hello

hi, i'm Alex. i'm 26 years old, i live in a shared flat in Bow, East London and when i was 5 both my parents died and i inherited some money. when i turned 18, i was entitled to about £100,000, which i later learned was the income generated by the trust set up after my parents' death. i lived at home back then, with my grandparents and sister, and had no idea what the cost of living is, so this seemed like a huge sum of money to me. i couldn't concentrate at university because i had bad social anxiety and wasn't able to socialise with anyone except my room mate, who i spent every day of the year with, getting high and playing Counter-Strike, but also because i had so much money in my current account and everyone else was broke and i'd been seeing a girl from Florida for about a year and skipped uni all the time to visit her.

that girl later became my ex-wife. when i think back to my brief life in Florida (less than 2 years), they don't feel like my memories any more. they're so far removed from my life here, i can't reconcile the two. anyway, after i dropped out of university in my 2nd year, i spent a year working part time in GameStation, Barking, which was good. i still had the social anxiety, especially around girls, and hadn't learned how to present myself yet, but i was pretty happy having a routine to follow and chatting to customers and my co-workers. after a year there, i emigrated to the USA after a successful marriage visa application process that cost about two grand and was the most stressful experience of my life. spent about 18 months there before i broke up with my wife. i wasn't happy; i'd settled down with the first girl who showed any interest in me and felt robbed of my youth. i came back to London and moved to Brixton with a friend of mine, and there began A Good Year. i dated a lot and went out a lot and smoked a lot and for a while i was happy. i started posting on 4chan's fitness board under the alias "tinytrip" because the novelty of being ripped was so overwhelming and i didn't have the confidence IRL to express it, so i used that place as an outlet, with amusing but also unhealthy consequences. after a year, my flatmate moved abroad for work and our lease expired, and i was running out of money and not entitled to more until the following year. i moved back home with my grandmother and quickly fell into the worst depression i've dealt with so far. i stopped going out, lost whatever friends i thought i had, stopped meeting new girls, fell into another unhappy relationship for company and for the first time i was broke.

having no money is probably a good test of character, and i didn't pass: i nearly didn't make it out of this depression, even after i got my money and moved back to the city into a new flat. i used to take these torturous walks around the South Bank and Westminster, listening to the most miserable music in my collection ("Hospice" by The Antlers got a lot of play during this period), staring over the bridges at the Thames, wondering if they were high enough to jump from.

i don't remember how this happened, exactly. i had a couple of people i could call to make plans with, and i think i was round someone's house with a couple of other mutual friends i'd only ever seen there before, and one of them had brought his girlfriend. she said i was funny and invited me to a house party she was having in a few weeks. she asked me twice and was so enthusiastic that even through the fog of depression and insecurity i took it as a genuine invitation. a few weeks passed and i went to the party. initially it was as bad as any other party i'd been to in my life: i tried to stick by my friends because i couldn't talk to anybody else. but after a few drinks i loosened up a bit and started chatting to a few other people. then my friend brought out some MDMA and i thought, fuck it, my life is so miserable -- i would be stupid not to take a shitload of it. i had tried it a few times before, but either my mood wasn't right or the stuff was shit because it hadn't done much of anything. initially i thought the same thing had happened after i took some of this. i completely shut down for a while and sat in a corner by myself. my friend told me to do another dab and i trusted his advice.

about 30 minutes later i felt this wave of complete refreshment and wellbeing crash over me, and suddenly the drowsiness from alcohol and weed was gone. i felt like i'd never have to sleep for the rest of my life and desperately wanted to share what i was feeling with everybody around me. i spent the rest of the night getting into all sorts of trouble; i accidentally insulted a young Army sniper and got into a huge argument with a woman in her late 50s about the invasion of Afghanistan. after a time most of these people left and there were maybe 10 or 15 of us in one of the girls' bedrooms, all lying on the bed and floor, listening to my iPhone. this was a big deal to me, because i love music and take pride in my listening habits, but i was also high as fuck on MDMA so all my music was blowing my mind. i had this really intense conversation with a friend of mine deciding whether i could conceivably play "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" at a grimy house party in South London, and i did.

after this night, and after i sobered up, the memory of those social interactions stayed with me, and my anxiety and depression just seemed to have lifted overnight. i've been out with these guys a few times since, once to another house party that was even better, another time to a burlesque club which was also good, and now for the first time in my life i feel quite comfortable with who i am. i've been doing psychoanalytic therapy for about a month now, and it's been like a sanctuary for me. every week i spend an hour unloading everything i've felt in the last 7 days and get some perspective on it. i come away from the sessions feeling weightless and with new insight.

so now i'm happy, right? i realised i have a lot of money and i can talk to people and a lot of them like me. but every time i have a day to myself, i can feel myself falling back into depression, and it's only with conscious effort to understand that pattern that i've prevented it happening. for instance, today i've been waiting since 1pm for a reply to a text i sent this girl i'm going out with on Monday. she replied to one last night, and works late shifts, but nothing today. this has sent me into a neurotic tailspin and today has not been good. i want to be in a place where if something like this happens, it doesn't completely disrupt my life.

i smoke too much weed, and i need to get a job, and i can be a complete dickhead when i feel confident or an insufferable depressive loser when i don't. i had a pretty bad time growing up in what's left of my family. i have so much baggage, i wonder if i'll ever be happy. here i'll document some days in my life, good and bad, because i'm not embarrassed to say i want to share it with people.