Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

22. Wells of Silence

She had to leave him. She couldn't be certain that she was making things worse, but she certainly didn't seem to be making things better. It was so painful to see the man she loved in a steady decline. All her attempts to help seemed to antagonise him and make him more secretive and defensive.

But she couldn't abandon him. She almost immediately regretted making him feel rejected. She knew he already felt completely isolated and alone, and leaving only made it worse, but she'd had to protect herself.

She stepped into the bedroom, invading his precious private sanctuary. It was dark but the scene was still horrific.

His body.

Laying awkwardly, his naked skin was purplish and yellow in parts, as if covered with terrible bruises. There was a paleness to the rest of his body where the blood had drained away completely. The small amount of flesh covering his bony frame had swelled, leaving his skin tight and shiny.

He was undoubtedly dead.

She didn't gasp, scream or flee the scene. Her mind reeled with a sense of responsibility. How could she protect him now? How could she defend this undignified end to his life? How would she deal with the police, family?

She scanned the room. There were so many things lying around that she wanted to pick up and dispose of that it was completely overwhelming. How could she stay here and deal with a cleanup operation, tip-toeing around his dead body?

Having stood rooted to the spot, surveying the scene, the situation was clearly hopeless. She wouldn't know where to begin. She left to phone the police. 

She didn't feel guilty that she hadn't been able to do more after he'd died, but she wasn't able to forgive herself for leaving him.

"What if I'd stayed?" she sobbed.

It wasn't her fault, the police, her trauma counsellor, her parents, her brothers and her friends all told her. How could they be so sure? How could they know whether things might have turned out differently if she hadn't left him?

Next chapter...

Background Info

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) takes place every November, when aspiring authors attempt to write a 50,000+ word novel within 30 days. This means averaging 1,667 words per day.

My 360 odd blog posts to date have averaged 1,246 words per day, so it shouldn't be too much of a stretch for me to write a bit more each day and achieve the goal. Plus, I have the support & encouragement of all the other authors who are taking part in this challenge.

Since leaving school, I have done very little creative writing, so a whole novel may be rather more difficult than I anticipate.

Hijacking my blog for the next 30 days seems unusual, but the general advice to authors is "write about what you know" so you may find that my novel is a natural extension of my blog, in actual fact.

Anyhoo, the working title of my novel is "Poste Restante" and without further ado, I shall begin #writing.

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

1. The Caravan

Neil's consciousness sparked back into existence. This was not like waking up, as if he had been dreaming. This was not like coming round after an operation in hospital, under general anaesthetic. It was much more akin to a sudden re-ignition of his brain activity, after head trauma, perhaps after being knocked out cold by a punch or a blow to the head with some other blunt object.

At first, Neil's mind was confused; everything was jumbled up. He could make no sense of what was going on. His thinking was cloudy; cognition impaired. Then, the blurry mess and unfamiliar shapes that had previously filled his field of vision now came into sharper focus. He started to see things in his surroundings that he could identify, even though he still didn't know where he was or why he was there.

Neil lay on a bed at one end of a caravan. The bed filled the width of the caravan and extended all the way to the bedroom door, which was wide open. At the opposite end of the caravan was a dining table, surrounded by a U-shaped bench of seating, with windows behind. The bench was upholstered with a pink floral pattern. The table had a wood veneer, although it was clearly made of chipboard, exposed around the edge. A small kitchenette was on one side and a toilet and shower cubicle on the other.

The interior of the caravan was not in good condition. Mildew stained everything. The ceiling had dark black patterns where the permanent dampness had allowed everything that was water permeable to fester in the moist atmosphere. The carpet, which seemed to have been some sort of dark maroon colour originally, was soggy and stained. Mud was trodden into the pile of the carpet around the entrance to the caravan. The carpet had started to rot and there were patches of blue furry mould growing in places. A lightly coloured textured wallpaper peeled away from the walls in places, revealing a layer of polystyrene insulation, as well as the glue behind, which had now turned an orangey-brown colour as it had aged and dried.

The bedroom windows were covered by navy blue curtains. These had been neatly stapled to the wall below and at the sides, so that little light could penetrate through each of the three windows at the bedroom end of the caravan. Where the curtains hung on the curtain rail, a small amount of light crept in and it was clear that it was daytime.

The other windows had been covered with self-adhesive opaque plastic, which allowed light into the caravan, but you could neither see in nor out. The plastic had been applied with little attention to detail: there were air bubbles and the edge had been cut rather raggedly, exposing some of the clear glass near the white plastic window frames. Paper masking tape had been applied around the edges of the windows, to cover the gaps between the plastic and the frame. The large window at the opposite end of the caravan from Neil had newspaper stapled above the curtain-less windows, draped down so that it covered two thirds of the window. On the left hand side, a bedsheet had been stapled above and at the side of the window. The staples were haphazardly placed and the sheet had folds and creases in it, hanging hopelessly from the wall, and no use as any kind of curtain. The staple-gun lay on the dining room table, abandoned.

In places, there had been small craters scraped crudely in the polystyrene insulation of the walls, so that the thin aluminium exterior skin of the caravan was exposed. In each of these craters in the wall, a hole had been punched through the aluminium. Beams of sunlight shone into the dingy interior of the caravan through the holes. These beams illuminated swirling mists of moisture within the caravan, almost like the silken threads of a spider's web, heavy with morning dew and shining in the sun.

Clothes were scattered throughout the caravan. Some were torn, others stretched or unusually knotted; all seemed ruined in some way. There was the debris of habitation: discarded food wrappers, dirty plates and cutlery on the floor. There were many other objects made of bits of broken plastic, rubber and string that seemed to be the twisted, mangled and knotted remains of other things that had been dismantled, torn, bent and otherwise manhandled to the point that they were no longer clearly identifiable as anything in particular. Things were strewn all over the floor, with no discernable pattern.

There were many containers distributed around the caravan: plastic bottles were filled with fluid in various hues of yellow and orange. Then there were mugs, saucepans, bowls and glasses that were filled with orangey-brown liquid. A glass on a shelf near Neil's bed had a layer of red at the bottom, then an opaque layer that was milky pale yellow and the topmost liquid - which filled the majority of the glass - was clear and brownish in colour.

After his sight, the second of Neil's senses that returned was his sense of smell. His nostrils were assaulted by a strongly pungent but not putrid smell. The smell was extremely unpleasant, but not so much so that it was causing Neil any feeling of nausea. The smell had a kind of nasty allure, like a strong ripe cheese. There was the smell of mould, damp and decay of soft furnishings, mingled with the smell of bodily odour, and distinctly a smell of urine. Sweat intermingled with the general dampness in the caravan and ran down the walls in droplets. The windows were completely misted up with condensed moisture. The cheap sponge of the upholstery and bed had soaked up a lot of this foulness. Clothing and bedding had also absorbed some of the humidity from the air.

Neil's memory of how he found himself in this position now slowly returned to him. Things made little sense to him. They had found him; they had surrounded him; they had been readying themselves to storm his little stronghold and they would tear him from the private surroundings which he had attempted to create for himself. They had antagonised him; they had spent an incredible amount of time making noises and assembling themselves for the onslaught; the invasion of Neil's privacy, now that they had found him. They had hidden in the shadows and attempted to remail unseen, but Neil had seen them: fleeting glimpses, as he looked out of the peepholes. Counter-espionage: they were spying on him, so he would spy back at them.

Neil had no idea what their motivation was. Why was he so relentlessly pursued? Why were they so voyeuristic, wanting to intrude on his private world? Why were they so childishly antagonising? Why did they tirelessly toy with him, so close, but waiting and waiting before they made their move? He was angry with them. Quite rightly too. He had gone to such incredible effort to create a bubble of privacy, far away from anybody he could possibly disturb, or who might happen upon him by accident. He was in such a remote hidden location. How could anybody have possibly taken offence at his presence?

His final memories before he blacked out were of a night filled with terror and blind panic as the people he had tried so hard to avoid and evade were now making their final advances. All the dim shapes he could make out in the surrounding gloom of the trees were of figures, coming towards the caravan. He could see the movement of people in the shadows that danced on the ceiling and walls of the caravan. He could hear twigs snapping underfoot as they were stepped on. He could hear the sound of bushes being brushed past and branches being bent to make way for the advancing horde.

He passed out. When he came round they were gone.

Tentatively, he started to try and sit up and make his way to one of his peep holes so he could look out, but he realised he had blacked out with his leg jammed awkwardly underneath himself. His foot had gone to sleep. Incredible pain swept through his leg as the blood started to flow again and the feeling came back into his numbed limb.

There was momentary relief as the pain in his leg subsided, but then he was flooded with pain from multiple parts of his body. His hips ached, many parts of his legs seemed bruised and swollen, his back and neck were very stiff and painful; his body was covered with cuts and grazes, especially his knees and elbows.

In agony, Neil managed to prop himself up by the nearest of the peep holes and pushed his face up against the wall so he could look out. He saw nothing. Just trees. Where had they gone?

How long had he been unconscious for? It had been night time when he had blacked out and now it was daytime, but there was no way of telling whether it was the next day, or the one after that. He had lost all sense of time: days and nights had blurred into one.

Neil had spent a long time, afraid to leave the caravan. How long, he couldn't be sure, but he knew that they had laid seige to him and now his situation was desperate. He was dying in that caravan. He was so thirsty. He was in a great deal of pain. It was clear that there was a lot of blood in his urine. He felt so weak. He really didn't want to confront his persecutors and he had hoped that they would act first so that he didn't have to make the decision. Now he was confronted with the dawning realisation that they had won. Surrender was his only option if he wanted to live.

He collapsed back onto the bed to contemplate his next move, not at all able or willing to fully comprehend the staggering unpleasantness of the situation he was in.

Next chapter...

This is a story about self healing...

Does brain damage mean game over? Is it right to write off somebody who has suffered brain lesions, neurotoxicity, a stroke etc. etc.?

At one time, my left eyelid had started to droop and I had a pretty bad facial tic. My body jerked and shook with pseudo-Parkinsonian symptoms. My speech was slow and slurred. No wonder I was treated as if I was as good as dead, right?

But you know what? With good diet & sleep, you can quickly recover your heath, depending on the severity of your situation.

Bizarrely, I was able to get a job and get through an eventful and highly stressful re-entry into the working world, while my poor brain was busily trying to repair itself. How is that even possible?

I've done the same job for the best part of 20 years. In fact, my friend Ben taught me how to program a computer when we were 12 years old, and I'd been messing around with computers since my first forays onto my friend Joe's Dad's Apple Mac, in 1985.

With repetition, your brain lays down pathways that become more permanent with age. Neural pruning - the loss of less used connections between brain cells - makes your brain into something that has become well adapted for the common tasks you perform. Some people call this "muscle memory" but of course it's your brain, not your muscles, that has the memories. Practice makes permanent, as they say. Just like riding a bike.

So, I relied on instincts and techniques, knowledge and experience that has been unchanging for my whole working life. I still use the same job search technique, the same interview technique, and the job of developing software is unchanged, despite the constant creation of new acronyms and jargon for things that do exactly the same job in exactly the same way.

Just like riding a bike, I was able to navigate the corporate landscape and just about get away with a day job that involved my damaged brain pulling the levers to operate the battered mince-puppet that was my body, in a vaguely convincing way, to cover up the fact that I was basically at death's door.

With physiotherapy for the body, your recovery can be improved, and I'm sure that brain training exercises would be useful for those with brain injuries, but the stimulation of trying to get myself off the streets and escape bankruptcy and destitution was challenging and stimulating enough.

Fundamentally, time is the great healer. The brain is a homeostatic organ that will try to restore itself to a stable base state, once external forces are no longer pulling it hither and thither. I was able to have nearly 6 months abstinent from stimulants and over 3 months abstinent from alcohol, in order to give my brain a fighting chance of finding equilibrium again.

But, just as important as cessation of putting powerful narcotics into my body, was stopping drinking tea & coffee, as well as other caffeinated beverages. Even though my brain screamed out for stimulants, because it was going through withdrawal, they are terrible things when your brain needs to adapt and heal.

Caffeine is very bad for your neuroplasticity. That is to say, the ability of the remaining undamaged neurons in your brain to try to compensate for whatever trauma it has suffered, and repair itself. Caffeine impairs your ability to recover.

If you have some boring repetitive task to perform again & again, then caffeine is your drug. Once you've mastered the simple steps that most jobs require, the boredom becomes unbearable. Caffeine solves this problem, and allows us to maintain concentration on the most mind-numbing dumbarsery that ever disgraced the working world.

Most of the world is just doing stupid shit, time & again, because they're in a trance-like state performing repetitive actions and making the same old mistakes over & over, because they've medicated themselves up to the eyeballs with the powerful stimulant called caffeine.

By stopping my caffeine intake, I was able to recover from the symptoms of fairly harrowing neurological damage, spot patterns in my behaviour and even re-learn new healthy behaviour. I genuinely believe that this would not have been possible, with caffeine in my life.

I did supplement my diet heavily with amino acid building blocks:

• 5-HTP to help my serotonergic system
• L-Tyrosine to help my dopaminergic system
• Phenylalanine to help my adrenal / epinephrine system

I ate vast quantities of biltong (dried beef) and other protein supplements, to give my body everything it could possibly need to repair itself, and replenish its stores.

In theory, I should have been left in a permanently psychotic state, with delusions, paranoia, inability to emotionally regulate, facial tics, poor concentration, poor memory, nerve damage on one side of my face etc. etc.

However, I put out the fire before it consumed me. When somebody is sick, you don't write them off and watch them wither and die. That's immoral!

I was watching a Louis Theroux documentary, and one hospital patient they followed was declared brain dead after he asphyxiated from a heroin overdose. The doctors were absolutely certain there was no hope, and that the life support systems should be switched off. I agreed, and I thought it was madness that the family were holding out any hope at all. After 37 days, the young man in a coma woke up. His family saved him from a premature and unnecessary death, by refusing to cut off his life support.

My life support has come in the form of kind strangers, policemen, nurses, doctors and indeed unwitting work colleagues, who have been willing to overlook the immediate situation and imagine that things can and will get better, given time and opportunity.

I'm physically, neurologically, a completely different beast to who and what I was a little over a year ago, when I was totally fucked.

Tags: #drugs #addiction #recovery #mentalhealth #bipolar #career

This is a story about pounding the mean streets...

Here's a map of the fun run route that I followed. I wasn't actually following a route or a map, as you will see from the tale I'm about to tell.

Picking up again, where we left part two of this story, yesterday. I had just left my hotel bedroom, in pursuit of the woman and her family, who had been antagonising me all day. In my mind, this had become a game of hide & seek.

I dashed down the back staircase of the hotel, and found myself in the kitchen. Everything was dark and deserted. I went to the front windows and looked out. The police helicopter was still there, shining its light onto the front of the hotel. I decided to try and get out the back of the hotel.

At the back of the hotel was a room full of building materials, as well as the fuseboard controlling all the electrical circuits in the building. Everything was falling to pieces, with plaster hanging off the walls, doors hardly on their hinges, and some kind of makeshift extension on the back of the building. The back door wasn't locked.

Going out of the back door led me into a kind of car park, that was also a bit of wasteland. I started heading away from the hotel, but then noticed that there was a security guard at the gates. I pretended not to have seen him and to be looking for my car. Then, the lights from the police helicopter shone over the top of the hotel, and I rushed towards the back wall so as not to be seen. I explored the other end of the car park, where it was just overgrown and derelict, but there wasn't anything there of interest.

I spotted another entrance into the hotel, but that seemed to be serving a function room and I didn't want to freak any other guests out, so I headed back to the back door where I had originally come out from, turning my jacket inside out as I went, as some kind of 'disguise' as I planned to try and come out of the front entrance and I didn't want to be recognised by the police.

I was scared that I might have been spotted by the security guard, going in and out of the back entrance, so I hid myself behind a big stack of rolled up insulation and other building materials and waited for 20 or so minutes to see if I would hear anybody coming looking for me. I heard nothing.

I made my way out of the hotel, where there was a man on a scooter, talking incessantly on the radio and watching me. I walked down a side street, changed my jacket again, and went back into the hotel. This time, I went to the other side of the building, down a ground-floor corridor.

I descended a staircase into the basement and found a stack of plasterboards which I hid behind. I wanted to know if the hotel staff had been spooked out by me acting all weirdly, and if I was being followed. I tried to hide myself in the gap between the plasterboard sheets and the wall, but it wasn't easy. I was making a lot of noise and generally acting extremely strange, and felt sure that I was going to get in trouble with the hotel or the police. Surely I was disturbing other guests? It had been about 45 minutes of running around already.

I came out of hiding and found another corridor, this one had guest bedrooms on it. I heard somebody talking in what sounded like a bad German accent, and followed the sound. I decided that I was sure to be confronted by hotel staff though, and near the sound of the voice I decided to hide in a maintenance cupboard. Strangely, none of the maintenance cupboards were locked.

This particular cupboard I hid in didn't have a proper floor: it was just the floor beams. There were also two water tanks for 2 bedrooms' ensuite bathrooms, plus various pipes. It was also really dusty and cobwebby in there. I struggled to hold the door shut and regulate my breathing. I must surely have been overheard by guests, hiding in this cupboard.

I bumped into the girl who had been speaking in the German accent. She didn't seem shocked to see a dust-covered man, hiding in a cupboard right outside her room. She appeared to be beckoning me inside her bedroom, but I couldn't be sure exactly what her body language was saying. She certainly wasn't freaked out. I had no idea what to do. I was receiving no clear communication, and my thoughts were jumbled, confused.

I decided to go back to my room, but on the way there, I freaked out about somebody seeing me and decided to hide in another cupboard. This one was much the same. However, it sounded as if my noises had upset a guest. I could hear them phoning somebody. I imagined that they were freaked out by the sounds emanating from the flimsy walls, which were probably very clearly audible in the ensuite bathroom of their room. It certainly would have freaked me out.

I marched up to reception, and explained that I might have disturbed a guest, and that I was very sorry. I must have been quite a sight, covered in dust and cobwebs. There was a man sat in the lounge near reception, and he muttered something about "what a disgusting state" when he saw and overheard me, and wandered off when I made eye contact with him, and agreed with his sentiments.

I returned to my bedroom, and wasn't sure what to do. I was sure that the police would surely arrive at any minute. I didn't want the police to think that I had tampered with any evidence or anything, so I went to the window, and sat on the sill with my hands behind my back, so they could be clearly seen from the helicopter, if it was still there. I waited there a long time.

The night passed with much confusion. There was no sign of the police and I even rang the non-emergency number to see if there was anything they could tell me: was I in trouble? Things seemed to quieten down.

As it got light, I got changed and made my way outside. There were some young lads hanging around. They offered me drugs, which I declined "I don't do that anymore" I told them. I'd never encountered open drug dealing in a suburban residential area. Perhaps it was because I looked a wreck, or perhaps it was a setup, I mused.

I went back inside the hotel, to my room. The noise of other guests moving around was starting to rise. I heard a big group leaving, and looked out of my window to see a large family party getting on board a coach. A girl saw me looking out of the window and she waved and beckoned me. I was very confused about what to do.

Then, there was a voice. "Are you coming down?" it said. There then ensued a kind of argument, between me and a couple of voices, where I basically said I'd had enough... I'd been running around playing this silly game all night, and I still didn't know what I was supposed to be doing or why. I started to say "do your worst, you can't hurt me anymore, I've been bullied loads and some more won't matter" but these people, these voices, threatened to 'tell' everybody I knew what a disaster area I was.

It seemed I was being ransomed in some way. The footage from the spy camera, and perhaps other things, was going to be used against me in some way.

I sat down on the bed and decided that I wasn't going to play anymore. I was sulking. I was fed up of being bullied. I'd had enough.

Then, I thought, sod it, I'll go and see what they want me to do. I grabbed all my bags and went down to reception, where I put them into left luggage, except for my backpack which had my laptop and my mobile phone which was plugged into an external battery pack, for extra charge. I then left the hotel.

I heard somebody shout "wanker!" and I made my way down the street towards where I thought I had heard the voice from. As I walked down the street, I heard other catcalls of abuse. "Tosser" I heard, as I went past another house. I noticed that some windows were open on the top floors, but there wasn't anybody to be seen.

I walked up and down the road, noticing that the yelled abuse would come from a few of the same places, but nobody was showing their face. I was very confused about what I was supposed to be doing.

I started walking further and further along the road. There was lots of building and decorating work going on at various houses, and I would hear clanging that was much more like somebody trying to get my attention rather than somebody doing some work. I went to investigate these noises.

Eventually, I started to feel like I was being directed by these clangs and bangs. Somebody clanging, hammering or shutting a car door seemed to be my cue to cross the road, or to turn 90 degrees right. Two slams would see me do a U-turn.

As I made my way up and down the road, I noticed that as I passed somebody, they would run off down the street or get on a bike and ride past me. As I came and went, making several trips, it seemed like I was being made to walk a circuit so that I would see a bunch of people face to face. I started to say "thank you" to the people who I saw, who were all looking for my eye contact for some reason.

I started to jog along, and the vehicles got larger and larger. Starting first with a stream of bicycles, then cars, then vans, then lorries... I seemed to have to greet a larger and larger number of people with a "thank you" while I was running in circles, directed by people slamming doors and banging on scaffolding.

I realised that a huge number of people were involved in this dance, and I could be holding up their day. I wanted to show that I cared that they'd all got involved in 'helping' me and that I was going to put in as much effort as I could. I tried to run as much as I could, with my heavy backpack.

There appeared to be co-ordinators. People would jump on their mobile phones as soon as I passed them and they'd say "yeah, he's just gone past" and other things to suggest that I was running late, behing schedule. I tried to pick up my pace.

I had been hoping to get the ordeal over with quickly, and had assumed that it was only the road that the hotel was on that was involved, but it soon became clear that I was then starting a much bigger circuit. I started being directed through roads taking me away from the hotel. How big was this route and how long was it going to take me?

I kept kind of hoping that I would run into the usual crowds of commuters and normal London life, and this strange experience would be over... I'd just be mingling with everyday Londoners and there would no longer be this sense that I was being guided on a pre-planned journey around Islington, choreographed by people banging on building sites and slamming doors.

I ran, and I ran, and I ran, hoping that I would soon be done, hoping that I would have seen and been seen and said "thank you" to everybody I needed to, and the route would turn back towards the hotel, and I could collapse in a heap with exhaustion. However, the route seemed to be taking me nowhere near the hotel. I had no idea where I was going or how far I had to run for.

I started to feel really dehydrated and that I was getting dangerously tired. The backpack with the expensive and heavy electronics was a real burden, and the shoes that I was wearing, although they were waterproof, were really heavy - designed for walking, not running. There was a bottle of isotonic fluid in my backpack, but I felt bad stopping to drink it.

Eventually, after many miles, I decided I needed to stop and drink the half-bottle that remained. I heard jeering as I paused to get it out of my bag, but I couldn't go on without something. I was drenched in sweat, and I put away the fleece I had been wearing and carried on running.

As I ran down a big wide open road, with a park in the middle, and large grand Georgian terraced houses either side, I noticed that I was being followed by an ambulance. Whatever I was part of, it was certainly well organised. I started to get the idea that I was being tracked by GPS, so that I wouldn't be lost, and there was a little restraint being shown by the organisers. I wasn't going to be hounded to my death. I had to trust these people, I told myself.

I ran down one road, and a girl and her boyfriend stopped me. "My boyfriend did this too, and it helped him get better" the girl told me. They were a sweet looking young couple and were linked arm-in-arm, and looked very happy and in love. I was touched that they told me this, and it spurred me on to continue.

I ran down another road, past a school playground, and all the kids yelled "Nick! Nick!" I thought I really had lost my mind, so I went back and ran past again. "Nick! Nick!" all the kids yelled in unison, once again as I ran past. This was getting pretty surreal.

I then ran into a less residential area. There were people there that were clearly minding their own business. I was starting to get into ordinary London, and it was clear that nobody was paying a blind bit of notice to me. I started to think that perhaps it was over. Then I realised where I was... I ran right past my bike, where it was locked up on the road, where I had gotten into a bit of trouble, and really upset somebody, about 4 or 5 days before this whole weird fiasco.

I looked around, as I ran past my bike, to see if I could see the injured party, who had perhaps been the trigger for this entire event, but I could see no sign. I kept running. At times I assumed that I had perhaps reached the limit of the 'zone' where I was supposed to be, and I was outside the influence of the people who were directing me, but then surprising things happened...

Whenever I needed to cross the road, there was always a gap on both carriageways, opened up by the cars, vans, lorries and busses. This was uncanny. Also, the ambulance was always there, somewhere nearby, presumably on hand in case I collapsed. The traffic thing was really spooky though. London traffic rarely parts like the waves to make way for you.

I kept running and running, but I was getting tired and dehydrated. It had started to drizzle with rain, but it wasn't doing much to keep me cool. I tried to scoop up the water as it settled on railings and benches, to put on my face, to cool down. I really needed some more water as I had run a long way and quite fast with a heavy backpack.

I started to get dizzy and my balance was getting dubious. I started to wonder where the 'finish' line was likely to be for this crazy event. I imagined that it would probably be right at the top of Finsbury Park, where I knew there were some large function halls. I imagined that there was probably going to be an 'intervention'-like event up there, with me having to face the people I'd somehow upset.

I decided to get my phone out and look at a map to see where I was. I could hear groaning and jeering. People in cars started to toot their horns at me and yell at me. I knew I was quitting something too soon, but I didn't know how far I had left to go. I didn't feel like I could carry on any longer, without water, without a break.

Using my phone, I made my way to the top of Finsbury Park. There were lots of hostile yells now, mainly coming from people in cars. The drizzling rain got more persistent and there was a real air of disappointment in the air. I felt like I'd let people down, but at the same time, I felt in my heart-of-hearts that I'd given it my best shot, and to continue would mean passing out from exhaustion and dehydration.

I reached the buildings at the top of Finsbury Park, and there were lots of people milling around. I looked to see if there was any acknowledgement of me, but there was only hostility. It looked like whatever was happening there was being packed up. I heard things being yelled at me.

There was a water fountain in the park, and I greedily guzzled water down, and splashed my face and neck. My feet were in agony and my muscles ached. I was also soaked through with drizzle now.

I set off in the direction of the hotel, or so I thought, but I emerged onto the Holloway Road by accident. I had taken a wrong turn. I decided that I couldn't carry on by foot and tried to hail an Über using the app on my phone. It said the wait time was 35 minutes. I went into a local cab office and waited there for ages, but there didn't seem to be any cabs.

Lots of people were hanging around, sheltering under shop awnings and under the eaves of buildings from the rain. Holloway Road seemed to have reached gridlock. The traffic was bumper to bumper. People still seemed to be yelling abuse at me from cars and vans though. There were occasionally people who passed me on the pavement, and gave me a withering stare, as if I'd personally failed them somehow.

As I stood, sheltering momentarily from the rain, I heard the familiar voices of the woman and the main man I had been talking to. I looked around. Where the hell were they? How the hell did they get here? "We're in your phone" they cackled with laughter. I felt like such a fool... how obvious it suddenly seemed, that these voices had been coming from my phone, which had done the entire journey with me, in my backpack with a 12,000 mAh battery backup pack attached.

The GPS data from my phone confirms the precise route I followed, on this crazy caper. I plotted the GPS data onto Google Maps, which is shown in the image above.

I phoned my friend Cameron, who lived nearby, and left a message saying I really needed his help. I realised that I had left my wallet back at the hotel, and besides, I was exhausted.

I started to wander up the road aimlessly. I was sure that I was still a long way away from the hotel. Then, miraculously, I bumped into Cameron. He hadn't got my message, we just happened to be crossing paths. Anyone who knows London will tell you that this is a very unlikely occurrence.

I begged Cameron to get me something to eat and drink, and help me get a cab back to the hotel. Cameron got me fed & watered, and then into a black cab, to collect my bags and get me back to the hostel in Camden, where I collapsed and went straight to sleep for 24 hours.

I tried explaining to Cameron what had happened, and had imagined that he might have even been involved, as it seemed so co-incidental that I'd bumped into him at that moment. I also knew that he was very interested in street theatre and had organised a kind of zombie apocalypse 'run away from the undead' type event, as well as attending a couple of these events put on by professional outfits in London and Bristol. I thought that his sister, an actress, could perhaps have provided the 'voices' for this personalised event that I had just experienced. He listened to my wild theories, but didn't seem to be doing anything other than humouring me.

The next day, in Camden, I went on a similar long run, where I tried to respond to the slamming of doors and clangs from building sites. I think I was just insane though... completely freaked out by what had happened, and exhausted.

My feet were screwed: two bloody stumps, covered in blisters and with my toenails black and hanging off. I'd completely soaked two sets of clothes with sweat. I'd been through a physical ordeal, to match the mentally horrific things I'd been putting my brain and mind through with powerful stimulant drugs.

It's hard to know what the hell happened. I've looked back at emails and messages I sent from around this time, and it's clear that my brain was barely functioning, and what it was spewing out was total gibberish. I had been through some fairly stressful stuff and I was definitely losing my grip on reality.

However, I know what I saw. I know that I interacted with people. I know that it's pretty hard to go absolutely bat-shit insane and not attract some attention to yourself. The fact I didn't end up in trouble with the police or in hospital is either a miracle, or there's something fishy about the whole mad caper.

In a way, I came back to London so I could let an episode of insanity work its way out of my system. The anonymity of the place, and the fact that most people turn a blind eye to even the most alarming behaviour, means that you can go stark-raving bonkers without causing a scene. Perhaps this was just the ultimate realisation of that urban solitude, and me pushing that envelope of insanity to the very limit.

I often think that in all the parallel Universes where I have died or gone insane, I'm obviously not able to tell the story. Therefore, at that moment when I should have died of a drug overdose, or my mind should have finally splintered and collapsed from all the abuse, chaos and trauma... at that point, the only possible outcome was for something incredible to happen to stop me in my tracks.

I've got to say I'm incredibly grateful to this fantastic city - London - for being everything I have ever seemed to need. I have no idea how I've managed to scrap through such ordeals as I've been through, but I seem to be pretty much unscathed, which is not the case for the crappy things that have happened to me outside London.

I guess it's fairly clear to me, in retrospect, that my sanity is hanging by a very slender thread. Another bout of addiction would be sure to finish me off, either physically or mentally, I'm sure.

It bugs me, not knowing what was real and what was in my mind, but in practical terms, it's given me a sense that I owe it to those who helped me on that day, to see that lots of people want to see me stay clean from the powerful stimulants that I was hopelessly addicted to. I have no idea who they are, or what brought them together, but there was kindness and compassion there. That girl and her boyfriend will always stick in my mind.

I wish somebody would reach out and tell me that they were there, they know what happened, but I know it's unlikely to happen for whatever reason.

Anyway, sorry it's so long and there aren't any pictures. I hope you've managed to read the whole story and been able to follow it, even though it does sound every bit as crazy as it was.

Hopefully, I'm well and I'm sane at the moment. I certainly feel fit and healthy and in OK mental health, apart from a bit of anxiety and depression. Anxiety and depression are nothing compared with a talking mobile phone.

By the way, I don't recommend you getting a Google Android phone or using the Google Gear watch... I've been very suspicious of these devices, and a lot of the apps on the Google Play app store... I suspect that one of the many many free apps that I had installed had some kind of ransomware software in it, but that's just a hunch.

I'm just praying I'm not mad.

Tags: #mentalhealth #addiction #drugs #london

This is a story about things that can't be changed...

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.

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.

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

Tags: #london #friends #parents #divorce #bipolar #depression #mentalhealth

This is a story about a fresh start...

Why do we believe we can motivate change by shaming people, blaming them, making them feel guilty, placing even more obstacles in their path, isolating them, damaging their self-esteem and denying them the basic respect that every human should expect to receive?

My assumption, from childhood, school and my longest relationship, is that I'm going to be physically and verbally abused, to get me to comply with somebody else's idea of how I should think and act.

If you tell somebody they're "bad" enough times, sometimes, that person might say "screw it" and start acting up to the bad name you've given them. If you always expect the worst from somebody, one day, they might start fulfilling your long-held prophecy.

I saw a satirical cartoon the other day, where a policeman arrests a person doing drugs, because "drugs destroy lives". That person is then tried in court and sent to prison, and of course, they then can't get a job, seeing that they're a convicted criminal. When the policemen then sees that person, now living destitute on the street, the policeman says "I told you so!".

I've been trying to escape the gravity of an abusive relationship for quite a long time now. It's harder than you think. When your partner that you love has no respect for you, and your self esteem is destroyed, you can't expect a person to get back on their feet quickly. You don't know how deep the damage runs.

I've still got the shouting and screaming and battering of doors ringing in my ears. Imagine being shut into a tiny room, with somebody raging and snarling and unleashing a torrent of vicious aggression on the other side of the door. Imagine being trapped in that corner, not knowing when it's going to end, not having any way out.

I'm not looking for pity. I'm trying to explain how a confident, outgoing, gregarious character, with a bright, sunny positive disposition, might end up becoming pale and withdrawn. How that person might end up falling foul of escapist traps, and being brainwashed into believing that they're a "bad", "evil" and "worthless" person.

I've been asked to carry the can, to shoulder a shit-tonne of blame. I've been asked to beat myself up and hold myself accountable for every 'choice' I've made, and every consequence. I'm expected to think of myself as some isolated individual, who acted entirely with free will... I'm not subject to influence of other people, circumstances, my environment. Apparently I'm the first person in the history of the Universe to be in total control of my own destiny.

I don't think it's at all useful, this idea of holding everybody accountable for unforeseeable consequences, or the unavoidable results of being beaten into a corner. Does it really make you feel better, to have subdued a person, where they just resentfully start to parrot your bullshit? Does it really feel like a victory to have abused a person to the point that they submit to your muscle-flexing and intimidation?

Feeling sorry for myself is not going to lead anywhere positive. Yes, if you do wrong by a person, you do give them an excuse to act up, to react. I'm sorry, but if you're going to treat a person like shit, you have given them the mandate to act the way you wanted them to. That's not to say that you've revealed or changed that person's character though. There's no such thing as 'bad' or 'evil' people... we're all shaped by the world around us.

It's taken a hell of a long time to move judgemental, unkind people with no compassion or understanding, away from me. Breaking the bonds with people who were supposed to care - but don't - is a hard thing to do. It's not my job to re-educate those who would rather see a life destroyed than admit they're wrong. It's not my job to soak up the abuse of somebody who's got an axe to grind, and I'm their punchbag.

I don't want to become another bitter, twisted, negative, cynical and bullying individual, out to trample other people in order to get ahead myself. If I can't beat them, I'm not going to join them... I'm going to put as much space between me and them as possible.

When we think about Game Theory, and specifically a game called Prisoner's Dialemma, what strategy would you employ? In this game, the person who rats out their co-conspirator stands to gain the most, by stabbing their partner-in-crime in the back. The person who acts in a positive, giving, trusting way stands to potentially lose everything, even though their motive is to reach the fairest possible outcome.

I refuse to switch my strategy to that used by my persecutors. I refuse to become a backstabber, because then the whole world just turns into a horrible place of mistrust and unpleasantness. I don't want to live in a world where everybody is out to screw over everybody else.

I have literally turned the other cheek. I had the trust that, having received a black eye one side, I would return my face to centre and allow it to be struck the other side, if my abusive partner wished to dish out further unprovoked blows to my head. They gleefully gave me a black eye on the other side, before planting one square in the middle of my face, breaking my nose.

Even with self defence as a reasonable just cause to raise my own fists, I'm quite glad to say that I simply took that beating and stood by my strongly held beliefs that we can't simply descend to the level of animals, and be ruled by our temper, anger, aggression, violence.

When I eventually cracked, it was with glee that I had given this vicious person exactly what they wanted, and they tried to label me as the 'bad guy'. For some crazy reason, I felt guilty about no longer wanting to be the passive punchbag. For some crazy reason I felt guilty about defending myself. For some crazy reason I felt guilty about retreating into a corner, in self-defence.

This abusive partner had the gall to talk about me infringing their human rights, when they had me as a prisoner in my own home. Violence, aggression, verbal abuse... and I was the bad guy for using a door as a shield to protect myself from the blows of their fists, and kicks. That doesn't make any sense.

That was how this horrible, horrible relationship ended, with me having been sealed into my own tomb, a sarcophagus. I had no access to a toilet, food or drinking water, but still it was me who was in the wrong, despite the fact I was completely trapped, dying, in a corner.

When the separation was mercifully forced upon this unrelentingly vicious person, a friend took pity on me and took me into his home, to release me from the place that had become my prison cell.

It should come as no surprise that there was lasting psychological damage from the sustained attacks that I received. However, the expectation - especially from my family - was that I should bounce back immediately and be absolutely fine. They were even surprised to find that given the same treatment: shouting abuse at me, while cornering me, would give the same negative response of me retreating into a position of trapped self-defence, paralysed by fear.

It was me who made the brave steps to start moving forwards. I was living with a generalised threat of abuse, invasion of privacy, being attacked anywhere, anytime. I had gone through the long period of abuse, and been psychologically scarred, but it was me who made the first moves to try and repair the damage.

I tried to allow myself to be even more open to attack. I tried to fight fear with trust. I thought that by allowing myself to be in a vulnerable situation, things would somehow improve. It's very hard to let yourself be vulnerable when you've been so deeply affected by something that's damaged you so deeply.

My attempt to open myself up to abuse by my persecutors backfired spectacularly. Psychologically, I couldn't cope with that level of threat, and it made me act in a very strange way. The net result was that I kept myself hiding in my corner, with absolutely no defence. I spent 3 days paralysed by fear, before eventually being physically attacked by a member of my family who's supposed to love and care for me. I was hospitalised with a major injury. Hardly a success.

Later, I ended up in large hostel dormitories, which meant the total loss of all personal space, privacy... living in a totally exposed way, under continuous scrutiny. Again, you can't imagine how hard it is to be suffering major psychological trauma, while being watched like a goldfish in its bowl by nosey strangers. Many people found it far more entertaining to stare at me, rather than get on with their own lives, mind their own business.

People found me fascinating to sit and stare at. Instead of leaving me alone, moving away from me and the shit that I've been dealing with, they've been drawn to me like moths to a flame. They've pulled up a chair, got out the popcorn and sat back to enjoy the show.

"Oh my god, this is awful" they must have exclaimed. "I know, we can't miss a single second of this engrossing stuff. It's so entertaining" is what they really mean. Nobody recoiled in horror, or could tear their eyes away. They were fascinated, intrigued. Are we so used to seeing pain and human suffering on TV that we genuinely consider it entertainment, a spectacle for us to simply sit back and observe, for our own sick pleasure?

One of my friends, who actually understands a bit of what I've been through, actually managed to convince people that I'm not part of the paid entertainment. I'm not a one man travelling show, for your viewing pleasure. Much to my audience's disappointment, he actually convinced them to go and gawp at something else. That helped. A lot.

Very recently, another friend masterfully diverted attentions from creating an unwelcome storm, an intrusion that would have been unhelpful. He recognised the hallmarks of somebody trapped by psychological trauma, and actually held back those forces that I feared so much, so that some repair work was finally done.

Fools rush in, and first, do no harm. These are good mottos. If you don't understand what somebody is going through, it's not a spectator sport, and you don't know what damage your interference is going to do. Hands off, back away from the person who's trapped in the corner... don't drive them deeper into their attempts to fend off the world.

There's a hell of a long journey to feeling safe and secure in my own home again. It might not seem like it, because the story is a long and complex one, but there's a lot of damage to be repaired and it takes a lot of time.

It's the rushing that makes everything take so much longer. When you expect a person to be magically back to normal overnight, and you do nothing to understand what they've been through, or try to imagine what they're dealing with... that's what keeps a person trapped in a never-ending cycle.

You might think that episodes of illness prove that I'll never be fully better again, but it's actually you who is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you mistreat a person, assume the worst, and act on your own negative views, of course you're going to trap a person into a position they can't escape.

It's hard enough to just deal with the backlog of problems. To have extra obstacles placed in front of you, to have support withdrawn and be left to fend for yourself... those are the reasons why lives get written off, why people sink without a trace.

It's a long game, helping somebody recover, get their strength back, get back on their feet. There are no short cuts, and there are no easy conclusions you can jump to. Even when you start to think you understand what makes a person tick, and you can extrapolate, guess, and work out what their possible future is, you're wrong. As soon as you start writing a person off, you're part of the problem. You're hurting and hindering that person.

I know it sucks to care about a person who's really hurting, and is really damaged. I know it's easier to protect yourself by joining in the attack on that person, rather than taking the harder road of actually undoing the years and years of attacks that an easy target sustains.

Once you've started to be abused and bullied, you get weaker, so you're easier to abuse and bully, and so the cycle continues and gets worse. Everybody wants to be on the winning team, to some extent, and there's an animal instinct to pick on the weak.

I think we should be better than that. We're humans, not wild animals. We need to be better than that.

Damaged people need a clean, fresh start, but you don't know how much baggage they've got. You don't know how much of a burden still rests on that person's shoulders. It takes a lot more effort than you could possibly imagine to give that person a chance of a fresh start, a clean break.

Tags: #divorce

This is a story about a desire for privacy...

I've pretty much given up on the idea of having any personal privacy and instead swung to the other extreme of making most of my life completely public. Our family has never had any locks on bathroom/toilet doors and finds the notion of knocking before entering another family member's bedroom to be a baffling concept.

It might sound odd, but this issue grew and grew to become psychologically traumatic for me, and when I'm unwell, I can become obsessed with the idea of people bursting into my bedroom or bathroom at random, leaving me feeling vulnerable and under threat. I appreciate that this is not exactly rational thinking.

My ex-wife had demanded that my parents take me away from the home I owned, the bedroom that my parents put me in had one half of the door lock, but not the other half. I fashioned something that would fit in that lock from a roll of sellotape and had made myself a crude 'front door lock'. Something I was quite used to having from 7 years as a homeowner, and several other years with my own flat.

When my Dad came to randomly burst into this bedroom, he found that the door would not immediately open. Instead of saying, "Hello, can I come in?" or even "Hello", he marched downstairs and phoned the police. It was me who tried to initiate a conversation with him, which he roundly ignored. It wasn't until the police arrived that I found myself having a normal human conversation.

For anybody struggling with the concept of human communication, it goes like this:

• First, greet or otherwise attract the attention of the person you wish to communicate with, using their name or saying "Hey!" or "Hello!" or some other form of greeting or conversation initiator. This avoids saying things when nobody is expecting to be addressed or otherwise communicated with - they might be distracted or busy talking to somebody else.
• Secondly, once you have succcessfully established a dialogue, you may then raise your topic of discussion: ask a question, make a statement.
• Finally, if a response was expected, you should receive one. Otherwise, after a reasonable wait, you may ask if you were heard and understood correctly.

It doesn't seem that complicated for the vast majority of the 7 billion souls who crawl over the surface of the planet every day.

Also, there are fairly universal taboos that are not times when communication normally takes place, throughout this large human population: when a person is bathing or showering, when a person is getting dressed or undressed, when a person is having sex or masturbating. Those are normally not acceptable times to expect to hold a normal conversation or interact in a communicative way.

I honestly don't think that it was the fact I didn't grow up in the Swinging 60's that means that I follow the human communication protocol and respect the taboos of most people. I'm fairly certain that most people would have some problem with my parents entering your bathroom while you're taking a shit, for example.

You might have heard about acid flashbacks people get, when they have a really bad trip on LSD. One example might be feeling like ants are crawling all over your body, and then that imagined event might occur again, purely psychologically with no drugs in your system, simply because it was so traumatic when it happened.

Similarly, now I'm in my own flat again, and I have a lock on my en-suite bathroom door, I still have attacks of paranoia about people bursting in randomly, unannounced. This has led me to screw 6" screws into the door woodwork, and other acts of keeping my bedroom door physically closed. This has become obsessive and frantic, at times where my underlying psychological trauma has been exacerbated with drugs and lack of sleep.

My flatmate is actually the first person I've ever met who can calm me down and get me to realise that there is no threat, and it's all imagined, and put down my tools and whatever else I'm fashioning a barricade out of and start to relax and feel safe in my own home again.

I don't think it takes a professional psychologist to understand that if somebody feels under threat in their own 'safe' space, it only takes fairly limited reassurance that the human protocols of knock before entering are going to be observed, before the distressed individual starts to feel better.

That's the view looking down from my attic in my old house. As you can see, there is no ladder or steps lowered to ascend or descend. I climbed into the hatch without the aid of either. The more you shout at a person and corner them and traumatise them and use the police to do the human part of speaking to somebody, knocking, talking etc... the more you drive them into a state of complete psychological trauma, fear, madness.

The psychological damage can be repaired, and the self-protection response doesn't have to be triggered to the full extreme, and it gets better over time. My friends Will & Jess, who had let me stay in their guest bedroom, pretty much left me alone until my leg was mostly healed and I was sat in their lounge, before having a normal human conversation about how it was probably time I started looking for my own flat. They were very delicate and considerate with my feelings. They were kind and considerate. They helped and repaired psychological damage.

I have no idea how 5 people can co-exist with a total loony in the same house, and nothing was really said, but they were very discreet and I'm sure they were kind enough to tell a few white lies to save my blushes. I can't thank them enough for doing that for me, although just like applying the brakes on a supertanker, it takes some time before a person can start to feel safe and unthreatened after a long period of trauma and stress.

You certainly won't get an aggressive response back from me, however you choose to deal with me, but you may find me trying to burrow my way under your floorboards or pretending to be a pair of curtains or something else equally bonkers, as an absurdly twisted response to the extreme threat that I wrongly perceive.

Aggresssion rarely solved any problems in the world.

Direct action might be disruptive, but you can never be sure that the consequences will be positive, and not simply drive behaviour underground and close off open and honest dialog. You can also never be sure whether a person is trying to disrupt/interrupt their own behaviour, unless you really know what you're looking at, when you peek into their private world.

Tags: #addiction #mentalhealth #friends #divorce #parents #london #oxford #police

This is a story about dying while doing something you love...

Please forgive the gallows humour. I find death quite darkly comic, having lived in its shadow for far too long.

I found myself in possession of a year's supply of Supercrack once. It cost me less than $150 including shipping. A whole year of drug abuse, in one little baggie. Addiction never leaves your side. You can go anywhere you want, but you can't escape yourself.

Having a year's supply of your drug of choice should be an addict's wet dream, right? Well, it depends on the nature of your addiction. If you're still managing to eat and sleep, then perhaps you will make it to the end of the year. If you're not eating or sleeping, then you're simply committing suicide, slowly.

When I was trapped in an abusive relationship and kept away from London, I had given up on life. I was dying. I used to occasionally get scared of death, and clean up my act for a few weeks, but then I would always relapse, because of the same old abusive relationship and isolation from the city I call home.

I finally made it back to London, but there was pointless crap dragging me back into things that were far less important than saving my life.

That's a letter I received, in my mother's handwriting, hassling me about some divorce paperwork that could have waited until I had completed the treatment that I was undergoing to save my life. I had explicitly stated that I didn't want my wife or parents to be in any form of contact with me, while I was trying to get better. During this second attempt, I explicitly forbade my wife and parents from having any contact with me or the professionals who were paid to take care of me.

It was time to get better, get away from the s**ts who nearly hounded me to my grave. It was time to move on. It was time to recover.

Eventually, the vultures f**ked off and thankfully I had enough money left to pay the deposit on a flat and the first couple of months rent and bills, so I could get myself settled, get into a new job etc. etc.

I rented a room in a shared house near some friends in Kentish Town. My time up to this point had been wasted on pointless divorce crap that could have been deferred. I had been relentlessly harassed. Also, having my leg in plaster cast and being on crutches didn't help. My treatment was ruined by people not respecting my wishes. I was in a worse state than ever.

I hobbled into my new room and collapsed. I spent a week crying myself to sleep, I was so exhausted by the trauma of everything that had gone before. I had just about enough money left to make a go of things, but not quite. Everything had to go perfectly.

I had resolved not to commit suicide in my friends' house, where I was a guest, as it would have been a very unpleasant legacy to leave behind in somebody's home. They seemed committed to making that house their forever home, so there was no way I could do that to them.

After moving out and having a week where I felt that I didn't have the reserves of strength and money to continue, I decided to shut up shop. I decided to commit suicide.

The final straw was when my Dad tried to poison my friend's opinion of me, with his warped version of events. People were talking behind my back, and my confidentiality and consent to share information were completely breached. The place where I had spent the best part of £8k on treatment became some kind of counsellor and general centre for misinformation for my parents, despite explicit instructions that they weren't allowed contact.

I took a massive overdose and collapsed on the floor. The three metal prongs of a plug were sticking painfully into my thigh, but I couldn't move. The hot transformer for my laptop was burning my abdomen, scorching the skin, but I couldn't move. My arms were in the most uncomfortable position, but I couldn't move. The weight of my head rested uncomfortably on my chin, with my neck extended very awkwardly, but I couldn't move.

When you have taken an overdose, and you realise that it's overwhelming you, you start to panic. Can you make yourself throw up, if you've swallowed your poison? You know that it's too late... the chemicals are already entering your bloodstream and vomiting will make no difference. There was a moment's regret, and then resignation.

My body spasmed and twitched for quite a long time. There were a lot of auditory disturbances (I heard weird things). My mind kinda went blank for ages, or was caught up with weird confused thoughts. Then it dawned on me that I was alive but still on collision course with death. Day turned to night, and night turned to day, and so on. About 4 days went by with me paralysed like that... just breathing, and my body spasming.

I then started to think about death. I started to consider the possibility that I was going to discover if there was an afterlife or not. I started to think how embarrassed I would be to meet some deity who I never believed in. I didn't start believing in any god, but I considered how sheepish I would be if I met my maker.

Next, I started to think about the waste of it, the waste of life. Not that I was wasting my life, but that there was nothing positive that was going to come from my death. I started to consider how I could leave a message that would somehow prove useful to those who survived me. I started to consider how frustrating it would be to discover something in death, but have no way to pass on that discovery to the living world.

I started to imagine a weird experiment, where two suicidal people would risk their lives to discover if it's possible to communicate from beyond the grave. They would be in two isolated chambers, each with a keyboard. There would be a randomly timed event that would kill them, but they would get about a minute's warning before they were about to be killed. They would then type messages, and only in the event that the messages were co-incidentally the same, would the time be extended.

Eventually, one of the experimenters can type no more and rushes out of the experiment exit to safety. The other experimenter is killed. When the messages are later examined, we can see that the co-incidence of the messages being the same is immensely unlikely, but yet there were a sequence of messages that were identical, despite death being inevitable at that point.

Don't worry, I didn't decide to start a cult with a suicide pact. I did however decide that dying alone, leaving no note or anything was rather silly. I summoned the strength to claw myself off the floor and onto my bed, where I lay in agony for some time.

I urinated into a pint glass - I was virtually immobile - and saw that my urine was cloudy and the colour of orange juice with a lot of blood in it. My organs had started to shut down. My thigh was a painful mess from the plug that had dug into it, and my abdomen was burnt from the laptop transformer. My kidneys hurt and my tummy was tender and painful. My muscles were weak as hell. I had a lot of fluid on my lungs and my chest was tight. Breathing was difficult.

I decided to try and make death a bit quicker by severing my jugular vein, but my blood pressure was so low and it was actually really hard for me to even find a pulse. I kept blacking out with orthostatic hypotension.

Later, my ex-girlfriend discovered me in this dreadful state, and got me to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, where the hard-working lovely people of the NHS saved my life.

Here's the view I woke up to, from my hospital bed. I was quite surprised to wake up (May 2014)

Tags: #addiction #suicide #divorce #depression #london #nhs #injury

This is a story about interpretation...

Anybody who has studied physics to an advanced level will tell you that at a certain point you have to suspend the search for the tangible, the intuitive, and start to make some leaps of faith. The Newtonian Universe, with action and reaction, starts to struggle to explain real-world observations.

I'm not in a survivable situation. I shouldn't have even been able to get this far, to climb this high. The odds are stacked against me in every way. There's not a chance that I could have been through what I've been through, and emerge relatively unscathed. People just don't recover from the trauma that I've put my mind and body through.

On examination, I have a facial tic and two hefty scars on my legs. My facial tic appears to have improved somewhat, since the summer. It's made worse by tiredness and stress, but I feel like it's not as pronounced as it was.

But what does this evidence tell us? Well, it's the tip of the iceberg. My mind and body have been to hell and back, quite a few times. For example, having functioning kidneys is a big surprise. You can't see the damage from the outside, but I suffered near-catastrophic levels of muscle loss, with accompanying damage to my kidneys, as the breakdown products from my body eating itself were going to ultimately prove fatal.

Would you believe that I have induced within my mind, all the symptoms of schizophrenia? I have, at times, believed that 'they' are out to get me (I have no idea who 'they' are... that's the point... it's mental illness) and been hearing and seeing things in a distorted way, misinterpreting what my senses have been telling me. These psychoses should be permanent. I should have been left permanently paranoid, psychotic.

The fact of the matter is that sanity is quite delicate. Anybody will start to have strange thoughts, if you skip enough nights of sleep and meals. Sleep deprivation and hypoglycaemia will mean that your brain will struggle to function. You can't really predict how badly each individual will react to these unusual stresses, but you can be sure that every human needs sleep & glucose.

I guess when you total up all the time that I've been in a psychotic state, it adds up to quite a worrying amount. Certainly enough to give me that facial tic. I used to have really bad full-body spasms, but I figured out which neurotransmitters needed topping up, as a form of prophylaxis to protect against early-onset parkinsons.

If you wonder why I eat so much protein, and take so many amino acids, it's because those things are providing my body with the building blocks to repair and protect itself. It's a thin line between temporary and permanent insanity.

If you were a psychiatrist or a psychologist, just looking at my clinical picture on paper, you would have to assume that I'd be a gibbering wreck. The path that has torturously wended its way through a few different counties NHS mental health services, through the private sector, and then back into NHS with rather a lot of chaos and the involvement of emergency services, across the midlands and several boroughs of London. Well, it's not a story that sits easily alongside a person who appears - to all outward observers - to have their s**t together.

The fact that I'm coping without medication, without the help of the mental health crisis team, without outpatient services, obviously not an inpatient... it's not something that very often crops up, given my case history.

I'm a bit of a statistical anomaly. I don't fit the data very neatly. If we're talking probabilities, I'm dead & buried several times over.

But what's going on inside my cranium? How much crazy am I just bottling up? Well, it's not pretty but it's not that bad either. I'm certainly not battling any psychosis. I don't hear voices, I don't see things, I don't think that I can read thoughts or control people with my mind. In fact, I have never experienced psychosis like that. My sanity has, thus far, been fairly solid in its foundations.

However, I have poked and prodded at questions, which are to all intents and purposes, unanswerable. I have plumbed the depths of what is knowable in an Earthly realm. I have considered things which are really not advisable to consider, lest you drive yourself insane.

Once you start to consider the full implications of something like the Many-Minds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics you start to question the very meaning of what it is to be conscious. When you start to do some basic maths, regarding the chances that you are alive and conscious at this very moment in time, with 7 billion other souls on the planet, then you can get rather overwhelmed by the statistical significance of it.

These thoughts come back to haunt me time and time again. When I'm unwell, I can even believe that I can perhaps model some of the Universe from base principles. I can perhaps come up with some great unifying theory of everything. Clearly this is a delusion of grandeur.

However, I'm no less able than anybody else to conduct thought experiments. In fact, I'm blessed with a very rational, logical mind. I have even done 'game of life' simulations and models in the past, with some success. But the fact remains, we're talking about hard problems, where hard doesn't even come close to cutting the mustard as an adjective.

So what's all this rambling all about? Well, in one sense my fate is sealed. If we were to consider the evidence, the clinical picture, the pattern of behaviour... I'm doomed! Either insanity, suicide or slow suicide by addiction should surely claim my life soon. It's a miracle that those fates have not already consumed me, and I'm here, stringing a sentence together.

Indeed, many people in my life have chosen to act as if there is a known outcome, as if they have a working crystal ball. Perhaps they have simply computed the odds based on the raw statistical data, and are playing the numbers. According to the numbers, I don't actually exist. According to the numbers, I died a long time ago.

I used to be very upset that people were writing me off before I had even had a chance to make an attempt at life. I used to get very frustrated that I was always a few days or a week or two behind those who wished to frustrate and undermine me. However, the tide has turned now and I finally have a fair wind behind me, and the gradient of the ground in my favour.

It must be upsetting to have somebody who just refuses to die and conform to your prophecies. It must be frustrating when somebody won't fit in the pigeon hole that you have assigned to them. It must be frustrating when somebody refuses to act in the way that you preordained, based on a supposed character flaw or some gift for knowing the future that you believe you have been blessed with.

I'm quite a fly in the ointment, refusing to shuffle off my mortal coil, or be driven irreversibly insane. People are a lot easier to handle when they fit nicely somewhere on the curve.

But I'm an outlier. I'm a stubborn son of a gun who refuses to just lie down and be neatly categorised. I'm very hard to manipulate. I'm very hard to discredit. I'm very hard to marginalise. I'm very hard to silence.

People have tried various underhand techniques to tame me, such as bullying, shaming, assaulting and the gathering of 'evidence' that they believe will show a 'smoking gun' unequivocally pointing to some easy conclusion that can be drawn. I'm sorry, but I'm just not that simple.

If I had one bit of advice for you, it would be to stop jumping ahead. Stop thinking that you can extrapolate from the few data points that you have. Stop thinking that you can predict the future, my future. I'm writing my future, and it very much seems as though my fate is not yet sealed, from what I can see. The grand finalé is as yet unwritten, despite your impatience to flip to the last page of the book and see how it all ends.

People come and go from my life, and I'm very grateful to those who have loyally stuck by my side. You have hopefully been rewarded with seeing a few different aspects of my character, and you can see that understanding and knowing a person is not as simple as making a rash judgement based on what you see, the moment you walk in on a person's life.

People are full of surprises, and even if you've known somebody their entire life, you still don't know what makes them tick, or what they're going to do next.

Tags: #mentalhealth

This is a story about anger management...

I like to nurture. I like being with nature. I like to mow the lawn. I like to plant things and water them and watch them grow. I like to look after animals. I like knowing that I'm helping living things.

When people were shitty and mean to me, I liked to be with my cat in my garden. I liked to take care of my lawn. I liked to get rid of the dead leaves and dead flower heads, and feed the plants.

I'm a pretty simple character really. If you make me sad and anxious and afraid, I will be depressed. If you keep attacking me, I will withdraw more and more and more. You will back me into a corner.

What do we know about cornered animals, that are beaten and stressed and anxious? Well, it's time to stop being unpleasant to them and either leave them alone or be nice to them, unless you want to get bitten.

I'm not out to bite anybody. I just want a little garden and a cat. If you take those things away from me, you'll make me very sad.

I don't have a lot of opportunity to nurture anything at the moment. I don't have any plants or kids or pets. I treat my girlfriends nicely, but those relationships tend to be a lot more complicated than boy & cat.

My Dad thinks that rearing a little boy is just like owning a dog. He thinks that little boys are members of his pack, and they will respond like a pack animal would to the leader of the pack. Humans are not pack animals. Humans are advanced primates with complex social and emotional needs. You shouldn't try and 'train' them like you would with a dog. They're not performing animals, like dancing bears or dogs that roll over and play dead.

Respect is a two-way street with humans. If somebody orders me to respect them, they will lose my respect. Respect is earned. I don't respect anybody who doesn't respect me back. There is no automatic entitlement to respect. Everybody's opinion is equally valid. When my Dad's car broke down, my sister opined that it might have run out of fuel. He dismissed her opinion immediately. She was right, he was wrong. More fool him.

One of the few times that my parents came to visit London was because they had gone to go away on holiday, but then discovered that their passports were not in date. I can tell you exactly when my passport expires, and I'm not such a drug addicted disorganised lazy layabout that I would fail to be able to take my flight because of such an idiotic oversight.

Yes, this one-way-street is a source of a lot of anger. I have been disrespected a huge amount by my parents, but when we examine the evidence it becomes clear that they are hypocrites and there is no excuse for such disrespectful behaviour.

I need to be the bigger person, and vent off this anger at such injustice, mistreatment and damage to my identity, self-confidence and happiness. Ideally, I would like to forgive and forget, but it's very hard to forgive somebody who is not at all sorry.

I've had to be sorry all my life. I've had to be very sorry that I was so inconsiderate as to become a fertilised embryo, grow and eject myself into the world. What terrible poor planning on my part. How grossly irresponsible of me to not think of the impact on my parents plans for drug taking idleness.

I've come up against anger that has been misdirected against me time and time again. Recently, a girlfriend started to physically attack me and throw objects at my head, when she threw a tantrum about the fact that she had strewn rubbish all over my flat and didn't want to clean up after herself. She wanted me to 'admit' that I was the messy one, and flew into a rage when I told her the true origin of every sweet wrapper and crisp packet, that she had absentmindedly thrown on the floor.

I have an atypical reaction to stressful situations. My pulse slows and my blood pressure drops and I calm down. I get very cold and rational. I've been in life and death situations enough times to know that losing your head will get you killed.

When my ex girlfriend started hurling plates and knives at me, I didn't react, except to make sure I protected my head. When she left, I was glad she was gone. When she slammed the door of my flat on the way out, I was relieved. Obviously, I didn't want to date her any more after that. That's rational, right?

When my ex wife started getting aggressive, I would put a door in-between her and me. Some kind of physical barrier to stop me from being physically attacked. Sure, she would attack the door - punching and kicking - which only further confirmed that I was right to put some protection around myself from somebody with a streak of violence in them.

My ex wife would sometimes scream that her human rights were being infringed by her not being able to enter my prison cell, in-between beating the door with her fists. It seemed more like an infringement of my human rights, that I wasn't able to move around my home without fear of physical aggression against my person.

The psychological trauma of being trapped in a room with an angry person trying to kick the door down is not healthy for your mind. The more it happens, the more if affects you. You are attempting to retreat to safety, but some cruel and abusive person is rattling your cage, banging on the bars of your prison.

Why didn't I just leave? Well, if you're in a corner, you only tend to have one escape route, and that's right through the arena you're trying to escape. That means running the gauntlet right past your persecutor(s).

Trust me, if you want to help a person who is cornered, harassing them and being menacing and aggressive towards them is not going to coax them out of the corner.

My solution is to either wait for starvation or the police to release me from the trap. I have never called the police to come help me. I once had to threaten to call the police, in order to be allowed to be released from my cell to go to hospital for urgent treatment. That's not right.

Here's the bottom line: don't persecute people. Don't harass people. Don't stress them out and corner them with aggression and threats. Don't relentlessly bang on the door to their cell and kick and stomp and tantrum. They're in there, starving. They're in there, cornered and alone and dying.

Yes, I can tell you a lot about dying from starvation. I chose to die of starvation rather than be beaten by my abusers. That was a rational choice that I made.

A person doesn't retreat into a corner for no reason. A person doesn't starve themself to the brink of death for no reason. There is no 'carrot' or 'reward' in being trapped in a corner. It's being beaten with a 'stick' that drives them into a corner. It's verbal and physical abuse that makes a person cower in a corner.

I don't feel very safe, because my parents and my wife all abused me. They all put me in hospital and none of them give a shit. They're not sorry. They think it's my problem, not theirs. Well, isn't it strange that now that I've got away from those abusive people, my life has improved?

They will blame drug taking, but I'm not a drug addict and I'm going to show you in the coming weeks, it's them who are the drug addicts, and who act abusively. I'm going to show you conclusively that I'm not a drug addict and that their accusations are an attempt to cover their own guilt.

I'm going to show you that paranoia is not something that just exists in the mind of a sick person, but a reaction to extreme stress and mistreatment. Can you imagine being shut in a room with no food, drink or toilet, and having violent aggressive people pummelling on the door and screaming abuse night & day? Can you imagine what psychological impact that would have?

I'm going to show you every part of the psychological trauma and abuse that I sustained, and how that drove me to suicide attempts and mental illness. I'm going to show you how mental illness can be induced in somebody by mistreating them. I'm going to show you how the human mind reacts to bullying and abuse.

You're going to have to be a really clever smarty pants with a good memory, and remember that there is such a thing as cause and effect. You're going to need to remember the sequence of events, otherwise you're going to get confused. You're going to start trying to make quick and easy assumptions.

The main thing you're going to need to remember is this: abuse nearly killed me, and I was abstinent from drink & drugs. You just need to remember this one thing: I was driven to suicide, and there were no drugs involved, and I wasn't an alcoholic.

See if you can remember that, as I tell you the rest of the story. It's important that you do, because otherwise you might get confused.

It's easy to get confused when you're drinking and smoking and having tea & coffee, because you're manipulating your own mind. You're muddying the waters. You are confusing yourself and your perception of reality.

I'm able to make an accurate appraisal of reality, because I am speaking about periods where I wasn't on any medication, drugs or drinking. I'm able to rationally analyse all the facts and evidence now, because I'm completely abstinent from any psychoactive substances whatsoever, including all medications, legal drugs, illegal drugs, caffeine etc. etc.

The only time that you tend to have a clear mind in modern society is when you have kids. Becoming a parent normally sharpens the mind a little bit, and good parents decide to clean up their act (mine didn't). However, you also become filled with irrational fear, because you have children that you want to protect. You start to become afraid of the boogeyman.

Actually withdrawing from alcohol can make you very anxious. Being a parent is very tiring, and it's easy to try and compensate with tea and coffee and other wakefulness agents. However wakefulness agents make you very anxious and paranoid. You start to imagine that the world is full of dangerous people out to hurt your child.

This is the power of nightmares. You get pregnant because you're fucked up on booze. Perhaps you were so pissed that you vomited your contraceptive pill. Anyway, you end up pregnant even though you're right in the middle of being a massive binge drinker.

So you not only have the anxiousness of becoming a new parent, but you also have to give up alcohol and cigarettes. That's pretty hard on your anxiety levels, which you had been self medicating for with booze and fags. Now you don't have those crutches and you've got a kid that's going to need a stable home, but you haven't sorted your life out... you were still in party mode.

Dad has to give up on his dreams of being a footballer, Formula One driver, professional gambler or whatever idle fantasy he had been secretly harbouring. He's going to have to put on a grey suit and go to a dull concrete office until the age of 65 doing something very boring. That's stressful. He's also going to get a lot less sex, because his girlfriend/wife is going to be busy raising kids. It's an anxious time for the new Dad. He should probably show support to his partner by also quitting smoking and drinking, but he's not going to.

So, the home environment is filled with stress and anxiety before the screams of an incontinent midget have even pierced the tranquility of sitting around getting drunk. This isn't how that drunken night was supposed to turn out! What a little bastard for inseminating itself. Let's load it up with lots of blame and stress and teach it a lesson for arrogantly getting born.

It's a shame I'm so exhausted by it all. I have enough energy to finish the story, to prove the point. The point is simple: I'm good enough to achieve some cool stuff. I'm good enough to make a difference, to make a contribution. I haven't got enough energy to fight all the bullies though. I haven't got enough energy to fight the stigma and the presumptions and the lazy assumptions and the prejudice. I haven't got enough energy to be ganged up on. I'd done, I'm over.

When I've finished my story and killed myself, you can cut me open and you'll see the truth. You can dissect my body and see that I was physically healthy. I have written this text so that you can dissect my mind and see that I was mentally well, but driven to suicide by relentless abuse and a lack of apology or opportunity to beat my oppressors.

People like my Dad and ex-wife could just say sorry, but I know they never acknowledge their own guilt.

I'm guilty of lashing out. I'm guilty of reacting to stimuli. Sorry about that. Sorry for being a human being.

My parents and ex wife think they're saints, so I will be the martyr, in the hope that somebody else might get to avoid being killed for other people's sins.

I asked you to stop being mean and abusive. I asked to be set free. I asked for help. You failed me. I forgive you.

If you pile unmanageable stress and pressure on somebody, they will go wonky, they will get bent out of shape. You will put their world into a downward slope that they can't escape (1994)

Tags: #childhood #parents #divorce #addiction #drugs #alcohol #unpleasant #bipolar #suicide