up and spat me out. It's hard damn work trying to make it in London, because so many wide-eyed dreamers head to the capital city thinking that they're going to make their fortune. London's a good place to go to get away from trauma, because it's full of runaways, waifs and strays. London's a good place to heal.

It might look like I'm unnecessarily re-living painful memories on the pages of this blog, but this is therapy. This blog is a good listener. This blog is nonjudgemental. Here's where I'm finally able to tell my side of the story, without the lies and bullshit from the perpetrators of abuse, violence, neglect and all the other awful things. Yes, bitterness drives me to tell the story in a way that's somewhat lopsided occasionally - nobody is completely evil - but we've heard quite enough from the bullies. Those who are strong are quick to stomp on the weak; to silence the defenceless and vulnerable. Here's where the bullied kid finally gets to speak up and condemn those whose hands he suffered at. Here's where justice is done. This is my day in court.

It would be good if I could forgive and forget, but part of forgiveness is about acceptance. I can't accept things and just forget about all the trauma until the tale is told. There are some who'd like me dead, to shut me up. There are some who'd like it if I took my secrets to the grave - that'd be mighty convenient for them. Hence, that's why I write so much. Here it all is in black and white - the ugly truth. If I die tomorrow, it doesn't matter because at least I finally got to tell my side of the story. If I die tomorrow, at least the truth is out there.

There's always a danger I could ruminate on the injustices of the past and get stuck in a rut. Certainly, when things aren't going well and there's no hope of any improvement in my life, I'm prone to bouts of bitterness about my suffering at the hands of some key people in my life: my parents, my ex-wife.

It's quite a cliché for a man my age to be filled with bitterness. It's quite a cliché to complain about my lot in life. I'm the living embodiment of a cliché.

I should be embarrassed and that embarrassment should cow me into silence. I should be silenced by social pressures: "your parents did the best they could". No. No they did not. My parents tried their best to obtain and take drugs. They tried their best to get drunk. Fuck them. I don't hold sway with the "their heart was in the right place" bullshit. I'm sorry, but there's no excuses for ruining childhoods because you were too off your head on drink and drugs to notice what the fuck you were doing to your kids. No excuses.

I don't know quite where this is coming from. I think it's probably a result of the exhausting journey I've been on, and the fact that I'm still not safe and secure... I'm still having to work as hard as I can to try and get myself into a decent position, where I'm safe from homelessness; destitution; death. I'm still in a deep hole, digging my way out.

While my life still has considerable present-day struggles, I think I'll always be reminded of the reasons why I ended up here - I'm forced to re-live past trauma.

Tags: #childhood #parents #divorce

This is a story about compassion fatigue...

I imagine that the boy who cried wolf was probably telling the truth every time he raised the alarm, but the villagers just wanted him to shut up - they wanted him to quietly deal with the wolf on his own and to leave them alone. I mean, what kind of monsters would leave a little boy to protect sheep from wolves? The moral of the story is "don't complain" and "fuck off and die".

I'm sick and tired of explaining that my depression and suicidal thoughts aren't going to be cured by yoga, kale smoothies, exercise, mindfulness, whale song recordings or other quack cures. I'm sick and tired of explaining that I've had enough of swallowing a heap of different pills to try to level out my moods - one to counteract another, and so on ad nauseam. I'm sick and tired of explaining that my job is making me unwell, but I can't quit because I need the money. I'm sick and tired of explaining that my living and travel arrangements are toxic to my mental health, destroying any sense of wellbeing. I'm sick and tired of hearing simple solutions to an oversimplified version of my complicated problems. I'm sick and tired, and I want to die, because that's the only easy solution.

I was pleased to reach the end of Jinxed January. I was pleased to start dating again. I was pleased that money has started to flow again. However, it's all too little too late - the demands which have been placed on me are too great. The things I've had to battle through and overcome have exhausted me, and I've got nothing left to give - I'm spent.

In the last year I lost two girlfriends, two apartments, two jobs. In the last year I spent 7 weeks in hospital. In the last year I quit stimulants, opiates, benzodiazepines, neuropathic painkillers, sleeping tablets and a host of other pills, powders and potions. I moved between several cities and slept in so many different beds that I can't possibly count them all. You'd think that all the hard work would pay off, but it hasn't. For all the agony and anxiety, there's no reward at the end of it. For all the stress and strain, it hasn't got me anywhere. For all the self-denial and good behaviour, there's been no benefit.

I emerged from work this evening and the sky wasn't completely dark. Longer days are coming. Better weather is on its way. However, sustaining myself until the first warm days of this year is going to be impossible - I'll never make it to mid-spring, because I'm fucked right now. "One day at a time" is the problem - the days are unbearable.

I thought my suicidal thoughts had subsided, but this evening I had the strongest urge to end my life that I've had in quite a long time. My suicidal thoughts had turned into hopes and plans for the future, but this evening those hopes seemed too far out of reach. I've done the maths and the figures just don't add up. There's no way that I can carry on. The money's not coming in fast enough to stop the rot. I can't keep myself afloat like this any longer.

I found some Bitcoins I'd forgotten about. They're sitting there ready to be spent on the dark web. I'm not going to relapse, because that would be slow suicide. If I'm going to kill myself, I'm going to do it quickly and suddenly, not in the drawn-out and degrading way that happens with drug addiction. If I'm going to kill myself, it's going to be with pride and dignity, knowing that I tried as hard as humanly possible to rescue myself, but it wasn't enough. If I'm going to commit suicide, I'm going to be clean, sober and sane.

Life's not worth the aggravation. Life's not worth the effort. The rewards just don't match up with the stress, exhaustion, loneliness, isolation, boredom, trauma, suffering, grief and inevitable death.

Why bother?

I've worked a million jobs and delivered a zillion projects. I've moved house so many times, built fortunes, created companies and invented products. I've travelled. I've lived and loved. I've taken everything to the extreme. I've had enough. I'm sick of this shit.

Don't try to persuade me to live and don't be sad when I'm gone. I've lived a thousand lifetimes. I just can't stand having to live one more, when it's just repeating the same old bullshit I've done a million times before.

Don't ring the police or whatever. I'm not going to kill myself immediately. I just really want to die and I'm planning when and how I'm going to do it.

Tags: #suicide #depression

This is a story about music...

The only things that seem to be capable of making me cry at the moment are Disney movies and a 90-second passage from The Tempest, which is about dreams and sleep. I quote it now for your interest, and as I write this big salty tears are rolling down my cheeks:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air: 
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep.

It seems remarkable to me that I'm not able to resist the mawkish and emotionally manipulative thrust of the Disney movies, and I blub in all the right places and even some of the wrong ones. To accuse me of being emotionally unstable or having a tendency towards inappropriate emotional responses to situations, is grossly inaccurate and untrue. I would agree that I'm unguarded; trusting... a little vulnerable and certainly quite naïve, although I would argue that I prefer to be naïve than cynical and guarded.

In terms of protecting myself from whimsically falling in love and getting hurt, I would say that I don't protect myself at all. My emotions go where they want to go and I let them. I use the "L" word very sparingly and tend to distrust strong emotions, viewing them as transient; fleeting. I favour loyalty above everything else. I've got no time for game playing and wimpy wusses who are afraid of getting hurt.

Under a railway arch in Vauxhall, I experienced what the children of doting parents must experience their whole lives - to be loved, cared for; adored. I felt a sense of contentment and security that had been absent throughout my bullied childhood. I felt the warm embrace - the hug, if you like - that had been absent in my life and had turned me into an insecure person who completely lacked self-confidence and a sense of identity. I'd been through 8 schools and lost countless friends due to my druggie alkie loser parents not giving a shit about the damage they were doing. The experience of clubbing under the railway arches was curative - this was the love that had been sorely absent in my life. The catalyst? MDMA.

Fifteen years later, my marriage was collapsing. I needed to go to hospital. I was admitted to The Priory thanks to my private health insurance.

It's actually unremarkable that I grew out of a brief period where I dabbled with recreational drugs - ecstasy - and went on to have a 15-year blemish-free career, before the stress of a toxic and abusive relationship tipped me back into the very state I was in when I was a child: in desperate need of some unconditional love. It seems obvious that depriving a person of their identity and security, and bullying them, would result in trauma and psychological damage. It seems obvious that the same negative stimuli would elicit the same negative response.

While I was in The Priory, I handed in my iPod after a couple of weeks. I had decided that I was using music as a way of manipulating my moods, in a similar manner to people drinking, smoking and using drugs, in response to stress and other negative situations. I decided that if I was going to take treatment seriously, I would have to avoid things which I could use and abuse to alter my mood.

Presently, we seem to think it's virtuous to deny ourselves all the things we enjoy. Cream cakes (too fatty), fizzy drinks (too much sugar), beer and wine (alcoholic), masturbation ("wanker", "tosser" etc.), spending money (too fun) and all the other things that make life mildly bearable are given up for January, while we run on a treadmill in a gym, or lash ourselves with a bunch of nettles or whatever the f**k it is that 'virtuous' people do these days.

When I was seized with the notion that pure devotion to a 'natural' life would lead to happier, healthier times, it became as obsessive as anything else that might be characterised as an addiction. I became addicted to making every single tiny health tweak in my life that I could. I cut out dairy and gluten. I washed out my sinuses with saline. I probably would have done colonic irrigation if I'd thought about it at the time. The whole thing was dumb - pure superstition and pseudoscience.

Today, I take dietary supplements - 5-HTP, tyrosine and magnesium - which are supposed to provide my brain with the building blocks it needs to restore normal mood and improve my sleep. However, I've also abused simple amino acids and even pure dopamine - in the form of L-DOPA - to put my brain into a completely unnatural state, with the intention of achieving an otherwise unattainable euphoria or level of performance.

I've abused stimulants to stay awake and give me the energy to dance all night. I've used prolactin-suppressing medications to allow me to have multiple orgasms. I've used erectile dysfunction medications to allow me to sustain an erection for priapic lengths of time. I've used drugs to move my mood up, down and sideways - attempting to 'play god' if you like.

How many drugs and medications have I tried? Two hundred? Three hundred? More? This is not hyperbole - I had the time, the money, the determination and the means.

If you think I'm an idiot who makes bad choices, I ask you to look again. Imagine what my upbringing was like before I discovered that there was this chemical - MDMA - that unlocked me from that miserable prison. Of course I was going to mistakenly believe that it was a trick that could be repeated. In my desperation to escape a toxic abusive relationship 15 years later, I tried heroin, crack and crystal meth - amongst innumerable others - and none of them grabbed me. I methodically worked my way through everything I could get my hands on - illegal drugs, legal highs and black-market prescription medications.

The net result was not a predictable one. Instead of being dead in a ditch due to poly-substance abuse, I'm now quite averse to any psychoactive substances. I'm one of the few people you know who doesn't drink caffeinated beverages. That I'm unmedicated for my mental health problems is not because I think I'm "well" but because I know that I prefer to suffer the symptoms - very few people you know are prepared to tolerate depression and anxiety, but I do so on a daily basis without medication to assist me.

There's a part of me that wants to quit carbs, quit booze and join a gym, but frankly I've got enough shit on my plate just trying to get up in the mornings and not kill myself.

I loosened the purse strings and bought a few new clothes at the weekend. I went on a couple of dates. I'm listening to euphoric dance music, eating what I want to eat and drinking quite a lot. Fuck it. Life's too short to be miserable.

Last night, a woman ran up behind me as I was crossing the road and started asking for money. I said "sorry". She launched into an escalating level of abuse, accusing me of saying "no" and for toying her when she was "begging [for my] help". She was too busy yelling and screaming horrible names at me to be interested in the fact that I would've helped her, absolutely. In fact I still would. Fuck it, even if she was just rattling for "B and white" (heroin and crack, also known as "dark and light") and she was short for the score, I'd have helped. You've got to acknowledge the complexities of life and human nature if you want to help anybody. Expecting everybody to be gym-going, kale-eating, alcohol and drug free totally fucking ridiculously 'virtuous' people is absurd. Most of us have a vice.

When I think about how long I lived without my cat to stroke, and without the pleasure of snuggling with a girl I'm really into, I'm surprised I made it this far. What's the point of life without a good healthy dose of oxytocin? Is life even liveable without the bonding hormone? I really don't think it is.

So, as we approach the end of Jinxed January, I'm throwing caution to the wind little by little. I'm buying myself new clothes and having a haircut, because it's great for my self-esteem. I'm dating and having sex because it's fucking awesome. I'm letting myself do a million little things that just make my day a little bit more bearable, because that's what life's all about if you don't want it to be suicidal misery.

There's a chance that all the little changes in my life will destabilise me. It's all quite stressful, even if it's also fun. I'm quite well aware that something as simple as a late night can throw my world into quite a lot of chaos, but sod it, life's too short and I've waited and been sensible for long enough.

I don't think I'm going to go clubbing and take any MDMA any time soon though.

Tags: #relationships #sex #bipolar

This is a story about aide-memoires...

I've been blogging for 779 days, including a period of 120 consecutive sober days and the current stretch of 45 sober days, which totals 165 days. I worked for approximately 300 days (including weekends). I spent circa 60 days in hospital. I had two major periods of drug abuse, six girlfriends, wrote a novel and I attempted suicide seriously once. I've written 702,412 words on the pages of this website.

So, where's it gotten me?

Nowhere and everywhere.

I had no idea I had so much to say; so much stuff that I needed to write about. When I uncorked the bottle, all this stuff just came flooding out - bitterness, resentment, bad memories, as well as strong opinions on myriad subjects. Of course, there was a lot of toxic filth which spewed from my mouth - not everything I've written has been kind and eloquently put. Do I regret what I've written? Sometimes, yes, but on the whole I feel glad I spoke up. I feel ashamed that I wrote some absolute gibberish when I was messed up, but there it is: my soul laid bare for all to see.

To have poured time and effort into sharing stuff on Facebook or Twitter would have left me horribly invested in those walled gardens. To have ingratiated myself with another online community - a discussion forum - would have perhaps been a useful exercise, to give me social contact and a clear purpose, but in some ways I'm glad that I've learned how to work in isolation; to keep up the discipline and routine even when I don't know why I'm writing or what good will come of it.

If nothing else, I can proudly say I'm a writer, of a sort: I'm an eccentric hermit who's lost in his own thoughts. I've got 200 blog posts planned and my next novel to write in November - my mind buzzes with ideas. I'd write long rambling posts that jump around from topic to topic, running to many thousands of words, except that I feel like I've had enough practice of sentence construction and finding my natural voice. Now I'm starting to enjoy a kind of delicious frustration, knowing that I only allow myself to write once a day, and I aim to keep my daily word count to around 700.

As a barometer of my mood, there is nothing finer than writing. I can see all my insecurities, anxieties and my propensity to become obsessive or consumed by things, as clear as day. Of course I fear egocentricity, narcissism, navel gazing and other undesirable labels that might be hurled at me, but frankly the process of writing is an essential pressure-release. Not having this blog made me unspeakably frustrated, because I was grotesquely misunderstood. "Oh, bless you poppet... so full of teenaged angst!" you might patronise me. LOL says I.

My maturing process has been unorthodox, due to relentless bullying and a generally unpleasant start to life that robbed me of my self-esteem and opportunities to be a child, a teenager and a student. I now take my chances where I find them, and delight in acting like a great big kid. Being a late starter in life has its advantages, even if there is a general presumption that I should be better at handling life events, when I actually have not had the benefit of experience - how was I supposed to, for example, get any good at relationships if I didn't have stable friendships, childhood sweethearts or good role models in my parents?

Entering my third year of daily writing, this could be considered my "finals". I've had a few jobs which have stretched to the 4+ year mark, and enjoyed a little more stability with friends and homes in my adult life, than I did through the 8 different schools I had the misfortune of attending. This writing project has provided stability and structure, when my world was blown to bits by divorce.

While the backdrop to my story has changed from hostel to hotel room, to a few different apartments, hospital wards and psychiatric institutions, I've somehow managed to keep writing on a regular basis. I feel like the same person, when I sit down in front of the keyboard, even if there has been a huge variation in the state of my mental health. I know that I have written during periods stimulant & sleep-deprivation induced mania, causing me to pour out thousands upon thousands of words in a confused jumble. However, my mind still makes a surprising amount of sense, despite circumstances which should have tipped me into out-and-out insanity.

I am fearful that the pages of this blog might chart my final decline into a state where I'm rendered permanently useless to the world. I often wonder if I have caused so much trauma to my fragile brain, that it can never recover. If I'm at all paranoid, it's that I'm talking complete nonsense, and everybody is just humouring me while snickering behind my back. "Why didn't anybody tell me I'm writing utter crap?" I sometimes think.

Watching a friend or a stranger careen towards imminent disaster, in a slow-motion car-crash, is something that holds our gaze while also somehow stunning us into silence. I'm vaguely aware that many will be thinking "what can I do?" and be paralysed, without a clear cry for help or call to action. Not only is this the world's longest suicide note, but it's also the world's slowest ongoing crisis, for anybody following along in real-time. It took me a long time to find the guts to finally make a decent attempt at killing myself.

I'm aware now that the burden of responsibility shifts back to me, having received an outpouring of support from unexpected corners, in the wake of my suicide attempt. To resort to self-murder again, would be churlish.

As my mind begins to un-fog from the painkillers I had been taking for most of this year, I wonder whether I have learned anything from the events of the past. I hope I have developed and I'm in a better position than I was, when I was rather trapped in some most unpleasant circumstances, although I find myself in a never-ending cycle - rushing back to work before I'm fully recovered, in order to service debts and otherwise line the pockets of the rich.

Stress keeps me wired, and I wonder when the last time I cried was. Surely, there's a lot of tears that I'm holding back.

I'm tense; agitated; nervous; anxious; hypervigilant.

Tags: #writing #anxiety