My parents divorced when I was 7. Pretty much from then on until the age of 16, I was bullied constantly. I had no real parental role model as I lived with my father who had anger issues and was at best neglectful during that period. To say the least, the issues began early. I went to university and subsequently dropped out in my second year, unable to cope. What at first was social withdrawal and probably a personality disorder turned into psychosis in 2017. The episode was identified by the health services but they failed to diagnose or treat me at the time. In late 2018 I returned to a different university to complete a degree in Forensic Computing. For the first time in my life I was orientated towards long term goals and was able to partially take care of myself after a long period of counselling. 

I completed my first year and moved into my second with the ambitiion to establish myself with a good career upon leaving. I loved studying, I went beyond the syllabus and taught myself OS internals with another eye for certs. I cannot explain to you how happy it made me to treat my education like a job, even though it was not the degree in my heart I wanted. Imagine it, another shot at life. 

About halfway through the year a group I shared the computer labs with took a disliking to me. The reason? Because I was weird. A loner. Essentially for the rest of the academic term while I'm sharing the room with them they spend the time gaslighting me. Man did they go to town on me. Any little detail about me was open season. I tried everything to ignore them and just carry on working. An entire University society was in on it, as they were all friends with each other. The head of that society has a very good life now. She's been on TV. Tears in my eyes as a last resort I went to the department head to try to explain at least to someone what was happening. I was met with: sometimes people can be a little rough, are you sure you haven't misunderstood? 

At first it was a nervous breakdown that then turned into a hospitalization in a mental health ward with delusions. Everywhere I went I thought I was being followed by these people. If the people responsible were to see this they would take pleasure in knowing what they have done. I was released around christmas, this time with a diagnosis. I was put on medication and stuck at home when covid hit. Sometime in March my family begins to become overly-controlling of my care, we get into a disagreement and I leave home; I still had a room near the university. One last act of defiance in my mind against a world I cannot make heads or tails of. I didn't return and got a job working as a carer. When I left home I had only my bicycle and a laptop. 

I go through two jobs whilst still near the university, the first doing domiciliary care, the second as a support worker. In the beginning of 2018 I'd worked as a chef for apprentice pay doing 70 hour weeks running a section by myself, so finding a job wasn't impossible. I'd moved from domiciliary to being a support worker because in the first, your role is simply palleative or end of life care. No matter what you do their condition degrades. Being a support worker, ideally, means playing a proactive role, setting an example, understanding someone's complex needs. I've met and helped all sorts of different people. 

After a year of care and no contact with my family I ask my father if I can return. I had moved during that time and was staying with a woman, her four dogs and her son. I left after she threatened to cut the brakes on my motorbike. What lead to that, you may ask. She had discovered after raiding through her own bins that I had been buying a luxury brand of peanut butter and flew into a white rage. What originally was going to be a temporary week living with my father looking for rooms to rent turned into a permanent stay. I took whatever job I could. At first, a night support worker for teenagers with nonverbal autism and learning difficulties. I kept getting flats on my motorbike's tire along the road where I worked from nails on the road so I had to stop. Probably for the best. Nonverbal autistics can flip like a switch. One of the carers I was working with got bodied by one of the boys while I was there and ended up with heavy bruising all down one side. He had blinded himself from pushing his thumbs into his eyes, but had very good hearing and was incredibly temperamental. He used to snatch thin air and if he grabbed hold of you it took two of you to free yourself.  If you want to know what it's like, there's a louis theroux documentary on it. 

I looked for another job nearby, anything, and lo and behold there was a chef job at a cafe in a town near me.

I worked there for maybe four months, I'm fairly certain the owner was skimming 5 hours a week from me unpaid. This was a job without an official leaving time, it was a family run business, with no real way of keeping track of hours worked. The guy who owns the place lives, along with his family, in very large houses in the middle of the country where the cafe is. He used to walk in mid-service and start fucking around with the section, moving things around while you had a ticket rack overflowing with orders. Then he'd get in yelling matches with the other chef and service would effectively shut down for ten to fifteen minutes while a 60 year old who could not be convinced otherwise that he was right squabelled with a mother of three about the most inane shit you can imagine. She got so pissed she refused to come in and he, a man who would put turmeric in lasagna, would have to work service with me. At the end of the stint I'd had enough and went off on one with a delusion of wanting to actually learn how to cook.

If you're going to be a slave you may as well be a good one.

A pub nearby was hiring for a chef with the promise of an NVQ. I spent maybe two days in that kitchen learning fuck all before realising I'd made the same mistake. I was promised an NVQ in catering by the 2018 chef position I took. Same shit. On the third day, having taken my motorbike in for a service, I ask my dad for a lift to work.

Just picture it, the middle of summer in one of the most beautiful locations you can imagine, driving through the countryside. Green fields, not a cloud in the sky. By the time I get there and my dad's driving off I've made up my mind to quit. I'd had an epiphany. What mattered the most in life was how I spent the days I had. And do you know what being a chef is? Earning dogshit pay in a grotty little kitchen running back and forth with endless fucking tickets, a front of house team that despises you and a head chef who is either a coke addict or an alcoholic trying to molest the waitresses (the chef I was replacing was fired for sending one of them a picture of his cock). 

Quitting on the spot, I took a two hour walk through the countryside back to the town with the cafe I used to work at. Sun blazing, I sit in a nearby pub and have a pint. Maybe a month later I'm working at a local supermarket. And then, in time, the delusions start again. The instore radio sets me off and I have to quit as I'm unable to work and laughing to myself in manic hysteria. Why? Because a doctor had prescribed me anxiety meds. And? So what? Anxiety meds can trigger psychotic episodes. Oh boy do they. Within hours of taking one I'm on the floor catatonic unresponsive completely unable to cope. Jobless, at home, I spent the remainder of the year delusional and untreated. Pidgeons on the fence? Sentry robots. License plates? Coded messages. To this day I still cannot go out in public and sit in the vicinity of strangers by myself as it sets off the delusion that they are secret agents sent to spy on me. By the end it had transitioned from delusional beliefs consistent with my diagnosis to auditory delusions, hearing voices telling me all sorts of things. Thought broadcasting, mind-reading chips, the whole works. The medications I'd been prescribed weren't doing the job. My family do not know what to do. I remember being fully psychotic sitting in a resteraunt believing I had the power to change the weather, with my family pretending everything was normal. One of them recommended mindfulness. For psychosis. When I tried to suggest that I was unhappy they asked if I had learned any coping mechanisms. I've yet to learn one.

As an aside, I once brought up to them how devistating psychosis can be. I was promptly told that 'people just get over it'.

Finally, sometime after christmas I go in for a review, and the doctor riddles me with questions as though I may be pretending. Probably because my symptoms were too perfect. After a heated exchange I recieve a different prescription and within a couple of weeks most of the delusions are gone. Not only that but I'm more grounded than I've ever been. 

And then the regret sinks in. For about four years I've been on one long bender improperly medicated taking the advice of someone else instead of listening to myself. I've wasted whatever financing I had for a degree that ended up in the past repeating itself. I had given up the prospect of studying languages, my dream, for something more realistic, at the behest of a family member. My very first therapist / counsellor had warned this would happen. She tried to warn me shortly before I want off to university for a second time. I didn't believe her at the time. 

Anyways, in the new year with my tail firmly between my legs I get a job working in another store. Simple checkout assistant? Oh no, buckle up ladies and gentlemen. This store had ambitions. They were going to set you a KPI. Your KPI? How many membership cards you scanned. At first it was 30% (30% of all customers you serve must have a membership card). Reasonable, doable. You can see there's no logic in being responsible for something you have no control over. But you accepted it. In order to get around this we kept a copy of membership cards underneath the till. Not meeting your KPI? Just scan a few of those copies. 

Then the manager left, before he could be fired. A chill guy. Wouldn't push you. Understood that the store had hours where not a customer could walk in. Replaced by a 21 year old who got the job through friends. She would watch the CCTV obsessively to check you were doing something, even when there was nothing to do. The two big go-tos for 'doing something' in this store are fronting up stock and 'spacing' clothes (making sure that the hangers are an equal distance apart). You must be doing something. There is nothing to do. You must be doing something.

A very chill job quickly turned into a nightmare. I actually met the people who had helped her get the job. Managers too, but of different stores. To the regional manager, to the store manager, to anybody self-important enough to take the paperwork upon themselves, you are nothing. They would take pride in treating you like shit in front of your face. In belittling and humiliating you. That is what you are there for, after all. I learned from someone who worked there that a year or so before, the regional manager, a 6'3 balding 40 year old succeeded in making a 5'1 Japanese employee called Koko cry, for nothing less than the crime of doing their job. But let's continue.

Management had noted that X store has a phone app. Y store have a phone app. We need a phone app! Now bare in mind our customer base in this quiet little town we call paradise is mainly doddering 60 and 70 year olds who come in because a) they're retired and b) they have fuck all to do. Managment, in their infinite wisdom, decide that they will retire customer membership cards, something easily carried by these lovely aging people, with phone apps.

Have you ever tried to help someone who was born well before the advent of the microchip with a smart phone? 

But this wasn't enough. They were so convinced the app would be popular, that they revised the KPI target. You now needed 50%, that's right, every other person in the store must have a phone app. Kids buying sweets? Little old ladies buying biscuits? You must sell them the app. If you did not say the line, the manager would write you up with a warning in your file. It still wasn't enough. Head office wanted proof the app was being sold. You must wear a sash. You must have your photograph taken wearing the sash. You must smile. You must have your photograph taken whilst selling the app. The long and short of it is that management were trying to coast by driving unpaid commission from its employees.

The store manager got so desperate after being shouted at on a zoom call by head office that they devised a cunning scheme.
Employees (that's you and me) would have to stand at a stall at the very front of the store, and you must greet and sell the phone app to everyone who comes in. You must have at least X sign ups in the hour, or you will be there for another hour. They were so chuffed with themselves when they came up with that, as though they'd just cracked the enigma.

I left and handed in my two weeks notice. The store closed within a few months. When I pass that place now on my evening walks I just laugh and look at the empty space through the giant storefront windows.

I tried out doing a night shift at a nearby care home afterwards. Two staff taking care of twenty residents for the night. No clear procedures explained. A mountain of paperwork for you to complete with no explanation as to how. I'd worked in care before so I went in thinking that while it might be dificult, it would be managable. I remember shortly before the shift finished we walked into the room of a woman who was supposed to be in bed. Her diaper had slipped and she had shit all up her back. Down her arms. In her nails. I was left to watch over her whilst the carer overseeing my 'induction' went to get fresh towels to clean her up. I could do nothing but hold her hands. Partly out of sympathy, partly out of fear that she'd try to touch me and I'd get shit all down my uniform. After we had finished she spoke the only words she could seem to remember: "Thank You. Thank you". I swore after that night to never work in another care home again.


For the past year I've been a shut in, under the care of my father. Not the father who made me repent my childhood existence, but the father who used to garden. The man who once grew sunflowers, who once worked two jobs to pay for his mother's end of life care, who used to crawl around on the floor with his kids laughing and playing.

In september he had a suspected TIA stroke and is at the beginning of what has long been suspected as dementia. Since September he has lost the capacity to cook for himself, or remember to eat. I've been taking care of him, mainly just making his meals for him and being there for him when he's ill. He gets so tired some days; sitting for hours exhausted, barely able to speak through the black pale of weariness and age. The man who once terrified me. Who I would barricade myself against with all my might, my body holding back the door with all my force as he tried in all his rage to burst in and thrash me, driven mad by anger and grief from the inexplicable loss of his wife and his mother. A child, not even ten, against a full grown adult.

Nothing lasts forever. 

I've spent two years in therapy, again. Nothing can fix this. I don't have it in me to learn to drive. I don't have it in me anymore to work. I cannot go on. I cannot continue in this world anymore. I can no longer struggle. I cannot take care of myself. I have tried to tell you so many times but you do not listen. You do not understand what it means to have lost all will. I cannot go on living.




This was all preventable five years ago as it was fifteen. Five years ago it could have been the correct medication, a different university with a different career plan. Different choices. Fifteen, a visit from a social worker. A teacher noticing what's in front of them and raising the alarm. School can be a wonderful place for children. Imagine waking up every day excited to learn something new surrounded by friends; one could bear the hardships of the world if only for the perfect childhood. 

Of the friends that I did make, I recently saw them a few years ago. After years of hiding my condition.
When I saw them I was at the height of my psychotic episode. 
I was never invited back and have not heard from them since. One need not wonder why.
They are all succesful, working white collar jobs with careers and partners. 

I wonder if they remember the day shortly after we finished school, at a fancy dress party.
I was handed 'awards' after some of them had voted on topics such as 'most likely to go to prison', 'most likely to kill themselves'.
Certificate upon certificate.
Paper upon piece of paper.
I was handed each, probably fourty in all.




Ironically, after all this, I've been told I'm fortunate, by a family member, to be in the position I am.

From someone who has never woken up at 5am for a 14 hour back to back shift.
From someone who has never driven through the depths of winter on a motorbike daily.
From someone who has never cleaned up shit ten times a day.
Administered medication, taken blood sugar level readings, cleaned vomit off of walls, bathed and dressed another human being, had epilepsy training, raised a safeguarding concern, dealt with an autistic meltdown, sponged water into the mouth of the dying.

From someone who has the childlike freedom to believe whatever they may well want to with no understanding as to why. 

From someone who has never had their very existence turned inside out. Twice. Three times.





For you reading, this world works.

You can live in it without asking questions. 
And of those you do, you need only be satisfied with the answer:
"Yes, and?"

But it didn't for me.

So I'm leaving before things get worse.

Before my father forgets who I am. 

Before I lose what little I have left.