The Bad Place...

This is not going to be a nice update – if you are looking for my normal sarcastic or jovial self deprecating life updates, then go further back or sit on your laurels – because this is not one of them and they may be vacant for some time.

This is going to be the most honest I’ve been, probably with myself as well as anyone else in a long time. 

And as it’s going to be honest, I’m going to start by saying that I am an incredibly accomplished and proficient liar. In fact if there was a degree in emotional espionage I would have a masters degree, in fact, I’d probably be involved in writing the course material by this stage.

When I say lying, I mean in an emotional sense, my name really is Chris, I am a 31 year old writer/dreamer/card player and musician. I am quite funny, relatively handsome and can solve a rubix cube in under two minutes. 

So what do I mean I’m an emotional liar? Well let me explain...

Firstly I’ve been lying to myself since the start of the year that I am no longer suffering from depression – that, was and is a total fallacy. I am in fact currently at the lowest point I have ever been in my life.

Several weeks ago I hit absolute rock bottom one day in work and just couldn’t cope anymore, I couldn’t keep up the facade. 

See because I’ve not only been lying to myself, I’ve lying to everyone that I am happy, that I’m good, that I care. I am fantastic at feigning empathy – it’s like I’ve been wearing this ‘mask’ of the person that everyone thinks I ‘am’ – and that mask is made up of the person ‘I’ think I should be – but it’s not who I am. 

Wearing the mask I’ve learned the expected response to situations and I give these responses without much conscious thought.  The problem with this is that often, these responses are at my own detriment, and are not actually how I feel. Think about it yourself, how often on a daily basis does someone say “Hi, how are you?” with a smile as they pass and you respond saying something like “Good!” or “Fine yeah, you?”

Are you really fine? Are things really good at that very moment? Sure sometimes they will be, a lot of the time though the honest answer is “Well to be honest they’re not fucking great. I had an argument with the Mrs last night, got next to no sleep, the dog shit in my slippers, I poured orange juice in my cornflakes, the toaster blew up, the car wouldn’t start, the trains were cancelled, I got stuck in the lift, my system won’t load and I’ve got an absolute nutter of a client that I need to speak to that I’ve been putting off...oh, and I’ve got this weird rash appearing on the inside of my leg – how is your day going?”

And while we’re talking about this, do you actually give a fuck how the other persons day is going, like really? Or is it just another one of those people that you've got on facebook because they added you after a 3 sentence exchange at an office party six years ago? Do me a favour then, see if you don’t care, change your greeting. It’s one of the most hollow statements in the English language, right up there with the McDonalds staff saying “Have a nice day” in the same dulcet tones to customers one after the other minute after minute for their entirety of their shift not evening bothering to muster the energy to pretend they give a fuck whether you have a nice day or a crap one - just pay and piss off.

Why have we as a society developed this habit of fallacy, why do we need to hide how we really feel and plaster this fake “perfect life” all over social media? And why is everything in life geared towards telling me I have to improve or should be aiming for some perceived pedestal of perfection? Why can’t I just be me? What’s the problem with that? I do not need to be bombarded with adverts that show drop dead gorgeous woman falling over themselves to get close to the guy who's got the Lynx effect - even on a subliminal level, that's not how it works so why are you pretending it does? What's wrong with the tag line - "Lynx - it smells better than B.O" - my brain understands that! That makes sense to me!

I do not need to be shown image after image of food that will make me healthier or regulate my bowel movements while there is a woman who in the prime of her life, tip top shape,  smiling and jumping around being happy in the sunshine. What does she have to do with that advert? Seriously? Ok ladies, when was you last time you ate something that was sooooo good, that you just had to go outside in the garden, through your hands in the air and dance around with a stupid grin plastering your face? It's never happened? Oh right ok then. What a bowel movement, ever make you feel that happy? No? Then why the hell are these adverts done like this? Like there is some sort of tangible bridge from the product the advert is pimping to the person and people that are in it.

Nor do I not need to see the perfectly physiqued male, driving his ferrari, next to his super model wife up the driveway of their suburban mansion - then be shown a link to Indeed.com like that is what will turn me in to that guy. I don't want to be that guy. He works too hard for his body, the running costs on a ferrari are unreal, his house is excessive for two people (and there is a gated community charge that they never tell you about) and with a body like that his wife has no doubt had more one ups than Mario - why is that the perfect life we're all encouraged to shoot for? 

    

...a bit like that rant, I don’t know where this depression has come from, and trust me I’ve tried to work it out. My family and home life is fantastic, I have great friends who despite my constant failings and long absences have never turned me away. My colleagues and work are hands down, fantastic. Honestly the support I have had through this experience, while I’ve been wallowing in a mire of self pity and lethargy, has been far more than I would ever expected from an employer. Financially I am more sound than I have ever been, romantically I am so much ‘happier’ to be out of the long term relationship I was in and thoroughly enjoy the advantages and freedom that being single allows. I can talk to who I like, go for dinner with who I like, flirt like I'm a teenager again and and yet every morning I wake up - and wish I hadn’t.

I wish I could sleep until this depression has passed. I wish I could sleep period. It’s currently 3am, I’ve slept for about 4 hours in the last 48 and thats been my sleeping routine for the last 6 weeks since I started on these happy pills.

I have no motivation, no energy. So many people have offered to help me, but I don’t know what help I need – so no, I’m afraid you can’t.

So why am I writing this? Because for a long time I’ve ignored the problem, lied to myself that it wasn’t a problem. By acknowledging it I hope to finally start to work towards resolving it. I’m writing this because I want to start being emotionally honest with people, and let them know that right now, when they ask me “How are you?”. The honest answer is “I’m not ok.”

And that’s ok, it’s ok not to be ok sometimes.

But I will be. I won’t be in the bad place forever, but I’m there now.

So what am I doing? Well I’ve been prescribed different anti-depressants, which I can’t start until I’ve come off of the other ones. Apparently I have to wean myself off of them because there are withdrawal symptoms otherwise. Those start next Wednesday, so maybe that’ll work.

If it doesn’t I have some 1 to 1 counselling sessions which might help.

I’m exercising a lot – ironically I am physically fitter now than I have been since leaving the Merchant Navy. I cycle about 100 miles a week currently.

I’m playing a lot of poker, and studying a lot of poker. These activities help my brain to get engrossed in something. I’ve also started to write a kind of ‘how to’ manual on Poker which combines my love for writing with my love of the game, but I’m even struggling to find passion in them.

There is nothing funny about depression, it’s not kid on, it’s not fake, it’s a real legitimate illness, and like a broken leg or a flu, it needs to be treated.

So bare with me folks, I’m not ok – but I will be.

Thanks for reading,

And thanks for all those who have supported me as I try and deal with this, thank you so much.

Dare to Dream,

SBPhoenix.

Back in Business

It’s been two years since my last update (which is a personal record!) so suffice to say this is long overdue, and because it’s so long overdue – this will be a pretty massive post.

Life Changes

Let’s deal with the big stuff first.

I have a different job entirely, if you read my last post you’ll know that I was struggling with depression in 2016, I think the pressure of my work at the time was a massive contributing factor and when leaving the office for the last time it felt like a weight literally lifted off of my shoulders.

I am single, no longer engaged. After just over five years I separated from Toots in April of last year. I can honestly say it is the hardest conversation I’ve ever had to have, but there is no point denying it wasn’t working anymore. We were both stuck in a rut and I made the right decision. I hear she is doing really well, bought a house and is seeing someone new.

As for me I' dating, and for the time being am happy dating. I have no intention of getting involved in something as serious for the time being. Reason being I’ve re-discovered my passions and honestly cannot convey how much better I feel about life compared to my post two years ago.

I’m writing again, I’m playing music, I’m laughing and joking and travelling and playing cards regularly and enjoy getting up every morning and going to work. Ok, slight lie there. No one actually enjoys the act of getting up in the morning – but when I get vertical I am generally pretty happy to be so.

And that is a pretty convenient bridge to go on to talk about what I want to  talk about in this blog (so convenient it's almost as f it was planned!)

 Being Happy

I believe that the aim of anyone’s life, should pretty much be this:

“Do what makes you happy, and create something that outlasts you.”

From my early twenties I wanted a successful career, I wanted to climb whatever ladder I was on and strove towards being the best at every role I found myself in, I believed that this was what would make me happy. And for the most part I achieved this, I’ve never not been promoted in a job, I’ve never not been ‘the go to’ guy for questions and until 2016 I’d never found myself in a job that was ‘too much’ for me.

Then I started somewhere new, and as per usual I strove to excel at it. It was a new role, I had next to no experience and the learning curve was exceptionally steep – but I got shit hot at it within a year, earning several pay bumps as I did so.

But the pressure was mounting, and I wasn’t in control anymore. The business won two new contracts, hired five new staff to cope with demand – four of these guys left within 6 weeks because it was too tough a role, because the expectations were too high.

Suddenly we were dealing with 3 times the work with only one extra body. We had a larger work force to manage, more jobs coming in and a 40 hour week just wasn’t enough – but the business still expected results.

Some days I’d start at 8am and not finish until 10pm, eventually every other supervisor including myself had a set of keys because we were always the last ones out of the office. On two occasions, I fell asleep at my desk after 2am, and woke up there at 6am…and started working again.

And despite the effort and commitment, we (the supervisors) still got slated at weekly meetings.

So what did my job involve?

Well, in a nutshell, I put houses back together. We would deal with insurance claims for various insurers and assigned labour, ran jobs and organised materials to put those customers back to the position they were in before they made the claim. It sounds pretty simple.

But I shit you not the amount of work involved was astronomical. And the quality of the trades that we had was…questionable…at points.

Imagine grafting your ass off all week and getting to Friday at 3pm when the business closes early.

You get a call from a tradesman whose been on a job all week and the conversation goes like this:

Tradesman : “Hi, how’s your day going?”

Me : “Not bad, why weren’t you in for a van check? Did you get held up finishing that job?”

Tradesman : “Yeah – about that…we’ve got a wee problem here.”

Me : “…”

Tradesman : “See, the wee wifey said to me this morning she wanted me to ‘move’ the door – but I thought she said ‘remove’ and obviously there are two doors in the living room so I thought the other one must go in to the hallway or something like that…”

Me : “Right…so what are you telling me?”

Tradesman : “Well, I’ve kind of built myself into the living room – the other doors a cupboard.”

So to put this in perspective – this guy has spent an entire day taking down a wall with a door in it, re-built a wall without a door in it – went to leave only to realise that the ‘exit’ door is actually an ‘entrance’ door in to a fucking cupboard.

Tradesman : “What do you want me to do?”

Me : Numbed to Silence

If it wasn’t so inconvenient this would be hysterical but the problem I have is that margins are so tight – and time so precious that this has just fucked this entire job. He’s wasted an 8 hour shift (that I need to pay him for) – because this’ll now need to be re-done. The decorators who were meant to go in on Monday now can’t and I have to re-allocate their labour, if I can’t then their time and their costs also go against this job. I have to find an available joiner to fix the cockup (labour is booked about two weeks in advance, but I now need a guy on Monday), then a plasterer to plaster out the wall. AND I have to have a bizarre conversation with a customer to explain why her living room cannot be accessed – AND I have to do all of this, and still turn a profit.

Tradesman : “So…eh, what am I doing here?”

Me : “I’ve got no clue but it’s not joinery. Put a hole in the wall and get out of that room – make it tidy and get off of site.

Tradesman : “…no worries boss, sorry…will I eh, just put it down as overtime?”

I kid you not, problems like this were not as isolated as you would hope.

Another phone call mid-week from two labourers who had been tasked with stripping out a kitchen of units, worktops etc.

Labourer : “Alright mate, guess whit?”

Me : (Harassed as fuck)  - “No, I'm not guessing. What is it?”

Labourer : “Jobs done!”

Me : (Genuine surprise) – “Really? Wow, I thought that would take all day.”

Labourer : “Nah mate, was only a small bathroom and the new guy was getting stuck right in.”

Me : “That’s great! So you’re available to help Scott-...wait a minute, did you say bathroom?”

Labourer : “Aye, the wee wifey said she was getting a new bathroom installed, weird though cause the bathroom that was there was banging!”

Me : “And what does your job line say?”

Labourer : “Well the job line said kitchen, but we just figured since she was talking about getting a new bathroom that’s what the line was meant to say.”

Me : “…right. And you decided, all on your own – that the hand typed line was wrong. Despite it specifically saying remove worktop, dishwasher, fridge freezer and a whole host of other items not commonly found in your typical Scottish bathroom?”

Labourer : “…well aye. Showing initiative n’ that.”

Fucking brilliant. So these two guys have spent the first five hours of the shift ‘showing initiative’ and tearing out a bathroom that had nothing at all to do with the insurance work. Meaning that A) The kitchen is still in, I now need to pay more money to get this job started. B) Labour is now all out of sync because the guys going in tomorrow to repair walls, can’t because the kitchen is still in the way. Oh, and not to mention that I need to have a train wreck of a conversation with a customer about why she now has no fucking bathroom in her house.

Me : “Ok, this is a bit of a disaster. You’ve cocked up a bit. Have you at least still got the bathroom suite?”

Labourer : “Well aye…technically.”

Me: “Elaborate.”

Labourer : “We’ve got all the wee bits – but I mean we took it out with sledge hammers so cannae imagine it being able to get used again.”

Let me tell you this folks, there are few sentences in that line of work that make your soul sink to the same levels of terror as “took it out with a sledge hammer” does.

Just for the sake of completeness here – this customer had been talking to the tradesman that morning about just having had a new bathroom installed. When I spoke to her (well I say spoke, when she shouted at me for 20 minutes straight before crumbling in to a weeping mass of blubbering nonsense) it became clear that this bathroom had been her pride and joy – and I’d effectively called her on her way home from work to say we’d carefully removed it with a couple of sledge hammers.

And these issues occurred on top of all the ‘normal’ things to expect when you’re managing a work force. Sickness, no shows, lateness, van breakdowns and materials not being available. On top of  that – you had the ‘normal’ things involved in doing construction, additional unexpected works occurring on almost every job, tradesmen legitimately causing unavoidable damage etc. AND then you have the added juggling act of dealing with members of the general public – I legitimately had a customer who overdosed on pills and washed it down with vodka because the insurance company hadn’t arranged a close enough cattery for her pet cat, her fucking CAT!  She cornered the joiner and said she was going to keep him there until she died and the guy phones me asking what he should do. 

Oh! AND one of the supervisors was held HOSTAGE until he agreed to cover the customer’s claim, even though it shouldn’t have been covered! Literally locked in a room unable to leave – the poor guy had to climb out of a window and leap a fence in the garden!

I mean come on! I was hired as an Insurance Supervisor not a psychiatrist!

At one point I had 40 jobs “on the park” at one time – and my day literally consisted of answering my work mobile between 8 and 5 – THEN after that I could start actually doing my job.

Now some of that I realise will sound pretty funny, on hindsight I laugh at some of this too. Some of it will sound bizarre and some just down right unbelievable. I swear on whatever matters to you that this all happened.

And essentially, the pressure and the stress – it broke me.

See I began to realise towards the end of my time with that company that I no longer wanted to climb the corporate ladder. If it meant sacrificing so much of myself, then it really just wasn’t worth it.

There was a quote from an American TV show that I felt was apt at the time:

 “I don’t want to look back on my life thirty years from now behind the desk of my dead-end 9-5 and think about what could have been.”

So when my time there ended – I swore never to do that to myself again.

And this is what I want to highlight here. I am in a much happier place now. I am comfortable in my job. I could take better paid positions with more responsibility, and to be honest I’ve declined a few, and the reason I’ve done so is because to me now, it is more important to be happy in life, in the here and now than anything else. 

I spend my free time (which I had lost for years) working on my passions, writing, music and creativity in general. Sure I could be earning more money – but I wouldn’t be happy – and that’s what matters.

The Goals

So that’s a good bridge (again, as if by magic ;) ) to talk about the things I’m doing that matter to me.

As the dedicated few will know I’ve been doing pretty well at Poker online for the last three years – I’ve not had a losing year since I started tracking my progress in 2015 – this year I’ve started to play more games live with a view to building up a sufficient balance to take me travelling for a wee while. I’ve been to London 3x this year, Birmingham and Nottingham too as well as games in Edinburgh and Glasgow – and I am ahead (though not as much as I would have hoped at this point, but then I guess it’s called ‘The Grind’ for a reason”) 

I'm heading down to Nottingham in August to play for £250k (that's not a typo - legitimately a quarter of a million prize pool). Then immediately afterwards heading to Barcelona for the European Poker Tour where I am aiming to satellite in to the main event there. A final table at any of these tournaments, would be life changing.

After a long hiatus – I am writing again, really writing. Last month I churned out 117k words – an entire book, in five weeks. It needs edited, and the word count chopped down to around 90k but the spark was there and so was the passion.

Now the subject of the book is another thing entirely.

Have you ever came across something that just resonated so much with you that you couldn’t leave it alone? Well I have. And it happened when I was playing six tables of poker online at the same time and had a random ‘Murder Mystery’ play list on in the background.

What happened next was entirely unexpected – and may honestly have changed my life forever.

But that I feel, is a story all on it's own so more on that next time…

Thanks for reading

Dare to Dream folks

SBP