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I walk out the office doors to a bitingly cold February evening, after a particularly draining late shift, with the incessant buzzing of the panel lighting still humming in my ears and my glazed, obsidian eyes stinging from the hours spent gawping at the constant glare of a computer screen. Wrapping my jacket tightly around my body, I stare at the cold London skyline and look forward to my weekend ahead of doing absolutely nothing.

“You fancy a pint, Frank?” Connor mutters, his voice tired, cold and without even the slightest murmur of inflection. He, like I, has fallen into a listless existence. I know Connor through work and, though I’d call him a mate, our friendship has never managed to transcend the pub.

“Ah, no mate. Trying to knock it on the head again” I say, my speech equally monotonic, rendered tired and stale in the way only a telesales job can.

I go through stages of time when I want to get my head straight and try to figure out exactly where I’m headed in life. These moments of clarity are usually immediately preceded by finding out some nugget of information about how Danielle, that’s my ex-wife, is settling into post-married life as a young, liberated divorcee, so happily, and today is no exception. She just gave birth to a beautiful, healthy, baby boy with her new partner. I know this because Facebook knows this. We divorced over two years ago after she decided our marriage didn’t fit with her Vogue magazine template for happiness. We’d got married young. Too young, or so everyone told us, and as it turned out, everyone was right. I was 20 and Danielle was 19 and we were in love. We were naive, but we were definitely in love. I adored her. So, when she had gotten pregnant, it seemed less like this crazy leap of faith, and more like the right thing to do, so we had gotten married. But Danielle miscarried and everything changed after that. I started drinking more and she found herself in a marriage that didn’t give her what she needed. We were divorced within two years. I think it’s the silence that hurts me most.

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I fell apart after that. Big style. It wasn’t pretty and, though now I have been able to accept it, I suppose I haven’t really moved on. I’m caught in an empty loop of what might have been. That thought is always there, subject to fluctuations in intensity, but always there. Like the cognitive equivalent of ringing in the ears. Yeah, what might have been is a tough pill to swallow and one that invariably gets stuck in your throat.

Giving up drinking has always been the key to sorting myself out and, though this has been evident enough through the years, I can never seem to stick to it. The feeling of apathy, that I have come to rely upon so heavily, since potential melted into mediocrity and ambition gave way to routine, keeps me stuck in an almost metronomic swing between recovery and relapse. The desire to do things differently, without the conviction to see it through. This sense of apathy hangs like a thick smog in my brain, choking my desire to live a different life, rendering it infirm. It doesn’t take a genius, or even vaguely enlightened mind, to see, I need to break this cycle. Cut through the veil that keeps what should be from what is. This, however, is easier said than done, being that I take a daily prescriptive dose of apathy, with a glass of water, every morning, after breakfast: Paroxetine, trade name Seroxat. It’s a chemical attempt to curb my intrusive mind. I ritualise a lot. Count in my head. Symmetry provides relief. It’s exhausting at times. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot to mention, a big one for me, I have a persistent fear of the number three and do anything I can to avoid it. No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.

“Really?” Connor says, adding disappointment to his already languid cadence, “Giving up drinking? Okay, well, good luck with that.” His tone sardonic.

I pause as we stare at each other over an imaginary line, “Well, I’m heading that way, so I’ll walk with you”.

Without the aid of alcohol, our conversation is stiff, terse and punctuated by lengthy silences. Once we get to the pub, I can’t help but look in. The place looks buzzing and I know in a few beers time, I could be heading that way too. I can feel myself gazing at the taps on the bar like a kid at the window of a sweet shop. My problem with alcohol is knowing when to stop, that is to say, I don’t, and I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t a big factor in Danielle leaving me.

Connor guiltily kicks at one of a dozen empty laughing gas canisters that lay discarded on the roadside, glinting delicately in the paling light. He knows that he probably shouldn’t try to tempt me but I guess he’s scared of the silence.

“You sure you don’t want to come in?”

I pause and look at him with as much conviction as I can muster, “No mate, I’m going to pass.”

“Okay, well if you change your mind, you know where I am”.

“Ta, but I won’t.”

As I turn to walk away, I already rue my decision to leave, thinking only about the night I’m leaving behind. One last time flashing neon in my head.

After making my way through the bustling station, I jump on the tube, pick up one of the many copies of The Metro that lay about the carriage and read an article about gang violence as we hurtle through the underground tunnels towards Mile End. Outside the station, I immediately indulge my aggressive need to consume, buying four pieces of chicken, chips, onion rings and two cokes. Grease covers my lips and fingers, as I eagerly stuff big handfuls into my mouth, washing it down with huge swigs of drink.

I’m pretty sure that’s the root of all my problems; my desire to binge and an inability to control it. I do it with everything; food, obviously. Alcohol- my broken marriage is a testament to that. Even sleep. With nothing to get up for, I’ve been known to sleep away entire weekends. Even more if I’m hung over. And every time I’ve got into drugs, I had a tendency to chase the high down a rabbit hole until I collapse in the darkness.

My mind turns back to Danielle. I don’t begrudge her happiness, I really don’t. She deserves it. I suppose I’m just jealous. I want what she has got. Happiness, love, a family. I could nicely settle into a life like that. I look to the sky, remember why I’m doing the whole sobriety thing again, and will myself to get my sober head on the pillow tonight. It’ll be a win. That’s what they say.

I walk past an old beat-up phone box on Eric Street, plastered with hand-written stickers offering massages, complete with a mobile number, and wonder whose life is on the other end of that number. Suddenly my shit job doesn’t seem so bad either. I think about this as I meander my way through various side roads towards my flat, past rows of tired houses, with stains from the polluted London air scaling the brickwork. Past the row of cigarette shops, tags and postcodes daubed on their weathered fronts. Past the gangs of boys that sell their weed on the street corner.

A plane passes overhead following its flight path into City Airport and, as it comes into my line of sight, all I can think of is mechanical failure, hijackings, explosive devices, pilot error, suicide bombers, a sudden loss in cabin pressure, and those oxygen masks dropping from the overhead containers. My pulse starts to accelerate as the thoughts run unchecked. I need to calm down. I need to get a grip. I recite symmetrical patterns of numbers over and over until I get a hold of myself. 1-2-2-1, 2-1-1-2, 2-1-1-2, 1-2-2-1. I get caught up in this circle of thoughts and lose a few minutes, at which point I become aware of a presence over my shoulder walking behind me. I instinctively turn to look, coming face-to-face with this pasty-faced, skinny guy, hair swept back, steeped in sweat. In the dimming evening light, he looks even more despairing than he otherwise might, stricken of hope. We stare directly at each other for the briefest of moments. I don’t know whether it’s the look of desperation in his deep sunken eyes or the way he holds himself but I can feel violence in the air.

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You may have even read some of my first novel, Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown, the first excerpt of which I released here. Just knowing that lights me up more than you’ll ever know. Thank you.

But here’s the honest bit. Default Setting seems old to me now. I wrote it a long time ago, and while I’m still glad it exists, I’ve now finished a new book that I think is much stronger. Something I’m genuinely proud of in a way I never quite was with the first one.

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So here it is. It’s called Magnolia Burning, and the first part lands on Substack on Tuesday (1st September 2026). Like Default Setting, I’ll be releasing it in extracts, one a week, on Tuesdays, with each part accompanied with my usual comic book illustrations.

A few of you got in touch after Default Setting to say how much you liked seeing the characters rendered that way, and I loved the feeling it gave the piece too. I’ve spent time working with software again, sitting with what my new characters look like, and I’m pleased you’ll get to see them for the first time below. It makes the whole thing feel a good deal more real to me.

So, what’s Magnolia Burning all about?

The story

It’s about three Londoners, one night, that none of them walk away from unchanged. It starts with a single act of violence that drags them into each other’s orbit whether they asked for it or not.

Each of them ends up backed into the same corner, forced to answer the same impossible question: how far would you go, in the name of love, justice, or simply staying alive, before you become the very thing you were afraid of?

You’ll meet each of them in turn, one story at a time, and only gradually understand how close they’ve actually been standing to one another the whole time.

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The idea behind it

Magnolia Burning explores three narratives that look entirely unconnected on the surface but underneath, are actually tightly woven together.

It happens more often than we probably realise, if you think about it. A decision made in one person’s story quietly becomes the wreckage in someone else’s. Something that looks like a footnote from one character’s side of things might be the whole plot from someone else’s. I couldn’t let that idea go.

That’s really what the book is about, how people talk themselves into the things they do. None of my three main characters think they’re the villain. Love turns into possession without anyone noticing the moment it happened. Justice turns into vengeance the same way. And survival, when it’s desperate enough, always finds someone else to hand the bill to.

Let introduce you to them...

Frank Bowden, 24 (Part One)

Frank has spent his whole life negotiating with his own mind with his OCD keeping him locked in careful, controlled routines. Then one chance encounter forces his hand, and something in him gives way. He learns fast that the first line you cross is the hardest. After that, they get easier. Frighteningly easier. And there’s a point past which the man he was doesn’t get to come back.

DCI Laret, 62 (Part Two)

Laret used to believe in the job. Grief has since rewired him, and what started as a pursuit of justice has curdled into something closer to obsession. The law starts to look less like a foundation and more like an obstacle. When it can’t give him what he needs, he must decide whether he’s willing to become the kind of man he’s spent his career chasing.

Evie Stillman, 19 (Part Three)

Evie’s trying to outrun addiction and a past that doesn’t stay buried easily. She wants to believe redemption is still on the table for her. The trouble is that the past tends to catch up with the people who run hardest from it.

That’s them, in a nutshell, though a nutshell never quite holds what these three are carrying. I’m fond of all of them and their imperfections that make up their flawed psyches, but I think the one I’m closest to is Frank.

His OCD isn’t something I researched from a distance. If you read my article OCD: The Hijacked Mind about living with it, you’ll know why I wanted to give it to him specifically. I wanted to write about something I really understood from the inside, something that had shaped me. They always say write what you know – and so I did.

As well as posting Magnolia Burning in instalments, I’ll still be slipping in a few regular articles about my usual musings on life and whatever’s moving me that week. Is there anything you’d like me to write about? I tend to gravitate toward mental health and OCD, addiction and self-destruction, masculinity and vulnerability, loneliness and urban isolation, and writing and creativity as a survival mechanism.

Thank you for reading this far, and for sticking with me through Default Setting and everything since. It means more than I can really say.

I think Magnolia Burning is the best thing I’ve written, and I can’t wait for you to read it. I’ve never been more nervous to put something out there!

They say everyone’s got one book in them. I wanted to know if I had two.

Tuesday, you tell me!

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I released my novella Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown here on Substack in parts earlier this year (if you’re new to my page part one starts here) and it’s now available to buy on Kindle and paperback.

BUY ON KINDLE HERE (£3.99)

BUY ON PAPERBACK HERE (£8.99)

If you’ve been with this from the start, reading my protagonist Edward stumble chapter by chapter, collecting prescriptions and disorders like other people collect hobbies, thank you. You already know the story. This is just the bit where you can put it on a shelf, or hand it to someone who refuses to read things on a screen, or leave it face-up on a coffee table to seem interesting.

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Here’s what I learned getting it onto Amazon, because nobody tells you any of this until you’re three tabs deep at 1am wondering why your spine text won’t sit straight.

The tool: Amazon KDP

I used Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, which lets you self-publish Kindle, paperback, and hardback editions. There’s a genuinely huge help section covering the actual mechanics, so I’m not going to walk through every click here, it’s mostly intuitive. It just takes considerably longer than you think it will.

If you want to review a sample (recommended), then the whole process takes between 4 days and a week - and that’s assuming you’re happy with the first sample. You may be able to do it quicker but that’s what it took me - mainly as I obsessed over things like designing the cover the layout.

The preliminary bits

Before any of the design work, there’s a set of book details to fill out: language, primary marketplace (I went with.co.uk as I’m based in the UK), categories, and keywords etc. Since you know your book better than anyone, I won’t tell you how to do this. I will say it’s worth doing properly and not rushing, since it’s what helps people find the thing once it’s live. Use as many categories as you can that are genuinely relevant and when in doubt go with the recommended option.

Creating the cover

Covers are far more achievable now than they used to be, thanks to AI. By far the best results I got were from ChatGPT. Worth knowing I ended up paying for a month’s subscription, because free-tier edits ran out fast once I started iterating.

I’d already done illustration work for the Substack release. Dark comic book style images that some of you liked, so I picked the one I felt worked best and built the cover around it. There was one shot I kept coming back to: Edward locked out of his own house, from Chapter 3. I’ve always liked that image of him alone, contemplating his own thoughts (it’s currently my Substack profile photo), so it felt like a no brainer that it would form the basis of the book cover too. ChatGPT nailed the design in a handful of passes.

Getting it onto KDP was the fiddlier part. I used their built-in Cover Creator rather than uploading a finished file, even though the whole design was already done elsewhere. I found it gave me more flexibility. If you are uploading it without the Cover Illustrator it needs to be a PDF.

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I picked the plainest template and stripped out all the text boxes, since the design work was already finished. Not necessarily the “correct” way to do it, but it worked.

I went through more than ten versions for the cover to get it to fit Amazon’s Cover Creator template. Spine text smaller. Move this up slightly. Change that. Make this bit more in the style of that bit. It is always fiddlier than you expect.

Leave a generous space around the edges (more than you think you need) since it gives you some wiggle room to fit the design to the page properly. And make sure you leave a gap on the back page near the bottom and the spine where Amazon will add a bar code.

Here’s the final front and back cover (version… at least 10!). Thankyou Chat GPT!

One thing I’d actively avoid: don’t design a visible spine line into your cover image, meaning literal lines or edges meant to mark where the spine sits. In my case the edge of the wall happened to line up with where the spine would but Amazon’s own production process creates the actual spine based on your page count and trim size, and it won’t necessarily line up with wherever you’ve guessed it should go. Let their system handle it.

And worth knowing, a human at Amazon actually reviews the upload. It’s not purely automated.

Uploading the manuscript

This part needs proper attention too, margins, spacing, page breaks, all worth checking carefully rather than just glancing over.

What worked for me: ask an AI for standard book margin sizes, apply them in Word, and put a page break after every chapter. I went with 1.5 line spacing (it looked better on the page), cream paper, 5” x 8” trim, gloss cover, Garamond font at size 16. None of that is gospel, it’s just what suited this book.

One genuinely useful trick: when you launch KDP’s previewer there’s an option to “Have us try to scale your file to match your book’s trim size.” Click on that. That single setting solved more formatting headaches than anything else I did.

Flick through the entire book on screen before you approve anything. Check every chapter starts the same number of lines down from the top, I did 5 or 6 spaces down on each one. And this is exactly why the page break after every chapter matters: if you end up nudging something down by a line, it only shifts the text within that chapter, not the whole book. Without the breaks, one small adjustment early on can ripple through everything after it.

And make sure you add a few blank pages at the start and end of the book like you get in all books.

Ordering a proof copy

I would definitely do this. It’s a few pounds. I ordered one, wasn’t happy with it – so went back and made more tweaks, then got a second one that I was happy with. They take about 3-4 days to arrive so factor that into your time line.

Getting a proof copy taught me more than any amount of on-screen previewing. Line spacing that looked fine on a monitor didn’t quite work in the hand. The cover text wasn’t as centred as I’d thought. None of it registered until I was holding the actual book. If you’re the type to overthink and re-check everything (and I definitely am, check out my post on living with OCD) this step is not optional.

Setting up an author page on Amazon

Not essential but I’ve got more books planned, so it made sense to have a proper home for them rather than treating this as a one-off. Here’s my page.

Drafting text for your cover(s)

This is worth getting right as it will appear on the back cover as well as in the Kindle store and on Amazon’s page when people are ordering a paper back.

I lead with a question to hook the reader – and settled on the final text below

For endorsements, Default Setting was previously featured in Shortlist Magazine, so I pulled a quote from that coverage. But there are book blogs out there actively reviewing independent titles, and if you can get even one endorsement, it does a lot of work toward making a self-published book look and feel professional. I also know the writer Graham Hurley, through a mutual friend, and asked him directly for a quote. Thankfully he said yes.

There’s something quietly liberating about realising you can just make your writing available to everyone. I say make the thing, put it out into the world, and let it find whoever it’s meant to find. I don’t think a book needs a huge audience to be worth writing. It needs the right one, people who actually get something from it. That’s always been the whole point, for me.

I’m genuinely pleased to finally have this out there in a form you can hold. If you read it back when it was going out chapter by chapter, or you’re picking it up fresh now, I’d love to know what you think.

You can buy Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown on Kindle here and on paperback here

Thanks for reading.

Will (and my faithful doggo friend) Rafferty

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Everyone who knew Suzie, in some way, been changed by her murder. I have spent my life drowning in its undertow, plagued by the sense that it could have been stopped. But after reading Luke Bennett’s file, for the first time in years, I saw a way out. A way to restore balance. I had come full-circle. No longer the boy who was unable to act to prevent the unspeakable, but now a man who can stop it happening all over again. A man who can protect another family, another community, another innocent life, from experiencing the same pain and horror that played out on Barkley Row. Only a person who stands outside the confines of law, untethered by consequence, and willing to be cast as the villain, can prevent such an evil from repeating itself. And evil, once again, has a name. This time, its name is Luke Bennett.

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Like Zakariah Finch before him, Luke Bennett stands openly and unashamedly before the eyes of the world, courting malice, defined by iniquity, acting on impulse, with no regard for consequence. I could not stand by, shackled and restrained by societal norms, rendered inert by the morally acceptable, and watch another tragedy play out to its obviously predictable end. Malevolence took away the life of an innocent, and now I had to become it to stop it happening again. Even the brightest stars in the sky need darkness to shine.

Bennett’s file contained his contact details, so I spent a week or so, waiting in the wings, just watching. Observing. Getting to know his routine. He was unemployed. He didn’t appear to have many friends, and his interactions with others were minimal. He spent his time meeting a parole officer, attending appointments, down the pub, or alone in his flat, which was a ramshackle ground floor place, a few miles from where I was living. The security was non-existent and it didn’t take much to force a window.

Even on the night when I found myself standing, in his bedroom, over his sleeping body, I never experienced a single moment of doubt. I just thought about Suzie. I thought again about how everyone could see the danger in Zakariah, and how I saw, so clearly, that same danger in Bennett. And I thought about how many lives would have never been destroyed had someone had the courage to do then, what I was about to do now.

With one swift blow of a hammer to his head, he was incapacitated. He was a big bloke, so moving his unconscious body and tying it to a chair was no mean feat. But I managed it. I had to. I did consider putting him out of his misery there and then, but he needed to know the sacrifice he was making. He needed to understand why he had been chosen.

As he sat limp, and unconscious, tied to a chair in his bedroom, I stared out the window into the night sky and thought about the world at large. I thought about how one act can change everything for so many, and knew that there were lives, out there somewhere, who would not be decimated by evil, purely on the basis of my actions tonight. There would be one less threat in the world. One less person whose sole purpose was to inflict pain.

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After about twenty minutes of sitting, watching and waiting, he started to come round. His eyes initially rolling in his head before they eventually focussed on me. The last person they would ever focus on. That was a beautiful moment. Knowing those eyes would never be given the opportunity to stare down at innocent victim.

Blood from his head wound had run down the side of his face and begun to pool on the carpet at his feet. He tried to say something, but with a sock gaffer taped in his mouth, his words were senseless.

“Don’t worry” I said to him in a gentle tone, “all will become clear, in good time.”

His eyes widened and he struggled in his chair. Though the sounds coming from him were inaudible, his eyes told me everything. An arrogant and vengeful stare. Cold like the killer he would no doubt become one day, should I have allowed it.

“I guess you want to know what the hell is happening, huh?”

I got down to his level and stared deep into his eyes, and proceeded to tell him the story of Suzie Clayton and Zakariah Finch. Sweat began to form on his brow and the look in his eyes started to shift from the intense hatred into a genuine fear as he realised what was coming. I spared him no details and took my time. He needed to understand. I told him how I knew him. How I knew all about him. About his past. His criminal behaviour. His escalating and senseless violence. I explained to him clearly and methodically that I knew what he would go on to do, and how society would allow him to. And I told him how I couldn’t.

Slowly, I pulled a blade from my pocket, and as it glinted in the moonlight, I think he finally accepted his fate. As one final act of kindness, and one that he surely would not give to his future victims, I removed the tape from his mouth and pulled out the sock, allowing him the opportunity to speak, for one last time.

After his coughing and spluttering finally subsided, and through rasping gasps, sodden with fear, he managed to get a few words out, “Who…..Who are you?”

I smiled at him, held his stare intently, and calmly answered, “I’m Zakariah Finch.”

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If you liked this and are interested in reading some more of my fiction then please check out ‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ - my semi-autobiographical novella about addiction, mental health, and the messy reality of being human. Its available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

Over time, some fade, but the darkest ones become imprinted, destined to play out in both conscious thought and dreams alike. Uncontrolled, unnerving, and unbridled. They rise and fall within us like the tides of the sea. Sometimes calm, understood and in perspective, while at other times, they crash down with such destructive force that we become consumed and totally immersed. Drowning in a thought stuck on repeat. Though we can still see the world from beneath the surface of such haunted memories, it is warped, muted and distorted. Completely out of reach. And with the darkest of memories, even in the calmest of waters, we know a storm is always coming.

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I’ve spent my life trying to leave behind the memories of what happened on Barkley Row, all those years ago. But as fast as I run, or as far as I go, they are always with me. A permanent imprint that endures over space and time. A soul branded by a nightmare. Whenever I close my eyes, I always see those two pictures that flooded the media; sweet little Suzie, full of innocence and hope, and the dead-eyed stare of the boy who took her from this world.

I have built myself a life since the horror of those days. Away from London. Away from the past. I have a job, nothing to write home about, but a regular pay cheque. I’m in a relationship with a wonderful woman called Maria. She’s filled with compassion and empathy, and has, as a successful counsellor, the skillset to help me, if I ever wanted her to. But I have never breathed a word about those days. I keep them locked away in some dark recess of my mind and though they are never far from conscious thought, I just can’t vocalise them. I don’t want those poisoned days to spill into my new life.

Of all the emotions that are irrevocably tied to Barkley Row, the one overriding thought is, why was it allowed to happen? I thought it at the time, and I still think it now, and have never found an answer that sat comfortably with me. Everyone saw what had been growing in Zakariah. As his behaviour and violence escalated, it was obvious that he was heading towards some awful event. It was like watching a car-crash play out on video in slow motion. With the passing of every frame, another opportunity to prevent a tragedy was missed.

I was just a kid when it all happened. I didn’t have it within me to control the monster of Barkley Row. I couldn’t have stopped him. I didn’t know how. But others did. Adults. Parents. The police. Social services. The wider community. They all just watched the birth of a demon, let it grow untethered, and allowed it to play out to its tragic and awful end.

Now, fifteen years on, Zackariah Finch has been released from custody, paroled after only twelve, and he walks anonymously among us. Protected by a meticulously planned, and tax payer funded identity. Hidden behind the aging process that turned the boy into a man. But whatever he tells himself, whatever his bank cards and driving licence say, he is, and always will be, Zakariah Finch. The personification of evil, lurking in the shadows. He could be your friend, your co-worker, or your boss. He could be the man you are meeting from the dating app. Maybe he’s your lover, or even your husband. You wouldn’t know. How much do we know about anyone? Nothing more than they allow us to. What people present as, and who they actually are, rarely align. And in Zakariah’s case, it’s a total disconnect. Governmentally sanctioned to protect a killer at the expense of all those around him.

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Over the years, the question of why everyone failed to act, has grown inside me from an initial youthful observation, right through to a full-blown obsession that constantly gnaws away at me. All the while, knowing that little Suzie would be alive if someone had done something. If someone had done what, by all standards of public-decency and law, is deemed utterly immoral, an innocent little girl is alive. But morality is a sliding scale, defined inherently by your own belief system. And when you have seen, up close and personal, what malevolence and depravity can invoke, when it has been so close to you, part of your world, part of your childhood, that it forever casts a shadow over your life, your base line sense of morality collapses.

As the obsession grew and grew, so did my desire to comprehend. My thirst for understanding drove me to pour over every book in the library on people like Zakariah. I found articles, read research papers, joined online forums, watched documentaries. Any source of knowledge available to me, I devoured it. And there it was, staring me in the face. Staring us all in the face, like an uncomfortable truth that we just can’t bear to look into the eyes of, for fear of compromising our own code of ethics. There is a profound commonality to these people. All the truly evil killers, the most sadistic and vile, they all share similar early life experiences to Zakariah. It is like some morbid right of passage they all went through to become a being absent of the qualities that make us human, and commit acts beyond the bounds of conscience.

As with so many things in life, there was a significant amount of luck involved for me to finally see things clearly. To know what must be done. I guess you could call it an epiphany, of sorts. If my girlfriend hadn’t decided to take a bath at the exact moment that she did, if she hadn’t neglected to lock her laptop screen, if my phone hadn’t been charging in the bedroom and my friend called, the moment could have been lost forever. But these factors combined at precisely the right moment for me to be in the bedroom during the brief window of time, before an idle computer screen automatically locks. In front of me, in that moment, was the answer. On the laptop, were the case files of her clients. All the broken people trying to change. Trying to overcome whatever darkness had clouded their lives, and I couldn’t help myself. I read. I read the private thoughts, darkest secrets, biggest fears and crippling weaknesses of people I didn’t know. People I should have never known.

It didn’t take long before I found the case notes of a 20-year-old man named Luke Bennett and it terrified me. He had recently been released from prison for GBH and one of the requirements of his parole was the compulsory attendance of various psychological therapy sessions. His profile matched Zakariah’s so closely it was like staring into the past. A different person from a different place in a different time, but the same malicious trajectory. The petty crime escalating into full blown violence, the regular thefts, the exclusion from school, the arson, the cruelty to animals, the abusive homelife, the drugs, they were all there. As I did, all those years ago, I knew where it would end. But this time I could stop it. This time I could act. In that moment, I knew exactly what had to be done.

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If you want to read the final instalment of The Boy, it is available here

Sometimes, people come into our lives that change the course of existence forever, opening up parts of us that we would otherwise have never known existed. Life refracted through a prism of circumstance so powerful that what could, and should, have stayed dormant is woken, and we become a person we were never meant to be. For me, that person was a boy named Zakariah Finch.

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My childhood was spent in East London, growing up on an estate called Barkley Row. A place that would later, tragically, become synonymous with the name of Zakariah Finch. Up to the age of 14, Barkley Row was the place I called home. There was a group of us kids, all within a few years in age of each other, that would hang around together. We were brothers. It was us against the world. A family. An inherently dysfunctional one, but none of us were strangers to that dynamic. We were thick as the proverbial thieves. Though it didn’t take long before the proverbial became the literal. I think every single one of us, at some stage or other, had been caught with some stolen item under our t-shirts, trying to make a break for it out of whichever minimart was unlucky enough for us to stumble upon.

We’d play truant from school, stay out all hours of the night, get drunk, and smoke cigarettes whenever we could get our hands on them, but we weren’t bad kids. We were just kids from broken homes that survived on benefits, living in council accommodation, on the fringe of a society that had shown us, in no uncertain terms, that dreams were not meant for people like us. There was an ‘us against the world’ mentality that was engrained within, and that built a community that looked after its own.

Though Zakariah, through proximity of age and location, was part of the group, he always seemed to be on the periphery. On the outside looking in. His dark obsidian eyes held a cold vacant stare, like he was somewhere else entirely. Like he looked upon a different reality to the rest of us and he couldn’t quite comprehend it. There was always something strange about him. Something uncomfortable. Something dark.

Though none of us had it good, Zakariah had it worse. He was the only son of an alcoholic mother and a particularly vicious step-father who seemed to take joy in tormenting him. From a young age he had been ridiculed after his step-father had taken to hanging out his soiled bedsheets on the front gates. He never lived that down, forced to wear it like a scar on his psyche for years and years. After what came to pass, there’s not a single kid on the estate that doesn’t question whether those taunts guided history, or simply punctuated it.

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Zakariah was always getting into fights with the other kids. He had a quick temper and a vicious streak that would see the slightest provocation erupt into a torrent of physical violence. He was always getting caught shop-lifting, giving cause for the police to become regular visitors to his home. This, in turn would, of course, anger his step-father, resulting in the administration of round after round of his own, particularly vicious, brand of corporal punishment.

As he got older, things only got darker, and you could see it in him. It was reflected in his escalating behaviour. Vandalism, arson, drugs, and possession of a blade, were all added to his record. He threatened teachers and was permanently excluded from school. There were even rumours that he had killed his neighbour’s cat. Something evil was growing in him and we all could see it. His vacant stare had twisted into a sinister leer that unnerved anyone who had the misfortune of being caught in its crosshairs. It was only later, when he became what he became, did everyone come to see that stare as prophetic.

That day came on a beautiful, scorching hot, summers afternoon in July, when little Suzie Clayton, the younger sister of one of the boys in the gang, was found dead, behind the community bins. It would later emerge that she had been strangled. Something changed in everybody living on Barkley Row that day. Innocence was ravaged and the pain was real for everyone. It could not be filtered through a TV screen, or rationalised away as something that happens to other people. This was on all our doorsteps and there was nothing we could do. You can’t hide from an evil that’s scarred into the memory of a community. Destined to be a horror that forever hangs over every resident.

What seemed like the world’s media descended onto the estate. For weeks, news teams camped on the roadside in huge vans. Masses of TV equipment were set up on pavements. Photographers would be constantly on the hunt for pictures and, even as children, none of us were deemed to be off limit to approaches by journalists asking for comments. It was a feeding frenzy, and the journalists were starved. It didn’t matter that the community was shattered. It didn’t matter that hearts were broken. They didn’t care that we were struggling to comprehend the loss of an innocent among us. None of it mattered to them. The story needed to be told and they would have their pound of flesh. Still dripping with blood, ideally.

For a long time, the police presence remined huge, as was the intense public scrutiny on the case. Every newspaper, TV screen, and social media field was plastered with Suzie’s picture. The picture of a pretty little girl in a white summer dress, pink bow in her hair, and blue eyes that sparkled with all the things she could have seen and done had her life not been, so cruelly, extinguished. That picture is etched into the soul of the British public, and probably the world, given the intense attention the case got.

It didn’t take long before the police had someone in custody, and though the world would have to wait until after the trial to find out the name and face of the monster that could act with such barbarity, everyone on the estate knew who it was. His absence since the police announced they had a suspect in custody, merely confirmed everyone’s suspicions. Zakariah Finch. With all the warning signs, how did we allow this to happen? And why did little Suzie have to pay for our oversights and inaction, with her life? This thought has stayed with me, ever since the day they found her.

From the first day he was taken in for questioning, Zakariah was held in custody right up to the point of the trial, and no one from the estate ever saw him again. The community tried to move on and forget, but no one really thought that was possible. His name was never spoken. But this refusal to talk about him, seemed to only lend more weight to the evil he brought into the world. He became an unspoken fear. A dark presence that bound everyone together in remorse and guilt. He became the reason why no one could ever really trust their neighbour again. He was why the kids didn’t play out on the estate anymore, and he was the cause the of eery silence that now hung over Barkley Row every evening, from dusk till dawn. He was one of the communities own, and the community had failed to act to prevent all this from happening.

I feel no guilt when I say this, but he should have been put down like a dog before any of this happened. Everyone knew he was bad. Everyone knew something awful would eventually happen with him. I know you cannot punish someone for what they haven’t yet done, but had the community acted on its gut instinct, had people heeded all the warnings and done what would have, at the time, been unthinkable, that beautiful little girl would still be alive, and it would have been the evil that is Zakariah Finch laying cold in the ground. That is a thought that has haunted me every day since.

The case took over a year to come to court and the trial lasted for about three weeks. For all that time his identity was a closely guarded secret, but on the day of the verdict, the judge decided that it was in the interest of the public that the reporting restrictions were lifted and the world learned the name and face of true evil. The photo that was released to the media was an old school picture. His face grinning at the camera while his eyes told a different story. It is that picture of Zakariah that is burned onto my retinas. It is that stare that haunts my nightmares. It is that face that was the last thing that little Suzie saw, and there are some days where I cannot bear that thought.

There was public outrage at the sentence; being 14 years old he would be eligible to apply for parole after only ten years. The world couldn’t cope with that and it only got worse when it was announced that, upon his release, he would be given a new identity to start a new life. The hate for the boy was intense, and rightly so. His parents’ home was constantly attacked and vandalised, and they were abused in the street until they were finally hounded out of London. But even with Zakariah locked away and the family that nurtured his evil driven out, nothing could ever be the same again. Graffiti adorned the walls of the estate, either vilifying Zakariah or paying tribute to Suzie. As soon as the council got round to cleaning it away, it would spring up again. But graffiti or not, it doesn’t make a difference. Everyone carried the memory of it all in their hearts, and it broke some people. The lucky ones got out of the estate, moving away in an attempt to move on, but many weren’t so fortunate and were forced to live in a place indelibly marked by tragedy and haunted by the memory of a monster that someone could have stopped.

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I lock eyes with the anxiety-ridden mess that stares, accusingly, back at me from behind the mirror, and I know that it has all been a lie. Mistaking acceptance for identity, I’ve become little more than a puppet, dancing on the strings of other people’s expectations. Every spoken word curated for acceptance and validation. Every action a performance. A manufactured version of a person, scavenged from the facets of the revered, and haphazardly pieced together one by one, have sculpted an identity where authenticity has been replaced by the farcical, and where the walls I put up to protect myself from rejection have become the parameters of my own confinement.

Beneath the suffocating masks I’ve forced upon myself, and crushed under the weight of false identity, there is nothing more than a gaunt, hollow-eyed, ghost. I made myself a stranger, then sat back and watched as the colour slowly drained from me. I exist now on some plain of ambiguity where my life is cast in the shadow of what I thought was expected. I am anything you want me to be, yet simultaneously, nothing at all. Void of substance, character, and soul. An empty vessel.

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I look deep into the eyes of my own despondence, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when the person became the persona. Likely rooted in the vulnerabilities of adolescence, where clothes, style, tastes, interests, abilities and preferences dictated our place within in an economy of acceptance, and where one wrong step invoked banishment to the doldrums of youth culture. Then, later, fused and compounded within an adulthood dictated by a social currency in which all my assets are counterfeit.

For all my motivations, for all my reasons, this hiatus of self was all for nothing. For less than nothing. The caricature that I concocted melted into the background, the responses tailored to the feelings of others fell on deaf ears, and deference was met with indifference. All I succeeded in was finding was an alternative path to everything I tried so desperately to avoid. Respect, belonging, and loyalty are concepts just as fictional as the masks I wore.

The real me, the one I exiled, is lost, and the persona that was supposed to protect, only manages to exist on the periphery. All I am left with is anger. It swells and throbs inside me with the inevitability of a sunrise. It’s tarred on my skin, pumps through my veins, clogs my arteries and destroys my heart. It’s imbedded within synaptic clips and muscle contortions. It’s in every time I excused the behaviour of others because of a self-engrained belief that I’m worth nothing more. It’s in my apologies for existing, interpreting my very being as an unwanted infliction the world it didn’t ask for or deserve. It’s within the emotions I buried and responses I filtered to fit a narrative that didn’t even consider me. It’s in everything.

I thought I was angry at everyone and everything, but how can I hate the world for responding to no one with nothing? It is not the fault of people for being blind to the invisible man. What isn’t even there cannot be overseen.

Collapsing on my sofa, amidst the discarded takeaway boxes that still contain the remnants of the deep-fired, calorie-laden diet that has come to be a staple of my routine, I stare at the ceiling and light a cigarette. Who the fuck am I? And where do I belong? All I know is that I am none of the identities I’ve concocted, and belong nowhere that I’ve been. Peace can only come once my mendacious existence falls like a house of cards in the wind, but unpicking a weave of lies built on a bedrock of deceit, inevitably leads to collapse. Some foundations are so rotten that renovation is no longer an option. Only destruction. But, after all, revolution only comes with the fall of the regime. So, I’ll burn it all down, and if I choke on the ashes, then so be it.

The bleep of the phone brings my attention back to the present. Social media notifications. A simulation of a simulation. I can practically hear my own whiney voice begging for love and acceptance in every crafted image and every scripted comment. This gallery of inauthenticity is the first target in the cross-hairs, and I feel an immediate sense of relief once it’s deleted. The next, my dating profiles. I reread all my sales pitches, words woven from the fundamentally fictitious. I replace the About Me section, carefully crafted by the advice of hundreds of online forums and tutorials, with two simple words, Not Applicable.

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I start to feel a sense of ease that I haven’t felt in decades. Honesty really can set you free. Laying back on the sofa, I smoke the cigarette down to the tab and my eyes come to rest on the framed print of abstract art I have hung on the wall behind my TV. I stare at it, wishing it evoked some kind of excitement in me. Wishing I recognised in it what the Shoreditch Hipster who sold it to me saw. The price was exorbitant. A pretension premium. And I paid it. I fucking paid it! I struggle to my feet and wander over to it and take it off the wall. It sums up everything I hate about myself; a pathetic desire to be the person I think I should be. To gain some kind of artificial respect and acknowledgement from someone who I don’t know, and don’t want to know. In that moment something just snaps in me and I slam it into the floor over and over again, like I’m destroying all the different versions I’ve spent my life pretending to be. Imitations of self.

The frame splinters as shards of glass shoot across the room but I keep going and going and going. Smashing it into the linoleum floor until my hands are bloodied from and torn apart by the broken pieces. I breathe deeply. Blood drips to the floor pooling on its imitation oak surface and I look at the space where the print hung. It is so empty. So, using my bloodied finger, I adorn the eggshell white surface with two words. Ground Zero.

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If you liked this and are interested in reading some more of my fiction then please check out ‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ - my semi-autobiographical novella about addiction, mental health, and the messy reality of being human. Its available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

There is no sun. There is no earth. There is no night and there is no day. No form, no matter, no place. There’s no beginning and there’s no end. No distance, boundary or direction. No up and no down. No body or brain, or you, or me. Just vibration, colour and a yearning suspended in an oblivion where existence teeters on the precipice of the abyss, meaning is hidden in shadows cast from nothing onto nowhere, and the concept of time is ineffable. Both surreal and profound, dreamlike yet authentic. Everything just is, and so am I.

The realm blooms and morphs in an effulgence of colour that endlessly unfolds as I flow along iridescent shafts of light that bend, twist and invert. For all the beauty that cascades and flows here, there is an absence. Though I don’t know who I am, what I am, or even if I am, I know there is something else. It’s like the place that memory once occupied, though vacant, still holds the remnants of something different. An innate understanding of a primordial existence. An ache for something missing.

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The spectrum ripples as light refracts and bends, and a sound from the other side of nowhere echoes and reverberates, distorting the harmonic resonance of which I am one. A strange familiarity that pulls at the fibre of a memory that doesn’t exist. Recognition without understanding. Within the glow, embers of darkness soar, flecks of shadow trailing in their wake, and a twisting and turning blackness tracing where they have not yet been. They build and build to the point of frenzy, until they block out all the colour, shrouding the light in shadow, and drowning the beauty in a veil of nothingness and all becomes deathly silent.

The darkness is endless, like there never was anything else. But gradually, oh so gradually, something starts to appear. Broken lines. Distant, faded and fragile. Somehow, I know they mean something. I search whatever I am to find answers for questions unknown, trying to make sense of something I know I am supposed to see. But in a space without limit, where reason is paradoxical, logic has no place.

All I am left with is a yearning that I cannot understand. Nostalgia without memory. And the lines just hang there. Suspended endlessly. But slowly, so very, very slowly, these lines turn to contours, the contours into shapes, and texture and shade drip onto the ethereal canvas. A constellation of shadow and light dances and delicately entwines forming the outline of an emotion and memory flickers. I see a face. The face of a woman. A face I know. The face I built a life with. The face that I love. The face of my wife, and the veil drops in an instant. It all bursts through.

Though she cannot see me, I am transfixed by her. In her tear framed eyes, exists only pain, and her screams tear at me. A phone falls from her hand as she drops to her knees, hunched over a still, pale, lifeless body, surrounded by discarded pill packets and an empty bottle of wine. I remember. I remember it all. The body is mine.

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She pumps at my chest, begging for life to reignite. Between her fear-stricken wails, words stumble and stutter out, “Come on…. Pl…. Please….. Please……” But there is nothing. No movement. No sign of life. As tears stream down her face, I feel her so completely. I feel her fear, her pain, her panic, her confusion, and her deep impending loss. The loss of the life she thought she had. The loss of a love that was meant to last forever.

It tears at her with a brutal and unforgiving savagery as I see it all flash before her eyes. I feel the pain and torment malignantly spread across space and time. Friends and family asking themselves why. Wishing they did something different. Asking themselves how they didn’t see it. I feel the guilt that will hang over them for the rest of their lives, and I am not there to tell them that the guilt is not there’s to bear. But bear it they will. I feel these emotions as if they are my own. They are my own.

Emotions that I have given to all of them in a poisoned moment when I lost sight of everything that mattered. I see the malignant darkness encroach on their existences. Destined to cast any moment of happiness that they will ever experience against the backdrop of a yearning that can never come to pass; reality does not bend to longing; it doesn’t yield to emotion. It is set in stone. I want to take it all back, but that chance has gone now. Some decisions cannot be undone. Some choices are final. My gift to the people that stood by me throughout my darkest times- to destroy their worlds without explanation or compassion.

In that moment there’s a loud knock at the door and she pulls herself to her feet, rushing to answer it. As her frantic footsteps fade, the room momentarily drops into silence. The kind of silence that is irrevocably tied to death, and I’m left there, staring at my body that lies lifeless, cold and grey. Outside the lights of the city sparkle like diamonds adorning the cold and unforgiving world I chose to leave behind. The cold and unforgiving world I chose to leave the love of my life behind in, alone and broken. Her future stolen from her.

Moments later, three paramedics rush the scene. The first drops to his knees, commencing his well-practiced and methodical assessment.

“Mate, can you hear me?” he says as he looks for signs of life. “Mate?” he says again, slapping me across the face.

No response.

Immediately he starts checking for a pulse and breathing as my wife stands close by, still sobbing. Just staring as she watches the trust, love companionship and future she believed in collapse in real-time.

“How long’s he been like this?”

She struggles to get the words out between the tears, “I…….I don’t know. Just got….. just got in.”

“What’s he taken?”

She motions to the pill packets and the empty bottle of wine laying on the floor and the second paramedic scrambles to pick them up.

“Amitriptyline. Possible TCA.”

“Get an IV.”

He nods and immediately tries to find a vein in my arm.

“I got no pulse and he’s not breathing normally. Starting compressions. Check the airway.”

These words cause a cataclysmic shockwave and my wife collapses to the floor.

“Get a monitor.”

Another paramedic unpacks equipment from what looks like an oversized briefcase as the first cuts open my T-shirt before they attach the pads. One under my left armpit and the other on my chest.

“You okay?” he says to her as he works away.

She just stays there, motionless, collapsed on the floor, processing everything and nothing all at once. A terrified look in her eyes, like she’s not only staring into the abyss, but the abyss is staring right back into her.

Once the monitor is properly attached and turned on, the screen comes to life with violent and irregular squiggles.

“Analysing rhythm…….. We got VF, shock advised.”

“Ok, stand back everyone, shock him.”

“Charging. All clear.”

He hits a button.

A bolt of lightning tears through this place, and as thunder claps, I feel an intense pain. After a seemingly eternal absence of any physical sensation, my first reaction is one of shock; I cannot comprehend it. Then comes the burn. A slow burn that crescendos to an all-encompassing torture.

Immediately he is back pumping at my chest.

Amid the chaos and fear, comes the gentle hum of distant sounds, like the sweetest melody amidst an inferno. All calm. All beautiful. All happy. Images of sweet memories fill the room, covering every surface, like a tapestry of love veiling a nightmare. Though all the sounds come at once, and the imagery entwines, overlaps and morphs, I hear it all. I see it all. I feel it all. I see the pride in my father’s eyes when I came into the world. I feel my mother’s love, relentless and without question or compromise. The soft tone of my grandmother’s voice as she rocked me to sleep, as an infant, swirls and soothes. The good times I spent with friends stare back at me and I know our bond is still there, if only I’d reached for it. The excitement I once felt at the start of each day seems, once again, to be real.

I see the moment I met my wife and feel us falling for each other all over again, and remember that it was only in that moment I really understood what it meant to be truly in love. I see myself helping others, others helping me, genuine acts of empathy, compassion and kindness, and I know I got it wrong; people are not inherently bad. I feel the beauty of art, music and poetry, and understand that there was another way. I see family reunions, birthdays, Christmas’s, happy times and feel the love. I hear it all. I see it all. I feel it all. But my body lies lifeless like a cancer at the centre of everything, and my wife’s tears continue as her heart breaks into a million pieces. Each one forever haunted.

“Ok check again.”

The other paramedic shakes his head.

“Again. Everyone clear.”

Lightening again flashes and everything starts to blur. I can still hear the panicked echoes swirling and spinning, and then comes the pain again. More intense this time, and just as it gets to a peak, there is a stillness where everything stops. Gradually, the twisting and turning luminescent beams return, spinning to infinity. But this time, I am not alone. Within the miasma of everchanging tonal brilliance, I see a silhouetted figure, warped and contorted, beckoning to me. A pull that is inescapable because I am this place, and so is he.

Suddenly, something shifts. Not obviously at first, but in some unquantifiable way. Where there was once vibrance there is now only imitation. The decline continues as what is left of the colour blackens and turns to ash, like grace reduced to torment. Then even the ash corrodes and there is nothing but silence. A silence so long and cold that even the piercing scream, that eventually ruptures this obsidian prism, seems merciful.

The dark figure and I become as one.

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If you liked this and are interested in reading some more of my fiction then please check out ‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ - my semi-autobiographical novella about addiction, mental health, and the messy reality of being human. Its available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is defined by the NHS UK as being “a mental health condition where a person has obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours”.

While the condition has gradually made its way into public consciousness, often accompanied by stigma and ridicule, there does still appear to be a misconception of what obsessions and compulsions actually are within the sphere of OCD. This is particularly evident to me when I hear someone, half-jokingly, say they are a ‘bit OCD’ about keeping their desk tidy, or claiming they’re having an ‘OCD moment’ when they are focussing intently on completing a task.

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But, obsessing over something, in this sense, is not the same as having your mind hijacked by intrusive thoughts that arrive unbidden, suffused with torment and bedlam. And feeling compelled do something, in the wider societal context of the word, is fundamentally different to having to act out a certain set of behaviours, usually repeatedly, in order to process those thoughts and gain some, usually momentary, sense of calm. Even in 2026, with all the work that has been done around mental health awareness, there remains a genuine lack of understanding. Sadly, however, this is not limited to OCD; it simply reflects a deeply entrenched public misconception of all mental illness.

Before we go any further, I want to caveat the content in this article by stating that I am not an expert on OCD, only on my OCD.

The Thoughts (Obsessions)

I’d like to provide a little context and explanation of what, on a good day are unsettling thoughts, and on a bad day, are outright harrowing ones. While everyone’s experience of the thoughts and obsessions experienced as part of OCD are deeply personal and nuanced, from speaking to others and reading around the subject, there does seem to be some degree of a common thread; bad things happening.

When I say bad things, I mean terrible things; for me, it’s death, disease, accidents, pain, destruction and collapse, and my experience is always centred around such things happening to those I care about. And when those thought-loops come, they run like some kind of morbid show-real in my mind’s eye until I successfully engage in the behaviours (compulsions and rituals) that allow me to process them.

These thoughts can come out of nowhere, but they can also be triggered by what is going on around me. I could be watching something on TV and, if a story about something bad comes on, my mind will often instantly race off down a dark tunnel, placing people I care about in the exact situation. This is anxiety inducing, as you can probably imagine, and the only way to alleviate this anxiety and bring my mind back to rational thought is to act out certain rituals numerous times until it feels right again.

To add another layer of complexity to it all, anxiety in itself, induces more intrusive thoughts. So, it is often possible to get caught in this cycle of having the thought, experiencing anxiety in relation to the thought, which then exacerbates said thought, cueing increased anxiety levels, repeat until, well, I’m sure you can imagine the state one could find themselves in. I feel particularly bad for people who have flown with me as, having a fear of flying, I morph into a distressed, agitated, twitching mess. That is, unless I have access to alcohol and Valium, but that is a story for another time.

The Rituals (Compulsions)

My rituals are time consuming, embarrassing, endless and have constantly evolved and changed throughout my life. I had rituals about touching the ground in a certain way, about turning on and off lights or opening and closing doors with the ‘correct’ image in my head. I have been consumed by not walking on the cracks in the pavement, counting my steps, and saying certain words with the ‘right’ image in my head. If it wasn’t what was deemed to be the right image, I would have to say it again, and again, and again, until it was right. I would spend inordinate amounts of time checking light switches, cookers, taps, locks, windows and anything else you could think to check before leaving home. It even got to the point that checking these things, for sometimes hours on end, was not enough; I started taking videos myself on my phone every day carrying out these checks so I could watch myself back, chasing a feeling of reassurance that could keep me on an even keel.

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I have also had this persistent need to avoid the number 3; not crossing roads by 3 cars, never having 3 of anything, and if anyone ever patted me on the back 3 times, I would somehow have to manufacture a situation where they’d do it again, just to get to 4 or beyond. The fact I can even type the number 3 now is testament to the distance I have come over the years. For a long time, I would have to refer to it at that number or 2+1.

The door checking thing got so bad that, at one point, I actually managed to break the lock on the reinforced front door to my flat, requiring an emergency locksmith and a bill of in excess of £500 to get back in. That was a bad day; I couldn’t go to work. I had to call in, and for a second, I considered being honest about the whole situation. But can you imagine how that conversation would go?

“Hi, it’s Will, I’m really sorry, I can’t come in today.”

“Why not?”

“The front door is broken.”

“What do you mean, the front door is broken?”

“Well, I broke it.”

“You broke your own front door?”

“Yeah, I was checking it, and it broke.”

“How can checking a front door break it?”

“Funny story. I have actually been rigorously checking it by pushing down on the handle every single time I have left the flat, and today, the whole locking mechanism collapsed internally and now I am locked out. I need to get a locksmith.”

“Why are you checking the door to the point that you have broken it?”

“Why? Well, if I don’t, my brain tells me that bad things might happen to the people I care about.”

I didn’t think he was ready to hear that reasoning, and I was absolutely not ready to provide it, so I lied and said I was sick.

One of the worst aspects of the rituals are when they strike in public. Though I am now used to them when they happen, and I have desensitised myself to it all, people’s reactions, even if unintentional, are painful. The ‘what are you doing?’ questions, or the perplexed looks, the laughing, or in the worst cases, the insults; they all hurt; I know what they are thinking. I know what they are thinking because, in those moments when I am not being so kind to myself, I think it too.

Confusion

If all this sounds nonsensical to you, try living it. I know with every fibre of my being that whether I check a door or not, or walk on the cracks, or whatever the current ritual happens to be, it has absolutely no impact on what will happen to anyone, and does not in any way shape future events. But knowing this it makes no difference. It is totally irrelevant. On a mental and emotional level, I guess I am hard wired to react like it does make a difference. As if it is the one truth. Set in stone. A prisoner of convictions that I don’t even believe.

As an adult with OCD, who has completed countless sessions of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and is medicated daily, I have found a way to live with this. The CBT and the medication have done just about enough to take the edge off and I can now live a relatively normal life. But, as child, I had none of these coping mechanisms or treatments.

The onset of my symptoms happened around the age of 12 or 13. I didn’t know what OCD was then. I would be running around having fun and then, bang, into my head pops this image of something terrible happening to a love one, accompanied by an innate and overwhelming sense that this image in my head would come to pass if I didn’t enact some sort of ritual. It happened hundreds of times a day. Even then, I knew it was nonsensical. But that knowledge didn’t change a thing. A war was raging, in my head, and rages still; an irrational sense of the impending doom that I could bring to my loved ones, verses reality, reason and logic. This duality of thought creates a tension that the mind finds unbearable and totally untenable. Sadly, the misguided emotional certainty always wins out over any intellectual awareness. It’s exhausting.

The condition only seemed to worsen over my teenage years and, despite finding out about OCD somewhere along the line, I was never able to vocalise it. It didn’t make sense to me, so how could I even start to try to explain it to another person? I was embarrassed, so I kept it all inside until I was 24 years old, when the constant thoughts and rituals, coupled with the confusion, shame, and the mental exhaustion of trying to manage it all, finally broke me. I fell apart in front of my mother who immediately booked a doctor’s appointment, starting me on my road to finding some semblance of normality. I so sorely wanted to write ‘started me on my road to recovery’, but recovery, at least to me, implies finality- that I have beaten it; that it had been banished from my mind, and my thoughts are be no longer invaded by the intrusive, nonsensical, and relentless. That is not the case; there is to be no recovery, only containment.

Writing

Mental health is a topic that fascinates me, and is one that I have explored a lot in my writing. Largely, in a bid to getting a better understanding of myself, but also, in my own little way, to try to help normalise conversation around, what is still for so many, unspoken. My previous novella, Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown focussed on depression, self-harm and addiction as the driving force behind a man’s actions (If you want to read that, I’ve linked to the opening chapter below).

I am excited to announce that I will be releasing my new novel on Substack in the coming weeks, and there will be lots more information on that coming soon. All I’ll say for now is that one of the central characters lives with OCD. His story explores the texture, rhythm and absurdities of a mind negotiating obsessive thoughts from the inside. Throw in a life-changing event and things get very messy, very quickly. Though the story is fictional, I have drawn a lot on my own experience in creating him, and have grown quite fond of him in the process. I wonder if his life will resonate with anyone else. I would love you to read along as sections are published on Substack twice a week as the story unfolds.

Has anyone had any experience of OCD? Whether that be personal or through a friend or family member, I would love to hear from you.

Thank you for reading and following my work. It means the world to me.

If you liked this and are interested in reading some of my fiction then check out ‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ - my semi-autobiographical novella about addiction, mental health, and the messy reality of being human. Its available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

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Looking back on a part of my life where psychological collapse, chaos, and terrible decisions shrouded my mind in a monolithic darkness that had me longing for a life that was confined to the past, while simultaneously wishing that same past had never even happened, brings with it a whole plethora of emotions. None of them being good, and each etched in remorse.

Many people who have read Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown have kindly reached out to me, commending me on my bravery and courage for sharing such a personal story and exposing my vulnerabilities to anyone who cares to read them, and I can say honestly, hand on heart, I am forever grateful to those individuals.

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The level of compassion, understanding and empathy that I have been afforded is way beyond what I either expected or deserve. But I consider myself neither brave, nor courageous in this endeavour; I am now at a point in my life where I feel that if I am going to be judged, ridiculed or shamed for sharing a story defined by psychological turmoil, then so be it.

I feel like I have worn a mask for most of my life, trying to fit the mould of what I thought other people wanted me to be, to the point that I don’t really know who I am. So, putting out Default Setting in a public forum felt like a step towards not hiding anymore.

The Shame I Still Carry

Though I don’t feel shame or embarrassment about the whole experience in relation to it actually happening (I see it for what I believe it to be: a man at the end of his tether without the appropriate psychological tools at his disposal to manage a situation that was unravelling faster than he could comprehend), shame is something that I do certainly feel when it comes to what I put those close to me through. This is never more poignant than when thinking about my brother.

My Brother

As documented in the novella, we lived together in a place in Mile End, so he was forced to have a front row seat for my total emotional implosion. Now that the sands of time have passed and I have gained perspective on that whole period of my life, I often wonder, was it worse for him?

The constant worry of not knowing where I was or what I was doing, and even if I was going to walk back through the door, must have kept his anxiety levels teetering on a knife edge. Even when we were together, my whole demeanour would have done nothing more than fan the flames of fear. Albeit, the answer to whether it is worse for those close to the individual in turmoil or not is never going to be clear-cut, being nuanced in a complex web of intricacies, I do believe that for at least a significant element of it, the answer would be a resounding yes; being seemingly helpless to stop a loved one slip into the abyss is a pain far worse than anything I could have inflicted on myself.

(Where I'd stand every morning, rehearsing how to look fine)

To compound that, he tried, he tried so very hard, time and time again. The number of occasions he sat with me, listened, offered advice, comfort and compassion, was innumerable. He supported me to create schedules to try to get a grip on the situation, found support groups so I could talk to those with similar experiences, drew up diet plans and exercise regimes hoping that the whole healthy body-healthy mind mantra would make a difference.

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He paid for psychiatrists, bought me self-help books, sent me podcasts, and inspirational stories. But all of these intercessory efforts to facilitate a change in me consistently had two things in common. Firstly, they would be met with a positive response where I would say all the right things, agreeing with everything he told me, and promising to give a good go at whatever this week’s intervention was.

In those brief windows of time there would be hope. But secondly, and without exception, that hope would be hijacked by my impulsive pull towards self-destruction as I would quickly revert to type, continuing my downward spiral towards oblivion, seemingly ignoring the advice, and abandoning all his good will. There is one hard, cold and brutal truth that I have learned from this…

You cannot save someone that doesn’t want to be saved. That must come from within.

Are you struggling right now? Or perhaps you’re the one on the other side of it - the brother, the partner, the friend who keeps showing up. If you recognise someone like that in your own life, tell them what they mean to you. Be grateful for them, while you still can. I know I am for mine.

Guilt and Depression

My relationship with depression, whether in the period covered in my novella or otherwise, has always been framed by a strong sense of guilt. I felt it then, in the fleeting moments of clarity that punctuated the chaos, and still feel it now.

With all the horror, war, famine, pain and suffering that exists in the world, how dare I feel depressed? What have I even got to feel depressed about? I have my health, despite working so hard to destroy it. I have a loving family and close friends. I am lucky enough to live in a country that is not being decimated by war or famine, and affords me all the rights, freedoms and opportunities that I could possibly desire.

(Where I stayed for ten nights, see chapters 12 - 14)

I don’t live in poverty. I received a good education and have never experienced discrimination, abuse nor neglect. Yet, despite all this, I find myself in bouts of depression and self-loathing, and, as Default Setting describes, when I came up against a situation (a personal heartbreak) that, let’s face it, is more than likely to figure at least once in most people’s lives, I responded by repeatedly smashing the self-destruct button like it was a fucking speed-dial.

This is something I have given much thought to and, despite knowing that depression is not something that can be objectively measured against a specific set of circumstances, then applied as some sort of linear scale to quantify the level of pain any given individual will experience, it is still something that sits often with me. These days I try to use that sense of guilt as a motivator to deal with my mental health in a more pragmatic way, focussing on what I can do to manage it, rather than trying to destroy it, and myself in the process.

Relationships Since

Since the dark days described in Default Setting, I’ve been in a couple of relationships. One lasted five years — she’s a great person, and I’m pleased to say we remain friends. In hindsight, those relationships had a much deeper sense of love and connection, and though I have not been in a good place when they ended (I mean, who really is when a meaningful relationship ends?), I have never reacted with such self-directed ferocity.

I suppose a significant amount of it is down to being older now, having more life experience. But being able to look at things a bit more objectively and respond in a more rational way has been fundamental. Plus, there is a further motivation now; I lost a lot of time being in that state of mind, and acting the way I did, and ultimately, did it help? No, it didn’t.

All it did was serve to delay me restarting my life, and the older I get, the more conscious I am that the clock is ticking. For all of us. We get one shot at this life. Spending it wallowing at the bottom of a bottle, or with a bank note shoved up my nose trying to numb a feeling, and escape reality, is not how I want to spend the fleeting time we have.

That is not to say that I think it is easy, far from it, and my heart goes out to anyone stuck in a similar destructive cycle, but my experience has taught me that if I want to get through these periods of time there are definite things I should and should not do. Excessive alcohol and any amount of cocaine fall squarely into the latter category.

Things like confiding in people I trust, trying to eat well, having some kind of creative outlet, exercising, spending time with loved ones and cherishing those relationships are what I reach for now. They are my safety net, and, knowing all too well my capacity for collapse, not having them in place would be akin to living on a fault line without an emergency escape plan.

Though what I have written here is hardly revolutionary, it is the commitment to following it through that is the key, and that is something I am still learning. But one day at a time, right? We are all entitled to fall now and again, it’s not what will define us. What defines us is what we do once we have fallen.

How Close It Came

Gaining perspective on that dark period of my life has definitely been a source of personal growth, however, only now, in retrospect, do I feel a genuine sense of fear about what could have become of me, or even if I still would be. I didn’t think about it at the time, and, if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have cared. But I think it is no exaggeration to say that I came close to it all being over on numerous occasions. It was even said to me by various people that I had a death wish, and maybe I did.

Whether it would have been directly by my own hand, through my consistent abuse of drugs and alcohol, the bad decisions I continuously made, the dubious company I kept, or the situations that I would regularly put myself in, I am sure it is only by the grace of God, or karma, or good-fortune, or luck, or whatever you call that unquantifiable factor that somehow got me through, I am still here at all. Whatever it is, I am truly thankful.

(The skate park on the Southbank at Waterloo, London. Where the story of Default Setting starts)

Though I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it then, it is clear to me now, that, had that eventuality come to pass, it would have been intensely felt throughout the lives of those that genuinely care about me forever. I am not trying to put down, or cast judgement on, those who may have succumbed to such a sad ending, not at all; I know the darkness, I know what it is like to feel like there is no escape from it, I know how we lose sight of the truly important things, and I know, only too well, the pain of an emotional collapse and the overwhelming desire to rid ourselves of it. But, in hindsight, I know that old adage is so true; it really is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Writing as Therapy

Writing Default Setting started out as therapy, nothing more than that. I had been to numerous counsellors, therapists, and psychologists over the years who had all encouraged me to write down how I felt, but I had never actually done it. I’m not sure why I decided to do it on the particular day I did, but it is a decision that I am so happy I took.

I really believe in the power of creative expression to process pain, manage emotions and help restore us to some kind of mental equilibrium, and I would strongly encourage anyone who is suffering to explore it. Whether it be writing, music, painting, sculpture, or anything else you enjoy, there is a restorative power to the creative process that has helped me, and so many others, so much.

Why I’m Sharing It

It is now my hope that by putting it out there, someone may read it and feel like they are not alone in their experience, that it is a part of being human, and that it is ok to share, because I know that seeking the support of others, before things get to the point of crisis, can potentially save lives.

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has read and engaged with the story, because as much as making experiences like this public is so important to encouraging others to seek help, it is equally important for those in crisis to see how people respond to such stories, and the response I have been given has been overwhelmingly positive and, for that, I am grateful beyond words.

One More Thing

Before I go, I’d love to hear what you guys thought.

Did you enjoy Default Setting? What stuck with you most? Was there a line, a moment, or a chapter that hit harder than the rest?

Let me know by commenting below.

Thanks, Will

‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ is now available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

(Me, June 2026)

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Will has written more about his mental health struggles including his battles with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). If you’d like to know more about that then click below..

Start making the most of life. What is the most any one life can be? I’m clueless. I really am. I mean, where do I even start?

Exercise is important, so I’m told. You know, the whole healthy body, healthy mind thing. I’ve been to the gym once, for an induction, and the trainer guy talked to me about how athletes hit the wall and push through it. About going through the pain barrier in order to make real progress and burn calories. Shit man. Burning calories, pain barriers, hitting walls? This whole exercise thing sounds like it’s going to hurt!

One of the biggest pieces of advice I was given by my psychiatrist was to get out and meet people. Avoid spending long periods of time alone. So I try to get out, meet friends. I tell them that I’m a different person now. That I’ve changed. I suppose an experience like this would change you. It’s only natural, every time I see my scars I remind myself not only of how far I can fall but also how far I can come back from.

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When you are in the middle of a breakdown, like I clearly was, you think no-one has loved and lost like you. You really believe no-one has experienced hurt and trauma like you are in that moment. In the haze of desperation you convince yourself that you are the only one. But once the dust has settles, and on a long enough time line it will settle, it always does, you see things differently. You realise that it is all part and parcel of the intricacies of human relationships. There are good times and bad times. To put it simply, you win some, you lose some. But I’m looking to the future now. Enough time has been spent on what has come to pass. Enough emotion has been drained and enough hurt has come from it. And not just to myself. This is the first time in a long time that I’ve felt like I’m actually facing forward. So yeah, I feel that now is a good time to meet someone new.

In a global population of 7 billion and rising there has to be someone else out there that you are compatible with. Statistically speaking it must almost be a certainty. So, with the odds stacked in my favour, I started looking. But where do you look? Well, we’re in an age when you can communicate with anyone anywhere through cyber space. We all have some device, whether it be a phone, a tablet, or a laptop that connects to the world-wide-web. We are living in a time when the internet can satisfy man’s seemingly endless fetishes and desires, no matter how dark or depraved they can be. We’re a generation whose life is constantly documented and updated through regular on-line profiles and postings. Carefully selected, pre-approved, social media friendly snapshots of our friends’ and family’s lives have become our template for living. In an age with all that, where did you expect me to look? And that’s how I came back to internet dating. And this, like so many other things in life, I binge on. I chat to as many girls as I can. I set up as many dates as possible. My plan was to try to overload on it and desensitise my social anxiety.

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What do you expect me to say about internet dating? That this is the modern age? It’s the 21^st century? That it’s a hassle free way of meeting like-minded singletons? No. I do it because it is a quick fix for loneliness and boredom. Let me take you through the process. You look through profile after profile after profile. A seemingly never ending conveyer belt of eligible women who fit within your carefully selected parameters of acceptability on things such as age, body type, height and so on. But people aren’t as unique as we like to think we are. With every profile I see the more similar we seem. People love to travel. People will tell you that they’re fulfilled in their careers. Everyone seems to be looking for “quality banter”, whatever the fuck that is. People like the cold side of the pillow. People find it weird writing about themselves and no one ever thought they’d end up on a dating site. But shit man, here we all are!

The similarity doesn’t end there though. I’ve found it’s replicated in the dates I have been on too. You’ll find that you will be continually having the same conversation over and over and over. I’ve gotten so into the pattern, cycle, and rhythm of the first date dialogue exchange that I’ve forgotten how a normal conversation goes. And that’s what it is- a dialogue exchange. A pre rehearsed set of lines that supposedly serve to illustrate who you are as a person.

My experience is not vast I grant you, but, since I have thrown myself into this, it’s probably better than average. What can I tell you? It’s a numbers game. You have to meet as many as you can as the chances are, you won’t be a perfect match. You probably won’t gel, and you almost certainly will not see that elusive spark that everyone seems to be after. But I guess that’s life. My cynicism is nothing if not consistent.

A few times I’ve met individuals that I like but you play it down. The more you play down the possibility that something might actually come of it, the more you hope it might. And that’s where I find myself today. I have been chatting with this girl on line for a few weeks and we have finally sorted out a date. Her name is Penny. She wants to go watch some jazz music in Brixton, but I don’t know that area too well so she is going to e-mail me a link to the venue. Although we haven’t met yet we have spoken on the phone once and she seemed to enjoy the conversation. She laughed where she was supposed to and she didn’t seem to be in a rush to get off of the phone. I took these as being good signs.

I check my email but nothing has come through yet so I decide to go get ready and jump in the shower. As I stand there under the hot jets of water I think about the night I got hospitalized and how it could have panned out very differently had the police not turned up when they did, or had I managed to seriously sever a main vein or artery.

I pick out a shirt and jeans combination to wear. The safe bet I think. Not formal, but not untidy either. That should strike the right chord methinks. I feel excited about the possibilities that are in front of me. To think about romantic relationships and feel something good at last is overwhelming. I smile a little smile to myself.

I clean my teeth, do my hair, and splash on some aftershave. I’m good to go. I open my email to check if my date has sent the venue link, and there it is. Sat right in my inbox. The two little words that could change everything. Again. Jess Sheppard, It hits me like a tonne of bricks, and then some. I instantly hold my breath and stand there motionless. Eyes transfixed on the screen. It feels like everything inside of me is falling. My heart bangs like a jack hammer in my chest. I am the proverbial rabbit in the head lights. I do nothing for a few seconds.

I try to gather my thoughts. Why is she writing to me? Why now? I want to believe that this is something that is behind me but this email, right here, right now, has made me doubt all of that. Shit, what to do? I drag the mouse across the screen and hover above those two words. Jess Sheppard. Open or delete? Open or delete? I look to the sky, as if it could provide me with an answer. Open or delete? I need to know if I have learned anything…………

You’ve just read a part of ‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ - a semi-autobiographical novella about addiction, mental health, and the messy reality of being human. The full book is available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

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If you want to know a bit more about Will (the author) and how the story of Default Setting came to be, please click below

Chapter 14. One Day at a Time

I ended up spending 10 nights on that ward, and, what can I tell you about it? Time goes slowly, very slowly and you’re bored for most of it, and, if you’re not bored you are probably asleep. Well, what did you expect from a place where happiness is measured in milligrams? Everything is regulated. Meal times, bed times, med. times: it’s all routine. Doors are locked and windows barely open. You are monitored day and night. Smoking breaks are supervised and possessions are restricted. Some of the other patients approach you and some keep their distance. You talk to doctors and nurses on occasion. I guess I could have read more or watched TV but I didn’t and so all else there was to do was to think. And I thought a lot. There’s nothing quite like a short stay in a psychiatric hospital to get you to really look at your life.

Something in me changed when I was in there. Did I have some big epiphany? Did I experience, what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity? No. I didn’t cast off the metaphorical chains that bind me and I didn’t have my eyes opened. Nothing in my life is different. It was all still the same and it all still mattered to me, but, I found myself existing somewhere new. Somewhere in between the drugs and alcohol, the depression, the self-harm, and the whole failed relationship thing. Somewhere in amongst all that I felt still. I don’t know what it was but I kind of allowed myself to let go. And I breathed. It took me to being in the most restricted situation of my adult life to start to feel free again.

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Did I get over Jess? Or, at least, start to take steps in that direction? Or, did it finally break me completely and I just don’t care anymore? Is there a difference? Maybe you just slowly acclimatise your mind and body to feeling a certain way until you accept it as the norm.

I told myself I was at a crossroads. I keep going the way I am and either die by my own hand, an overdose or slowly watch myself fall apart, losing my family and friends, my job, health, and money, or I change. So, I made the decision I had to: to change. Making that decision was easy. I’ve made it hundreds of times before in every come-down and hangover. It’s always never again. It’s the follow through I have the trouble with. So the first thing to do had to be give up drugs and alcohol.

Someone once told me that if the thought of this scared me then I’m an addict. Now, the thought of cancer scares me. The thought of losing someone I love scares me. Having a knife waved in my face, that fucking scares me. Giving up cocaine and alcohol just sounds boring. But, as the doctors keep saying, I have to replace it with something and that something is a normal life. What is normal though? Regular exercise? A gym membership? A calorie controlled diet? 5 portions of fruit and veg a day? 8 hours sleep a night? Dating? Working hard? Calling your parents once in a while? Package holidays? Mini-breaks? Saving for a rainy day?

As all the support groups I went to say, one day at a time. Speaking of support groups, I went to a few in hospital, but they’re not for me. Don’t get me wrong. If it helps people beat their demons they must be good and I’m all for them. But for me, I want to leave that life behind. I don’t want to reminisce a few times a week how fucked up things actually got. For me, in that scenario, cocaine and alcohol would be dictating my life as much in their absence as they were when I was using.

But change is hard. Everyone tells you this. I’m only in my first few weeks of sobriety and I can tell you that they’re right. It’s not just about stopping. I guess that I kind of figured that everything would sort of fall into place after that. But it doesn’t. Not immediately anyway. That takes time. So you are still stuck in the same situation and set of circumstances that caused you to self-medicate in the first place. The reality is still the same. The only difference is you no longer have that chemical filter to hide behind. So yeah, one day at a time works for me. But days can seem long, and at the moment they seem very long. You have your good days and your bad days as you’d expect and you do what you can to keep going. Keeping busy is obviously something you’re told to do and if it gets too much I try to go to sleep- to slip into the security of the unconscious.

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Today is to be my third appointment with the doctor since leaving hospital. It’s part of the care plan put in place for me to prevent relapse or hurting myself again. We talk about things like harm minimisation, substance reduction and relapse prevention. Detoxification. Regular medication. Drug rehabilitation. Crisis planning. Recovery. But they’re all just words. What it boils down to is, don’t drink. Don’t do drugs. Take your meds.

I get to the appointment and sit in the waiting room and flick through the magazines. They are all that trashy, celebrity obsessed crap. A man walks into the room, looks at me and I see a glimmer of recognition flash across his face and he takes a seat. I recognise him from the ward as he was the guy who, in a support group, had shared a particularly horrific and detailed account of how he had found his best friend dead, from a cocaine induced heart-attack, naked with dick in hand, mid-wank, in front of a laptop with hard-core pornography playing on-loop. I remember thinking, how horrible that would have been.

“Do I know you?” he asks, and before I have a chance to answer he goes on “Yeah, I know you. You was in hospital a few weeks back. Right?”

“Uh, yeah, I think so.” I hesitantly reply.

“What you been doing? I mean, you’re out………..” His comment tales off.

“Yeah, went back to work last week. What about you?”

“Just been going to meetings. You know, support ones. You doing any?”

“Nah man, just getting my head down. Keeping busy.”

“Tough! I need the meetings man. There’s no other way for me. Three relapses in 14 months are testament to that. I’m doing 90 in 90”

“What?”

“90 meetings in 90 days. I really fucking need them. Because outside….” He pauses momentarily and leans in closer towards me, “Outside it’s like there are vultures circling. Waiting for you to fuck up. And when you do they dive down to rip the flesh from your bones. But the groups and the meetings man, with all those people who understand and won’t judge you……In there, with those people, we heal together. We find strength together. We put the flesh back on our bones. Fuck it man, in there they give us wings to fly”.

He looks at me and I look at him and it feels like we share a moment, just like in the movies.

I’m glad it’s working for you man”. I say

He pauses, looks out the window, then says “Then you go back out there and they shit all over you again”.

I want to laugh at this comment but it doesn’t seem like it would be a good idea. Instead I say nothing and let an awkward silence hang in the air between the two of us. It’s at that moment that the psychiatrist calls my name.

“That’s me man. I hope it all goes well for you.”

“You too pal.”

Once we are in her office we talk about the usual things like how I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, work, life, drugs, alcohol. To be honest it’s not really much different to the last session I was in. And the one before that. And the one before that. I do feel like I just keep repeating the same old crap, regurgitating my fall from grace. I’m not really too bothered about what we talk about today as I am due to meet up with Annie after this and I’m pretty nervous about what I’ll say. To be honest I’m pretty nervous about what she’ll say too. I’m thinking the best thing to do is to just apologise as much as I can and try to focus on the fact that I’m trying to sort my life out and hope she’ll give me the benefit of the doubt. She’s meeting me though, so that’s got to be a good sign.

As my 50 minute session comes to a close my psychiatrist reminds me that if I feel suicidal I need to make my way to a hospital A&E. She says I can even call an ambulance. I agree to this but it puzzles me as if I genuinely decide to end my life, why would I consciously do the one thing that would prevent this from happening? Anyway, as I said, I agree to this before I leave.

I make my way to Mile End tube station, that’s where I’m meeting Annie. I get there a few minutes early and so I lean up against the wall and wait. As I wait there for her, out of the station walks Jas. I can’t believe it. I guess I just assumed that I would only ever see him, or any of the other dealers, if I called them. But here he is, large as life, and what’s worse is that he sees me too.

“Ed man, how you doing?”

It must have been about 5 weeks since I saw him last but he’s here now and on a charm offensive. He tells me it’s good to see me. That it has been too long. He asks me where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to. I reply with some shit about being busy. He chats away but I don’t really listen as I’m subtly trying to get him to leave. I really don’t want him here when Annie turns up.

“Listen, Jas, it’s great to see you but I’m off the coke at the moment so I’m not looking to buy anything.”

“You skint? I can let you have it on the tick”

“No. Seriously, I’m taking a break from all that”

I glance towards the entrance of the station but there is no sign of Annie thankfully.

Ignoring me, he goes on, “Man, you gotta try this stuff. It’ll get you sky-fucking-high. Like nothing you’ve ever had before man. “

“No. Thanks, but no”.

Despite my refusal he keeps pushing it.

“Listen, you’ve caught me in a generous mood. I’ll let you have a taster on the house. My gift to you.”

I’m about to decline again for the umpteenth time when Annie walks out of the station. Shit! This is the last thing I wanted to happen. She walks up to us and says hi. This, thankfully Jas takes as his cue to leave.

“See you soon mate” we shake hands, and as we do, he palms me something. I say “something” but I already know what it is. I don’t want to draw any attention to this from Annie, or anyone else for that matter, so I just take it and shove it into my pocket.

“I’ll text you my number mate, just in case you’ve lost it. See ya”

With that he leaves.

“Who was that?” Annie asks.

“Oh him? Uh, just an old friend”

Fuck, I’ve had coke in my possession a matter of seconds and I am already lying. I think of the sessions I’ve done on temptation, managing weakness, and crisis planning. Who I would call if I felt weak. What I would do to get through the tough times. Seeing warning signs. Distraction techniques and breathing exercises. They were all designed to stop me from getting hold of it. I never envisaged a situation where a dealer would give me it for nothing. It’s bypassed all my control measures and it’s here. It’s in my pocket.

Annie and I make our way to a coffee shop. As we leave the station area we walk past a bin. I don’t know why but I don’t throw the coke away. Instead I actively try to force from my mind the fact a method of disposal is right there in front of me. It’s raised all those old feelings and I just can’t get rid of it. I know I shouldn’t do it, but I can’t bring myself to throw it away either. I try to justify this to myself. I tell myself that I have a substance problem and this is just what people with substance problems do. I try to absolve myself of any responsibility. A couple of lines wouldn’t hurt. It’s not like I went out looking for it. No one would know. I just want a taster, that’s all. That’s okay right? For old time’s sake.

We arrive at the coffee shop and, despite it being busy, we find a seat. I try to get my focus back but I’m still thinking about the coke. Shit, this has really thrown me. I knew exactly what to say and now it’s all jumbled up.

“Annie, what happened on your birthday, I’m really sorry. Things got fucked up. I got fucked up. I’m sorry for all of it.”

“I know you are”. She sighs as she says this.

“I don’t know what happened. I can’t remember a lot of it. Not that that’s an excuse though.”

“Edward, I think you are in a bad place and you really need to talk to a professional and get some help.”

“I know”.

We chat for a further 20 minutes or so and I tell her all about the last few weeks. She doesn’t look or sound surprised at any of it.

“Edward, there’s something else I need to tell you.” She pauses. “I’ve been trying to think of a good way to tell you this, but there isn’t one. She pauses again “I’m moving to New York for work. It’s an opportunity I can’t pass on”

An empty silence just hangs in the air. I say nothing. Instead my selfishness kicks in and I only think how it will affect me. I try not to let it show but I’m devastated. Annie has always been there since we were kids. I don’t want to think about a life without her. I congratulate her but I think she knows I’m upset. We continue chatting for a while until she has to leave and I’m left alone. My thoughts immediately turn to the cocaine in my pocket. My sadness is driving me on to do it so I go to the toilet and lock myself in a cubical. I take it out. It’s about a grams worth. Am I going to do it? Shit! I want to. I really want to. This is so hard. Too hard. Way too hard. People fall off the wagon at times. It happens. That’s all this is. No big deal. But if I start again now that’s it for me. I think of the word’s I have said to Annie. Word’s like new start, and moving on.

I think of all the promises made to my family. All the pain and hurt I put them through. I can’t let this happen. Not again. I take a deep breath, hold out my hand, and drop it down the toilet.

You’ve just read a part of ‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ - a semi-autobiographical novella about addiction, mental health, and the messy reality of being human. The full book is available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

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Chapter 13. Looney

The following morning I am woken early so I can get some breakfast and be transferred to another hospital before the end of the nurse’s shift. I don’t eat, I’m not hungry. Food is the last thing on my mind. I try to make sense of things but I just keep thinking how my parents will be waking up this morning to the news that they have a son in a psychiatric ward.

The ward is just as quiet as the previous night. There is no sign of Michael so I just leave the bear on the bed with a note saying thank you. They call me a taxi and, along with the nurse, I am taken to Mile End Hospital.

The journey takes about fifteen minutes. Neither myself, the nurse, nor the driver say a word throughout the whole journey. There is nothing to say. Outside time rolls over, as it always does but in here I feel frozen in the moment.

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We pull up outside the main hospital entrance and the nurse pays the cabbie. I am taken immediately to the psychiatric ward where we are met by a doctor. The nurse officially hands me over and completes the appropriate transfer paperwork. Whilst the doctor and nurse converse I glance about the ward. It is one large room with areas set out for dining and relaxing. There is a TV that has quite clearly seen better days entombed in a Perspex case and various seats and sofas are positioned around it. There is also what looks like the remains of a DVD player scattered in bits about the base of the TV. The walls on the ward are painted beige and the floor is a light brown lino. Again, everything is of a neutral colouring. I guess this is standard hospital decor. Dotted around the room are various plastic plants, presumably put there to brighten up the place, but they only succeed in adding to the already benign atmosphere of the ward. Something about the lifeless plastic leaves sadden me. I look around and notice that this ward is much busier than the previous one but the atmosphere is surprisingly calm.

There are a few patients sitting around the TV. I go and sit in a vacant chair and say nothing. The nurse who had accompanied me through the transfer comes over to say goodbye. I simply nod back at him. I stay in the chair for about half an hour before being ushered into a consultation room to meet a doctor. The doctor is a petite blonde lady with an heir of quirkiness about her. I think she is beautiful. In a different life and under different circumstances, who knows, maybe we could have been lovers. She takes my hands and removes the bandages. Her hands feel soft and warm against mine. They make me think of a better, simpler time. They make me feel safe. We talk for about an hour about my childhood, my family, my relationships, my state of mind, and, of course, what I had done to myself. I break down and start to cry. It is during this meeting that it is decided that I should stay at hospital, at least for the near future anyway. The doctor says that it will give me time to be seen by specialists, and could also serve as a timeout from the stresses and strains of real life. I reluctantly agree, although, honestly, I feel that I was being told, rather than asked.

After having met the doctor I sit back down in front of the TV. At this point I find out that the remote for the TV is broken so I just stare numbly at the flickering images before me. Everything is still pretty tranquil, but this is broken when one female nurse, a large lady with a strong Jamaican accent and a voice like a fog horn booms out, “Medication for the nation!” She repeats this a few times and it whips the ward up into a frenzy of activity. Patients come out of their rooms, leave the TV area, and abandon whatever they are doing to queue up for their daily dosage. The doctor has decided I am to stay on my current medication for now so I join the others in line. Once at the front of the line I am given two small cups, one containing my medication and another containing water. I look at the nurse who has handed the pills to me. In her eyes I can see that I am just another patient, and she is right. That’s exactly what I am. I take the meds and sit down in front of the TV again. I start thinking about a boy from school whose father had been sectioned. I remember the abuse he got at the hands of unforgiving, cruel children. They called him Looney. I feel like crying but I won’t allow myself to, not in front of everyone.

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The bedrooms are off of two corridors from the main ward, one for the men and one for the women. Crossing into the opposite sex’s sleeping quarters is strictly forbidden. My room is similar to the one on the previous ward, with one notable difference: it has a window in it. The window is double glazed and opens only a fraction. There is a subtle smell of stale cigarette smoke in the room; I later find out that some patients had been using the room to secretly smoke in between their allotted cigarette break times on account of the room being vacant and having a window. I sit on the bed. Although the bed is made I can feel the cold, rubber coated mattress through the sheets. I wonder how many people have slept on this bed. Where are they now? Did they get better? I hope they did. On the pillow there are a set of standard issue hospital pyjamas. They are white trousers and a white shirt with hospital use only printed all over them in tiny blue, green, yellow and black lettering.

Later on Charlie and Janie come in to see me. I have been expecting their arrival since I woke up this morning and have been playing over and over in my head what I will say to them but nothing sounds right. It is what it is and I am what I am I guess.

They bring with them a bag full of clothes and other necessary items such as a wash bag, various books, and my phone charger. The phone charger is to be kept with the nurses for my own safety. Anything considered a possible suicide risk is forbidden. As soon as Charlie sees me, his eyes well with sadness. Something in Janie must have sensed this too as she squeezes his hand reassuringly. That simple action is not lost on me. It is perfect. They have something special. Something no one can touch, something that can’t be shared with anyone else, something beautiful. They are beautiful. I know I want this closeness with somebody, I crave it, and somewhere deep inside of me simply needs it. I mean, doesn’t everybody? Isn’t that what society conditions us to want? Society constantly reinforces this as the norm. You grow up, find that special person, fall in love, and get married, or have kids, or buy a house together, or whatever the fuck you do to cement that bond, tie yourselves together, and declare to the world that this is who you are now: complete, part of a set, a place to belong. Anyone who doesn’t fit in with this pattern is considered different or strange. At least that’s what it feels like to us singletons. Well, I speak for myself at least.

They walk over to where I am sitting and I stand up to greet them. Without saying a word Charlie embraces me. His arms tightly clamp around me. He ruffles my hair and kisses my cheek.

“Hey bruv” he says, his voice wavering with emotion.

“Hey Charlie, hey Janie”.

Janie hugs me.

“Oh Edward” she says “We have been so worried”.

“You okay?” Charlie cuts in before I have a chance to respond.

“I’m okay, I guess”. We all go and sit in a little area of the ward that is segregated for visitors. I can feel them staring at the wounds on my arms although I know that they are trying not to. What must be going through his head? Having to come down and see his older brother like this. I was supposed to be an example, I was supposed to look out for him. Not the other way around.

“What the fuck happened? I knew that you had been down, but suicide, shit man, why didn’t you talk to me?” At this point it becomes evident, or at least it does to me, that we are staring at each other across a line, a line that separates the weak from the strong, the successful from the failures, and life’s winners from its losers.

“I don’t know, I couldn’t, I didn’t know where to start, I’m sorry”.

“Don’t be sorry man, just talk to me. I’m your brother and I love you. There is nothing you can’t tell me.” Guilt starts to rise up in me like lava in a volcano. I hate myself for the pain I had put them through. I can’t look either of them in the eye. It hurts too much to do so. “So what happened?”

“Not sure, I was drunk and pretty out of it.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t fucking do that!”

“Do what?”

“Don’t try to sweep all this under the carpet and say it was all about the drink. You are clearly not happy, talk to me, please?”

I proceed to relay to them the events of the previous evening as best I can remember leading up to my hospital admission. With every additional detail offered they look visibly more upset and shaken. I hate this. I hate having to tell him this. I hate the fact that he has to hear it.

“So you are using cocaine again then?”

I nod.

“Did you ever really stop?”

“No, not really, I’m sorry”

“Don’t be sorry” he pauses, “maybe you are in the best place. You can get the help and support you need, and I am always there for you. Always.” This doesn’t so much pull on the heart strings as tear them out. I don’t deserve their kindness and compassion. “Mum and dad have been really worried, will you call them?”

“After you guys leave I will.”

My thoughts turn back to my parents. I can imagine them sitting at home. Worrying, trying to contact me and being told I was unable to come to the phone. I could see them asking what they had done wrong, and how they could have prevented this. I feel awful. For the remainder of their visit we make small talk. Charlie says he will be back tomorrow. I say that there is no need but he says that he wants to. We say our goodbyes and I go back to my room and think about the repercussions of my actions.

You’ve just read a part of ‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ - a semi-autobiographical novella about addiction, mental health, and the messy reality of being human. The full book is available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

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The journey is a short one and we soon arrive at Newham General. Upon arrival I am greeted by a couple of nurses, soon to grow to a group of about eight. The officer quickly hands me over, signs some paperwork and leaves. I don’t even get a goodbye from the man who had, for better or worse, I guess kind of saved my life. Maybe I am being over dramatic. Anyway, several nurses gather around me and mumble at each other as they remove my bandages, only to re-dress them. I wonder if their mumblings to each other mean something for a minute but ultimately, I don’t care enough to ask. These mumblings continue for a further ten or so minutes, with a couple breaking away from the group every now and then to have their own private chat, shooting glares back at me over their shoulders. What these glares mean, or are meant to mean is lost on me. I can’t imagine that the bloody mess I had made of myself is anything out of the ordinary, nor could a botched suicide attempt be an irregularity for a hospital that has its own psychiatric ward. I decide, like I have with much of the night’s events, to confine it to the back of my mind and hope it becomes a detail lost in the abyss of drink, drugs, and extreme emotions that has taken up residence in my head tonight.

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I am sat in what I guess is some kind of a waiting room. It is pretty sparse and very plain, all neutral colours; white walls, beige seats, with the occasional pine fitting all drenched in soft lighting. At this point I notice for the first time that I had not come in through the main hospital emergency entrance; there is none of the chaos that you would normally associate with a Saturday night in a busy London hospital. Fuck, there are no other patients at all. The normal hospital experience would always be too many patients and not enough staff, yet here I am, sat in a small room, alone, with eight medical staff tending to me. Upon this realisation guilt instantly floods my senses, it oozes out of every pore. I, with my self-inflicted injuries and ill thought out plan to die, command numerous staff yet some other poor bastard involved in some accident would be made to wait, vying for the attention of some over worked, and under paid nurse. The order was fucked! What’s more, I had contributed to this in no small form. Images of terribly injured people flash into my head; blood pumping from every part of the human body. I can hear the hair raising screams in my head and want to tear my brain out just to silence them.

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“Come with me Mr Staten”, comes a stern voice, cutting through the horror being played on loop in my conscious mind. I slowly get up, and walk where I am directed to, flanked by two large male nurses. I don’t ask where I am going, I don’t care. We enter a lift and go up two floors and come out at the bottom of a long corridor. The lighting is much harsher up here and I squint until my pupils have the chance to adjust. We walk briskly down the corridor and I glance up at a clock on the wall, it is just before ten thirty. Shit! I had managed to go out, get wasted, turn into a massive twat, basically ruin Annie’s birthday evening, score, drink too much, get thrown out of the bar, walk around aimlessly, make a failed attempt at slitting my wrists, get picked up by the police and taken to hospital, and be frog marched down a long hall to meet a doctor who is to assess me, all before half ten. They say time flies when you are having fun, well apparently it drags its heels when you are mentally anguished. I can’t believe it is so early!

The doctor I meet, I didn’t catch his name, seems to be a nice guy with a genuine empathy for how I am feeling. He asks the usual questions. How I feel? What had happened? What had I taken? What I thought about being here? We talked for what seemed like ages and as grateful as I am for the compassion being shown to me, it only makes me feel more and more guilty. What do I know of pain? I mean really, of the wide range of terrible afflictions suffered by human kind, my situation would barely be worth a foot note. What do I know of hurting when there is starvation in the world? War? Disease? Oppression?

The doctor’s questions go on. He has been charged with the task of trying to decipher my answers, pick through what was genuine emotion and response and what was simply chemically induced. He decides that I need to see a psychiatrist. As you can probably imagine, these services are not readily available on a Saturday evening so I am to stay the night in the hospital and be transferred to another hospital in the morning to be seen and assessed by another team.

At this point a nurse comes in and escorts me to the TV Room, where I am instructed to wait while my room is prepared. My room, wow! For a second I forget where I am. The TV room is situated a few doors down from the room that I spoke to the doctor in. It is no bigger than the average sitting room in a small house, complete with one sofa and two chairs. It seems ridiculously small for a ward which, at first sight at least, would seem to be big enough to house over twenty patients. I guess there is not much call for TV here, which surprises me as there seems to be little else to do. I turn my head and look out the door and down the dimly lit corridor where the nurse has gone to prepare my room. No one is about. At this point I realise that I am rapidly sobering up and will at some point have to deal with the grim reality of my situation with a sober brain. This is not something I look forward to.

“Hello there, you must be the new guy?” A small, skinny man, who can’t be more than thirty-five, appears from nowhere clutching a small slightly off white teddy bear that he appears to try to hide behind. He seems frail and his eyes are tired with dark rings around them. “You must be the new guy?” he says again, lowering his bear just enough to let the words out before whipping it back up to cover most of his face.

“Er, yeah, just got here” I cautiously reply. Not really knowing what to say. As it turns out this seems to be enough as a big grin crosses his face and he thrusts out his arm.

“I’m Michael” he whispers, shaking my hand.

“Edward” I reply.

“I’m Michael” he whispers again. His eyes darting around the room in a way that made me question my surroundings. I find myself starting to glance about. Is this what places like this do to you? Maybe this guy is just like me: a stark confirmation of the decisions he took and the choices he made. I mean, what is life, if not a series of events, shaped by decisions and choices? As much as I want to blame the world I know that I am at this point in my life through my own doing. I’m lost in a life of my own making. Is this what is to become of me? Shit, I have to get out of here. I push past Michael, I don’t mean to be rude or aggressive, but panic has struck me like a jolt of electricity. I have to get out of here. Michael scuttles off down the corridor with his bear in tow. I find the doors to the ward but they are locked. I pull and yank at them but they are not moving. My breathing quickens as I realise that there is no way out.

“Mr. Staten”, a voice comes from behind me. I turn around. “What are you doing?”

“I’ve got to get out of here”. I pull on the door one more time, knowing full well it won’t budge.

“I want you to calm down. You can’t leave yet, we need to assess you properly and that cannot happen tonight”. The nurse’s voice is calm and soothing. I wonder if they train them in that art. I glance back at the door. “Mr. Staten, this is an Acute Psychiatric ward, the doors remain locked at all times. You can only leave with the doctor’s expressed permission. Your room is ready for you. Why don’t you come and lie down for a while?” Resigned to the fact that I am here for the night at least, I follow the nurse down the corridor to the last room on the right. “As you are new in here, and due to the circumstances that surrounded your admission, we will be placing you under observation for tonight. This means that someone will be at your door all night, and will accompany you anywhere around the ward should you leave your room.”

I just nod back at the nurse.

As it turns out my room is across the hall from Michael’s. I can hear him scurrying around. Peering in, he is throwing things around as he appears to be searching frantically for something. My room is as sparse and devoid of life as the rest of the place. I flop onto the bed. With the infinite number of possibilities that were open to me, I never saw today panning out like this.

The nurse who had drawn the short straw of observing my first night says that he has to go get a magazine and will be back in a second. Almost instantly Michael’s head peeps around the door but he doesn’t say anything. He just stares vacantly through me.

“Listen man,” I murmur, “I’m sorry for earlier, I’m just a little freaked out. I didn’t mean to hurt or scare you.”

Michael just smiles back at me. He is a gentle soul.

The nurse returns with some magazine he has acquired. “Michael” he says in a stern voice, “Edward needs to rest, go back to your room”. Michael flinches at his every word then glances back at me and smiles.

“Here”, he whispers, before thrusting his teddy bear into my arms and embracing me. He kisses me on the cheek. “Take him. He’ll keep you company on your first night.”

As strange as it was for a grown man to do this it was an act of genuine kindness and I smile. With that he is gone.

I get under the covers and try to sleep but the effects of the coke haven’t yet warn off so my mind just won’t shut down for the night. I lie there and think about how I had got to this point in my life. I have good parents who would do anything for me, I had a good upbringing, I have been given every advantage in life, but here I still am. I think about myself and my life. I think about mistakes I have made and the people I have hurt. I think of the opportunities missed and chances squandered. I think about her. I think about how I try to block out life with drugs and alcohol. I try to search myself for answers but none come to me.

Outside the weather has taken a turn for the worse, a storm is raging and rain beats down unremorsefully. The wind howls. It is dark now. Dark like suicide. Dark like my soul which has been forever blackened by tonight’s events.

You’ve just read a part of ‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ - a semi-autobiographical novella about addiction, mental health, and the messy reality of being human. The full book is available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

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Chapter 12. Section 136

The evening had started off so well. Annie and I had been back on speaking terms for a few months after the whole business of the drunken message I had left on her answerphone. She is one of my oldest friends. It’s her birthday and I bought her this necklace that she seemed to love. I’d joined her and a group of friends at a bar in east London. Tonight was the first night in ages in which I had gone out in an attempt to socialise.

In many ways Annie and I are pretty much opposites. She is confident, beautiful and positive. I am, well, just me. She’s ambitious and driven. I’m fading away.

At first everything had been fine. I mean, I felt uncomfortable but I had wanted to go out for her birthday. It’s what people do, right? They socialise and enjoy each other’s company. I thought that I could handle an evening out with her friends but as it turns out I soon resorted to type and sat awkwardly in the corner. With it being her birthday she had been making her way round the guests saying her hellos and what-have-yous like a social butterfly.

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I had made a decision not to drink but within a few minutes of being there I realised this was the wrong decision. I had felt so uncomfortable in my own skin and this was only compounded by the ease at which everyone appeared to be in each other’s company. I watched them for a few minutes chatting, and generally having a good time and it baffled me. I knew in that moment the only way to get through this was to drink, and drink I did. And I drank the only way I knew how: to excess. This was the point at which everything started to unravel. And unravel it did. One drink turned into two. Two turned in to three. Three to four and so on until I had lost count. My behaviour went from shy and reserved, to rude and loutish. I spilled drinks. I argued with bar staff. I swore at strangers. I became aggressive. My mood darkened and I became that person I seemed to be more and more of the time these days.

At one point I had managed to get hold of some coke and this only served to supercharge my transformation into a fucking arsehole. I knew I was doing it too and I justified it to myself. I continued to drink, told Annie’s new boyfriend he wasn’t good enough for her. Called him a “fucking prick” when he had tried to reassure me that he only had the best intentions towards her. Did more and more coke. Started sobbing at some point. Became a massive embarrassment for her until she started to cry and asked me to leave. Which, incidentally, I flatly refused to do. Before finally being ejected from the bar for doing coke in the toilets. And I achieved all of this in the space of a few short hours. My descent into this dark madness was getting quicker and quicker.

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That brings me up to now. I’m sitting on my arse on the side of the road cursing everyone and everything. I’m suffering deeply at the crippling realisation that the best of my life is now behind me. There is no mandatory happily-ever-after. Life isn’t about fairy-tale endings. The future is not bright. The future is the same broken heart. The same shit job. The same self-destruction. The same disappointment. I’m a worry to my family, a waste to my employers, an embarrassment to my friends and an enemy to myself. My head is no longer in a safe place. I look to the sky and, though the stars are out tonight all I can see is blackness. In that exact moment the balance tips, only momentarily but it’s enough and the thoughts start to flow uncontrollably through me. In that moment I decide I would do a better job of living in the memory of other people.

I’ve heard people refer to suicide as the easy way out. Well, I doubt they’ve ever been in the position to know. It’s not fucking easy! There’s nothing easy about it. What’s easy about taking a decision to free yourself at the price of condemning those you love to the exact state that you want to escape from? What’s easy about swallowing a bottle of pills and waiting for your body to start to shut down? What’s easy about taking a knife and cutting yourself deep enough to rupture the veins and then just sit and watch as the blood spills out of you? What’s easy about reaching a point in your life where you would rather die than face another day? Suicide goes against our natural instincts to survive and going against that, is anything but easy.

*****

“You okay sir?” comes a deep voice out of the cold night air. It’s reassuring and authoritative.

I barely open my eyes. My mind is still flashing back snap shots of the night’s events; Annie, the drugs, the drink, the embarrassment, the words, the lights. All merging into one heaving, ugly mass, writhing agonisingly around my head.

“Sir?” comes the voice again, “I need you to respond, I am a police officer, and I am responding to an emergency call. Are you okay?” He sounds like he has repeated those words 1000 times.

I barely move, choosing to simply open one eye. The officer is silhouetted by the flashing lights of his van against the night sky. I lift my hand to my face to shield my eyes from the unmistakeable blue glare of the emergency services. Blood flows from my wrist to my face, trickling down over my cheek mixing with my tears. I’m a mess.

“Are you okay?”

I shake my head. I am lying on my back, tears running down my face, fresh wounds on my wrists, pissed out of my head. I’m surrounded by shards of green glass that, until recently, had been a bottle of Becks. A crowd of about eight people has started to gather around the police van. Presumably they want to see what all the fuss is about. People are drawn to pain. All I can feel for them is contempt. I need to feel this. I need to feel contempt so I can justify what I have done. And so I hang onto it as tightly as I can.

Maybe I have just thought about suicide one too many times.

I look at the blood and cuts on my arms and wrists. In a weird way, it looks beautiful. Elegant. Vulnerable.

The officer helps me to my feet and into the back of a police van. Once inside he examines my wounds, cleans them, and bandages them. My heart is racing. It feels like it is trying to burst out of my chest. Each beat is a reminder that I have failed. Failure: my closest companion, my shadow, my life.

The officer had arrived on the scene extremely quickly, I guess that a member of the public had seen me and called it in. The response time was impressive. I hadn’t had enough time to severely lacerate my wrists so a lot of the damage is superficial. Cutting human flesh with broken glass had turned out to be tougher than I had imagined. You really have to dig and gouge at your skin.

“What is your name, sir?”

“Edward”, I reply, raising my head to meet his eyes with mine. “Edward Staten”.

“Well, Mr Staten, you seem to be in a bad way, what were you doing?”

I shrug my shoulders before dropping my head back into my hands. I guess he realizes he doesn’t really need an answer to that question.

He goes on. “Mr. Staten, I need to take you to hospital”, he pauses, “Is there anyone I can call for you?”

I pause for a moment to think about my situation, there is no-one that I want to know about this. The officer repeats the question.

As much as I don’t want him to know about this, I need to hear someone tell me that it’s going to be ok.

“Call my brother, Charlie” I murmur, sliding my phone across the van floor. The officer picks up the phone and flicks through to Charlie’s number. I turn away and lean my face against the side of the van and try to block out the obviously distressing phone call my brother is about to receive. That’s the thing about suicide, it’s a choice, whether to live on, fight on, push through all the shit that builds up, or whether to die. But by exorcising my choice, I take away everyone else’s. There is no choice for the ones left behind. The choice I made would have condemned them to a lifetime of suffering, a lifetime of asking why? What went wrong? What could they have done? Yes, it’s my body, my soul, and my life, but suicide does not occur in a vacuum, its effects will be felt by those around us until their dying days. What gave me the right to inflict that upon those I loved? I’m worse than nothing.

The officer then puts me in the hold area at the back of the van explaining that no matter what the reason, citizens must always be transported in this way. The hold area is basically a caged off area at the back of the van with room for only two. I wonder who else had been held in its confines. I am as guilty as anyone that had sat here before me. Probably more so. I peer out through the steel mesh of this mobile cell. Through the windscreen I can see that the night is starting to come alive, bars are filling up with people out for the evening, revelling in the glory of life. There are drinkers, coke-heads, pill poppers, and MDMA fiends all out chasing the elation of the buzz. All coming together and uniting for the thrill. I haven’t felt this thrill for too long now. I witness excitement spilling out onto the streets of East London as I sit, broken, and caged.

You’ve just read a part of ‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ - a semi-autobiographical novella about addiction, mental health, and the messy reality of being human. The full book is available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

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Chapter 11. Boxing Day

I haven’t seen anyone in days and days. Charlie and Janie went on holiday about a week ago and I have cut myself off from the world as best I can. Without having the cornerstones of normality, which are having a job to go to and people to interact with, to hang these past few days from, life has lost any sort of shape and rhythm. It’s been a blur. I’ve just been drinking bottles of wine, eating re-heated takeaway, sleeping or passing out (depending on the toxicity levels in my blood stream), pissing and shitting. Seasonal cheer in the form of feel-good TV has been a constant backdrop to all this, but I can’t actually recall watching anything.

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One of the worst things about depression is the not-knowing how long this black cloud will hang over you for. There is no take this or do this and you will be fine. Even medications are a slow burner. 12 step programmes, they can take years to work through. And any type of organised therapy, well the ones I’ve done were both 22 weekly hour-long sessions, are hardly a quick-fix. There has got to be a time that you will be free from this. I mean, on a long enough timescale you will be free from the hurt you feel. Right? I’ve got to believe this, otherwise what’s the point? But every day this gets harder and harder to believe. I sometimes find myself thinking if only I knew how long. I could get my head down, grin and bear it, and just work through it. Sometimes I imagine there is a timer over my head counting down, second by second, to a time when I am free from all this. Because, as every moment passes I get closer. Right? But what happens when the timer hits zero? The alarm goes off? There is more than one way this could end.

I saw Jas again earlier today and as I waited for him I sat down at the side of the road I remember seeing a small puddle that had gathered by the curb that mixed oil from the traffic with the general murky waters scattered about the London roads. The oil had created a rainbow of entwining colours like some psychedelic stained glass window. High above my head the sun sat low in a red and blue sky illuminating elegant clouds that created a scene so beautiful it would be fit for choirs of angels to sing in. The gentle breeze carried the arches of smoke from my cigarette away with grace and dignity. All around me was charm, but it meant nothing. I couldn’t make any emotional reaction or meaningful connection to any of it. It just meant nothing. It seems life has beaten me into submission. Exposed and vulnerable, like I’m lying on my back waiting for life to nod its head at me and say that I’ve suffered enough. I need to find some strength from somewhere. But it feels like any strength I did have has long since been vacated; it left without trace. Maybe one day I’ll find it again.

The News comes on the TV so I change it immediately as I can no longer watch it; man’s destructive nature is too much for me to take. The channel I switch to is one of those countdown of the top Christmas songs. It doesn’t interest me but it’ll do.

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I do a line and swig my wine and think about how this past year panned out. I think of all the what ifs? and the might have beens. I play out different scenarios in my head, all of which end with Jess realising her mistake and throwing her arms round me. But that’s just not real life is it? Look at the state of me. Sitting alone on Boxing Day, doing drugs, and drinking to excess. What have I become? What, indeed? Well, I’m broken hearts the world over. I am tear framed eyes. I am all the letters, e-mails, phone calls, and texts she chose to ignore. I am all the things she left behind and I’m the lonely broken voice left on her answerphone. That last thing that ties us together. I bet when she hears those messages she has a niggling feeling of guilt pulling at her. I hope she does because despite her believing that love conquers all, or that all is fair in love and war, or any other bullshit cliché she decides to convince herself of, she put me here and I hope it eats at her.

It is in this cocaine and alcohol fuelled miasma of love and hate, hope and despair, anger and affection that I decide that I am going to call Jess. Probably not the best choice I’ll ever make. It has been months since we spoke and in this haze I stumble onto the idea that now is the time to do it. Things need to be said. And they need to be said now. I don’t have much of an idea as what exactly needs to be said, but I dismiss this as a minor detail. I think on some level I know this is a disaster waiting to happen. I mean, I must do, right? It’s all set up for it. The overtly emotional state of mind. The alcohol and cocaine. The fact that she is right in the moment of celebrating Christmas with her loved ones and the fact that, with one phone call, I can bring this back to the forefront of her mind. Her mind that has long since compartmentalised our relationship and put it away. Yeah, despite this, I’m hopeful.

I set my phone to withhold my identity. I do a big line and take a couple of large gulps of red wine. I wrack up a couple of other big lines and refill my glass. Just to be on the safe side. Right. I’m ready. I briefly compose myself, scroll through to Jess’ number and hit call. My heart is beating like a drum. The line connects and I hear the ringing tone. Here we go. The anxiety feels like it is building up to a point where it is ready to burst through my skin. Fuck, this is intense, and she hasn’t even picked up the phone yet. It rings and rings. And rings and rings. And rings and rings. Just as I am about to give up, a voice answers. It’s apprehensive, but still chirpy. Full of seasonal cheer. As soon as I hear her voice my whole mental state shifts. I panic and my voice croaks out a weak hello. She obviously knows it’s me straight away as her mood changes. It instantly darkens. Her voice becomes distant, as if by doing this she will put a big enough space between us so she doesn’t have to deal with me right now.

“Why are you calling me?” she bluntly asks, her voice laced with vexation.

“I miss you” I can barely get the words out.

I take another mouthful of wine to try to steady myself, and get some sort of control.

“We need to talk” I go on.

“There’s nothing to say.”

“What do you mean, there is nothing to say? I’m still in love with you and I know deep down inside you somewhere, you feel it too”

“Don’t do this Edward”

I ignore her request. “I love you”

“I don’t feel the same. Not anymore. I’ve moved on and you need to too. This is not helping either of us.”

My voice starts to break. “But I love you”. God, I am pathetic. I hate myself more than ever right now. This blatant show of weakness is sickening, but my response to this is to delve deeper into this state of decrepitude and be more tearful. More desperate. More pathetic. I go on pleading with her. At this point it begins to dawn on me quite how far I have fallen. I’m sitting here, alone, off my face, and, I’d like to say fighting back the tears but it’s just not true. I’m sobbing into my phone. Begging her to feel something she lost a long time ago and clearly has no interest in rediscovering.

I put the phone out of earshot and do one of the pre-prepared lines and it gives me a second wind.

“Come on Jess, you’ve got to feel something?”

“I’m sorry”

Fucking great! She feels fucking pity for me. Now, the last time I checked, pity was not one of the prerequisites or building blocks for any great romance. I start to get angry.

“What? You love him do you?”

“Don’t do this to yourself”

“Do this to myself? I’m not doing this to myself! You’re doing this to me! Now, do you fucking love him?

”Edward, please”

“Do you?!” I almost shout down the phone. “I need to hear you say the words.”

“Edward, this isn’t helping. You’re just torturing yourself”

“DO YOU????!”

Then something inside of her just snaps. “Ok yes. I’m in love with him. That what you want to hear? I’m in love with him and I don’t love you.”

A deafening silence follows before I completely break down, losing control of my emotions and with it, any self-respect that I had left.

“Listen” she says, her voice soft and gentle again. “I want you to move on with your life. You’ve got to. You’ve got to get past this and forget about me. I’m going to go now and, please don’t call me again.” She pauses. “Goodbye Edward.”

The line goes dead, and with that, she’s gone.

There is something dark inside of me forming. A space in my heart that she used to occupy. If my soul has a face, it is ugly as sin, and if true love has an antithesis I have become it.

You’ve just read a part of ‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ - a semi-autobiographical novella about addiction, mental health, and the messy reality of being human. The full book is available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

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10. The Hour of Postponement

It is 3am and I find myself standing on a street corner waiting for my dealer. You get some really shady fucks around at this time of night. A bloke walks past, his eyes intent on searing a stare right through me. Fuck. I try not to engage him, “just walk by” I think to myself, “just walk by”. He does, and relief washes over me. I glance at my watch, Jas is 20 minutes late.

I tell myself that I’m not an addict; my drug use, it’s not an addiction but I guess I have to admit it’s got slightly out of control when you find yourself up at 3am cursing the fact you only scored two grams. “I’ll just do two tonight, you know, be a bit good for a change” (I mean, that attitude for a start has got to cause alarm bells to ring). But after it’s gone, and you’re in the grip of a fierce cocaine binge, if you can get more, you will. I can, and I will. It’s not like I need it, I don’t even overly want it; my nose is bunged up and aches and my lips are sore though the constant chewing. It’s all about postponing the inevitable crash at the end of the high. And now is the hour of postponement!

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I glance again at my watch, it’s 3.10am. Shit, how much longer will he be? I am entering into a weird phase of the night’s events. I have done too much to be coming down as such but with no more to do, regrets and guilt start to creep in. You know the type. I am wasting my life, what would my family think if they could see me now? The exact type of shit you really don’t need when crashing, you feel wretched enough as it is. So why do I do it? I am unhappy and it is a source of comfort? Maybe. It gives me a few hours where nothing matters? Possibly. Or maybe I just like it? Who knows? But the answer to my life’s woes, indeed to anyone’s lives’ woes, is no more written in little white lines that I cut up and shove straight up my nose, than it is in the scars on my body, the lines on my face, or the tracks of my tears.

I decide to wander up the road to the 24 hour shop. I’ll buy myself a pack of beers to kill the time. I try to focus on the beer and the shop and keep out all those negative vibes. Not long now, Jas will be here soon and all will be alright, at least for a few hours anyway. As I said, the crash is inevitable some time.

The shop I am heading to is one of those mini supermarket types. Sells all sorts. I wander in. It is lit by a flickering electric light that gives the whole place an eerie feel. The shop floor is sticky under foot and there is a strong smell of rotting fruit and vegetables that suggests the owner really doesn’t give a fuck. As disgusting as this is, there is an upside; the cashier doesn’t even blink when I pass him my credit card encrusted with the remnants of the evening’s activities. He simply takes one glance, wipes off any residue of cocaine and puts it in the handset.

I get beer and fags and start walking back to the supposed meeting point. The night air is cold but clear, especially for London. For a minute I forget all my worries and just think how beautiful the starry sky is. Maybe there is someone out there for me who is looking at the same starry sky, pondering the same questions.

I’m pulled abruptly back into reality when Jas’ car pulls up, he winds down the window, “Jump in mate!” he shouts.

The door pops open and I slide myself into the passenger seat. “We’re gonna go round the block mate, I’ll drop you back to your door”. This was out of character for Jas, his disregard for the law was usually blatant, verging on the kamikaze. This change of attitude is of comfort for me. The last thing I need is a charge for possession or worse.

“How you been mate?” he continues.

“You know, the usual” I reply. Aside from the fact that he dealt in class A’s, Jas was a pretty good guy. He seemed to genuinely give a fuck about people. I don’t know, maybe he is just a great salesman. Either way he had never stitched me up.

“I knew you’d need more my friend”, he laughs. Not in a mocking way but a knowing one. “Anyways, here it is”. He hands me the baggy and I hand him the cash.

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“So why the trip round the block?”

“Just being safe my friend” he says, “At this time of night it looks dodgy enough driving around, let alone conducting business through a car window. Anyways, you had a good night?”

“Yeah, just been chilling out.”

“Chilling out? You’ve done 2 grams and you’ve bought 2 more, the last thing you’re gonna be doing is chilling out!” There is a pause in the conversation before he adds “So, you seen Simon around recently?”

“Not for a while” I reply. “He’s got a new bird, she’s pretty straight so he is trying to give that a go. You might know her actually, Gemma, works in the Falcon?”

“Blonde girl, glasses?” He says.

“Yeah that’s her”.

“Good work Simon my man. Shit, he’s punching above his weight?”

“I don’t know, she’s not my type.”

“Mate, no one is your type. Not since that “what’s her face” anyway. Shit man it’s been, what, a year?”.

“It’s been 7 months” I correct him.

“7 months? A year? Two years? Who gives a fuck? It’s in the past. You need to be getting over that shit. Take this shit”. He points to the baggy in my hand. “It’s 94% purity. Fucking turbo-charged! You need to be taking that out on the town, meet some new girls man.” He was right. At least he was about meeting new women. Free life coaching with every score, could be a unique selling point. “Anyways, here’s you”, he pulls the car over. “Take it easy Ed man, and remember what I said”.

“Take care”. And with that, he was gone. Off into the night to offer more advice to unwitting punters no doubt.

I walk down the street in the direction of my house. The acquiring of the narcotics has lifted my spirits. My nostrils can almost feel the coke in anticipation, my throat can almost taste it, but most importantly, my hand grips it. I make it to my door and quietly let myself in. It try to maintain silence as best I can as I don’t want to wake Charlie and Janie. They’re off on holiday early tomorrow, and anyway, I don’t want to be subject to their probing questions about why I’m out or what I’m doing up at this time of night. They thought I was off the drugs and this would just be a confrontation I didn’t need; I know they have my best interests at heart and I know they are right, but I just don’t want to hear it. Not right now.

Once in my room I have a proper look at the baggy, not a bad size. I immediately start to cut up a line with my credit card. In one long sniff I ingest it. There it is. Right there, the hit my whole body has been craving and I don’t feel sad, and I don’t feel low, and I don’t feel put upon by the world. I’m fucking Superman in my own fucked up world. That’s the 94% purity Jas was talking about. Everything is good, for now at least. No more ex-girlfriend worries, no more hate, anger, fear or loathing. No more thinking about the future decisions, or past mistakes. I’m in my own kind of bliss. I grab my laptop and start looking for interesting things to watch but my attention span can be measured in seconds so I inevitably move on. I log onto the dating site that Janie registered me with. No messages, but that is ok because I scan through all the beautiful faces. My mind is racing but I feel great so I have another line. The next few hours will be spent maintaining this high at all costs. Health doesn’t come into it. The thing about cocaine is that there is never enough. You always want more. It is the nature of the beast. As the hours rack up the coke dwindles and before I know it the glorious sun of dawn pierces my nocturnal world.

At one point, my nose starts to bleed and panic sets in. Not panic for my health, but panic that if blood is coming out, nothing could go in. I stumble to the bathroom as blood inevitably drips onto my shirt. Pushing my face under the tap I try to stem the flow. It eventually subsides and I once again retire into my room.

As I come to the end of it, again panic starts to set in. I start mulling over how I can make it last, keep it going, and delay the drop. I make the lines smaller, I try to put more time between each one, but it is no use and it goes as predictably as it started. The silence after that last line is deafening. With no coke left there is nothing for me to do. It is like it had breathed new life into the mundane but now it is gone the mundane relentlessly returns, and it is unforgiving. I don’t feel right. I know I’ve done too much so I go to my bed, try and kid myself that I’ll sleep. But there is to be no sleep for me tonight. Tonight I am a slave to my insecurities and despairs and I will pay for what I have done in guilt and hate, and payment is full and immediate. I lay down. As my head hits the pillow my soul drops out the back of me. Through my mortal frame of skin and bone, through the mattress and the bed, through the floor boards and down into the cold, dark ground, and it feels like it isn’t ever coming back. I try to get into a comfortable position but the sweats kick in. It pours down my face and stings my eyes.

I try to take my mind someplace else by flicking through the possible matches the dating site has generated for me, but the pictures of these women’s faces don’t look the same now, somehow darker. I’m poisoned by his own sense of escapism. My face contorted with shame and my body shaking and swaying under the weight of regret. I get up, go to the bathroom and splash cold water over myself. A sickness is forming in the base of my belly, a sickness that will soon take over completely. I clamber to the toilet and hang my head over and vomit. Cocaine suppresses your appetite and only then do I realise that I haven’t eaten in hours, so nothing comes up but bile. I retch again, again nothing. With nothing inside me it feels like I am shredding the lining of my stomach. I go back to the sink and drink from the cold tap. At least this will give me something to throw up.

This ritual continues for about half an hour. Finally it appears to settle, though I feel no better. I crawl back to my room and get into bed. I lie down for a couple of minutes but can’t even get comfortable so I sit up, stand up and pace around the room. Why do I fucking do this to myself? I am fully aware at the start of the night that this is what it will descend into, but in that split second I convince myself it is worth it. It’s never worth it. My mind is racing and I try to think of things that will comfort me but nothing works. All I can see is my mother and father’s disappointed look, the words of the doctor’s and friends telling me what I am doing to myself. But I know what I am doing and it doesn’t help. I’m desperate, and like many a desperate man before me and many after, I resort to prayer. I get down on my knees and beg to a God I haven’t spoken to in years.

“Please save me”.

You’ve just read a part of ‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ - a semi-autobiographical novella about addiction, mental health, and the messy reality of being human. The full book is available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

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Chapter 9. Anti-psychotics and Personality Disorders

As I walk to the doctor’s surgery it dawns on me for the first time that, if this is to be of any benefit, I will have to be open and honest. I don’t like open and honest. Open and honest means vulnerable and pathetic, which, incidentally, actually happens to be a fairly accurate description of where I’m at.

So if I am not going to be open and honest, why am I even going? Well, the answer to that lies in an incident that happened just under a week ago. My brother had found me in a particularly sorrowful and wretched state. I was drunk and crying. When I say crying, I do mean an uncontrollable fit of tears. I don’t even remember it. I only know about it because he wanted to talk about it at great length the next day when I was sober. This really scared him. He was even talking about cancelling his and Janie’s Christmas holiday to look after me. I, obviously not wanting to have this on my conscience, insisted that he did not do this. Anyway, the compromise we reached was that I would go to the doctor if he didn’t cancel his holiday. So, here I am, on my way there now.

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Up until this point I had managed to keep my depression hidden, well, at least I thought I had; all the bouts of self-harm, drug abuse, and alcoholism of the last few months were always behind closed doors. This was the first time in ages that I had let my semblance of well-being slip. Up until this point, the general consensus of my friends and family, was that I was, on the whole, doing ok. I mean they knew I was a little raw about the break-up still, but that’s to be expected. Other than that I was getting on with my life. My promises about drug use and excessive alcoholism had been taken on trust, as being fact. The sheer level of panic written all across his face as he begged me to get help was clear, and, for what? This was a tiny, and momentary glimpse of what my life has descended into. Into what I have become.

So, pondering all this, I ask myself if I am going to admit to my doctor that my mood has come crashing down and my life has unceremoniously ground to a halt. Am I going to admit that I have been living under a black cloud and everything seems futile and pointless? Will I admit that, with every passing day I feel further and further segregated from everyone and everything? Will I admit to the drug and alcohol use? The self-harm? But, probably the most worrying, or at least the most private admission, would be to tell her about my constant thoughts about suicide. It is not that I intend to do it. I’m just fixated on it. In some of my darkest moments, thoughts like this bring me solace. Maybe it is something to do with taking control of a life that has long since lost control. Thoughts like these are known as Suicidal Ideation. Yeah, they actually have a name for this. Does knowing this make me feel better or worse? I don’t know. Suicidal Ideation- it can range from a fleeting consideration to a detailed plan.

Now, before I make this most personal of confessions I need you to understand, I need you to know, that I do not say this for any shock value. I do not labour under the misapprehension that there is any romance or glamour to taking one’s own life. It is always a tragedy. No, I tell you this to show you how far I have fallen. To give you a greater insight to my state of mind.

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So my suicidal ideation. For me it’s a detailed visualisation and it is the same every time. It always starts with a note to my family. The house is empty. I sit at my desk, alone in my room, and scribble out this note. It begs my family for forgiveness for what I am about to do. For the pain they will feel, and continue to feel, from the moment they find this note until the day they die. It pleads with them to be stronger and better than me and to live on. I fold the note, put it in an envelope marked simply “To My Family” and I place it on the pillow of my bed. I go to my drawer, get out a couple of razor blades and put them in my wallet. I put my coat on and, for the last time, sit back down at my desk. My laptop is in front of me so I open it and flick to Jess’ Facebook page. I stare into her profile picture. I stare into it like I almost believe that something will change. I stare into it like I have never stared into anything before. Like it will make a difference and I love her all over again. I type a message that simply says “I miss you too much x” and hit the send icon. Leaving my phone on the desk I walk to my bedroom door. I turn to look at her face on the screen for one last time and whisper the words “I love you” and it is the most honest moment of my life.

Outside, I pull the front door closed behind me, double lock it and push my keys back through the letterbox. Picking up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the way, I make my way to a hotel as I can’t let my brother find me once it is done.

Once in the hotel room I sit on the bed and have a drink. Then another. Then another, because I know I am not strong enough to do this sober. I put a note on the bathroom door saying “Call the police. Do not come in here” and lock myself inside with the drink and the razor blades.

I take another drink and sink to the floor. I take another drink and stare at the veins in my wrists. I take another drink and I cut myself. I cut myself free from all of this. And that’s how it happens. That’s how it ends. My life slips away from me as I lie on a cold, tiled bathroom floor in a shitty hotel in east London. And as it all fades I think of the silly little things that Jess and I shared; the way she would roll her eyes at my shit jokes; the silly faces she would make at me when she thought no-one was watching; the cartoon peanut men she would doodle on notes she would leave me, and the way she would squeeze my hand as we drifted off to sleep. And then it would be over.

The walk to the doctor’s is a short one and I’m greeted by the same listless waiting room atmosphere as always. Half a dozen people sit there, still like statues avoiding making eye contact with one another, just waiting for their names to be flashed across the screen as a buzzer sounds to signal their turn with the doctor. It is only two young children who do not conform to the stillness as they play with toy cars on the floor and chatter, unaware that they are breaking the unsaid rule of silence of the waiting room.

As I sit patiently I look around at the posters and pamphlets that adorn the waiting room walls. They talk of bowel cancer and its symptoms. How to check your prostate. Quitting smoking. They talk about heart disease and high blood pressure. They talk about stress, depression and self-harm. They talk about diabetes, hip replacements and the Norovirus. Life is so fragile. It’s a wonder anyone is capable of doing anything other than cowering at the grim reality of how vulnerable we really are.

The wait seems like ages but eventually my name flashes up on the screen and I make my way to the consultation room.

“Hello Edward” the doctor says as I take a seat at the side of her desk.

“Hello”

“What can I do for you today?”

“Well”, I pause, “I’ve not been so good”.

I have been in and out of doctors rooms, on and off, since my teens with, shall we say, emotional issues, and my doctor knows all about my colourful mental health history. I go on and tell her all about the past year. Understating my alcohol and drug use. I have always found opening up to health professionals about such things difficult as I know what they’ll say. They will tell me that it is not helping, that it is damaging my mental and physical health, and the risks that go along with it. I know these things, as does any addict, but this information is incidental when you are caught up in this state of mind and life cycle. It doesn’t even come into it.

We talk for a while and I tell her all about the low moods, the self-harm, the depression and my inability to connect with anyone or relate to anything.

“Doctor”, I finally say, “Can you give me anything that can help?”

She looks over my record on her PC screen and says, “Well you’re already taking the maximum dose of the anti-depressant Chlomipromine for your Obsessive Compulsive Disorder so our options, medication wise at least, are limited. I could prescribe you with Quetiapine. It’s an anti-psychotic but it has mood stabilising qualities, and it can be taken alongside Chlomipromine. “

“An Anti-psychotic?”

“Yes, but as I say, you will be taking it to help stabilise your mood. But medication alone is not the only course of action. You need to distract yourself. When you feel yourself getting depressed you need to actively do something to take your mind off of it. You also need to interact and socialise with people. Shutting yourself off from the world is not the answer.” The doctor pauses and, in a calm tone says “These issues have been a problem more or less all your adult life. They have been a hallmark characteristic. I think we may need to consider the possibility that you have a personality disorder, probably Borderline Personality Disorder. I want to refer you to a specialist for an assessment. The referral may take a while to come through but I definitely think it would be worth checking out.”

Shit! Anti-psychotics and personality disorders! I’m on a fucking role now!

So I take the advice, pick up my prescription and leave. On my way home my phone receives an e-mail informing me that my profile on the dating site Janie signed me up to had been viewed by someone so I load up the application and have a look. As I look through it my doctor’s words about interacting and socialising ring in my ears. I decide to look over my profile to see if I can improve it in any way. I read words like exploring London, enjoying new things, travelling and cookery. I laugh to myself; enjoying new things? I’m so entwined in this shit routine that the only parts of London I supposedly enjoy would be my own bedroom, bars, and off licences. As for exploring, I’m always looking for dealers. Travelling? Well, I went back to Portsmouth a few months ago, and as for cookery, I can’t remember the last time I cooked anything other than a microwave meal for one. My profile makes a mockery of the age-old advice that one should always be themselves. In fact, my whole profile couldn’t really be less representative of me if it tried. It should read something more like:

An obsessive compulsive with depression and possible Borderline Personality Disorder. Medicated daily on large doses of anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. An addictive nature with a taste for cocaine and alcohol. A penchant for self-harm and a tendency to hit the self-destruct button.

Ladies, please form an orderly queue!

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I take another mouthful from the glass and swill it around my mouth before forcing it down. It’s a really shitty bottle of red but the more of it I drink the less that matters.

So yeah, I use and drink to block it out and to anaesthetise my soul. With drugs and alcohol there is a window when I have done a certain amount in which I can feel ok. In fact, a window in which I can feel fucking great! A window where the future doesn’t look so bleak and alone. Much like hope, drugs and alcohol can pull the wool over your eyes and you can convince yourself that it will be all ok. The trouble comes because once I start drinking I can’t stop. I just can’t, and with cocaine, I don’t think anyone can. So this window is always closing. The more you do, the quicker it closes so you always end up chasing a feeling that won’t last down a very dark path that part of you doesn’t come back from.

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So, knowing all this why do I do it? Well, if I put them down I’m left with me. Just me, and I can’t bare that. Anyway, what else am I supposed to do? Talk about it? I’ve talked about it a thousand times to anyone that would listen and it doesn’t change a thing. There is only so long you can publicly miss an ex-girlfriend for. People want you to mourn the loss of the relationship and move on. I want to mourn and move on. I would do anything to leave the past behind. No one wants to hear about it, but I think about her all the time; every minute of every day.

Even now, months on, I can’t sleep because of it and when I do I dream of her. I have this reoccurring nightmare in which I’m dying. I don’t know how or why, but I know that I am. I can feel death stalking me. I look up and she’s standing over me. I reach out to her but she doesn’t react. She just stands over me, staring with a cold gaze, a glare. Then she slowly shakes her head, turns and walks away. She never looks back. In its entirety this dream can’t last more than a few minutes but it seems to be with me all night. So whether I’m awake or asleep, I’m constantly on edge. Her relationship with me ended, but mine with her never did. I still love her completely. I can’t let her go. I just can’t accept that I’m confined to her past; nothing more than a footnote in her life story when she is everything in mine.

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Something about everything changed the day we were introduced. When our eyes met, it all changed. Maybe not the change I hoped for or thought, but irrevocable change nonetheless. How could either of us have known the impact it would have? Where would I be now if we had never met? Someplace happier I guess. Some place happier. But it’s better to have loved and lost right? Bullshit! No fucking way! I’d have rather felt nothing.

So maybe I am losing it. Is it possible to pile alcohol and cocaine abuse onto an already fragile and desperate state of mind and not have it touch your sanity? I am so far into this pattern of self-destructive behaviour that I can no longer tell whether my substance abuse is a cause or consequence of my state of mind. Life can’t go on like this. Life? I call it life but this isn’t living. I’m just going through the motions. I have become spectral and distant. Not really there; just existing from one minute to the next. Jess picked her new man. Simon has left me behind. Charlie and Janie are building a future together. All my friends are coupled off and starting families. Life is happening to everyone around me while mine slips through my fingers. So I drink too much, do way too much coke, and sink further and further into self-pity. It’s weak, cowardly, selfish, self-indulgent, and in its own way, vain, but it is so fucking easy! And when everything else about your life seems to be poisoned, painful, and it hurts to even think, easy is comforting. Easy is good.

Simon’s epiphany coincided with his embarking on a relationship with Gemma, the barmaid he was interested in at the Falcon. I get it. I mean he only wants what I do; to love and to be loved. But it doesn’t alter the fact that it feels like I am being dumped all over again. Why am I so easy to leave behind? How do people turn their feelings off so easily? I guess, at heart, I’m just a weak person. I need that validation from another person. Look how quickly I gave up my healthy lifestyle and everything I had worked for once there was no one to share it with. Look at how quickly I turned my back on how far I had come. My weakness makes me sick. No wonder she fucking left me. How did things get so fucked?

I down the remainder of the wine, open the second bottle, and sit and drink. Alone. My thoughts are frenzied. Images and memories of her vibrate and resonate inside me with such intensity that it feels like my soul will rupture and spill out into the world, taking with it my sanity. I feel like I can’t take much more. I feel like I’m in a nightmare from which I can’t wake up. I just want to be free of all these feelings, escape these emotions and leave sorrow behind. I’ll do anything to take these thoughts away. Anything. So I reach for the razor blade. I know it is not a healthy and rational thing to do but in the moment I just don’t care. It has become routine. I think too much, get overwhelmed and have no other way to deal with these feelings and so I burn or cut myself. Tonight it’s the razor blade.

I loosen my belt, undo my jeans and lower them enough to reveal the tops of my thighs. They are covered in scars, cuts, and burns, but here they are easy to hide. I start to cut and slash at my flesh. The stinging pain of each cut reminds me that I can feel something other than sadness. It’s a pain on the outside, a pain which I can understand, a pain which I can control, and a pain from which I can heal. Each cut provides more relief. If I cut enough, maybe I can cut her out of me. I just want to keep cutting until it all goes away.

As the blood seeps to the surface the tension in me recedes. As it flows gently over my skin it takes the pain inside of me away and keeps my thoughts at bay. In this moment it all goes away, not for long, but for a while. The physical pain helps me manage the emotional and brings me back to a sort of equilibrium. I sink to the floor, and I have space to breathe and feel normal again. Well, as close to normal as I get. I look down at the bloody mess I have made of my legs. Seeing the wounds there provides a weird sort of comfort. It is something to focus my feelings on. Most importantly, it’s something outside not inside. But my relief doesn’t last and is soon displaced by thoughts of shame and anger. What have I done to myself? Why did I do that? In my head I see all the people I’m letting down. I can feel their stares bearing down on me. I see the sad eyes of my family because I know how they would feel if they could see this. So I must hide it from them. Keep it from them to protect them. It’s a lonely experience but that’s the way it must stay. I want someone to understand but I can’t tell them. I want them to care but I can’t let them in. So I say with my body what I can’t put into words.

I don’t know how long I sit there staring at my wounds. Time doesn’t mean much right now. But there I sit, until I can no longer be faced with the disgrace of it all and so I turn out the light. Because in the darkness my damaged skin almost disappears completely. I almost disappear completely. Almost.

You’ve just read a part of ‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ - a semi-autobiographical novella about addiction, mental health, and the messy reality of being human. The full book is available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

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Chapter 8. Medication for Life

As I sit here alone in an empty office, the last glimmers of the refracted winter sunlight ebb through the windows. I am waiting for Miss Stokes to summon me for what she has termed “an end of year review”. The fact that I am the only member of staff to have one of these does not bode well for me. I try to think back over the term for any positives that I can come up with to put up some sort of defence but they are few and far between. I know that I am going to have to think fast and basically lie my way out of the situation. It seems that all I do these days is lie. I lie about how much I drink. I lie about cocaine. I lie to my parents. I lie to my brother. I lie to my friends. I lie about Jess and I lie about closure. I lie about my health and I lie about my state of mind. I lie about happiness and I lie about the cuts and burns that periodically turn up on my body. I lie to anyone who takes an interest in me and I lie to those that don’t. And I lie to myself; I tell myself that none of this is a problem. Deceit has become so easy. I convince myself that I’m something I’m not. I don’t know where the lies end and I begin. Maybe it’s one and the same thing. I’ve become a caricature of myself; a concoction of lies, half-truths and outright deception. I don’t know who I am anymore and I’m not sure that I care.

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All my colleagues are down the local pub celebrating the upcoming festive season and the party atmosphere that surrounds it. I do not share their excitement. In fact, I haven’t felt anything vaguely like excitement for too long now. I think about the days ahead of me with utter indifference and know that they will essentially play out the same as any other. The only difference will be the hour I drag my arse out of bed at.

The phone on my desk rings. It’s Miss Stokes’ PA. She is ready to see me now.

In her office the meeting starts with an awkward silence as she glares straight at me. I nervously shift my gaze from hers, around the room, and back again.

“Where to start?” she eventually says.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to respond or not so I just stay silent.

“How about your class’ failing grades? Your sick record? Your appearance? You’re timekeeping? Your poor class observations? Your inability to produce any of the requested lesson plans? Or how about your apparent lack of interest towards any of these things?” She pauses, “Stop me any time you want to contribute Mr Staten.”

I say nothing. There’s nothing to say. She goes on and on and, although I don’t look at her, I can feel her eyes scrutinize every inch of me. In that moment I am seized by an unnerving desire to scare her, to flood her senses with fear. I find myself thinking about smashing up her office; throwing her monitor to the floor; shattering the many photo frames that adorn her desk; grabbing her by the hair and screaming in her face. That thought shocks me back into reality. What the fuck was that? My thinking is twisted. This isn’t me.

She pauses and looks straight at me. Evidently it is my turn to talk so I tell her what she wants to hear. I tell her that no, this is not acceptable. That no, it is not setting a good example. No, it is not fair to the students and, yes, I will do better in the future. But these are just reflex actions and damage limitation responses. I mean, what does she expect me to say?

“And, if that is not enough, why am I getting phone calls from concerned parents regarding completely inappropriate and unprofessional relationship advice you are giving students?”

Again, I say nothing.

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She goes on, “While I am pleased that you have built up enough of a rapport with your students for them to confide in you, and I am, I must ask why you are telling a sixteen year old boy that, and I quote, “Women will fuck you over sooner or later, you’ve just got to deal with it”? You can see my concern Mr Staten. What would you do?”

Silence engulfs the room, but my thoughts run on and on.

“Well” she goes on, “I am going to make this very clear and very easy for you to understand. If there is any repeat of this, or your performance does not dramatically improve, you will be out of a job. Please take this as your final written warning.”

With that she hands me an envelope.

“I suggest you give this matter some serious thought over the Christmas break. That will be all.”

With that she motions towards the door so I pick up the envelope and leave.

On the way home it takes me all of 10 seconds to decide the best way to deal with all this is to score.

Am I an addict? I mean really and truly? I don’t know. All I know is that I have two settings; on and off. There is no middle ground. So this warning is all the excuse I need. I know that doing it is no good and I want to stop for my health, for my family. I want to stop for the promises I’ve made and the promises I’ve broken. I want to stop because it hurts everyone. But there is part of me that can’t or won’t stop, and there is always a last time, right? But tonight I have no luck. It’s a rare occasion when I am unable to get hold of any gear. It’s usually rife, but not tonight. I try all the dealers I know, ask favours of friends and of friends of friends and I still come up with nothing. My ingenious plan to deal with this situation is to just drink more. Drink to blackout and drink to oblivion. So I pick up a couple of bottles of cheap wine and a 4 pack of beer on my way home from work which I start on immediately.

At home I just sit in my room and stare out the window for no particular reason. The buildings on our estate are tired and grey. Children jump precariously from garage roof to garage roof in the gleam of the flickering street lights with little concern for their safety.

It’s cold outside and condensation has built up on my window and droplets roll down the glass from frame to frame. From here I can see a couple argue, I can see their tempers flare in the whites of their eyes. In the corner of the estate, under a street light, sits an old man. I wonder what brought him out on this cold December night. I watch him for a while. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and slowly puts one to his mouth. As he lights it his face is temporarily illuminated and I can see hopelessness. It’s written in his eyes, the same way it’s written in mine. I wonder if he knows that I’m watching him.

Simon has been true to his word. It’s been a month to the day, not that I’m counting, that he dropped the you have a problem bombshell on me and I haven’t heard a thing from him. His rationale- he can’t keep watching me do this to myself. I thought we were bound together but he is getting out. Apparently all I care about is getting fucked off my face and it’s no longer about having a good time- his words (I stress), not mine. I couldn’t quite believe it when he put that one on me. I mean Simon, the party-boy, the walking advocate for excess, telling me I’m doing too much. He even said that I use cocaine and alcohol as my medication for life and everyone in it. Do I? Maybe. Probably. He thinks I’m losing it.

I take large mouthfuls of wine and light a cigarette. I wish I could get some coke. I scan through the contacts in my phone to see if there is anyone in there that I have overlooked and could maybe hook me up. I know there isn’t; I’ve been through the list numerous times already tonight.

It’s been nearly 7 months since she left me and this break-up is defining my life and I fear it always will. My mind is constantly in the shadow of this failed relationship. I can’t have a thought, look at a photo, or reminisce without relating it to her. Everything fits into one of three categories: it was either before I met her, while she was with me, or since she left. It’s my frame of reference for everything. It sounds stupid but it’s true. The other day I was looking for something, I forget what, and I came across this pair of trainers. They were a few years old at least, probably more. There was nothing that linked them to Jess, or my relationship, or love, or loss, or anything, but I found myself thinking about the time I bought them. That time being before I had even met her. Back then everything was a possibility; love and hope. It was all in front of me. I would do anything to go back there, do things differently, to somehow change what has happened. And this is not an isolated incident. It is constantly going on in my head. Screaming at me. Constantly screaming and reminding me. It won’t let me forget, not even for a minute. There is no respite. To call it a battle implies I have a chance. There is no chance, no hope. I’ve already lost.

You’ve just read a part of ‘Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown’ - a semi-autobiographical novella about addiction, mental health, and the messy reality of being human. The full book is available to buy on Kindle here and on paperback here.

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