This is a story about sequels...

Two years ago, I was experimenting with my blog. I thought it would be profound to write a public suicide note, record a video and go jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. I thought I would get sacked from my job and illustrate how the stress would push me into acts of extremism. I decided to sleep rough close to the skyscraper I had been working in. I thought I was going to starve myself for 25 days and spend Christmas Day in a tent. I thought I was going to kill myself by going on hunger strike.

For 25 days I wrote an advent calendar type series of blog posts. The whole thing was leading up to the punchline: boxing day. Really, what I was doing was building up to the revelation of the truth: that I'd had problems with addiction. It was a big admission. It took a lot of courage to be honest.

Why did it take me so long to acknowledge my problems with addiction?

Generally, addicts don't get a very favourable hearing. Addicts are amongst the most stigmatised people on the planet. If you're looking for a sympathetic non-judgemental ear, it's probably best if you don't mention any addiction problems you've had until somebody's got to know you.

So, people had to get to know me.

My friends, family and work colleagues knew me. Those people who've gotten to know me have seen that I'm an OK person. I'm not a monster.

But am I a monster?

It's surprising how little it takes for us to question everything we ever knew about a person. Sometimes, there's a revelation about a person that can completely shake our perceptions of them. Suddenly, it's as if a person we knew well is a stranger to us, and not just any stranger: a horrible nasty stranger who's going to rob us and kill our children and eat them. Everybody knows that addicts leave a trail of HIV-infected needles lying around everywhere they go, especially in areas where children play. Everybody knows that addicts enjoy nothing more than random acts of killing. Also, if you discover that somebody's had problems with addiction, you can pretty much forget everything you ever knew about them.

Hang on a second though.

How quickly can you completely re-evaluate an entire person and decide that they're a completely worthless hopeless junkie, who'd rob you without a moment's hesitation in order to score their next fix? How long does it take to write somebody off completely and dismiss everything you ever knew about them? Why are junkies just so damn easy to hate and what happened to the person you used to know?

While there are some very unfortunate people whose morals will be corrupted by their addiction, that's not the case for most addicts. Not every addict is a liar, a cheat, a thief and somebody who would recklessly endanger the lives of your precious children. Not every addict is flakey, unreliable, untrustworthy, unscrupulous and immoral. Not every addict is worthless, hopeless and doomed to forever seek and take drugs. Not every addict is a menace to society, and should be treated like a leper: shunned from work, friends, family and all the other things that give us a functional life. Not every addict should be marginalised and demonised.

Of course, I write with a vested interest. I don't want to be mistreated. I don't want the stigma attached to me.

So, why don't I share my stories of addiction anonymously? Why don't I join Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous and Crystal Meth Anonymous, and while I'm at it Gambling Addicts Anonymous and Sex Addicts Anonymous? Why don't I keep quiet and just pretend like I'm normal? I don't even take drugs.

Nobody thinks that gambling addicts inject packs of cards, so why is it that when you think of me - an addict - you immediately imagine dirty needles? Where did the OK Nick that you used to know go? Why did you eject the pleasant memories you had of me, and replace them with an imagined version of me, where I was mugging grannies for their life savings?

It's necessary for me to concentrate on the prequel to my story, in order to receive a fair hearing. I need to explain that adverse childhood experiences, an abusive relationship, stress, burnout and mental health problems, all created a fertile environment in which to grow a substance abuse problem. I need to explain that my mood instability - bipolar - predisposed me to reckless sensation seeking, such as substance abuse. I need to explain that my motivation was self-medication, not getting high. I sought relief from symptoms, not enjoyment. I was trapped and I needed a way out. I chose the wrong one. I made a mistake.

We might take a quick glance at a situation and utter the words "why don't they just...?". Why don't they just what? Leave their abusive partner? Stop moping around and get out of bed? Stop taking drugs? Move somewhere else? Sort themselves out?

When you're secure and happy, everything looks pretty easy. All people have gotta do is get a house, a job, a sexual partner, friends, hobbies and interests, a loving family, a supportive environment, a healthy lifestyle, coping mechanisms, substantial financial resources and favourable socioeconomic conditions. That's it. That's all. Just get on and do it!

For some, remaining addicted is not about the ongoing want for drugs, it's actually slow suicide.

That last point is worth re-iterating. One of the reasons why some people won't stop taking drugs, is because they don't want to live anymore. They literally don't care if they die. I would say that most addicts are very well aware that their addictions are going to kill them, but they carry on anyway - they're committing suicide, slowly.

Looking at teens and twentysomethings who smoke, we might see that there's a general belief that "it'll never happen to me". In our youth, we tend to believe we're pretty indestructible. By that same token, we might assume that a drug addict believes that they'll be one of the lucky ones, who addiction will spare. I don't think that's the case.

As an addict, it quickly becomes apparent that control has been lost and you're on collision course with health problems and early death. Repeatedly, the addict will have extremely aversive experiences which scream loud and clear that the path of addiction is going to lead to death and destruction. Do you think every lecture about what an addict is doing to themselves falls on deaf ears?

Equally, do you think that addicts just don't care? Do they want to die?

Committing suicide - including addiction - is not about wanting to die. Suicide is driven by hopelessness and inescapable awful feelings. If life only has pain and misery to offer, why wouldn't a person choose early death? If building any kind of liveable tolerable life is an insurmountable task, what hope is there? Who'd want to spend the rest of their life miserable, depressed, anxious and in pain?

It's easy to say "keep putting one foot in front of the other" or "take things one day at a time" because you don't have to live through that misery. It's easy to ask somebody else to tolerate the intolerable, because it's not you who has to suffer: it's them. Eventually, a person can conclude that there aren't going to be any good days, or that the few pleasant times don't outweigh the multitudinous bad times. On balance, one might conclude, life's not worth living.

When you've made that decision that life's not worth living, it's pretty hard to find any reason to not have that next hit of drugs, even when the drugs are killing you.

I write to you today clean, sober and with no intention of obtaining and taking drugs.

However, I think it's highly likely that I will take drugs again, both recreationally and abusively. The number of protective factors - friends, family, work, money - have increased, but my life is still very badly broken. There are innumerable things that predispose me to relapsing onto drugs, and on the flip side there is a huge list of things I've got to fix or get in my life in order to have enough on the other side of the scales to balance things out. I look to the year ahead: what do I have look forward to other than hard work, living out of a suitcase, paying off debts and otherwise scrimping and saving? I'm sorry, but I'm not exactly thrilled by the prospect of living off sandwiches that I've made in a hotel room, spreading the mustard with a shoehorn.

But, perhaps also there's a desperate desire to self-sabotage because life was simpler as an addict. Even the synthetic cannabinoids have enough of an attractive intoxication for addicts to jettison the stress and strain of paying rent and bills, and having to hold down a job, in favour of homelessness. The bureaucratic burden of civilised society is wearisome and ridiculous. The form-filling and pointless makework of bullshit jobs is absurd. It's not just about the drugs - it's also about dropping out.

You'd think that dropping out would be a terrible thing. You'd think that the shame of the loss of status would be unbearable, but it's liberating. You know that you have to work hard to keep up your mortgage or rent payments. You live in constant fear of losing your job, which would quickly lead to eviction. When you become homeless, it's a relief - a thing you feared the most has happened, and it's not as bad as you thought it would be; somehow you manage to cope.

I'm averse to the idea of a miserable dead-end McJob. I'm averse to the idea of spending any more time stressed out of my mind, helping my boss get richer; helping my landlord get richer. I'm averse to the idea that the peanuts that most people get paid, in any way compensates them for giving up the prime years of their lives. I don't see that society is working well for most people. I see that stress, anxiety, depression and other mental health problems are rife. I see that suicide is the biggest killer of the group of people who are our most productive members of society. That's not fair.

So, I need to find a middle way. I need to find a way that's not suicide, not drug addiction, but it's not a miserable dead-end job either. I refuse to get a bullshit job that pays peanuts. I'd rather die.

At the moment, I'm clean from drugs and I'm working a very well paid job. I'm learning stuff. It's stressful, but it's not boring. I'm increasing my value - my employability - as well as doing a good job. It feels fair.

I'm starting 2018 at a considerable disadvantage. I'm deeply in debt. I don't have a girlfriend. I don't rent or own a home. Why bother?

It's been 6 months since I had an addiction. I'm clean. Why would I even write about addiction? I've won, haven't I?

In fact, addiction is always there: a dependable companion. Very little effort is involved in resuming an addiction. Addiction will always be everything you expected it to be. Addiction never disappoints. Conversely, a happy functional life with all the components necessary to make it work, is very very far out of reach; almost unattainable. You might think that because I'm only 6 months away from putting a lot of the pieces in place, that it'd be easy. 6 months is no time at all, right? In fact, 6 months without all the things you take for granted, might as well be a billion years. It's never going to happen. Try getting in a bath filled with ice cubes. Try holding your hand over a naked flame. What you perceive as quick and easy is not quick and easy when you're in pain.

My present situation might look infinitely preferable to my life as an addict, but it's not. Addiction could last me forever - until the day I die - but what I have today is only temporary; it's fake. I can't stay where I am forever. My contract will come to an end and I'll have to find another job. I'll need to rent or buy a place to live. I need to keep moving around: 3 and a half hours on the train, one-way, and moving from hotel to hotel, AirBnB to AirBnB... always moving on. I'm tired, even though it looks like I should be well rested. I'm stressed, even if it looks like things are going in the right direction.

Addiction's there as a one-stop-shop. Addiction means that I can stop pedalling so damn fast. Addiction means relief. Addiction means there's an end in sight. I'd be a liar if I didn't admit that when I'm alone with my thoughts, I don't immediately think that addiction is infinitely preferable to the mountainous task ahead, to merely build a mediocre life of disappointment and depression; boredom and bullshit.

Going cold turkey doesn't prove anything.

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

This is a story about being gainfully employed...

Follow your dreams, as long as your dream is punching made-up numbers into a spreadsheet, trapped inside a depressing office with no natural light in the middle of an overcrowded polluted concrete jungle, with a horrible commute every morning and evening.

I started a new job this morning. I'm 1,200 miles from home. I had to take a train, a plane and an automobile to get here.

For a whole month, I wrote. That's a lie... I had some days off. I had to get my stuff from London, I had to get my passport from Manchester and I had some days when I just didn't feel up to writing, but I pretty much spent a month as a writer.

In order to indulge my artistic ambitions, I've had to give up a couple of months when I should really have been job hunting. My writing has also lost me lucrative contracts, when my Twitter/blog has been discovered by bosses. As a hobby, it's been incredibly expensive. As a job, it's been financially ruinous.

A friend of mine had two job options when he graduated: writer or computer programmer. He chose the latter, because the salary was five times as much and he wanted to be able to afford luxuries like food and rent. Another friend had the choice between an electric guitar and a computer. He chose the latter, knowing that it would pave the way for a lucrative career. I too have forgone opportunities to pursue academic interests, because of economic incentives.

In fact, we are strongly economically disincentivised from pursuing art. There can only be a handful of Damien Hirsts in the world, while there are millions of penniless artists.

They say that if you're good at something, you should never do it for free. However, how are you going to ever get good at something unless somebody's going to bankroll you while you're bad at it? Nobody is born with prodigious talent. There are also vast numbers of negative people who'll criticise, tell you that you're going to fail and tell you to give up and do something else. There are vast numbers of people who have a vested interest in seeing you fail - they don't want to see you succeed when they're too much of a gutless, spineless, miserable moaning, pathetic, uninspiring and otherwise wimpy excuse for a human being, to actually ever try to follow their dream or support somebody else in following theirs.

Given that it's rewarding to fuck about with paint or clay, stand in front of people singing or playing an instrument, act, play sports and otherwise pursue the performing and creative arts, one might argue that we're never going to be short of people who want to turn these hobbies into jobs. Wouldn't we all be artists if we could?

Here is the present paradigm: given an oversupply of people who'd like to do something more rewarding than the bullshit McJobs on offer, we have fierce competition for just a few slots. Only those who are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths, or those who are lucky enough to have been born into a family that already possesses wealth and fame, will be able to do a job that's fun rather than fucking awful.

Is capitalism working? Isn't capitalism supposed to reward those who work hard? Isn't the whole reason why capitalism's better than other systems of wealth distribution, because it incentivises hard work? What happens when that's no longer true?

The way I see it, we give up our childhoods to study hard, in the hope of getting better jobs. We give up our prime healthy years so that we can have a good retirement. What happens when the pension system is about to collapse and we can't hang on to the money that we've squirrelled away because our children can't afford houses? What happens when we bust a gut to get top exam grades and go to good universities, but there aren't any jobs and the ones there are wouldn't even allow us to afford the cost of living anyway?

Why are we working so hard? Why are we competing?

The competitive element of capitalism seems to have failed to deliver our most brilliant minds into productive endeavours. All those miserable hours of homework don't seem to be benefitting anybody. All those miserable hours spent in a traffic jam or otherwise in the rat race don't seem to be benefitting anybody. All I see is people chasing a dream that seems to slip ever further out of reach. What the hell are we doing, working so hard so that we might be able to one day stop and catch our breath, except we never can?

What happened to the age of leisure?

Of course, I see the irony and hypocrisy of writing this when I've been lucky enough to enjoy career breaks that have enabled me to write a couple of novels. "When do I get to write my book?" some might ask. Yes. I refer you to my previous question.

Something's gone horribly wrong and the prospect of a comfortable retirement is sailing over the horizon. Extrapolating, the prospect of any dreams being realised is an absolute one-in-a-million shot. As opposed to the buy-now-pay-later bogyman that we're all supposed to be afraid of, it seems to me as if we've sleepwalked into a kind of pay-now-never-get-the-benefit kind of dystopia. I really don't understand why people aren't chucking in the towel on their bullshit jobs and writing that fucking book. Why don't students say no to homework, and enjoy their youth? From what I can see, the stress and anxiety of modern life is ruining the vast majority of people's mental health.

I guess there are going to be growing pains, while we shift from a productivity-based capitalist global economy, back to a kind of life where we value human things like staying near our families, seeing our kids grow up and having what we want and need NOW not LATER. I mean, for fuck's sake we're not asking for much and we don't need much. Since agricultural mechanisation, we've been able to feed vast numbers with very little effort. Only about 1% of the UK's income comes from farming and fishing. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

So, as I beaver away in an office working Monday to Friday yet again, I wonder how close we are to that day when we all suddenly decide that enough is enough and we really don't need any more exotic and arcane ways of disguising the fact that what we do all day for 'work' is absolute total and utter horse-shit, for most of us. Why can't we all be artists?

Tags: #art #economics #capitalism

This is a story about the generation who want to die...

So you mean to say that I've inherited a dying body on a dying planet, over-populated by dying coffin-dodgers who are squatting in all the big houses and hoarding all the money? So you mean to say that all those times I didn't get to eat jelly and ice-cream; all those times when I had to stop playing with my toys and go to bed even though I wasn't tired; all those times I couldn't see my friends because I was being dragged around the place by grown-ups... you mean there's no payoff for all of that?

What's so infantile about acting like a spoiled child? What can we learn from children?

It strikes me that even though we went to school and ate our vegetables and had lots of tears and tantrums as children, everything went to Hell in a handcart anyway. When the survivors of the nuclear apocalypse crawl out from under the rubble, aren't they going to wish that their kids weren't raised by strangers in institutions? Aren't you going to wish that you didn't act more childishly when we're all going to die anyway?

How precisely has all of our discipline and self-denial benefitted us? Half the planet lives in dire poverty; those in the middle live in conflict zones, afflicted by war and refugee crises; the top couple of per cent have wealth, technology and education, which they use to write angst-filled books, share suicide memes and otherwise complain about the agony of existence.

Even tiny tots get given homework. Exhausted looking parents complete after-school projects for their kids, the night before the deadline. Extracurricular activities demand every spare second of time - every waking hour of the day is seen as an educational opportunity.

Pinching our noses and shovelling in disgusting-tasting food, because it's good for us, is something that we have become habituated into doing as adults. What can children tell us about the madness afflicting the planet? Why do I want to be healthy and live a long miserable life?

"Are you smarter than a five-year-old?" is the title of a gameshow. A chess grandmaster is not smart per se - they are probably a thoroughly impractical person if they've dedicated so much of their life to playing a board game. Better chess players are simply better at spotting patterns they've seen before, as opposed to brute-force reasoning - to become good at chess requires a lot of experience. To be an adult is simply to have gained more experience of how to play the game of life - I often think that children are the smarter ones.

Stood in the supermarket today, I wondered why I didn't just take a doughnut off the shelf and eat it; I wondered why I didn't lie on the floor and kick and scream that I wanted something until it was brought to me; I wondered why I was walking when I could be carried or wheeled around in a trolley or pushchair; I wondered, in fact, why I would adhere to any of society's expectations at all - none of us are getting out of this alive, so why shouldn't we put down our tools and just run around like a bunch of kids?

Of course, when we get cold and hungry, we're immensely grateful to have a fire and some food, but those things don't require me to sit in a classroom, lecture theatre or an office. I don't need to wear a suit and take a crowded commuter train to put food on the table and keep my house warm - the work of the service industries is not farming, fishing, producing energy or building homes. I wonder if our advanced society should feel as smug as it does, given the vast numbers of us who are stressed, anxious and depressed. When our bright, energetic and enthusiastic young people are faced with such grim prospects, have we led them astray?

For those "I'm alright, Jack" few, who are content to mortgage their grandchildren for the sake of their desire to be idle in opulent luxury, they will mock socialist movements as immature and naïve. Conceited media commentators deride supporters of the Labour party & left-wing as being mainly students and bleeding-heart liberals.

Literature is littered with examples of the youth being to blame for everything. Parents are afraid of their own children. It seems acceptable to laugh at the angst-ridden teenagers, as if us adults have got things all figured out. It seems OK that millennials won't get to buy a house and have a job that pays enough for them to raise a family, because they've got smartphones and social media - as if that's some kind of fair trade.

I find myself somewhat sandwiched in-between a generation who feel entitled to do nothing, as their reward for fucking up the whole world, and a generation who get no reward for giving up their childhood, despite eating their vegetables and doing their homework. Why?

For every 'good' reason I can come up with for why it's better to act in an adult way, I have to admit that I can fully empathise with the childish stance. Furthermore I can see that inside even the most po-faced and responsible adult, there's still a part of them that would like to have a big tantrum and not do any of their chores. Under the veneer of maturity, we are still children. It struck me that the only difference between me and a child is that I look like a grown-up, and my play-acting has gotten a lot better - I can keep a straight face.

If we're not careful, then childish ideas will take hold. The us-versus-them mentality that has brought Donald Trump to power and threatens the unity of Europe, is lifted straight from the playground. If we wish to be po-faced about the behaviour of children, shouldn't we discipline ourselves first? What kind of world have we created for our children to inherit, that makes us so damn smart and justifies feeling so smug with ourselves?

Personally, I'm turning to children to remind me not to be so dazzled by the brilliance of my own mind. Whatever I've read; whatever I've learned - it's clearly becoming less & less relevant in the modern world. There were 4.3 billion people crawling around like ants on the planet, when I was born, and now there are 7.6 billion humans alive today. In a little over a decade, there will be twice as many people competing for the same scarce resources, than when I started my life. What relevance do attitudes of the 1970s - when I was conceived - have in the 2020s and beyond? What could I possibly tell a young person about the world, when it's changed so much in my lifetime?

The old strategy of studying at school, working hard and complying with the rules of the game, seems deeply flawed when we're telling people that no matter how hard they work they won't get a job, get a house and be able to afford the things that seem like a human right: to be able to raise a family of our own. Are we supposed to be happy that at the end of it all, we will be living with our parents, like overgrown adult-sized children? Why not just remain infantile and childish for life?

Although I can see that to spawn my own progeny might change my attitude, I also see that I might begin to impose my own "I know best" attitude onto my children, which perpetuates the cycle. While I do occasionally cringe when I look at myself, talking like an angst-ridden adolescent, I would prefer to be accused of immaturity than associate myself with the sneering po-faced group who got us into this mess - those who refuse to accept that society and civilisation is crumbling all around us; refuse to acknowledge the untold human misery.

To critique parents has become rather boring, so instead, I write this essay in support of anybody who wants to have a tantrum, eat crisps & chocolate instead of vegetables, bunk off school/work and otherwise run around having fun instead of living a life of intolerable suffering.

Tags: #childhood #parents

This is a story about being inspected...

Today the psych ward is being inspected by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and the staff are so nervous that some of them feel physically sick. I try to reassure one nurse that they're doing their best, despite staff shortages and rampant drug use - the synthetic cannabinoid called Spice is ubiquitous throughout prisons and psych wards.

There's always somebody peering over your shoulder, sneeringly judging you. Is it any wonder that paranoia takes hold in a mind, destroying it? The United Kingdom has an exceptional ability to track the movement of its citizens, using simple conventional CCTV - no spy satellites even needed.

In the free West, we deride the Stasi and the KGB. We talk about China's vast number of people employed to snoop on their own citizens, but we don't acknowledge the work of GCHQ and the NSA. Have we forgotten Edward Snowden's revelations so quickly? The Government read your fucking emails and the police - the regular ordinary police - have a backdoor into Facebook to read all your private messages.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear. If you believe that, why do you feel stressed if a police car is following you when you're driving, and a sense of relief when the police overtake you and disappear over the horizon? You have insurance; you've had your car's roadworthiness tested; you've paid your road tax... nothing to worry about, right?

It was only a short time ago that I was deeply indoctrinated by my schooling, that had shaped me into a meek conformist - I was fearful of defying any of society's rules and regulations. A family friend wanted to go fishing with me, and I said we needed to obtain a permit. "Our prisons are full of people who got caught fishing without a license" this friend laughed. "What are you in here for? Murder. What are you in here for? Fishing without a license" he continued jovially.

The city centre is crammed with 50,000 protestors preparing to march. I walk past a police cordon and I can hear a police officer yelling at me that I can't go the way I'm going, but I know that he'll be busy dealing with my obedient friend who will have stopped per the instructions. I keep walking, pretending to be unable to hear the entreaties to return. The policeman lets my friend go and we walk to the head of the march.

I'm sure that anarchy would be a disaster for sick and vulnerable people. I have no desire to see civilised society crumble. We can't all do whatever the fuck we want, whenever the fuck we want. Perhaps if everybody acted like I did, it would be the end of the world as we know it.

"Don't walk" says the sign in the United States. I jaywalk with gay abandon. Even in Manchester people look at me like I'm mad and suicidal, for the way I cross the road. However, it's done with such confident aplomb that nobody challenges me. I notice that people who are surrounded by plenty of steel and glass and plastic, such that they would suffer no injury at all if they killed me to death with their motor vehicle, do not give a single fuck about whether I live or die. In London, a motorist will slow down or even brake, to avoid killing a pedestrian, but these provincial plebs treat human lives with no such sanctity.

To live in a crowded city is to be humbled by humanity. To be detained against your will on an underfunded psych ward is to humbled, also. In the city, you are forced to confront your pathetic meaningless existence, as an ant crawling in its nest would be, if it had the faculties to perceive itself and its surroundings. But an ant's nest is akin to a row of gleaming skyscrapers, insofar as being a testament to what can be achieved by a society working together. On the psych ward, you are forced to confront your powerlessness over forces greater than yourself - society will exclude its troublemakers.

Perhaps you think I would endorse heroin being sold in supermarkets and that babies' pacifiers should be replaced with crack pipes?

As six police officers pinned me to the ground and my bum was injected with lorazepam, in the Accident & Emergency department of a hospital, I noticed a cleaner and a security guard nearby - some of the lowest paid people in society are often completely unacknowledged for the role they play in maintaining the division between the peasants and the aristocracy. My face was inches from the floor, but the policeman's trousered knee on my head was clean and so was the linoleum. Circles of red and green blinked at me - the police bodycams, videotaping the whole gruesome specatcle. I'd fallen from grace, but I hadn't slipped anywhere near the bottom - it's a long way down.

A friend whose judgement I trust and respect, tells me that I should drop the bad boy image of "the guy who got fucked up in Manchester". She knows that people are watching and I'm misrepresenting myself. She knows that people are lazy and won't look any deeper than the superficial image that I present.

Is my life - and the way I document it - by accident or by design? Do you imagine that when I'm writing, I don't think at all about how things are going to be perceived? The joke's on you if you don't read what I write with the prerequisite pinch of salt.

If you just dip in at random - like a care quality inspector - then you will get a random impression. On a good day you'll get a good impression. On a bad day you'll get a bad impression.

Do you think the graph above shows that things are improving? No. No it does not. Things are getting worse. Much, much worse. The data above shows conclusively that during the period under examination, there was a fourfold increase in the very metric that was supposed to be cut by 80%.

Do you remember blue tablet man? Well, anyway, he assaulted a nurse for giving him a yellow tablet (5mg of diazepam) instead of a blue tablet (10mg of diazepam).

A drugs dog sweeps the ward. The patients believe the dog can sniff out cigarette lighters. I ask the handler if the dog can sniff Spice and he confirms that it can. There's Spice everywhere on the ward, despite its deleterious effect on the mental health of susceptible individuals - prodromal schizophrenia can turn into fully-blown psychosis under the influence of the powerful synthetic cannabis, making it all the more concerning that it's so widespread on an acute psychiatric ward.

The patients here are the lucky ones and they know it. Everybody agrees it's better to be here with a warm dry bed and three hot meals a day. Everybody agrees it's better to be here, where the chances of being beaten up and/or robbed are minimal. With winter on its way, months of unimaginable suffering lie ahead of Manchester's homeless population, which has increased 1,100% in just 7 years - and a huge number of them smoke Spice.

Abandon hope all ye who entered the world from the mid-1990s onwards. What are the prospects for the youth of today, and the glut of graduates who were promised that indebting themselves and spending three or four years at university would be a good move?

Does it not seem like an obvious reaction to a decline in living standards, to retreat into drugged-up oblivion?

We're sifted and sorted and dissected by tests. We're examined, inspected and measured in every conceivable way. We never have any respite from the world's desire to label us, grade us and monitor us. The pressure to meet the expectations placed upon us is relentless. Some of us will crumble and have nervous breakdowns or be paralysed by anxiety disorders. Some of us will rebel and kick back at the suffocating environment that's desperate to eject and marginalise anybody who doesn't neatly fit in a box. Lots of subcultures have sprung into existence, with members exchanging knowing looks - these people are so much happier now that they have rejected the stereotype they were supposed to embody.

It saddens me that the hard-working staff on the ward are anxious and on best behaviour, when the other 364 days a year I know that they try their very hardest. This is just one of many psych wards, where the macro problems are greater than anything that can be influenced in the microcosms.

If you're going to randomly dip in, be careful to not make a lazy judgement based on a small sample size.

Tags: #nhs #hospital #mentalhealth #addiction #politics

This is a story about therapy...

Everybody's an expert on my mental health, it seems. I need to be exercising more, eating a balanced diet, abstaining from alcohol and mind-altering substances BUT not the ones the doctors want to give to me. But which doctors? Every doctor has a different idea of how I should be treated - which doctor should I listen to? Perhaps somebody else knows, because people have some very strong opinions on what I should be doing, considering that only a handful of individuals with whom I am still in contact, have known me for any length of time and have followed along. Only I know what I've tried before and what I haven't - what works and what doesn't.

Here, there's a student nurse whose dissertation investigated the benefits of exercise, in terms of potentiating - that is to say improving - the efficacy of medications. Not considered for a single second, was the control study which would have investigated the efficacy of exercise alone. This student nurse, who I find passionate and intelligent, was eager to suggest that I tried sodium valproate or lithium - both life-shortening medications prescribed to people who have regular episodes of mania where they believe they're Jesus reincarnated etc. Everybody thinks they've got a cure to a problem I might not even have - it was under a very dark cloud that I entered hospital, one must remember.

Externally, the perception of a psychiatric ward is that it must be a place of therapeutic activities and meetings with doctors to fine-tune my medications and cure me of my madness, making me safe to release back into the community again. Internally, my fellow patients perceive staff members as persecutors, jailers and masters of everything from food & drink, to bedtimes and bathtimes - a cross between a policeman, a teacher and a parent. Certainly, to have a blackboard on the wall is an incredibly dated nod to the classroom days of our youth. Note that the list of activities for the ward is completely blank, which I find quite accurate... not that I'm complaining.

The UK's stringent fire regulations for institutional buildings - hospitals, schools etc - mean that they look very similar. A company that manufactures and supplies the fixtures and fittings for a school will probably also supply those same items to a hospital. Everything needs to be built to last in this incredibly abrasive environment, where the footfall in the corridor would destroy even the most hard-wearing of floors, laid by a contractor who normally worked in regular houses. The finish is not just high standard, but the selection of the materials used has been honed over the years to create an interior that is easily mopped and wiped down, and very hard to damage.

As a patient, I find myself recalling my schooldays, as a dinner lady ladles goo onto plastic plates and I sip juice from containers that are identical to those that I had in my boyhood. Just like school, nothing much really happens except for crowd control. There is a little sifting and sorting, so the naughtiest boys end up in the shittest parts of the hospital, and the golden child will find themselves in the top class. However, it must be remembered that staffing a hospital is a job to quite a lot of people, and over the many years that they will work their job, any ill-founded notions of making a difference, will be thrashed out of them by the system. Nothing changes very much or very fast in massive organisations - you can't fight the system, or else you will drive yourself insane... that goes for both patients and staff.

It's very hard to not be driven mad by being hospitalised. It's a chicken and egg situation. For sure, nobody gets hospitalised without putting some effort into it. It's very hard to get a psych bed in the UK, unless somebody's gonna pay £5k/week for you to go into a private place. Of course, the patients here are here for a reason, but I have also experienced the terrifying moment where I realised that my liberty has been restricted. I just heard the jangling of a massive bunch of keys, carried by one of the staff members, as she passed my bedroom door. If I was to draw back my curtains, I would see bars on my window, to stop anybody climbing in or out. There are constant reminders that I'm here under lock & key, and to escape would require a little more social engineering (or climbing) than another secure ward that I was on in 2015, where I could have just walked out behind somebody who was leaving the ward, and then run away. To run away now, I would need to request an escort off hospital premises, and then I would simply get an Uber or perhaps I might have arranged a local cab company to have my getaway car waiting. I came into hospital with £1,150 in crisp £50 notes, so I have the financial means to grease whatever palms I need to.

Why would I want to escape though? Yes, you're right - to discharge myself prematurely would be a mistake. This isn't a very therapeutic environment, because staff spend so long spying - quite literally - on patients, which is absolutely dreadful for mental health: creating an us & them culture and exacerbating even the slightest hint of paranoia. If you value your dignity, privacy and liberty, psych hospital is not for you. There aren't any therapeutic activities. However, it is a safe place where my rent and bills are paid, I get 3 free hot meals a day, I get my own bedroom/office type thing which is quite generously proportioned and has an ensuite bathroom, and I don't need to cook, clean or otherwise worry about the responsibilities that burden nearly every other creature that was unfortunate enough to have been born.

Sounds nice, doesn't it? Perhaps you too would like a stay - mandated for up to 28 days on a section 2 - in the hotel "psych ward". Perhaps you imagine that it's a calm and restful place, where I get to sleep lots and read books. I think perhaps you're getting confused with that holiday you took to Tuscany last year. On a psych ward, you get woken up in the middle of the night by alarms going off, staff running in the corridors, yelling and screaming. On a psych ward, music blasts at top volume from patients' bedrooms, because headphones are not allowed lest we strangle ourselves with the cables. On a psych ward, one must evaluate the level that one's fellow patients are intoxicated by their cocktail of medications, and whether one has the energy to engage in their psychoses that are extremely repetitive - I've been here a week and I've learned a little of everybody's "thing"... their particular identity on the ward, which is characterised by an apparent madness, which is why we must remain here. I wonder what mine is? The staff tell me that I'm lazy - always just sitting with my laptop. Yes, that must be me right? Probably just watching mindless Netflix rubbish on it, right?

Ward rounds - when important decisions about "leave" are made - happen on Fridays and nothing else happens apart from waiting and hoping. Most patients here are hoping to get some leave. Some have not left the ward for nearly 6 months - considered too much at risk of running away, if they were allowed out of this super secure part of the hospital, accompanied by a staff member.

Gossip is rife, and everybody on the ward knows that I arrived with a wad of cash and was granted leave from the hospital almost immediately. I try to downplay these things, and now people have forgotten. When takeaways or shop orders are being placed, I feign not having any money, in the hope that I can alter my perception in the eyes of my fellow patients and the staff. I remember being called into the office, simply because some of the senior staff members wanted to have a look in my envelope, containing all those fifty pound notes. It's totally vulgar, and an accident of the illness that was stimulated into existence by the ridiculous sleep deprivation, stress and disruption to my medications and routine, over Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday of last week, which followed my near-fatal suicide attempt... it should be expected that my behaviour would have gone a bit haywire, under the crushing pressures I faced.

Perhaps I will be "stepped down" to a less restrictive ward today. I had to pack my bags last night, because I thought I was being moved. I should have remembered that nothing happens very quickly in the National Health Service, but sometimes if you're quick, you can nip in before the system decides that actually you're getting ahead far too fast. I'm not really in a rush to go anywhere though - this ward is perfectly decent and I know the two spots where I can get 3G signal.

I'm here to recover, but I'm not here to feel completely isolated. Who do I know in the local area who can come visit me? Two months ago I'd never set foot in this city, and the company I've been working for has cut all contact and has been skulking around in a most unusual manner. I have nobody - it's a real ball-ache for any of my friends to travel, just for a 2 hour visiting slot. Even my fellow patients, who are locals, do not have visitors - the hospital environment is not exactly somewhere people would like to spend their free time.

Should I immerse myself in the daily rhythms and routines of the hospital? Should I hang around by the door to the kitchen, looking for food scraps to be tossed out? Should I hang around by the door to the yard, hoping to be let outside? I'm not a fucking dog. I find it immensely useful to maintain contact with those who are still in full possession of their marbles, while I'm in an environment where staff humour the patients - "is it Tuesday today?" one asks, and is told that yes it is, even though it isn't... is that useful, helpful, therapeutic?

I was very sick when I was brought in, without a doubt. Some incredibly stressful things still hang over me, like Damocles' sword. I have little power to influence the speed of my recovery, nor the speed with which those who have wronged me are forced to offer recompense. At least I'm in a safe place to pursue what is rightfully mine: to get money that is owed to me and recover my possessions. I'm in a safe place to make arrangements for housing and income, so that I don't fall flat on my face, as soon as I leave.

I'm glad I'm here, at the moment.

Tags: #mentalhealth #bipolar #suicide #depression #hospital

This is a story about hypocrisy...

I wasn't born into a wealthy family. I don't have trust fund income. I'm practically disinherited. My relationship with my parents was causing me far more harm than good. I don't have lottery winnings, bonds, gilts, shares, Swiss bank accounts, briefcases full of banknotes or any other assets; securities; cash; collateral. I don't even have youth and toned physique on my side any more, so men aren't going to pay for the pleasure of my company, which was always plan "Z" in the event that plans "A" through to "Y" had failed.

I've got 61% of my kidney function left, I can't feel my left foot, although - irritatingly - I do feel pain if I stand on something. I also get something akin to phantom limb pain. As far as my brain is concerned, most of the time my foot doesn't seem to exist anymore, but at night it aches all over parts of my foot, ankle and calf. It aches so much I can't sleep without pain relief and/or sleeping tablets. I drink too much. I put all the weight I lost back on. To top it all off, I'm going to be closer to 40 than 35 soon.

I'm in a precarious position.

I couldn't work doing a job that required me to stand for any length of time. I couldn't work a job that required me to do much walking at all. That rules out McDonalds, stacking shelves and being a security guard. Even the homeless people who sell The Big Issue do so standing up.

So, why would I risk my professional reputation by blogging and tweeting so candidly about every innermost thought and private detail of my life? Don't I care about my job? Being able to find gainful employment is pretty important for me, as I don't own a home and I don't have the fallback option of living with any family member. Loss of income means I can't pay rent or even afford a hostel bed. Putting my private life out into the public sphere looks like I'm jeopardising my career - my reputation - and therefore my job - my income - and my housing. Doesn't it seem like I brought my recent crisis, where I was almost homeless, on myself?

What does homeless even mean, anyway? Well, if you're not receiving social security benefits - job seekers' allowance (JSA) or employment support allowance (ESA) - then you don't get any other benefits either, which includes housing benefits. If I go to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets council offices and find their housing department, and tell them that I have been paying over £2,000 a year in council tax, but I've become homeless, they will just tell me to f**k off, in no uncertain terms.

That's what homeless means: it means that every single safety net has failed you, and you will be sleeping on the streets. It's happened to me. I've been homeless.

You would think that this would make me dash to the Job Centre to sign on for JSA as soon as I lost a job, or phone the government telephone line to apply for ESA as soon as I got sick, but there are rules. Strictly speaking, I've got a job - I'm a company director - and strictly speaking I've already got a salary... it's just that my company hasn't been able to afford to pay me for several months. My company only sells one thing: me. If I'm broken, my company doesn't have anything to sell, so it doesn't make any money.

Here's how the government process goes:

Q. Have you lost your job?

A. No, I have a job

--- I'm not eligible for JSA --

Q. Are you able to work?

A. Yes, I do unpaid work every day, without too many problems

--- I'm not eligible for ESA ---

Q. Are you receiving JSA or ESA?

A. No. I'm not eligible for either

--- I'm not eligible for housing benefit ---

So, I get shunted out of the welfare benefits system and into the hands of the NHS, who view me as a vulnerable person in crisis. Therefore I could be hospitalised for 24 hours, 28 days or 6 months, purely because otherwise it's pretty clear that I'd be fucked. I could be housed in a crisis house for a couple of weeks. However, until I tell the government a white lie - that I'm so disabled by mental illness that I can't work - then none of that income tax, national insurance and council tax that I paid over the years, is going to be used to give me some assistance with housing and income, until I'm recovered enough to go back to working full-time. Equally, I'm not going to get any paid employment until I omit to tell a prospective employer that I have had some health issues and need to work part-time, until I'm well enough to work full-time.

Do I kowtow to the government for less than £100 a week of ESA money? When you lose your ESA, you lose your housing benefit too. Where's that going to get me? Back to square one.

Do I start a full-time job earlier than I'd like to? I pretty much have to. I don't have any other options, given that the other options lead back to the same place: homelessness.

There are a lot of things that make my situation very unique and hard for the 'one-size fits all' government systems to cope with. Nothing is left to the discretion of the people who have to deal with the unemployed, the sick and the homeless.

As Joseph Heller described wonderfully in Catch 22, there are situations where to act rationally leads to the least desirable outcome. Most men don't want to fight in wars, because they'll probably be killed. Therefore if you're driven insane, that's actually the most sane response - through your madness, you also proved your sanity, ergo, you're fit for battle. Quod erat demonstrandum.

I've made my choice to use my professional reputation to get work, but I also have every detail of my private life and my psyche fully on display in the public sphere. I have no security. I have no job. I'm soon to have no home.

I would be a hypocrite to take down this blog and delete my Twitter account, because I've lived for 2 years in the public sphere, documenting very private and personal matters, which might seem to contradict my professional reputation that a person may glean from my CV, LinkedIn, meeting me, talking to me and talking to the people I've worked for and otherwise know me in a professional capacity.

It seems cowardly, having taken the brave step of being honest with 7,000+ Twitter followers, that I would hide these 750,000 words from a handful of people, because I'm afraid of damaging my professional reputation and career. We're all human and we're all fallible. To err is human. However, to document one's own mistakes and shortcomings is not at all common. To put more of yourself into the public sphere than is hidden away in any other dark recess of the world, including your own brain, is exceptional. I read things I've written less than a year ago, and I don't remember writing them, but I did. I wrote it all; every word.

It seems stupid, having an excellent professional reputation and a successful career spanning 20 years, and having made a great deal of effort to secure vital income and housing, to risk losing it by having my private life and confidential matters, publicly available. My job security depends on my employer's confidence in me to do the work that I'm highly qualified and experienced to do. Most people hide their weaknesses and their struggles. To project a false image - to be vain - to protect your ego and appear impressively faultless, is the normal thing to do.

Do I stand by my labour of love, and defend it, despite the vulnerable position it puts me in? Do I capitulate under the pressure to conform to social norms, and hide this other part of myself away in some private recess?

What's going to happen? Is it true that putting unflattering things into the public sphere is automatically damaging to your professional reputation? Who's been brave or stupid enough to try the irrational and risky thing that I've done? Who would be brave or stupid enough not to pull the plug, to de-risk the situation and limit any damage that might be done?

I can't pull the plug. I need this blog. I need this identity. I need to be brave, even if it feels stupid, because otherwise I'm a hypocrite.

In the world I want to build, we don't need alter-egos; we don't have a professional persona; we don't maintain flawless CVs with no gaps between employers; we don't make a distinction between who we are privately and who we are publicly: we are just ourselves, all the time; warts and all.

I am guilty of imagining utopian ideals, but this is different. The lines between work & home life; public & private life; speakable & unspeakable; stigmatised & unstigmatised... those lines are being blurred and people are becoming proud of identities that 50 years ago were literally illegal under UK law.

We have laws that prevent discrimination on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, religion and a host of other things, but a woman may still choose to publish a book under a male pseudonym, when gender bias shows that she will sell more books if she does so.

I would be vain and egotistical if I painted myself as some brave campaigner for ending the tyranny that a 'career' and the painstaking care we take over our professional reputation, wreaks on our lives. However, this blog has helped me to overcome career-ending obstacles. What can you say your spotless CV brought you, when you eventually crumbled under the pressure to maintain an unsustainably perfect façade?

I recently said "vanity and ego: I hope they keep you warm at night". I said it slightly maliciously, with my words dripping with sarcasm. I felt regretful for saying that to somebody.

Perhaps therein lies the truth of it all: is this a vanity project, or is it the very definition of a deflated ego to publicly display the side of your character that you always kept hidden?

I'm going to decide, because I assume nobody is going to read this. To assume I have interested readers would be vain.

It feels like a pretty brave thing for a stupid person to do.

Tags: #career

This is a story about living an easy life...

Our behaviour is shaped by circumstances far more than free will and conscious decisions. I suddenly stopped using my smartphone, looking at Facebook and writing. Did I decide to stop wasting time, pointlessly reliving old memories and making myself look like a fool on social media? No. I broke my wrist.

My generation, and a few generations before me, found ourselves in the right place at the right time. No skill, hard work, good judgement or other factors are attributable to us other than being born in a rich country during a period of peace.

The Americans wasted a lot of time and talent on the Vietnam War, which allowed Britain to become a world leader in banking software and the global financial markets. Silicon Valley is on the opposite coast of the USA from Wall Street. London has everything you need all in one place.

British men have sheds, in which they tinker and invent things. There's a proud tradition of geekery in Britain, which includes trainspotting, stamp collecting and pipe smoking. I'm a member of the last generation who were able to turn their geeky hobby and wasted youth into cold hard cash.

Most parents have dismally similar plans for their offspring: to pressure them as much as possible to try hard at school, in the hope that they'll survive the onslaught and be able to go on to university and become an accountant or a dentist or something... take up a profession. Medicine, law, architecture, surveying.... basically anything with a Royal Institute. Something to give you letters after your name. Something respectable.

Barrowboys from Essex and the East End made a killing as stock market traders, because they already had an eye for a good deal and a head for numbers. Later, software became something that anybody could stumble into, if they had the aptitude.

All those years at school and college proved a waste of time, when the fast-paced world of technology demanded magicians, wizards, sorcerers: anybody who could conjure up working computer software, no matter what their academic credentials looked like. The curriculum vitae was overlooked in favour of technical tests and whether a candidate knew the latest jargon.

Briefly, the snobbery over Oxbridge graduates and the class of degree that one had attained, was overturned and the prized star employees in the multitude of software houses and consultancies that sprung up, were often self-taught and not considered academically gifted, in the traditional sense.

Filial obedience proved disastrous, when many parent-pleasing academic high-achievers entered corporate law firms, only to find that the remuneration in no way compensated them for the hours that they worked and the pressure they were under. The story was the same everywhere you looked: hard work didn't pay.

Private school fees, university tuition fees and loans for maintenance, would all be far better off simply invested in property. Buy your kid a house and let them sub-let rooms out. They'll be richer and happier in the long-run. House prices are an asset bubble that just refuses to burst: we all need somewhere to live.

Now I find myself in the position where I haven't been dismissed in disrepute from the professional body, to which I belong. I haven't been struck off the GMC's register, or expelled from the Law Society. I can still practice software and nobody gives a fuck, so long as I can make the magic happen.

When it comes to imposter syndrome, and the sense that you can't possibly be worth the money that the market is prepared to pay for your skills, there could be nothing worse than knowing that you took up your particular career, because it was a gift that was handed to you, requiring no effort: you just happened to have an aptitude and be in the right place at the right time. I can't point to a fancy diploma that took me many years to obtain. I can't rely on my membership of an exclusive professional body, to give me a sense that I'm somehow deserving of a certain salary or consultancy day rate.

Following the path of least resistance has allowed me to find my place: where I'm most qualified to work and the market pays the most for my skills. However, I'm full of self-doubt. Am I too old for this game? Have my skills gotten rusty? Have I missed the boat on a new development, and taken myself up a technology cul-de-sac?

I can point to exceptional things I've done as evidence that I'm no slouch, but it's often hard for a salaryman to understand just how hard it is to run your own business, for example. In fact, having run your own business is something that is often held against you.

I find myself somewhat trapped. Nobody will hire me as a permanent member of staff because I've been contract for so long. I can't use my highest achievements to their fullest advantage, because they're things that your 9 to 5 regular guy just won't wrap their head around. I can't even consider escaping and living a simple minimalist life, until I deleverage: I'm financially trapped.

It's strange that the path of least resistance would lead here, with me somewhat able to sit by the riverside, writing, but paying an extremely high price for the privilege.

It's almost the final straw, to break my wrist and be unable to even write.

Tags: #career #banking #london #writing

This is a story about sick leave...

On my very first week at my very first full-time proper job after college - working for British Aerospace - my friends talked me into pulling a sickie so that we could go to Alton Towers for the day. This was 1997 and I didn't yet have a mobile phone. I had to call my boss from a payphone in the car park of Alton Towers. You could hear people screaming with terror, as a rollercoaster thundered by, not far away from where I was making this tense phonecall.

I didn't make a habit of throwing a sickie. I moved to the town where I worked, so I could wake up late and walk to work. My boss was quite relaxed about me turning up late, as long as the work was getting done.

No sooner had I moved to Dorchester, then BAe decided to send me off to the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) on Portsdown Hill, near Portsmouth. A friend and colleague, who became my boss for this project, would come into my maisonette every morning and coax me out of bed. The early morning starts were agonising, especially if I had spent the weekend clubbing in London and was recovering from drug-fuelled all-night dancing. My body clock was sent haywire, but because I was only 18, I suppose I could just about cope.

I didn't have another sick day with BAe or DERA, or with the next company I moved to Winchester to work for. When I worked for Research Machines near Oxford, I even managed to get to work during the petrol crisis. I was allowed a day off when snow pretty much paralysed the country, and I went sledging in Haslemere, Surrey.

As an IT contractor by now, I realised I could use the time off between contracts to do cool stuff. I went on a week-long RYA Day Skipper course, to learn how to sail cruising yachts. I spent time with family in Devon, and did my interviews over the phone.

The dot com crash and 9/11 were rather unsettling events, so I decided to take a permanent job with HSBC, who are one of the more conservative banks. The interview process was exhaustive, testing my literacy, numeracy, reasoning and a bunch of other aptitude tests, and a grilling from various managers. "Why do you want a permanent job when you're earning good money contracting?" they asked. "Why do you want to work in banking, now that the bonuses aren't so good?" they puzzled.

HSBC Asset Management had a very familial feel to it. They had a policy of hiring a lot of former London Irish rugby players, and Surrey and Middlesex cricketers. If you were accepted, they would look after you. There was camaraderie. There was true team spirit. There was also copious amounts of drinking.

Somehow I got through some 4+ years at HSBC without pulling a fake sickie. One weekend, I ate far too many magic mushrooms, and then a team in Hong Kong phoned me up to ask why millions of pounds worth of equities settlement messages were stuck in a queue and were not being processed. The backs of my hands looked like playing cards, the walls were throbbing and swaying and everything was bathed in bright green light. I made my excuses and quickly phoned a trusted colleague, begging him to handle the support call for me, because I had accidentally gotten a bit too pissed. He laughed and I got away with it.

I had a persistent tickly cough that was annoying me. I had read somewhere that dextromethorphan - the cough suppressant - could make you have a psychedelic trip if you took enough, so I rang my boss, and said that my cough was so bad I couldn't come to work. I then downed 3 bottles of cough syrup, containing DXM. I got precisely zero thrills out of that particular mad caper.

Moving to JPMorgan, I had the perfect job. I used to work mornings and evenings, and go kitesurfing during the day. I say 'work' but what I really mean is that I used to turn the volume up really loud on my laptop, so if somebody sent me a message or an email, it would wake me up and I could see whether I needed to deal with it. JPMorgan were really cool with people working from home, especially if you were supporting their live systems, which was mainly my job at first.

I loved that job at JPMorgan, and never pulled any sickies. In fact, I would often work weekends and late nights. I was pissed a lot of the time, and there were plenty of Friday afternoons in the pub where we never went back to the office except to get our coats and laptops on our way home, but that was the culture. Work hard, play hard.

Switching to New Look - the high-street fast fashion clothing retailer - I had a long commute to Weymouth every day and they didn't really know what they wanted me to do. I spent a day working in a store, which was interesting. I spent a couple of days at their distribution centre, watching the boxes of clothes arrive from the sweatshops, and the stock being sent out to the stores. I spent some time trying to understand what the hell they wanted to do as a business, and what the hell I was supposed to do about enabling it. Eventually, I broke down and decided I couldn't face the commute. I couldn't face the job. I couldn't face anything.

Three days off... no problem... just fill in a self-certification of sickness absence form when you get back to the office.

Four or more days off... got to go to the doctor and get signed off: get a sick note.

It started with two weeks off. Then a couple more. Then I couldn't even face going to see the doctor any more.

I found out what happens if you just stop turning up for work, sending in your sick notes, answering your phone... anything. I just disappeared. The company gets scared that they're going to get taken to some tribunal and found guilty of making somebody so stressed and unwell that they can no longer work. The company is scared it's going to cost loads of money and be hard to get rid of you, so they offer you a cash payment to fuck off quietly, promising you a good reference if you just resign.

With my JPMorgan bonus, my payoff from New Look and my iPhone App income, I was having a pretty bloody good year financially, despite being laid low with depression for a couple of months. I would have continued to take time off, but my phone rang and it was an agent with a contract in Poole: about a 20 minute drive from my house. I interviewed and got the job. I was the highest paid contractor in the company, which was a joke because the company mainly did Microsoft work, and I'd specialised in completely different technology. I actually bumped into another contractor I knew - Bob - and I felt bad that I was earning more than he was, because he taught me so much and he was so much older and more experienced. Oh well, the arrogance of youth, eh?

Anyway, my boss was this cool French guy who liked the fact I could speak colloquial French quite well, so he used to send me over to their main office in Besançon very often. It was great in the winter, because I could go snowboarding in a little place just outside Geneva, before flying home. Me and a friend bought a boat and used to go wakeboarding during our lunch hour. I took my boss out on my boat. I took one of my colleagues out sea fishing. Life was pretty sweet. However, I got bored and started claiming I had illnesses like swine flu, so I could take some time off work. I took so much time off sick, that my boss asked if I really wanted the contract anymore. I admitted that I didn't, so we parted company amicably. I partly needed to get away from an annoying guy with a ginger beard who I had to work with, who irritated the shit out of me.

I then became a full-time electrician. At first, I let the customers choose when I would do the work, and filled my diary up with lots of random jobs. Then, I learned that I could block time out, to give myself a break whenever I wanted. I could tell customers that I was booked up in the mornings, so I didn't have to get up early. It should have been a dream job, which allowed me to go kitesurfing whenever I wanted, but by this stage my relationship was on the rocks and I was depressed and stressed as hell. I didn't do much of anything. I sold my share of the boat. I started to get out of my depth with the work that I was taking on.

After becoming too sick to work, I had a couple of months doing nothing, and then a tiny bit of holiday cover work for a friend turned into some iPhone development work, which then exploded into my idea for a startup: Roam Solutions. I decided to create a software house specialising in mobile apps for enterprise. I threw together a hunk of junk proof of concept and we exhibited at the Learning Technologies conference, at Olympia. Somehow, in the space of a couple of months, there was a working app on iPhone and Blackberry, a fancy website and some glossy brochures. A whole exhibition stand had to be designed and built, allowing people to play with the phones but not steal them. There was so much branding to do. So much design.

I wasn't actually that passionate about what Roam Solutions did, which turned out to be mostly digital agency work. Rebranding as mePublish, then Hubflow; rewriting all the software and creating an Android version - those were momentary distractions. Sales meetings were stressful. Supporting your software 24x7 with just you and a mate is stressful. Getting any money out of our customers was like getting blood out of a fucking stone.

We managed to get about £16k out of a couple of customers and raised another £10k by selling a few percent of the company's shares. In return, me and my mate got to go on a 13-week 'accelerator' program. The program was fantastic fun, but exhausting. By the end, I didn't turn up for a couple of days because I was 'sick'. The truth was, I was burnt out.

I should have swapped roles with my business partner. He made a great CEO in the end, when I stepped down. Anyway, I just disappeared for months, and my friend helped to tidy up the mess and calm the shareholders down. I was almost out of cash. I needed a job.

I went to work for a company that helped people who'd got into debt problems. Not one of those debt consolidation places - we actually wrote to the creditors and negotiated debt-write offs, freezing the interest and lower repayments. We helped people avoid bankruptcy or IVAs. It was a cool company, but they wanted me to be IT director without actually vesting me in or letting me sit on the board. I wrote them a brilliant IT roadmap. They ignored it. I had an argument with the CEO. I went off on a sickie. The private equity firm that owned the company liked me and sacked the CEO. But then I got paid off because I couldn't face going back. The following year, I was at a conference, and there was the bloody CEO of the parent company, who'd followed my fucking IT roadmap to the letter, telling the delegates how well it worked. I felt proud, vindicated, but also I know deep down that it would have taken a lot of hard work to implement, and I was no part of that, so I can't really claim credit.

After the London Olympics, I went back to JPMorgan. I was not a well man. I was limping along.

I managed to fix one of JPMorgan's major issues that was threatening to cause a major catastrophe - front page of the Financial Times stuff - and then I disappeared, never to be seen again. I got a phonecall from my boss, saying I'd received an extra bonus in recognition of the important work that I'd done. I felt like a fraud, thanking him for that, but knowing that I was so sick that I wouldn't be able to go back to work.

My GP signed me off for 5 weeks, and my first thought was literally this: "I can get fucked up on drugs for 4 weeks and have 1 week to recover enough to go back to work."

There was The Priory. There was the separation from my wife. There was the realisation that the rumours of my mental health and drug problems were well known to everybody I knew in Bournemouth and Poole. It's a small place. I used to ride a tiny folding bicycle invented by Sir Clive Sinclair, for the 10 minute trip to work, but yet this had not escaped the notice of all kinds of people whose path I crossed. I was becoming known as a rather odd and eccentric character - a nutty professor; a madman; a drunk; a junkie. It was time to go somewhere so big that those kind of labels couldn't follow me around: London.

I put my back out picking up my niece to put her on the swings at the playground, so I had a week working flat on my back at home, while I was working for Barclays. I started to slowly relapse into taking legal highs, and ended up taking another week off, where I rewrote the entire software system we were working on in a nonstop hackathon without sleep. It rather made a mockery of the whole project, as well as terrifying the hell out of the architects.

At HSBC, I had a full on meltdown after my first week, realising that it was impossible to work a demanding contract while living in a hostel. Somehow, I managed to get away with a week off work, thanks to my sister ringing my boss and making excuses for me. I did also have half a day off because I was so dreadfully hung over once. I wasn't going to bother at all, but my boss persistently phoned me. I reeked of booze, as I turned up at my desk at 2:30pm.

At a well-known leading consultancy, working for the world's biggest security firm, I didn't take any time off at all. I was a little late on a couple of occasions, and had to ask one of my team to run my morning meeting on my behalf, but I was mostly a reliable little worker bee. It helped that I had a whole week-long holiday: my first relaxing week-long break for over 3 years.

I was all set to start a new contract with a well known high-street bank, who I once worked for when I was 20 years old and Canary Wharf was mostly just a building site. However, I knackered my leg, which caused my foot to swell up and my kidneys to fail. I had to pull a sickie on the very first day. Thankfully, they've waited two weeks for me to get better; most of which I've spent on a high-dependency hospital ward, having dialysis. My leg is still fucked.

And so, I go back to work tomorrow, limping along with my robocop ankle brace and doped up on tramadol. I've got one reliable reference from the last couple of years. HSBC hate my guts. Most people at Barclays were shocked and appalled that my contract was terminated early, and my boss lost his job over his decision to fire me, but do you think I can get a good reference? Who knows.

I should have paid my rent 10 days ago. I just told the taxman that he's not getting any VAT off me for a whole quarter, and he fucking hates that. I have no idea what my bank balance is, but I'm sure that what little money I have is being frittered away at a frighteningly quick rate.

However.

I could possibly delay a few weeks and get another contract. I could have stayed in hospital, letting them do their blood tests and fretting over my kidneys - which have proven resilient so many times before - and waiting patiently for them to finally take a look at my original complaint: my fucked foot/ankle/leg. It feels like I've torn a bunch of ligaments and muscle. It feels like my old injury has suffered major complications.

But, two weeks work gives me the best part of 3 months rent. If I can limp through the contract, I go from zero to hero. I've been so depressed about having to watch the pennies and not being able to treat my girlfriend to romantic dinners and whisk us off to exotic locations, or at least make plans to have fun. My plans have all been focussed on stopping the ship from sinking.

You might think I'm mad to take such a risk with my health, but mental health is part of it. Stress is part of it. Money and the need to not run out of it, is something that has to be considered. I don't trust myself: that I'm able to knuckle down and get on with the job. I did a good job of keeping my mouth shut in my last contract and it sorted me out financially a bit. This is my chance to continue that streak of improvement, if I can hold my shit together despite my health being a bit iffy. This is my chance to get in front. This is my chance to reduce all that stress and those worries and that anxiety and that depression about having to be super careful with money.

Anyway, let's see what happens tomorrow, eh? Let's see how sympathetic people are, about the fact that I've just been discharged from a high-dependency hospital ward, where I narrowly avoided chronic kidney failure, which would have meant having to have a kidney transplant and all the rest of that kind of shit. My leg is fucked, but I've found some contraption that allows me to get around without crutches. Still though, it looks like I broke my ankle or something. Surely, I've got to get cut a bit of slack, given what I've been through.

But, it doesn't work like that with IT contracting. Nobody owes me anything. The contract is between my company and another company. It's not an employment contract. It's a contract that says my company will provide consultancy services to their company - I could send anybody I think is qualified. I could hire somebody on minimum wage, train them, and send them to go do the job in my place, and I'd earn just as much money. However, the client doesn't really want somebody like me. They want me and they want me tomorrow at the latest, otherwise they'll just find somebody else. London's not short of talent. It was an extremely kind personal favour, that they waited this long for me to get better.

It's going to be horrible, starting work in pain and so exhausted from the nights in hospital where you're repeatedly disturbed by patients yelling out in pain, nurses coming to measure your blood pressure and take your temperature, and phlebotomists coming to take blood samples. They wake you up at 7am for the crappy breakfast of dry bread and marmalade. It's going to be a struggle to stay awake at my desk, especially with all the pain medication I'm taking.

So, it might all go to shit anyway, but at least I tried. I could have taken my sweet time over everything, and let the hospital string me along, but eventually, I can't cope with the frustration anymore: the lack of control, when your destiny is in the hands of somebody who doesn't even know what they're looking at. Somebody who's hiring because there's a knowledge gap in their organisation: they're hiring somebody who knows what they don't know, so how can they know that the person they're hiring knows what they know? So many stupid interviews, where the interviewer just wants to talk about the lame crap that they have just about managed to memorise. So tedious. In the end, intolerable.

I'm falling asleep and it's 5 o'clock and I didn't wake up until after 10:30am. Tomorrow's going to be fucking awful. But, think of the money. Just think of the money.

Tags: #career

This is a story about conformity...

Why would you ever consent to being graded? Isn't that extremely degrading to have somebody sit in judgement over you and decide where you fit in the pecking order?

We don't have an education system. We are not educating our children.

Instead, we have a system that's designed to give us the best grades we can possibly afford, so that we will have better employment opportunities. Schools are businesses, and they need pupils to get funding, so they can pay all those lovely salaries. Teachers are judged on their students' exam results. Schools are chosen based on their exam results. Universities will offer places to those students with the best exam grades, but universities are money making machines, taking at least £27,000 for an undergraduate degree, from every student. Finally, employers will select prospective employees who have the best grades.

Imagine you gave up your childhood and a few of the prime years of your young adulthood, in order to get "A" grades and a first class degree from a top university. You worked your little socks off from the age of 5 to the age of 21. That's 16 years of hard labour. It wasn't an education. It was an exercise in grading. Your teachers didn't teach you. Instead, you were trained how to pass exams. The whole balance of incentives is such that only the grades matter. You just want the piece of paper at the end of it, so you don't have to take a shitty minimum wage zero hours contract McJob.

So, what happens when you graduate, take a graduate job, and then find what you're doing is utterly pointless bullshit?

What happens when those 16 lost years of your life mean that you're saddled with debt and working some drastically underpaid job that won't even buy you a house anyway?

In the US, every man woman and child has a debt of $60,000, even if they don't even have a bank account and never personally borrowed any money. In the UK the figure is circa £30,000. This is money the government borrowed on your behalf. Even if you're financially prudent, and you don't spend money until you've earned it, that's certainly not what your government is doing.

In order to stand a chance of getting a half decent job, you reckon you need to go to college/university. In the US the average student loan debt is $35,000. In the UK you have to spend £27,000 on tuition alone, for a 3 year degree course. Of course, the UK figure doesn't include the money you need to live on. You can borrow a further £32,000 in order to pay your rent, food, transport and other costs of living at university. Basically, you're going to spunk the best part of £60,000 getting your degree.

So, you've spent 16 years of your life, having no life - your nose has been stuck in those books and you've been doing all your homework - and you're £90,000 in debt. Imagine you met the love of your life at university, you both graduated and you'd like to have a couple of kids. That means your household is going to be £240,000 in debt, before you even take out a mortgage. That's £60,000 of government debt for your two kids, £60,000 of government debt for you and your other half, and £120,000 for your two university degrees. God damn! You'd better get a job and start paying that debt off, because you haven't worked a day in your life at this point, even though you're now 22 years old.

Because you worked so damn hard to pass your 11+ exam, your grammar school entrance exam, or private school entrance exam, your GCSEs, your A-levels, your university entrance exam, your final year exams, your dissertation... you're pretty heavily invested now, aren't you? You gave up playing outside in the sunshine with your friends so you could do extra Latin and calculus. You gave up swigging cider in the park and shagging in a bush, so that you could be at home poring over your books. You gave up being debt free, so you could now have a £60,000 student loan like a millstone around your neck.

Guess what? Even having a good degree from a good university isn't enough. You probably need to become a lawyer or an accountant to set yourself apart from the McJob fodder. Lawyers in the US run up student debts in excess of $100,000. Here in the UK, you're going to have to pay an extra 2 years of tuition and living expenses, before you can even get a job in a law firm. You're going to pay the the law school £21,000 in tuition fees, plus you'll need another £20,000 for rent and living expenses, while you study. So, your student debt is now £100,000 before you even enter one of the professions.

Even a graduate with first-class honours from Oxford or Cambridge is not a professional. Having read classics does not seem immediately useful, given the lack of living people who speak Latin or Ancient Greek. While you have clearly marked yourself out as 'clever' in a rather abstract sense, you're not obviously employable because of your education. It is merely your grades that make you attractive to prospective employers.

Is it even very clever, to spend so much of your parents money on a private or public school education, squander your childhood on homework and piano recitals, saddle yourself with the best part of £100k of student debt, and then have the prospect of doing legal or accountancy work to help billionaires avoid paying tax.

The more you invest the more exposed you are. You're not going to take some lowly entry-level job, because you've got a goddam degree dontcha know? You're not going to question how absolutely dreadful the work is that you're doing, and how appalling the salary is, because it's a graduate job apparently. The job spec said "must have 2:1 degree from respected institution" so therefore it must be a good job, right?

Yeah, at least you're not flipping burgers for a living.

But, can you buy a house?

Nope.

You were conned. You studied hard for 16 long years. You stressed yourself to bits over every exam. Writing your dissertation was pure agony. You were so worried that you were going to fail. You could have failed at any moment. You could have failed to get into a good secondary school. You could have screwed up your GCSEs. You could have screwed up your A-levels. You could have screwed up your finals. You could have screwed up your dissertation.

You were so damn relieved on graduation day. Sure, it felt good to have your picture taken holding a scroll of parchment tied up with a red ribbon, wearing a black gown and a mortar board. Your mum has that picture of you up on the wall in the downstairs toilet. Every houseguest sees that photo of you, a fresh-faced 21 year old graduate, proudly clutching the bit of paper you worked hard for 16 years to get. They imagine that you must be terribly clever but little do they know that you're now working some dreadful office job, copying and pasting numbers in spreadsheets, like some kind of factory worker.

Maybe you were a bit smarter and you realised that everybody's got a damn degree these days. Perhaps you did a masters, a PGCE, went to law school, studied accountancy. Now you have a profession. You're a teacher, a lawyer, an accountant.

You studied the extra years. You did the training. You took the shitty entry-level salary. Now you're a qualified professional. You're a member of The Law Society, you're a chartered accountant, you've got Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). Guess what? You still can't buy a fucking house.

My suggestion is this: if your parents have money, don't fucking work your bollocks off and study hard. Get your parents to buy you a house and give you some money. You don't need to work. The world does not need any more corporate lawyers.

If you don't come from a wealthy family, for God's sake don't waste the prime years of your life following the same path as all the other drones. There's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. School, university, graduate jobs... it's all just a miserable path that leads to debt and misplaced gratitude for a 'better' quality job, which is actually nothing of the sort.

I'm financially incentivised to stay doing what I'm doing, because I can buy a house and afford to have my family live in considerable comfort. My earning potential is a function of how able I am to say "fuck your shit" and go and get a better contract elsewhere, because I'm not driven by fear: fear that I have invested 16+ years of my life in a pointless piece of paper; fear that I have £60k to £100k of student debt that needs to be paid back; fear that I've been measured, graded, and that I know my place.

I don't know my place, because I never allowed myself to be graded. If somebody is turning me into a commodity, then I change my role. I'm very hard to pigeon hole. I'm very hard to label. I'll brand myself up as whatever I need to be in order to get the job, instead of harking back to my most recent academic or professional qualification. I have no qualms at saying "this bullshit job just ain't worth the pittance you pay" because I don't have this fetish for "graduate" or "professional" work.

In some narrow niche, you'll find that there's somebody who wants it worse than you. You'll find that somebody is prepared to study harder, longer, put more effort in. If you enter into the arms race, you'll find yourself competing in a completely unnecessary battle for something that's been created with artificial scarcity. Grades are not a precious rare metal dug out of the ground. There's a finite amount of gold on the planet, but there is no shortage of "A" grades or bullshit jobs.

The professional bodies are there to limit the numbers of people becoming lawyers, accountants, doctors, teachers and a whole host of other jobs that are better paid than flipping burgers. The only reason why those professions pay more than minimum wage is because artificial scarcity is created, by limiting the number of people who can qualify and practice those trades.

I never let my schooling interfere with my education. I taught myself how to program a computer, with the help of a couple of schoolfriends. I don't advise becoming a programmer today, because it's a crowded market, but there'll be something better that your kids can be doing instead of their damn homework. There's something you can be doing better than saving up money to help get your kids through university: buy them a damn car and a house, because they're never going to be able to afford things on their own, with the way things are going.

The education system was there to break our will and our sense of individuality, and prepare us for the workhouses. The education system is used for societal control. Your government wants obedient debt-laden citizens, who are grateful for a shitty made-up job. The plutocrats who rule your life want cheap labour, even though you think you've got a prestigious well-paid job. In actual fact, you know your place, and you have no social mobility at all.

We're moving beyond the era of the CV with your exam grades and other qualifications on there. The idea of sifting and sorting everybody, like grains of sand, ending up with the very finest particles graded right up to the grittier stuff... this is a flawed model.

Take your average super indebted grad today. Could they rewire a house? Could they fix the plumbing? Can they cook a fine meal? Could they organise an event? Can they lead people? Can they mend a car? Can they dress a wound? What are they like on a mountain? What are they like out at sea? What are they like in a crisis?

We're churning out people who are only good for one thing: regurgitating established facts and ideas. Parroting answers they've learned but don't understand. Passing exams.

Our kids these days don't pass exams because they've reasoned the answers from their knowledge and experience. Our kids these days don't make theoretical deductions. We have an exam passing machine that teaches our children how to pass tests, as opposed to educating them.

Everything's going to hell in a handcart because original ideas and critical thinking have no place in our education system or the world of bullshit jobs. We spend at least 16 years brainwashing our 'best and brightest' to be exam passers, box tickers, compliant little drones who all think and act the same way. The homogeny of bland corporate wage-slaves, churned out by the cookie-cutter 'education' system is frightening.

When sufficient numbers of people realise that they've been conned into giving away their youth, in return for a soul-destroying desk job that's mind-numbingly boring, but yet they can't buy a house, there's going to be rioting that far exceeds the disruption we saw in 2011, when it was the disadvantaged youths who took to the streets to protest their lack of opportunities and general contempt that is held for the underclass.

Debt will not prop things up forever. Without a wirtschaftswunder - debt forgiveness - the capitalists will destroy everything by demanding their pound of flesh. Empires always fall when debts are not forgiven and the proletariat are crushed by the weight of the idle elites who live in decadent luxury, while ordinary people struggle.

Teach your kids practical things. Let them play. Don't make them do their homework. Don't force them to practice an instrument "because it will look good on their university application". A new world is coming, and moulding kids in the shape of every other underpaid, underemployed corporate drone is not going to do them any favours.

Tags: #childhood #education #capitalism #politics

This is a story about being chewed up and spat out...

London might only be the 17th most expensive city in the world to live in, but it's still in the top 20. I call it home, and I have nowhere else I can saunter back to if things don't work out. Where would I go?

The work that I do demands that I have my bum on a seat in an office a stone's throw away from the Bank of England, 5 days a week. It's not like I'm one of those fabled tech workers who can just idly tap away on a keyboard from some remote location. I get paid to be in the same room as my colleagues, face to face. I need to be in London for my work. It's not like I could just pop into town for meetings. I spend at least 40 hours a week immersed in my job.

How bad do you want it?

In order to remain in London, I've slept on night busses, in parks, on heathland, in squats and in hostels.

Nobody is underwriting my risk. When things have gone wrong, it's meant homelessness. I don't mean the kind of homeless where you sleep on your friend's couch. I mean the kind of homeless where you're dirty and you're getting robbed in a park, freezing cold, snatching some fitful sleep in a bush.

Lots of petulant children will run away to London, get tired, hungry, dirty and find out that being homeless is pretty shit. They will slink off back to their families. I don't have that option. Homeless means homeless, in my case.

Sometimes being homeless means living in a dormitory with 15, 20 even 30 people, all snoring and farting. People come into the dorm and make a racket all night, and then they cause an almighty disturbance in the morning, as they fuck about with their luggage. Theft is a constant problem. People have taken my wallet out from under my pillow while I slept. None of your valuables are safe, even in the lockers, which are often prised open with crowbars. It's exhausting, being in such close proximity to so many other human beings, night & day, 7 days a week. It's relentless.

Sleeping in the parks and on heathland is welcome relief from the stress of having to live in such close quarters with other people. The weather is a problem though: fine summer evenings are all well and good, but rain and cold weather are miserable. Muggings and thefts are a nightly occurence, as well as fights and generally being preyed upon by other homeless and vulnerable people. To keep clothed and clean is hard enough, let alone keeping a few possessions safe.

When I was in the position where I knew that homelessness was a very real threat, I prepared. I would sit with homeless people and talk to them for hours, making notes on how to survive. I found out which night busses you could sleep on. I found out what the laws around squatting were. I learned how to spot overgrown back gardens of houses that were unoccupied, that could be used as campsites. I learned where the soup kitchens and Hare Krishna gave out free food. I learned how to spot friend from foe. I learned how to stay away from trouble. I learned where the cheapest hostels were. I learned how to stay reasonably clean and presentable, using showers in railway stations and such like.

A friend stayed one night in a youth hostel, and asked me where you could get a shower when you were homeless. He was clearly considering the possibility of homelessness, as if it was some jolly adventure, a silly fun game, When the day of reckoning came, his parents paid for him to go home and stay with them rent free. He knew which side his bread was buttered. His risk was underwritten. He didn't want to stay in London badly enough. He had backup options.

My backup option is a tent and a sleeping bag.

I've lived in doss houses, with 8 people in a room, all working black market jobs and spending all their money and spare time messed up on drugs. I've seen the grimmest possible working and living conditions. I've been bitten to death by bed bugs. I've experienced the cold and the damp of London's shittest accommodation, where people just about eke out an existence.

Now, I live in a lovely apartment, but it comes at a price. Not only is the rent extortionate, but I also have to drag myself into a job that I hate, 5 days a week. There are few words to describe just how incompatible my job is with my mental health. There is so little stimulation and challenge, that the hands of the clock seem almost stationary. I'm battling severe depression and 'recovering' from addiction. Do you think it's a great idea to be so alone with my thoughts, with no distracting tasks to hurl myself into? Do you think it's a great idea that I have to be a steady dependable worker, turning up on time and working all the hours, when my moods are unstable and I'm exhausted from all the stress and anxiety of getting myself off the streets and off the drugs?

It's a fucking miracle that I'm paying my rent, paying my bills, servicing my debts, working my job, pleasing my bosses, putting on my suit and looking like I've got my shit together.

I really haven't got my shit together, and I'm not taking passengers or carrying any dead wood, because I don't have the spare capacity to do that. It wasn't that long ago that I was hospitalised with the stress of it all. It's still a pretty desperate situation, even if it doesn't seem that way on the surface.

What more do you want from me? What more can I give?

Why don't you get a job? Why don't you try working full time? Why don't you try taking responsibility and paying the rent, the bills and paying off your debts?

It sickens me that anybody would suggest that I could be doing something more fun and in line with my values. It's a joke that anybody suggests that I could take my foot off the gas, take some time out. How the fuck could I do that, when it's me who's the responsible one round here, holding down a job and paying the rent & bills.

Yes, it's OK if you can go back and live with your family. It's OK if somebody's there to pick up the pieces of your failed idle fantasies, when they don't work out. But a fuck up for me means homelessness and destitution. Nobody underwrites my risk.

It's not that hard though: get a fucking job and work it, or fuck off back to mummy. Don't hang around in my fucking home town, mooching off people and talking about your grand plans, when really you're just sponging off those who are genuinely working hard. I'm sick of the bullshitters.

I know the difference between those who are genuinely industrious and hardworking, and those who expect to get paid for nothing. I know the difference between those who are genuinely facing homelessness and destitution if they don't get off their backsides and work their way out of a bad position, and those who have a comfortable position to fall back on, if they hit [not very] hard times.

My charity seems to have attracted more than a couple of idle wasters, but thankfully, I also have some other people who recognise that I'm vulnerable and can be taken advantage of. I'd go mad if I didn't have the counsel of true friends, who can tell me the truth, when people are looking for a free ride at my expense.

I don't mind giving people a chance. I don't mind taking a risk. I don't tend to lend more than I can afford to lose. Everybody deserves a break.

I would never ask anybody to work harder than I'm prepared to work myself.

But, if you don't share in the risk, you don't share in the reward.

Tags: #homeless #london