the kindness of hackers

i feel pretty goddamn shitty. i'm still at my mum's - i'll be here until September 2014 at the earliest - and i'm still completely fucking broke. i have to ask my parents for food right now. some people have volunteered to help, so if you really want to, i have a paypal at a.mason.06@aberdeen.ac.uk. i also have a bank account (it contains minus 2K). if anyone wants to give me 2K so the bank will stop trying to take my blood, you go right ahead, sir or madam. if you wanna throw me a few quid i will happily give you the details by email or you can text me, my phone number is a few posts down i think.

i will also accept offers of free food, random parcels, pills, your unwanted Steam items and/or oldarse games, all that shit your ex-girlfriend left at your place six months ago when she moved out, grocery vouchers pilfered from your parents, and a few people have asked if it is okay to send christmas presents, which it definitely fucking is. anything you wanna send, you can send. i am too poor to be proud, i will eat anything that doesn't contain cheese or tomatoes (they make me throw up). (well, they make me throw up more.) pizza is OK. and second-hand clothes you don't want, i seriously love those. especially men's ones, which are way more comfortable and seem to be the only way to get jeans which are not skintight or hoodies that actually keep you warm or hats that do not look fucking stupid. i am incredibly easy to please.

my mum has given the green light for sending things to this address, it is:

21 Ashgrove
Thornbury
Bristol
BS35 2LH
England

the condition on that is that nobody comes to visit. i'm not exactly up for visits anyway and i think most of you are on the mainland or in the USA to boot. so knock yourselves out.

*jingles its begging hat*

unfortunately i do not currently have the space for that pony.

L

recent events

i guess i ought to explain what actually happened with Muad-Dib now that i can sort of talk about it. even now it still makes my hands shake to do it, though.

so ctrl-shift-h a few months and i was still living with him in a tiny one room flat in the Silver City. i haven't been well for a long time now and i wasn't doing too good then, either. i had a seizure, pain levels were getting pretty disabling, syncope and BP were bad, my head was a mess. my ma came to visit, and while she was there, she came along to one of my appointments with my consultant psychiatrist (Dr. D). Dr. D kindly listed for her all the different ways i was fucked up, and explained how this litany of insanity made me not very capable of looking after myself to a normal person's standard, and between me, my ma and Dr. D it was decided that i would come down to England over the summer for respite care. this would last a month or two, during which Muad-Dib would get a break from me and all my shit and i would go to stay in an environment that would be less isolating during the day. then i'd come back up and finish my last year of university courses starting in September. before i left, he told me to take it easy, get rest, and promised me he would be there when i got back. i packed all my shitty secondhand clothes and gear into my great big fuckoff holdall bag and lugged it to the airport and there i was.

unsurprisingly the plan went arse over tits about a week afterwards. he called me one evening, and after allowing me to flether like a fucking idiot for ten minutes about how much i missed him and how i took the dog for a walk and stupid shit like that, flatly informed me that he had been thinking and didn't want to be in a relationship with me any more. i could still live in the flat with him, he said, if i wanted to, but he was leaving the relationship.

several seconds passed while my mind tried to form an adequate expression of just how stupid it was to expect that someone you have just dumped, who still loves you, could possibly be okay with staying with you in a tiny fucking bedsit which only has one place to sleep - we would either have to carry on sharing the bed or i would have to sleep underneath it. and at some point he would meet someone else and what the fuck would happen then? "Oh," i said. he carried on talking. he was sorry, he didn't want me to take this to mean he didn't care about me, et cetera. i had stopped processing the input at the bottleneck of your life partner doesn't love you any more and simply sat there. eventually i noticed the dangerous amount of water that had fallen off my face onto the keyboard. i remember saying emotionlessly that i had to go speak with my mum now and hanging up on him.

i cried so fucking hard. it felt like my chest had been punched through and just a gaping, howling void was left. i couldn't speak. i couldn't sleep. he was everything to me and he had ripped it all away with one fucking phone call. part of me couldn't even believe that this had really happened - i kept thinking, this isn't him, and then the riposte, no, this isn't what i knew of him. i'm so easy to lie to once i trust someone that he could easily have been thinking about this for months, telling me everything was fine. i don't know any different.

a couple days later my ma called him to figure out what the fuck was going on (i was there). from this call we understood that he definitely wasn't going to change his mind any time soon. he said a lot of things: he still cared, there wasn't someone else, oh you don't want to stay in the flat?, things had "changed", and some other platitudes. i said only that i could not "still be friends", which was the truth: i refuse to put myself through the agony of watching the only man i have ever truly loved get over me, meet pretty girls while he's out drinking, bring some home, get attached, fall in love. replace me with someone he doesn't have to waste his money supporting. watch some perfectly healthy beauty with no scars become his bride. i'd rather die.

"So it's all or nothing?" he asked, sounding surprised. "Yeah," i said. "I can't just be one of your friends." i didn't know it then, but that was in all likelihood the point at which he decided on "nothing".

at the end of the call he said he needed months, maybe more, to make a decision on whether he could ever countenance repairing the bond we had and getting back together. a month in i broke, and emailed him asking for a decision now. he replied, "I'm sorry, it's a no." he added more, things to make him feel better - i "deserved someone who would look after me", he promised to keep in touch, he was sorry again and again. he wasn't sorry enough to try and repair our life together. i could come and pick up my stuff any time, he informed me. as an awful postscript to everything, when we came to pick up my things, we found a "Guide to Lovers' Massage" hidden amongst his socks which had to have been bought after he left me. i don't know if there's another because the only message i ever received from him after that was one sent to my mum, asking for some shit we'd taken to be returned. i refuse to send communications on my part because i can't face talking to him and possibly finding out that i was deceived the entire time.

i ought also to point out here that he did sleep with another woman once, owing to an agreement between us from way back when we were just fooling around together - i said he should find out what he liked, before committing to me. since i never rescinded this, he thought it was cool to bring a girl back to our house while i was visiting my dying granddad in hospice. she slept in his arms in my bed, another image i can't get out from behind my eyes at night. i forgave him. i dunno if it's her, if it's anyone. idk if he just got sick of me. his friends' girlfriends are all beautiful, as is this girl, no giant tattoos or faded man hair or fat guts or self-harm scars or fucked up old-ass gypsy clothes. i used to see them sometimes when they went out and think how fucking lucky i was that he was with me when he could have had any of those lovely women.

so that's how i lost pretty much all progress from the past two years or so. my stuff is shoved into boxes in the back of my dad's office. i'm in my parents' spare room. i still love him and there is nothing i can do with that. i have no money, no house, and i can't go back to the University until late 2014. i wish i could write something happier. sorry, sibs.

L

i'm sorry to give you all bad news again. Muad-Dib left me this evening. i have no more words. L

broken

okay so i've seen all your comments more or less, but there's too many for me to adequately respond to right now including all the mentions and messages on Twitter, comments here on various posts, phone SMS and answerphone messages, emails etc. i haven't reaccessed the email box yet & to be honest i might just delete everything in it beyond the last month or so, so if you did send anything you desperately want me to see or you really need a reply to go ahead and resend it.

the situation is, my meat home is not faring too splendidly. a few months back my thyroid stopped working properly, and since it isn't the standard autoimmune problem (i have the problematic TSH levels but not the autoantibodies, if anyone cares) i'm not being treated for it. the GP i was seeing thought it was better to just leave it, and as you could probably have fucking guessed, that didn't turn out to be a great treatment. i'm carrying two and a half stones or so of extra weight and it's not pretty. i'm tracking calories as best i can, but on 2K/day i was still gaining and it's only stabilised on around 1500 or less now. that's fucking hard to stick to, although it helps that we're poor as fuck.

the poor as fuck is because i'm not currently getting any student allowance, on account of i've been too fucked up to do anything like either study or work. so i'm not possessed of any funds for experimentation, which is frustrating.

the rest is still there: i'm still anaemic as far as i know, my back's still fucked, i'm still taking 100mg of fucking methadone daily for it (which granted is free) and i'm still mad. officially the diagnosis is "BPD with cyclic treatment-resistant major depression and iatrogenic opiate dependence". (apparently that explains the two or three occasions on which i've heard weird songs that aren't playing in meatspace.) contrary to the general commenter opinion i am not in fact schizophrenic. i think someone made a video somewhere on YouTube or something, about how i'm a fucking nutjob and you shouldn't listen to me because i'm just telling you what the voices in my head tell me to, but alas, i've never had the sort of hallucination that tells you things. mine were only ever little odd tunes going round and round, with or without strange poetic lyrics.

as to the suggestion that maybe it's not auditory hallucinations and i'm actually a conduit for an unseen dimension of the world that most of us aren't aware of, well, that might be cooler but if it's true the hidden dimension pretty much just wants to sing songs about shadows and twiddle its thumbs. sorry.

so that's what i've been doing. absolutely bollocks all, more or less. i think if it were either purely physical problems, or just the mental stuff, i might have been able to deal with it better, but it's everything all at once. the mental capacity to deal with and ignore the pain got fouled up because of all the shit that goes on in my head, and anything in meatspace i might have turned to in order to escape or improve the psychological status goes out the window because of the pain and the loss of mobility involved, never mind the fact that going anywhere or doing anything tends to cost money. i've pretty much just been trying to sleep as much as i could, because pathetically enough, that was the only place that didn't hurt to be in. the downside of that is that in that sorry escapist state there's no room for communication, and in fact i had the general idea that it was better not to look at the email or blog and to keep the phone off because all the messages would be overwhelming. that's not strictly true but there are literally thousands of people wanting a heads up, and fifty or so who worry exceedingly within a few days of not getting one, so there is a fuckton to keep up with.

(that isn't to say that anyone trying to reach me worsened the sickness or did anything wrong, it's a flaw in my logic, so to speak, but it's so ingrained that combined with the fact that i don't like voice contact at the best of times, it just led to me totally shutting down in an attempt to escape it all.)

i think it's improving, slightly. after all i can speak now, right? i don't know. i don't wanna make any grandiose statements that it's all better. my blood family in England and my adopted big brother in Canada have been trying really hard to help, and for the first time my blood family now have all the details of my medical diagnoses. my mum came up here to see me and figure out what the fuck i was doing, then realised how fucked up i was, so with their support i'm currently planning to go down to England over the summer to maybe recuperate a little. there's animals there, dogs and little bantam chickens that sit in your hands and a cat, and there wouldn't be the same kinds of money problems, although i'd just be sponging off them which does bother me quite a lot. i also changed GPs to hopefully get a fresh look at my case and some decent treatment for the pain and thyroid problems, and i've had a formal care plan drawn up with the psychiatrist which is in draft right now. i feel like a broken cyborg that's just been discovered in the rubbish heap, dragged home and pulled up onto a bench for someone to take a look at. maybe they can fix me and get me running again, maybe i'm too damaged for that, i don't know. i've pretty much only just "woken up".

so if anyone else out there wants to help restore an obsolete piece of junk that might still have some use, i'm all ears over here on this workbench.

comms channels

i welcome any kind of message from pretty much anyone who isn't trying to sell me gods or penis pills. i sometimes can't reply to everything but i'll try my damndest to read everything people send me.

email: lepht at trioptimum point com
physical address [EDIT: 21 Ashgrove, Thornbury, Bristol BS35 2LH]
mobile: (+44) (0)7527 428831, i'm absolutely shit on the phone and i really hate voice calls because of how awkward they make me so SMS greatly preferred, you can call me if you like but you'll likely get stuttering and monosyllables and i tend to hang up if i can hear my own voice.
IM on request: lephthatesmsn@hotmail.com, tell me if you wanna IM so i can try to remember how to work it
twitter: @lepht_anonym

i have a Steam account as well but i can't remember its username right now. i'll see if i can dig it up so we can have some co op. any other things that you want me to set up or think would be useful, go ahead and suggest, i'm all for anything that helps me be less isolated and more connected with you guys.

gonna go make some spiced milk and play some Alice now. carpe corporem

L

access recovered

urgh. idk what the fuck actually happened but i've not been able to get into any of the Google services i use at all for the last couple of weeks - SA was rejecting my password and even the one i retrieved via mobile backup, Gmail wouldn't sign in apart from a couple of times i managed to get in through a different machine, and even then it would kick me out to relog every few minutes. dunno if someone smarter and more malicious than myself was fucking with me or if the Google account just had a stroke or something, but i'm in now. i do know that just after i posted on Twatter that i'd recovered access i was booted right back out on my pasty little arse. i fucking hate access issues.

real hackers seek knowledge, kids, they don't just fucking break things and torment people. i'll probably get another OH HEY NO HARD FEELINGS HUH I WAS WONDERING IF WE COULD SLEEP TOGETHER NOW I'VE FINISHED ANNOYING YOU AND YOUR ENTIRE READERSHIP email like last time.

makes it seem a little silly to post contact details, but what the fuck, i figure they're pretty much out there already. coming right up, sapes. cc

L

lazarus tl;dr's

i'm not dead. anymore. i feel like i have been. didn't move, didn't eat, didn't talk or communicate with anyone but Muad-Dib, barely even that. i couldn't remember what month or year it was or when anything was. i didn't go to the doctor or the psychiatrist except to mindlessly collect drugs. i didn't open my planner or my logs. i couldn't touch my phone. i don't even have any real memories from beyond about a fortnight ago, not since finding this place last-minute in early March and the rigmarole of getting it paid for and putting enough shit inside to make a house.

i had to stop there and go puke my guts up again. that's been happening for a while now but once again, the NHS thinks i am a skaghead and besides i already have a fuckton of antiemetics. the bowl under my bed is full of blood and all this green bitter shit i think is bile but might be stomach weeds or something since i haven't eaten the last few days. it's fucking gross, but it's better than being dead.

i also have some tramadol (legit!), which, predictably, has fucked me up. not in the good way either since i can't keep it down. i wish i had some goddamn intravenous doses. can't get the cyclizine to stay in my system long enough to take action.

veering off track again - apologies. my mind still isn't what it was yet. i'm losing the struggle to even fucking name what happened. i'd like to say depressive episode, but never in my life has it been that bad, never has my whole consciousness been reduced to catatonic coma like that. it's been so much longer than a normal episode, too; i can't really tell but i know i've been like that for months after i should have surfaced. i know i planned to die after i realised it was eating away at my mind, because i wrote it in an OO.org file i found amongst my documents about a week ago; i had the tools close at hand, but i didn't even try this time. in hindsight that's probably good, since what i built was more or less foolproof and does not allow for second chances. one breath would have deoxygenated this carcass in milliseconds and wiped me from its shell like rain off goretex. i shudder to think how close i came to this, and how close to its effect i was in life regardless.

no, i dismantled the assembly, and i must have discarded the components, because none are here and Muad-Dib would have done something memorable even to me, i think, even then, had he found them. for the first time i had the capacity to do it quickly and cleanly, and as the cliche goes, i couldn't. or must not have been able to, i've no real record of what happened. i found myself shackled to life by the simple existence of the man i love, and by weaker chains to everyone else who gives a fuck, Unqualified and my blood kin and Max and Usul and everyone else there is, all of you.

Muad-Dib said at some point that he didn't want to be what kept me there on life support. i remember saying that there wasn't a choice in it, and remembering what he had told me when he first knew: that my loss would rip his life to shreds, and he wouldn't be able to end that pain by following me. a lot of the time when your mind is crumbling like that all you can think of is the easiest of the hard ways out, deleting yourself. you forget that it would leave a wake of destruction in the lives of those you know and care about such as you can't even imagine, such as would fuck them up permanently just like you, reduce them to the same state you want to escape so badly - only without that escape, because they saw what it did and they won't spread the damage out any further. i know what it would do to Muad-Dib, the strongest person i know. i don't even want to think about the crushing blows my suicide would have dealt to my mum, my nan, my dad.

so i lived, half-dead, and after a very long time i woke up. i don't know what did it. the week before, i was prescribed an additional drug, Seroquel, although i don't seem to have taken more than three or four doses. maybe it was that. maybe it was Muad-Dib's hard work finally paying off, since he's been doing literally everything for me since i fell into catatonia. he quit his degree, took a full time job with one of the giant zaibatsu corporations that run this city, left at seven every morning to come home at five and cook something with meat and bread and try to coax me to eat it. he'd download episodes of a couple of TV programmes during the day and put me in front of them in the evening and watch them with me, he installed simple games over Steam that he couldn't really afford and set them running to try and get me to play. he did the dishes and cleaned the house and took the rubbish out, talked to my mum when she couldn't get hold of me, filled out the council tax forms and doctor's letters and sent countless emails to Prof. V trying to explain what the fuck happened. i owe him everything, again.

shit, i type too much. tl;dr then - it seems i cannot be trusted not to disappear when this channel of communication is simply me talking at you. i'm pretty sure that one of the contributing factors to what happened is that this is the first time ever that i have had absolutely no friends at all while an episode is ongoing; even the presence of B, who didn't really understand the whole depression thing and thinks suicide is an act of "ha! now they'll be fucking sorry," helped a lot more than i thought. so, i'm asking anyone who still reads this for a favour. i would like you to remind me of... well, anything. life. since my anonymity is far more cosmetic than concrete, i am going to give you every possible means to do so. i need contact from people or, it seems, i really do go insane. the details i will place in a second post for visibility.

i understand that maybe nobody except spammers will take me up on this, but the data haemorrhage is worth the risk to me. i'm fucking sorry i didn't do this before. i'm sorry i left you all. i'm sorry i didn't answer your messages. i'm sorry this has happened so many times, and that i wasn't good enough to stop it. i'm sorry i wasn't awake before. i promised you knowledge and i have not yet delivered.

it is my goddamn duty to hold up that promise as well as my life.

L